Music at Paxton, the Scottish Borders’ ten-day festival, returns from 19th to the 28th July with concerts in the fine acoustic of Paxton House’s Picture Gallery.   This year’s programme features internationally established musicians, violinist Viktoria Mullova and tenor Mark Padmore, and notable emerging artists, mezzo Helen Charlston, and pianist, Alim Beisembayev.  We can also look forward to the return of the Consone Quartet as the festival’s resident ensemble, other exciting chamber concerts, an imaginative range of folk-inspired music, events for children, and the first eve ..read more

Read Part 1 here In Part 1, I wrote about a day working with Pacific Opera Victoria in Canada. One can hardly imagine a more different working day from that at Pacific Opera than Covent Garden. My last experience of that great theatre was in 2017, when I played the master coppersmith, Hans Foltz, in Wagner’s ‘Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg’ and understudied the main bass role, Veit Pogner. The production wasn’t great, but it gave free rein to us, the minor masters, dressed in outrageous robes and wearing splendidly silly hats. If I have much to sing, I hate wearing hats on stage, as they inter ..read more

Over the past four years, I have endeavoured to give something of an insight into the life of a professional opera singer, a career I have followed since 1981. This has been a career of enormous variety, with many highs and the occasional lows, across a huge repertoire of music and a multitude of countries. I have tried to show how we work and where we work, and I thought today that I would attempt to offer a glimpse of the daily routine that I have followed for all this time, up to my retirement from the operatic stage in 2018/19. Each contract is different, and so I am going to use two speci ..read more

Modified Rapture  The RSNO has announced the programme for the season 2024/25 in the Usher Hall, which I shall be reviewing for the EMR, and, although there are several mouth-watering concerts planned, my overall reaction is modified rapture. It is clear that a combination of financial restrictions and musical conservatism has produced a programme that is safe and somewhat predictable, a programme for our time, as it were. The prevailing climate of falling public subsidy for classical music and indeed a nervousness about the real importance of our great classical heritage has led to a sea ..read more

Hugh Kerr, Editor of the Edinburgh Music Review: The Edinburgh Festival, which traditionally has been a low cost open access festival with big discounts for pensioners, has now become a high cost Festival more like Salzburg than Edinburgh! Top ticket prices for opera are £149 and lowest prices at £39 are twice what the Upper Slips at Covent Garden cost. Nicola Benedetti may want to get the community more involved with the Festival but she is in danger of pricing many traditional festival goers out! Kate Calder: Two weeks ago, I reported on the launch of the Edinburgh International Festival 20 ..read more

From Eric Bogle on 11/03/24: A sad day for me. This morning Ian Green, the boss of Greentrax Records who distributed my CD's in Europe and North America, died after a short illness. Ian was one of the good guys in an industry that has it's fair share of shonks. An honest, ethical man whose word was his bond, a straight arrow, a sealed with a handshake sort of human being, of the kind that you rarely come across now in these grubbier and greedier times. Ian was a policeman for 30 years, reaching the giddy heights of Inspector, and was also a cycling champion in his youth. Called up for National ..read more

The term ‘inspirational’ is often overused in arts and music PR. But this year’s Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) programme, comprising 161 performances from over 2,000 artists from 42 nations, comes across as a bold and ambitious attempt to revitalise, reframe and re-vision EIF for a new, challenging era.   That challenge is both situational and socio-economic. ‘Locally’, so to speak, the profile of the International Festival has increasingly been marginalised (in a certain sense swamped, you could say) by the enormous and highly commercialised Edinburgh fringe – which many simply ..read more

The EIF’s 2024 programme builds on Nicola Benedetti’s successful opening year as Director by remedying some faults of last year’s programme, and continuing innovations which proved popular in 2023. Last year there were no staged operas, and this year there are three and two concert performances. The Opéra-Comique’s new production of ‘Carmen’ by Andrea Homoki celebrates the original performances, with sets based on the art and architecture of the period. Gaëlle Arquez is Carmen and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under conductor Louis Langrée provide the music. Komische Oper Berlin under Mu ..read more

West Highland Music’s supergroup Dàimh headline Traverse One on Saturday 11 May. FESTIVAL DATES: Friday 3 May - Monday 13 May 2024  This year’s music programme for Edinburgh Tradfest is now onsale.  More festival events including film, storytelling, book launches and workshops will be announced at the Edinburgh Tradfest 2024 full programme launch on Wed 13 March at 10am at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh (save the date – full details to follow) VALTOS | NORDIC FIDDLERS BLOC | THE FRETLESS | BIRDVOX | TRIPTIC | DAIMH | JULIE FOWLIS | LENA JONSSON & BRI ..read more

Clea Friend at the Stockbridge Music Hub has just announced a French Week from 16th to 23rd March, featuring concerts by pianist, Steven Osborne, mezzo Taylor Wilson, and the young Parisian piano trio, Zarathustra. The week ends with a family concert in which Alexander McCall Smith reads his own narration to Saint-Saens’ ‘Carnival of the Animals.’  All events will take place in Stockbridge Parish Church. The programme for the week is as follows: Saturday 16th March, 6pm: Internationally renowned Scottish pianist, Steven Osborne, with Greg Lawson, Jean Johnson and Clea Friend, will play a ..read more