Red Note Ensemble: The End of the World (for one night only)

Scottish Mezzo Karen Cargill and the Red Note Ensemble perform Watching Over You,  Composer Rory Boyle's new setting of Dilys Rose's poems depicting the journey of early motherhood.

Red Note Ensemble's Sounding Brass in a unique afternoon of brass, percussion and electronics in an imaginatively scouted industrial setting.

Many composers would be delighted to be sharing the bill with Pergolesi, particularly if the ratio of programmed pieces were 2:1 in their favour. Judith Bingham combined composing and singing careers for many years, but she now concentrates solely on composing. However, she does – as she confessed in a YouTube interview – compose unconsciously in “breath lengths”.

St Giles’ Cathedral, at the top of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, boasts a wonderful acoustic. From the chancel of this magnificent building a string quartet, drawn from the Red Note Ensemble’s flexible and varied forces, presented a late-evening, candlelit programme of meditative music entitled, Hymn of Thanks (Transcendence).

In her short introductory remarks at the evening’s outset, Sally Beamish referenced Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and the Rose, wherein in the redness of a rose is secured by a nightingale’s pierced heart.

Viktoria Mullova is a superb soloist in Brahms' Violin Concerto, while an orchestra full of soloists play Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra with Kahchun Wong presiding.