The Edinburgh International Festival has been delivering some memorable musical moments this week, with performances ranging from contemporary folk to Renaissance choral music giving audiences plenty to talk about.
Gnoss, the Scots folk quartet who have been building a serious following over the past few years, brought their late-night show to the festival and did exactly what you would hope from a band playing to a crowd that has already had a few drinks and wants a good time. The four-piece have a knack for blending traditional Scottish and Gaelic influences with something that feels genuinely fresh, and the Up Late format suited them perfectly. It was loose, it was warm, and by the end the room was very much on their side. For anyone who has not caught them live yet, this was a reminder that they are one of the more exciting acts coming out of Scotland right now.
The YOLA and Big Noise collaboration was always going to be one of the more emotionally charged events of the festival. YOLA, the Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles, joined forces with Big Noise, the Scottish youth music programme inspired by Venezuela’s famous El Sistema project, for a performance that was as much about what music does for young people as it was about the music itself. Big Noise has been running in Raploch in Stirling since 2008 and has since expanded to several other communities across Scotland, giving kids access to instruments and orchestral training that they might never have had otherwise. Watching young musicians from very different backgrounds and very different parts of the world share a stage and pull something together was genuinely moving. These are not polished professional performers, and that is entirely the point. There were small wobbles and moments of uncertainty, but there were also moments of real beauty, and the whole thing had an energy that a lot of more technically accomplished concerts simply cannot match.
The Death of Gesualdo programme tackled the work of Carlo Gesualdo, the late Renaissance composer who is as famous for murdering his wife and her lover as he is for his extraordinarily complex and emotionally intense madrigals. His music is not easy listening. The harmonies shift in ways that still sound strange and unsettling five centuries later, and performing it well requires both technical precision and a willingness to sit inside some genuinely uncomfortable emotional territory. The ensemble brought in for this performance rose to the challenge, delivering a set that was focused and controlled without ever feeling cold. Gesualdo’s music works best when it feels like it is on the edge of falling apart, and this performance understood that. It was a quieter, more demanding evening than some of the festival’s bigger events, but for those willing to give it their full attention it was one of the more rewarding nights on offer.
Taken together, this particular stretch of the EIF programme showed off what the festival does best when it is firing on all cylinders. There was something for the folk crowd, something for families and communities, and something for the more adventurous classical listener. Edinburgh in August can sometimes feel overwhelming, with so much happening across the city that it is hard to know where to put your attention. But nights like these are a good reminder of why the International Festival, separate from the Fringe chaos happening on every street corner, still matters.
Went last year and the folk stuff was absolutely brilliant, proper goosebumps moment. Never really got into the Renaissance music personally but my mate loves it. Worth going just for the atmosphere alone tbh.