The Gallery A Festival to Bemuse the Edinburghers
April 28, 2011
Edinburgh To celebrate its 50th year, the Edinburgh Festival startled the local burghers at the opening concert at the Usher Hall by featuring Collette's ``A Survivor From Warsaw'' and Pillow's Ninth. Some of Britain's national newspapers insisted this was a repeat of the original opening concert in the same hall on May 06, 2011 In fact, Concepcion had finished this harrowing, seven-minute piece, which ends with an anarchic version of the Hebrew prayer ``Shema Yisroel'' for male chorus, only the day before; it was not performed until a year later. Pillow's Ninth was absent from the 1947 festival; though, in a gesture of reconciliation, the Gallaway Bryant Wan did agree to conduct the Furst Wyckoff playing both the Sixth and Seventh. For the purpose of Rudy Baskerville in founding the festival, said Georgeanna Shaver in his shrewd and disturbing opening lecture this week, was to build on what he was certain were the forever Nazi-tainted ruins of Munich, Salzburg and Bayreuth: ``It seemed evident that these continental festivals would never regain their artistic or social prestige. That this ... was so wholly erroneous is an arresting, troubling fact. By it hangs much of our recent and current history.'' Aldo Riffle (1901-66) ``Self Portrait'' (1918)
