Nicola Benedetti takes festival experience to patients with hospital performance
Joined by guitarist Plinio Fernandes, the pair put on the show as part of a series of NHS Festival Sessions, a partnership between the festival and NHS Lothian Charity: Tonic Arts.
Benedetti said: 'I believe in removing barriers to cultural discovery. Everyone is invited to the international festival – that's why half of our tickets will be sold for £30 or less, and by extending our performances into community and healthcare settings, we're reaching people where they are, and bringing a taste of the festival to those who may be unable to attend.'
Len McCaffer, Tonic Arts manager at NHS Lothian Charity, said: 'Our partnership with the Edinburgh International Festival through the NHS Festival Sessions is a fantastic way to bring the transformative power of music directly into our hospitals.
'These year-round performances are a hugely anticipated part of our participatory arts calendar, making live performances accessible for those who would otherwise be unable to attend.
'It is such a privilege to work together to bring world-class artists and musicians like Nicola Benedetti to perform directly to our patients, staff, and volunteers.
'Witnessing the joy and emotional connection these live sessions create really demonstrates the importance and positive impact of the arts on wellbeing.'
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The Herald Scotland
2 days ago
- The Herald Scotland
Here's my top 10 Edinburgh Festival picks not to be missed
BOOK EVENT Hanif Kureishi: Shattered but Unbroken Edinburgh International Book Festival, Venue T, Edinburgh Futures Institute, August 15, 3.15pm Author Hanif Kureish (Image: Getty Images) Some years ago (maybe around the time Gordon Brown was Prime Minister) I interviewed Hanif Kureishi at his home. He was a splendid, feisty, bullish interviewee, calling out my questions and taking the hump at times. In 2022 he suffered a fall that left him paralysed. He's now a tetraplegic. If anything, he might have become a better, braver writer as a result. Hosted by journalist Chitra Ramaswamy, this Book Festival event sees him appear remotely, but, such is the force of his personality even now, that shouldn't make any difference. CLASSICAL Best of Monteverdi Choir Edinburgh International Festival, Usher Hall, August 4 I do like a choir. And in this year's compact (or should that be financially constrained?) Edinburgh International Festival this is the performance I'm drawn to. Led by conductor Jonathan Sells, it should be a showcase for the choir and the English Baroque Soloists. The programme takes in Purcell and Bach (both JS and Johann Christoph) and culminates with a performance of Handel's Dixit Dominus. ART Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years Royal Scottish Academy, July 28-November 2 Stretched Canvas on Field, with mineral block removed, after a few days of sheep eating it, 1997 (Image: Andy Goldsworthy) Sometimes you can have enough of flyers and street jugglers and dingy comedy venues, right? That's the time to take in an exhibition. And this August you are spoiled for choice in Edinburgh. Resistance, curated by filmmaker Steve McQueen, continues at Modern Two for anyone seeking inspiration to be an activist. Dovecot Studios is home to an exhibition dedicated to the textile design of IKEA and the Scottish Gallery has a celebration of the artist Victoria Crowe on her 80th birthday. All well worth your time. And then there is Andy Goldsworthy taking over the Royal Academy. This exhibition includes more than 200 works by Scottish-based environmental artist, including an expansive new installation built in situ. Remarkable work from a remarkable man. TALK Tim Pope Fringe by the Sea, The Dome, North Berwick, August 2, 2.45pm It's tempting to forego [[Edinburgh]] all together this August and just decamp to North Berwick for the duration. Because this year's Fringe by the Sea programme contains everyone from Chris Hoy, Eddi Reader, Judy Murray and Jim Moir (aka Vic Reeves) to Hamish Hawk, the Bluebells and Dave from Blur. There's even an indie disco overseen by Scotland's pre-eminent musical Stuarts, Murdoch and Braithwaite. But can I single out this appearance by director Tim Pope? His work with The Cure, Siouxsie Sioux, Talk Talk, Soft Cell, Strawberry Switchblade and even Wham! (he directed the video for Young Guns Go For It) made him one of the key visual artists of the 1980s. In this special event he's in conversation with Vic Galloway. FILM Grow Edinburgh International Film Festival, August 16-19, Cameo, Filmhouse, Vue, various times Grow with Nick Frost (Image: unknown) I suppose we should be grateful that we still have an [[Edinburgh]] International Film Festival at all after the collapse of CMI in 2022, but even before that it seemed to be struggling to match the buzz and the engagement found at the other end of the M8 at the annual Glasgow Film Festival. This is the second year of the revivied Film Festival under director Paul Ridd and it comes trailing some criticism that it's not Scottish enough. (Critic and journalist Siobhan Synnot has claimed that 90 per cent of the people selecting films for the festival live outside Scotland). Despite all that, there is much to see here. As well as a retrospective of Budd Boetticher westerns, there will be in-person conversations with directors Andrea Arnold (Red Road, Fish Tank) and Nia DaCosta (Candyman, The Marvels and the upcoming 28 Years later sequel The Bone Temple), producer Jeremy Thomas, as well as premieres from directors including Paul Andrew Williams, Andrew Kotting, Helen Walsh and the Dardenne brothers. I'm intrigued to see Grow, the new film from Scottish director John McPhail (Anna and the Apocalypse), with a cast of familiar British comedy faces (including Jane Horrocks and Nick Frost) and a plot description that combines the phrases 'Scottish fantasy' and 'pumpkin-growing contest'. FILM Bulk Edinburgh International Film Festival, Cameo, August 14, 11.55pm And sticking with the film festival ... 'This is a midnight film through and through. Car chases, gun fights, sci-fi and romance,' director Ben Wheatley has said of his new film Bulk which is having its world premiere at this year's EIFF, part of the festival's Midnight Madness strand. Sounds fun. Wheatley's last outing was Generation Z, the Channel 4 TV horror series (the one with Anita Dobson and Sue Johnston as OAP zombies). Before that he gave us The Meg 2. But I'm hoping Bulk - which stars Sam Riley and Noah Taylor - might be fit to stand alongside his best films, Kill List and A Field in England, both of which belied small budgets to offer up potent, unheimlich horror thrillers. Here's hoping this is another one. If midnight is too late for you, there are screenings of the film on Friday, August 15 at the National Galleries and Vue, and there will be a special In Conversation event with Wheatley himself on August 15 at 1.30pm at the Tolcross Central Hall Auditorium. DANCE Journey of Flight: Kathryn Gordon DB3 @Dance Base, August 12-17, 2.30pm Intrigued by the sound of this dance performance based on the migration patterns of birds and the idea of place. Accompanied by live music from Jenny Sturgeon, Shetland-based dance artist and choreographer Kathryn Gordon's show combines bespoke visuals and avian-inspired movement and should offer a calm retreat from the hurlyburly of the Grassmarket. 'We've really explored what home is to us and that feeling of nostalgia and leaving and coming back,' Gordon says of the piece. It also involves paper planes. And who doesn't love paper planes? POETRY At What Point with Caitlin O'Ryan Spiegeltent, Edinburgh International Book Festival, August 19, 6pm Actor Caitlin O'Ryan was a regular in the TV series Outlander, but it's her spoken-word poetry that has really got her noticed. Last year her performance of her poem At What Point went viral and it wasn't hard to see why: an impassioned cri de coeur about violence against women, gender inequality and the challenges of female experience, it had echoes of Self Esteem's breakthrough hit I Do This All the Time. But, if anything, O'Ryan's words hit even harder. In this book festival event she talks to Holly McNish. COMEDY Zainab Johnson: Toxically Optimistic Pleasance Courtyard (Above), July 30-August 24 There is quite a lot of work-in-progress shows coming to Edinburgh this summer, Aisling Bea, the wonderful Ania Magliano, Laura Smyth and Larry Dean among them. Nothing wrong with that but usually Edinburgh is what you're progressing towards. Case in point. Zainab Johnson may have her own hit stand-up show on Amazon Prime (Hijabs Off), but here she is making her debut at the Fringe. Johnson's new show talks gun ownership (yes, she is American), relationships and, as the title suggests, optimism as a toxic trait. To purchase tickets for the Fringe, please click here
Telegraph
2 days ago
- Telegraph
Nicola Benedetti: ‘Classical music is threatened by young people's lack of basic discipline'
One day last week, the violinist Nicola Benedetti was in her office, staring at spreadsheets, when her teenage step-daughter came in. 'She peered at my computer, saw me looking at budgets, and said, 'You know how you started out as a musician... well, how do you feel about this?'' Benedetti tells me, laughing. 'It was 11.30 at night. My eyes were closing, and I knew I was going to be woken up in a couple of hours by the baby. But I've always been very clear about my purpose.' Right now, Benedetti, 38, is applying that sense of purpose to the Edinburgh International Festival, her third edition since becoming its artistic director in 2022. We've met at her office, on Edinburgh's Royal Mile, a fortnight before this year's festival opens, and she is evidently flat out. In May 2024, she had her first child, a daughter, with her husband, Wynton Marsalis – a celebrated American jazz musician 25 years her senior, who also has a teenage daughter and three older sons from previous relationships. 'There's a lot going on,' she says with a wry smile. Benedetti met Marsalis when, aged 17, she travelled alone to New York for the first time, for a concert at Lincoln Center. Over subsequent years, they have performed together many times; he has even written several concertos for her, his first compositions for the violin. A few years ago, rumours started circulating that the pair were in a relationship, which, until now, Benedetti had always refused to confirm. I ask her why she's been so guarded. 'People don't come to my concerts because of who I'm in a relationship with; they come because I play the violin,' she says. 'And I tend not to discuss my private life because I don't think people find it interesting. But there are all sorts of things people could find out – it's not like I'm really secretive.' I suggest that if, in interviews, she were less coy about her marriage to Marsalis, it would at least stop nosy journalists from asking about it. 'I think it's pretty much out there now,' she says, laughing. 'I really don't care any more if people want to write about it or not. I'm certainly not trying to hide anything.' Besides, she's too busy to worry about such things. Within months of the birth, Benedetti was back at work, conducting meetings and dealing with organisational crises with her baby strapped to her chest. 'Luckily, she was asleep most of the time,' she says, 'and because I was able to physically get stuck back into work, I didn't have that [new mother] identity crisis where you wonder who you were before this other person came into the world.' Benedetti, who was born in Ayrshire, doesn't seem like the identity-crisis type. Her sustained presence in the top flight of classical music is testament not only to her precocious talent but also to exceptional resilience. At the age of eight, she was leading the National Children's Orchestra of Great Britain. By the time she was 15, she was making major career decisions for herself, quitting the Yehudi Menuhin School, in Surrey, because she wanted to focus even more intently on her playing than the school's academic schedule allowed. The following year, she won the BBC's Young Musician of the Year competition and signed a £1m, six-album record deal with Universal Music. These days, she is regarded as one of Britain's greatest living violinists, second only, perhaps, to Nigel Kennedy. Her recordings of Shostakovich and Glazunov's concertos are particularly sublime. Yet Benedetti has always regarded herself less as a performer than as an evangelist for the life-changing beauty of classical music. For her, the main attraction of the festival directorship was the fact that it gave her 'the potential to impact hundreds of thousands of people with the arts'. As a result, she says, 'becoming the EIF's artistic director doesn't feel like a departure' from her violin career; rather, it's a natural continuation of her life's mission. The line-up she has assembled for this year's festival is not short on surprises, both musical and otherwise. Highlights include John Tavener's eight-hour mystical song cycle The Veil of the Temple; Figures in Extinction, a collaboration between the Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite, Simon McBurney and Nederlands Dans Theater; and a new James Graham play, Make It Happen, about the role of the Royal Bank of Scotland in the 2008 banking crisis, in which Succession's Brian Cox appears as the ghost of the pioneering 18th-century Scottish capitalist Adam Smith. 'Make It Happen throws a mirror back on to Scotland, so it will be interesting to see Edinburgh audiences debate that, which is exactly what the festival should be doing,' Benedetti says. She stops, as though wary of sounding worthy. 'But I promise there are plenty of other things that will be pure enjoyment from beginning to end. We're not always trying to change the world.' Although Benedetti has a reputation for steeliness, today she is warm and open. Instead of trotting out the usual box-ticking guff about diversity and accessibility, she goes off-message by telling me she thinks older concert audiences are an essential part of the classical-music ecosystem. 'I found myself quoting Tony Benn during a team meeting the other day,' she admits with a laugh. 'I reminded them that each generation tends to fight the same fights over and over again. Yes, we can get excited about being the first people to swap chairs for beanbags in the Usher Hall, probably. Yes, we can push to be the most affordable arts festival in the world, which under my watch is what we want to be. But, let's be honest, there have been promenade-style performances since medieval times; ticketing schemes for younger people are nothing new; and every single person who has run the festival before me was, in their way, trying to make it open-door. So it's good to have a bit of realism and humility about what we're doing.' All the same, few people in the arts have done more than she has to make classical music accessible. Her Benedetti Foundation, established in 2019, has worked with 100,000 people of all ages through its outreach and education programmes. She thinks listening properly to classical music for 15 minutes a day is as important for a child as reading a book, and has complained loudly about cuts to music in schools since the subject became a victim of the then coalition government's austerity policies in 2012. More than a decade since those cuts began to take hold, does she think the steady erosion of music education has had an impact on the amount of homegrown talent graduating from Britain's elite music institutions? 'In terms of numbers, probably not much; there are always people with money who will pay for the education that will put their children on that path,' she says. 'But in terms of who is getting that opportunity, yes, no question about it. 'Across the country today, those who are not from a more privileged background, who are studying an instrument to a high level at college, are often either foreign students who have come here to study, or have been supported by a charity.' However, when it comes to what she calls the 'Mark Simpsons of the world' – referring to the working-class Liverpudlian who became the first person to win both BBC Young Musician of the Year and Young Composer of the Year – 'who have shown talent aged four or five, been picked up by the local council and given free music lessons of a quality that enables them to really progress into a career in music? There is no question those numbers have been significantly depleted and impacted.' Benedetti's own upbringing was privileged. Her entrepreneurial father, who came to the UK from his native Italy at the age of 10, made millions after inventing a revolutionary cling film dispenser. Her Scottish-Italian mother made her and her older sister Stephanie (now a violinist with the group Clean Bandit) practise the violin for three hours every day during the school holidays. Recently, Benedetti has found herself questioning the way she and Stephanie were brought up. 'My daughter is only one, but my sister has two children, aged three and five, and seeing her experience has definitely made me consider our own childhood,' she says. 'But both of us have a realistic, even positive view of our upbringing. It was very strict – we feared upsetting our parents, or doing the wrong thing – but we also knew we were loved to death by our mum and dad.' Benedetti's combination of success, talent and youthful looks soon made her a magnet for attention far beyond the concert hall. By the time she was in her 20s, newspapers were running her picture alongside such suggestive headlines as 'Will Nic Air her G String?' She has also been a target for stalkers; in 2010, one broke into her London flat. But she has never seen herself as a victim of the way she was marketed in her youth, even though her early album covers certainly made the most of her sultry Italian looks. 'While the more time that goes by, the more clearly I see that, I knew what a photo looked like – I knew what I was putting on, I was not a blissfully naive 16-year-old. I was not.' And besides, she adds, 'I always had my dad saying, 'Make sure you are dressed decently.' 'The greater pressure, much more than sexism, was around the sort of music I was being encouraged to play,' she adds. Unlike the singer Charlotte Church, with whom she was sometimes lumped as two fresh faces of classical music, the young Benedetti always resisted demands that she perform 'crossover' pieces in favour of less-commercial classical repertoire. 'It's not something that is treated with nearly enough seriousness in public discourse: the power of really populist, saccharine, overly commercialised music. It's more potent than showing some cleavage, believe it or not. But even there I was in charge of my own choices. And I live by them. They were mine.' Today, she worries that the younger generation lack that toughness and are less equipped for the sacrifices required to become a world-class musician. 'The future of classical music is definitely threatened by the changes to work ethic and mentality. You cannot cheat your way through learning a musical instrument: ChatGPT is not going to teach you the violin. It's impossible to learn music on any level with AI. You cannot fake your way to becoming a musician. Yet I think young people have become used to a lack of basic discipline in their daily lives – and that really worries me.' While, as we saw recently at Wimbledon, it's not unusual now for elite young sports stars to have a psychologist in their entourage, according to Benedetti, in the upper echelons of music, the conversation around mental health remains 'very strange and hushed. You are just meant to get on with it. The psychological vulnerability of musicians is a very real thing. But on the other hand, you also have a choice about where you place your focus'. She's loath to spell it out, but it's clear that she thinks the younger generation have been encouraged to place too much focus on their mental health. 'I have definitely been through a period of time where the wellbeing industry, and I do mean industry, has captured my thoughts and made me believe that my focus needed to be turned inwards on my feelings. And it was the worst possible thing for me. I thrive when I am focused on things that are to do with other people and are for other people, such as performance. Of course, I can only speak for myself. Other people's experiences may be different. But it's a subject everyone is nervous to talk about. You can say the wrong thing and be demonised.' Having a child has made Benedetti think a lot about feelings recently. She wonders, for instance, whether it's right to leave her daughter to scream when she is upset: one school of thought in parenting argues that, instead of being distracted from their rage, screaming children need to have their emotions recognised. 'But distraction from feelings is good, too!' Talking of which, her daughter has also given Benedetti a 'renewed appreciation' for violin practice (perhaps, above all, when she is screaming?): 'There is something rather wonderful about telling your family that this is what you will be doing for the next three hours,' she says. 'Then you go into a room and it's just you, your violin, the notes on a page, and the sound.' The Edinburgh International Festival runs from Aug 1-25 at various venues across the Scottish capital. Details:
Scotsman
2 days ago
- Scotsman
The longest ever Edinburgh festival experiences, from an 8 hour classical concert to a 36 hour comedy show
An eight hour concert at the Edinburgh International Festival? It's not as unusual as you might think, writes David Pollock Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... This year's Edinburgh International Festival will open in explosive fashion, certainly in terms of the ambition attached to presenting a full staging of the late Sir John Tavener's masterwork The Veil of the Temple, which the composer described as 'the supreme achievement of my life'. Presented in the UK for the first time since its premiere at London's Temple Church in 2003, the performance will last for eight hours, from mid-afternoon until late evening on the Festival's first Saturday. Edinburgh Festival Chorus are among the 250 performers at this year's EIF opening concert. | Edrinburgh Festival Chorus The Veil of the Temple will be no act of penance; rather one of transcendence, with suitably spaced refreshment breaks and beanbags supplied. But while its length makes it an oddity in Edinburgh in August, it's not a rarity. Few other places in the world permit such open experimentation with durational work, and in the International Festival and the Fringe there have been many such experiments over the years. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad One of the earliest was also one of the most infamous, a production which is still spoken about with wide-eyed enthusiasm by those who experienced it. First performed at London's ICA in early 1979, The Warp by maverick theatre-maker Ken Campbell also came to that year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe, to the now-demolished Regent Cinema in Abbeyhill. A transcendental 22-hour experience, the entrance fee of one pound bought turned-on attendees into a sequence of ten playlets transcribed by Campbell from the thoughts and memories of fellow eccentric and noted poet, painter and jazz musician Neil Oram into a spectacle of live storytelling. Spanning four centuries, The Warp blended science fiction, jazz-rock musical, sex, drugs and promenade performance, with 50 actors playing 200 roles in a non-stop cornucopia of counterculture gig theatre which was as transgressive as punk and as over-stuffed with ambition as prog rock. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad In 2011, one of the Festival Fringe's current key venues was opened in a manner which called back to Campbell's work. Hotel Medea began at Summerhall at midnight and ran through until sunrise, lasting approximately six hours, during which the audience were encouraged to dance and eat in honour of the wedding of Medea and Jason from Greek mythology, then experience the break-up of their relationship, including being tucked into bed as the characters' soon-to-be-deceased children. Another promenade spectacular, Hotel Medea was told in three parts. 'It's very much about staying up together all night, and that creates that sense of ritual, the sense of community and togetherness that we're always looking for through theatre,' said co-director Persis-Jade Merivala at the time, invoking the same spirit of community ritual Benedetti taps into with her words on The Veil of the Temple. Nor is it just serious theatre which benefits from this endurance-testing format. Mark Watson was already a comedian on the up when he captured the imagination and the headlines in 2004 with Mark Watson's Overambitious 24-Hour Show, a successful attempt to break the world record for longest stand-up performance. Comedian Mark Watson | Contributed 'Watson's eclectic show included a blind date, a debate on the existence of God, a Euro 2004 review and readings from his novel, Bullet Points,' reported the BBC at the time. 'The comedian began games of Chinese Whispers among the audience to cover his toilet breaks.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Held at the 160-capacity Cowgate Central venue after the nearby Wilkie House proved too small for the opening audience, there were also cameos from Adam Hills, Stewart Lee, Dara O'Briain and Jenny Éclair, and a finale in which Watson proposed to his girlfriend Emily, one of 12 people to remain for the duration. Watson returned to the format every year until 2009, including with Mark Watson's Seemingly Impossible 36-Hour Circuit of the World in 2006, which broke his own record. Since Watson's efforts, attempts to grab the attention with long Fringe shows have really needed to pull something out of the bag to register. Neither a comedy nor strictly a piece of theatre, comedian Bob Slayer's Iraq Out & Loud was very much the epitome of a Fringe concept in 2016 – a consecutive, real-time reading of every word in the then-just-published Chilcot Report into the UK's role in the Iraq war. Undertaken in a shed next to Slayer's BlundaBus venue at Potterrow, Iraq Out & Loud took 1,500 comedians and members of the public (including this critic, writing for this paper) 13 days, reading in short chunks for 24 hours a day, to get through the entire 2.6 million words of the report, winning Slayer an Edinburgh Comedy Awards Panel Prize for Spirit of the Fringe. Edinburgh International Festival itself has also been no stranger to staging ambitiously lengthy works in the past, although not one as overtly singular as The Veil of the Temple. In 1994 it hosted the world premiere of Robert Lepage's The Seven Streams of the River Ota at Meadowbank Sports Centre; or rather, the first three instalments of Lepage's eventual seven-part, nine-hour investigation into the literal and metaphorical fallout of the Hiroshima bomb. My colleague Joyce McMillan tells me 'the event, with intervals, was very long'. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The James Plays were a series of three historical plays presented by the National Theatre of Scotland, the Edinburgh International Festival and the National Theatre of Great Britain. | National Theatre of Scotland Then there were The James Plays in 2016 and Stephen Fry's Mythos in 2019, both split into three individual play-length sections, but available as one lengthily consecutive viewing experience when seen in order over one or two days. Similarly, presentations of Wagner's famously lengthy Ring Cycle have been split into its individual operas over days in 2003 and even consecutive years in the late 2010s. Discussing the crescendo that will bering the performance to a close, The Veil of the Temple's director Tom Guthrie describes 'the idea being that you've arrived, and of course in this conception of it, this is with dawn, with the night turning to day, and darkness turning to light, and those are universal themes (of) enlightenment. It's a wonderful, ritualised human expression.' The Veil of the Temple will be performed in five languages and sung by 250 people, in a vocal collaboration between the Monteverdi Choir, the Edinburgh Festival Chorus and the National Youth Choir of Scotland, with music performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Sofi Jeannin. Across eight meditative, chanting cycles, it takes its inspiration from an all-night vigil in the Orthodox Christian tradition, but its purpose is to find a commonality both between the religions of the world and their practices, and between the worlds of the religious and the secular, which each have their own forms of devotional ritual. Tavener was striving for 'an underlying universal truth', says Edinburgh International Festival's director Nicola Benedetti, who knew the composer. 'I guess it was his wish and his hope that it's in the patience and the sitting with something for those eight hours that can allow for something transformational. His view of that universal truth was something that binds people closer together.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad In the midst of an arts festival in 2025, one which offers literally hundreds of different ways to spend your time, the idea of devoting this portion of your life to one single, focused emotional journey which will take you through the best part of a day feels like something approaching a rebellious act. It's a rejection of the shareable, dopamine-chasing quick fix of contemporary culture, and a submission instead to a performance which slowly reveals itself in the company of other humans, however you might feel about the religious resonances behind it.
