Nicola Benedetti featured in the London Times

Nicola Benedetti tunes up for Edinburgh Festival to break down barriers
By Mike Wade
The London Times
July 21, 2023

Picture the scene. It’s a late-night gig and musicians are scattered about the auditorium, where the young audience is lolling among them on beanbags, smiling and laughing as the band’s frontman pauses the music to tell a story. The atmosphere is decidedly chilled.

It might sound like an offshoot of Glastonbury, some event staged at a boutique rock festival, but just such a spectacle is coming next month to the magnificent Usher Hall, the high temple of the Edinburgh International Festival.

This is classical music, not as we have known it, but reimagined for a new generation and presented by Nicola Benedetti, one of a handful of daring innovations she has made in her first summer as the festival’s director.

The band playing among the audience will be the Budapest Festival Orchestra (BFO), whose conductor, Iván Fischer, pioneered these extraordinary late-night gigs, drawing large crowds of young people to classical concerts in the ensemble’s home city and in Berlin.

The BFO’s Edinburgh concert of music by Dvorak is just one element in Benedetti’s grand scheme to “develop a culture of listening” bringing, she hopes, a whole new demographic into “the fibres of performance”.

The strategy begins to unroll in a fortnight with her Opening Fanfare weekend, when, on the Saturday, more than 300 young musicians from around Scotland, including rappers, choirs, brass bands and pipers combine in Princes Street Gardens to create a “symbolically powerful” finale of joint music-making.

Benedetti, 36, is a violinist of international renown, but her sole performance on this year’s bill will help publicise another initiative, the Hub Reimagined, an informal concert series designed to break down the barriers between performers and people.

The Hub experience, she says, will be “whatever you want to make it”, a place for artists to forge new and intimate connections with audiences.

These are the radical, grab-them-by-the-shoulders moves you have to make, she believes if you are to lift people off their sofas and into the magical world of live performance. It’s not an easy pitch to make to potential punters spoon-fed a diet of culture-lite, and she is realistic enough to know her festival will not enjoy a “cut-through anything like mainstream pop would”.

However, she is not offering “an either/or” but something radically different. “We want to say the festival is part of the whole richness of life,” she says. Newcomers are urged to try “something that requires all phones and distractions to be off, and you are just absolutely present in a certain moment, something that has a greater degree of silence in it, or repose”.

Benedetti adds: “Look at any spectacle, like Glastonbury — which is available, not just on your phone, on TV or on an app — and put that against the intimacy of purely acoustic music, or purely acoustic theatre.

“We have to work out all sorts of ways in how we communicate breadth and depth to an audience with an entirely different experience [of] how a lot of the stuff we present was actually created.”

Which brings us to Maestro Fischer. He centres his approach in Budapest on the belief “we serve the people in our city”, says Benedetti.

“An absolutely necessary component is musicianship at the highest possible level because that in itself always has its own power, but his mission from the get-go was to bring people into a shared experience, shared listening, experiencing something together as a group.”

Fischer’s logic means the physical space of the concert hall has to be used in a new way “so the audience is essentially part of the orchestra”, as Benedetti puts it. “We have asked them to take away the seats in the Usher Hall, something very new for Edinburgh.”

Benedetti, the first Scot and first woman to lead the festival, is aware that some bemoan changes to the bill she has made.

The expensive pyrotechnics introduced into annual opening events by Fergus Linehan, her predecessor, have been ditched, along with the closing fireworks concert, a festival fixture for 40 years. Strikingly, too, there are no rock concerts at Leith Theatre and no main stage opera.

“Not to skirt around the issue, Leith Theatre was a very difficult decision for us,” she says. “As is the case for all festivals and cultural organisations, there are difficult financial decisions to be made.”

The absence of both Leith and grand opera “are two extreme ends of the programme that require huge amounts of resource that we had to make calls on,” but, she urges, “look at all the stuff we are doing. We have intimate, chamber presentations of some opera repertoire that are going to be unforgettable; and between Playhouse, Festival Theatre and Queen’s Hall, it’s the same contemporary music strand.”

To the new director, every part of the programme is of equal importance, though she recognises that audiences will have their favourite components.

“The artistic identity of the festival has to maintain that breadth and diversity but how exactly to balance that is obviously a decision we take really seriously,” she says.

“Part of the beauty of what we do is the diversity of what we present,” she adds, stressing she remains “100 per cent behind” the expansion of repertoire into rock and world music introduced by Linehan.

Does that mean her own musical tastes have broadened? “No, not particularly, but I don’t need to be a fan of every single thing we programme, when there are 300 performances.

“Rock music and pop music has most of the world as it stands,” she says laughing. “It’s doing more than fine.”

Changinging the tune — Benedetti’s innovations Friday August 4 — The Hub Reimagined, new informal concerts season at the Edinburgh International Festival HQ. Tickets £25

Saturday August 5 — Opening Fanfare. Youth and amateur ensembles take over Princes Street Gardens, featuring Intercultural Youth Scotland, Drake Music Scotland, Tinderbox Collective, Musicians in Exile and the Edinburgh Ukrainian Choir “Oberih”. Free.

Sunday August 6 — An “epic set” from the GRIT Orchestra, alongside The National Youth Pipe Band of Scotland, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and National Youth Brass Bands of Scotland, featuring the world premiere of a work composed for the Festival. Performances from 2pm and 4.30pm. Free, with limited tickets available for seats at the Ross Bandstand.

Tuesday August 8 — A model for the future. Conversation and classics with Nicola Benedetti, Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra at the Usher Hall, 8pm. Dvorak Inside Out. Fischer, the BFO and the chance for an Usher Hall audience to experience a classical masterpiece as never before, lounging on beanbags with the orchestra among them, 10pm.

Read the full article here.