RSNO Wagner's Ring Symphony Usher Hall Edinburgh 16th May 2025 Review
RSNO Wagner’s Ring Symphony at the Usher Hall Edinburgh tonight also featured one of my favourite musical ensembles, Dunedin Consort, who are also the RSNO’s current Partnership Ensemble.
Dunedin Consort is one of the world’s leading Baroque ensembles, and their attention to detail in recreating as far as possible the sounds that would have originally been heard by audiences of the original time period is always remarkable.
It was therefore appropriate that Dunedin Consort opened tonight’s musical programme with Handel’s Water Music which was written for King George 1 and to be played at a boat party. Oddly for such a well-known work, precise details of when it was first written and performed are at best open for debate, but somewhere around 1717 seems to be accepted by many people. There are also several known variants of this music lasting for different lengths of time.
The Water Music Suite No 3 performed tonight, lasting around 11 minutes, was probably the one first performed for the King and on an unusually sunny day in Edinburgh today, you could get some sense of hearing this music performed on an also nice clear and sunny day over 300 years ago.
Handel somehow managed the musical trick of making this work essentially a basic music structure in one sense, but his use of changing rhythmic structures are full of surprises and Dunedin Consort, as always, made this music come alive once more.
The first half of tonight’s musical programme was a joint performance between the RSNO and Dunedin Consort for Neil T Smith Hidden Polyphony: Illuminating Scotland’s Lost Music* World Premiere.
It is rare that you get the opportunity to hear a contemporary orchestra such as the RSNO performing with a specialist period ensemble like Dunedin Consort and the result was full of moments where you could hear that contrast between the two of them.
Hidden Polyphony is in one way a scholarly investigation into the history of Scottish music from the mid-16th century and. in many ways, how the Scottish Protestant Reformation of that period re-wrote, or at least changed our understanding for a very long time of how music had evolved. In another way, the music is looking both forwards and backwards in time with this joint RSNO/Dunedin Consort performance. This did though make for a rather crowded Usher Hall stage.
Wikipedia defines polyphony as “a type of musical texture that consists of two or more simultaneous lines of independent melody”. It was long believed that Scottish music of this period (and earlier) had not yet developed polyphony, but fragments of music and documents now indicate otherwise. Using some period written documents with Anna Dennis (Soprano) on vocals, this re-creation of a lost world of Scottish music was an interesting and illuminating experience. The nature of the documentation, one a will leaving instructions for music/voices to be sung at someone’s funeral, did however take this music often into a darker overtone and I am sure that had it not, as seems to be the case, been deliberately destroyed by some people, Scottish polyphonic music of this period would have been as joyous and uplifting as that written for any of the major European churches of the day.
Wagner’s Ring Symphony needs little introduction to many people, and the use of “Ride of The Valkyries” in the film “Apocalypse Now” has perhaps associated it more with machines of war than Wagner could never have imagined when writing it.
The orchestral snapshot of “The Ring” tonight (arranged by Henk de Vlieger) was at a 62 minutes performance time obviously a hugely condensed snapshot of this musical epic, but somehow it captured the essence of many of the major characters and moments in this monumental work.
The use of elements of his music in film and television over the years is appropriate as, in many ways, this is film-score music on a massive scale. Here Wagner with his assignment of unique music to each of the many characters in this story arc was laying the foundations of a yet to be musical genre, the film/television soundtrack.
Everything about this music is on a larger than life scale and that included 3 harps and 7 double bass being part of the instrumental line up for tonight and the RSNO, even in this snapshot of “The Ring” captures the essence of its sheer power and Wagner’s epic music, story and sheer imagination.
Review by Tom King © 2025
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com
Dunedin Consort is one of the world’s leading Baroque ensembles, and their attention to detail in recreating as far as possible the sounds that would have originally been heard by audiences of the original time period is always remarkable.
It was therefore appropriate that Dunedin Consort opened tonight’s musical programme with Handel’s Water Music which was written for King George 1 and to be played at a boat party. Oddly for such a well-known work, precise details of when it was first written and performed are at best open for debate, but somewhere around 1717 seems to be accepted by many people. There are also several known variants of this music lasting for different lengths of time.
The Water Music Suite No 3 performed tonight, lasting around 11 minutes, was probably the one first performed for the King and on an unusually sunny day in Edinburgh today, you could get some sense of hearing this music performed on an also nice clear and sunny day over 300 years ago.
Handel somehow managed the musical trick of making this work essentially a basic music structure in one sense, but his use of changing rhythmic structures are full of surprises and Dunedin Consort, as always, made this music come alive once more.
The first half of tonight’s musical programme was a joint performance between the RSNO and Dunedin Consort for Neil T Smith Hidden Polyphony: Illuminating Scotland’s Lost Music* World Premiere.
It is rare that you get the opportunity to hear a contemporary orchestra such as the RSNO performing with a specialist period ensemble like Dunedin Consort and the result was full of moments where you could hear that contrast between the two of them.
Hidden Polyphony is in one way a scholarly investigation into the history of Scottish music from the mid-16th century and. in many ways, how the Scottish Protestant Reformation of that period re-wrote, or at least changed our understanding for a very long time of how music had evolved. In another way, the music is looking both forwards and backwards in time with this joint RSNO/Dunedin Consort performance. This did though make for a rather crowded Usher Hall stage.
Wikipedia defines polyphony as “a type of musical texture that consists of two or more simultaneous lines of independent melody”. It was long believed that Scottish music of this period (and earlier) had not yet developed polyphony, but fragments of music and documents now indicate otherwise. Using some period written documents with Anna Dennis (Soprano) on vocals, this re-creation of a lost world of Scottish music was an interesting and illuminating experience. The nature of the documentation, one a will leaving instructions for music/voices to be sung at someone’s funeral, did however take this music often into a darker overtone and I am sure that had it not, as seems to be the case, been deliberately destroyed by some people, Scottish polyphonic music of this period would have been as joyous and uplifting as that written for any of the major European churches of the day.
Wagner’s Ring Symphony needs little introduction to many people, and the use of “Ride of The Valkyries” in the film “Apocalypse Now” has perhaps associated it more with machines of war than Wagner could never have imagined when writing it.
The orchestral snapshot of “The Ring” tonight (arranged by Henk de Vlieger) was at a 62 minutes performance time obviously a hugely condensed snapshot of this musical epic, but somehow it captured the essence of many of the major characters and moments in this monumental work.
The use of elements of his music in film and television over the years is appropriate as, in many ways, this is film-score music on a massive scale. Here Wagner with his assignment of unique music to each of the many characters in this story arc was laying the foundations of a yet to be musical genre, the film/television soundtrack.
Everything about this music is on a larger than life scale and that included 3 harps and 7 double bass being part of the instrumental line up for tonight and the RSNO, even in this snapshot of “The Ring” captures the essence of its sheer power and Wagner’s epic music, story and sheer imagination.
Review by Tom King © 2025
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com
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