United Kingdom Edinburgh International Festival 2025 [5]: Britten, Vaughan Williams, Elgar: Ian Bostridge (tenor), Sir Antonio Pappano (piano), Members of the London Symphony Orchestra (Benjamin Gilmore, Julián Gil Rodríguez [violins], Eivind Ringstad [viola], David Cohen [cello]). Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, 13.8.2025. (SRT)
Britten – Winter Words
Vaughan Williams – On Wenlock Edge
Elgar – Piano Quintet in A minor
The London Symphony Orchestra have arrived for a five-day-long residency at the Edinburgh International Festival, and this Queen’s Hall concert feels like an added bonus to their orchestral work, with four of the orchestra’s string principals playing chamber music with their Principal Conductor, Sir Antonio Pappano, on the piano.
The purely instrumental part of the concert was warm and affecting without, in truth, being particularly exciting; though maybe that is what you get with Elgar’s Piano Quintet. Expertly put together it may be, with a few touches of nobilmente thrown in for good measure, but you are a world away from the World War I era existentialism that was troubling many of Elgar’s contemporaries. It is broad brush melodic Edwardianism arriving a few years too late, but there is nothing wrong with that, and the musicians here played it well for what it is. Pappano bounded up and down the keyboard in a way that sometimes dominated or occasionally drowned his colleagues, but the four string players felt like characterful soloists walking in lockstep, with a pleasing sense of unanimity on the (perhaps too frequent) occasions where Elgar needs them to sound in unison, and beautiful flowing sound when the score required them to give it full throttle.
Tenor Ian Bostridge has been a frequent EIF guest over the years and has been a song soloist with Pappano many times elsewhere. Hearing them in Britten and Vaughan Williams was a tasty prospect, not least because I found their recording of Winter Words so rewarding when it was released in 2013 for the Britten centenary. Tenor and pianist know each other’s quirks well now, and they listen to each other very compellingly so that many of the songs sounded terrific. Bostridge’s greatest strength remains his identification with the English text, so that single words (like the long-vowelled ‘stung’ in the final song of Winter Words) are so freighted with meaning that they can catch you up short.
I wonder, however, whether the thing that he does has become ‘the thing that he does’? Impressive as is his way with the text, he seems to have one mode only on the platform, which can best be described as pained yearning, with the occasional touch of horror thrown in. The faces he pulls, the mannerisms he strikes, are all a not-very-distant variation on that, and that meant that some songs worked better than others. Vaughan Williams’s Bredon Hill, for example, never sounded remotely like a love song, and the mischief of Britten’s Wagtail and baby passed for almost nothing. Nor was there quite enough variety in a song that tells a tale in three parts, like The Choirmaster’s Burial. The pained keening of his voice did hit the spot wonderfully in the understated darkness of Midnight on the Great Western, or the actual ghost story of Is My Team Ploughing? Most of the variety was provided instead by Pappano and the strings, who conjured up a wonderful heat haze in Bredon Hill, while Pappano managed to make the piano line of At The Railway Station, Upway sound like modernist abstract expressionism.
Simon Thompson
The Edinburgh International Festival runs at venues across the city until Sunday 24th August. Click here for further details.