Frang, Romaniw, Liverman, LSO, Pappano, Edinburgh International Festival 2025 review - sunlight, salt spray, Sea Symphony

Right from the bracing brass fanfare that began this Sea Symphony, you know exactly where you were: right in the midst of the deck, with the spray in your face and the wind in your hair. 

The London Symphony Orchestra is midway through a residency at the Edinburgh International Festival. They’ve been the classiest musical act to grace the Usher Hall stage so far this festival, and this bracing performance of Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony has been the best thing they’ve done, not least because they fully grasped the scale of the piece and the many moods it goes through. This was always music of the great outdoors, the sunlight glinting off the textures of the burgeoning first movement, the wind whipping up the waves of the third, before the enveloping nighttime of the second and fourth movements. But it was all driven forwards by the captain of this ship, Antonio Pappano, who was in his element on the quarterdeck of the vessel. His decades of experience in the opera house meant that he knew well how to direct this piece of theatre, creating huge, oceanic heft that drove the music forwards through the faster movements, but also ebbed and receded when the poetry of the slower moments came into its own. His crew responded to every nuance, from the bracing brass and dazzling winds, to the terrific slow weight of the lower instruments, magisterial at the start of the second movement. 

The Edinburgh Festival Chorus were on cracking form, superbly responsive to Pappano’s direction, whether in the second movement’s ecstatic affirmation of oneness, or in the great setting forth in the finale. Soprano soloist Natalya Romaniw crested the waves of sound with ringing confidence, but could also sound thrilling in her lower register: her declamatory “Flaunt out, o sea” in the first movement pinned me to my seat. She somewhat left baritone soloist Will Liverman in the shade, a sweet but underpowered voice that lacked confidence in this company.  Before this midday blast of sea air, Elisabeth Maconchy took us into the forbidding midnight of her 1951 Nocturne, where the warm, flowing LSO strings conjured up 50 shades of darkness. Occasional twinkles from the winds or percussion couldn’t camouflage the feeling of scarcely concealed threat lurking in the music. No threat in Korngold’s Violin Concerto, however; just delicious musical textures and beguiling lines of melody, played with drama and vigour by Vilde Frang, who unfurled the solo violin line gradually, always giving the music space to grow. The orchestra had just the right level of razzle-dazzle gorgeousness to their soundscape, allowing Korngold’s twinkling celesta and shimmering marimba textures to balance the shamelessly glitzy violins. Altogether, a treat. 

• Edinburgh International Festival runs to 24 August
• More classical reviews on theartsdesk