Festival Music

La Pasión según San Marcos

Usher Hall, Edinburgh

THERE were unmistakable references to the Passion story in Deborah Colker’s magnificent staging of composer Osvaldo Golijov’s opera Ainadamar for Scottish Opera two years ago – and now the Edinburgh International Festival has brought us the Argentinian composer’s equally visceral interpretation of the Gospel of St Mark to open the 2024 programme in unforgettable style.

Much more than its inspirational form of classical oratorio, Golijov demands vast forces capable of spanning musical genres and has roles for two dancers and a lot of choreography for the singers as well. The cast the EIF assembled, for the sort of international collaboration that is the job of a great festival, delivered the work magnificently.

Portuguese conductor Joana Carneiro marshalled the various talents on stage with un-demonstrative authority, aware when to step back to allow the four percussionists or Latin-jazz vocalist Luciana Souza their own space, but equally on top of every detail of the score for the strings and brass players of the RSNO and especially attentive to the complexities of the demands on the choir.

Souza and soprano Sophia Burgos, who first appeared high in the choir stalls, had some of the most moving music – The Eucharist, In Gethsemane and the Aria of Peter’s Tears – in partnership with the chorus. Those intensely moving moments were set against the rhythmic treatment of the action of Jesus’s betrayal and arrest which cast the familiar Biblical narrative in an entirely new light.

There were individual contributions of brilliance, including Betsy Taylor’s Gethsemane cello solo, and jazz trumpet guest Ryan Quigley sparkling between the orchestra’s principal trumpet and trombone, while the singers of the Schola Cantorum de Venezuela supplied half a dozen step-out soloists of particular style.

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Those 20 visiting choristers were usually dispersed amongst the ranks of a large iteration of the National Youth Choir of Scotland, which in the end must take the lion’s share of the praise for the concert’s success. Now an utterly essential ingredient of every Edinburgh Festival – and with another eagerly-anticipated concert to come in the final week this year – this was an amazing performance from chorus director Christopher Bell’s young team.

Singing with dynamic precision in Spanish, Latin and Aramaic, and often nearly as eloquent physically as vocally, the NYCoS chorus was an essential part of what made this Passion one of the most memorable events I have witnessed in five decades of Festival concert-going. Its powerful conclusion, at the end of a compelling 100 minutes, deserved at least a moment’s contemplative silence. That the ovation it received was instantaneous can be probably be forgiven.