Edinburgh International Festival

Fire in my mouth

Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Keith Bruce

five stars

NEW York’s Bang on a Can collective – founded by composers Julia Wolfe, David Lang and Michael Gordon – is one of the most important new music initiatives in the world, and this staged oratorio, Wolfe’s follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Anthracite Fields, was receiving its UK premiere.

It is part of the Edinburgh International Festival 2024 residency by the Philharmonia Orchestra and boasted the presence of star conductor Marin Alsop on the podium, but as with the Opening Concert performance of Osvaldo Golijov’s Passion, it was the home-grown talent of the National Youth Choir of Scotland that made the performance.

Fire in my mouth commemorates the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in downtown New York, when 146 garment workers, mostly young immigrant women, died. Wolfe’s work, characteristically muscular and teaming a broad sonic palette with a libretto that derives its power from a reliance on primary sources, is an immaculately structured four-movement 50 minutes that tells their migration story, work experience, and union activism before the tragedy.

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The young women of NYCOS and the NYCOS National Girls Choir proved more than equal to a task that used professional singers alongside a youth chorus when the work was debuted and recorded in the US. As with the Golijov, the demanding music they had mastered was matched by a physical performance learned in short rehearsals with the Bang on a Can team and director Anne Kauffmann. The result was another EIF Usher Hall event, costumed by Márion Talán with video projections by Jeff Sugg, that will live long in the memory.

Alsop was, of course, in masterly control of the orchestra, augmented by a few familiar Scottish players. Electric guitar and bass were also crucial ingredients, but the carefully-scored sewing machine noises at the start of the second movement all came from the strings, wind and brass players. The conductor was equally attentive to the singers, from a quintet to the massed voices, with Yiddish and Italian lyrics part of the remit.

Wolfe’s exploration of labour history has been the most significant driver of her mature work, and this piece delivers a huge emotional impact. The fact that the same industry still claims the lives of young women a century later, as at Rana Plaza in Bangladesh a decade ago, makes its message all the more important.