First Night at The Hub – The Hub

And so, it begins.

A couple of hours ago I heard this exact piece played by these exact musicians.

So why does it suddenly sound completely different?

Earlier in the evening, at the Usher Hall, conductor Karina Canellakis had put down her baton, picked up her violin and joined pianist Kirill Gerstein for the Blues movement from Ravel’s Violin Sonata No. 2. It was beautifully played, but somehow this intimate little conversation struggled against the grandeur and ceremony of that enormous hall.

Now they have hightailed it up the hill to The Hub, as have I, and everything has changed.

The room is smaller. We are closer. The acoustic is different. Suddenly every inflection matters. The blues within Ravel’s music seems clearer, the conversation between violin and piano more immediate.

Same musicians. Same music. Different place.

Remarkable.

But this is Nicola Benedetti’s First Night at The Hub, so expecting the evening to remain straightforward would be foolish.

Benedetti begins alone with Jay Ungar’s haunting Ashokan Farewell. Although written in 1982, the piece has become almost inseparable from America’s Civil War through its use in Ken Burns’s landmark television series The Civil War.

And then Burns himself appears.

With America celebrating the 250th anniversary of its independence, his presence suddenly gives the evening a larger context. Burns speaks movingly about liberty, freedom of expression and the place of the individual within society, ideas which travelled between the Scottish Enlightenment and the emerging United States, and which remain anything but historical curiosities.

From there we are off.

Jazz arrives, including Blue Train, with trombonist Sam Chess among a collection of musicians who rapidly establish that this is not going to be an evening terribly concerned with musical boundaries.

At this point I should apologise to the many excellent performers I cannot name check individually. There were a lot of them, the programme was deliberately fluid and by 10pm this reviewer had already experienced a fairly substantial Festival day. Admittedly, I had enjoyed the considerable luxury of being steamed, scented, chilled and generally revived in Summerhall’s new Sauna Theatre that afternoon, but even that can only take you so far.

Fortunately, the music does the rest.

One of the pleasures of First Night is watching musicians reappear in completely different circumstances. Canellakis, who only hours earlier had been commanding the vast National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America, is now a chamber musician, joining Benedetti with Gerstein at the piano for a selection of Shostakovich.

Benedetti and Canellakis make a fascinating pairing, two extraordinarily accomplished violinists sharing a stage rather than competing for it, with Gerstein providing the third part of this intimate musical conversation.

Edinburgh, however, occasionally insists upon providing its own percussion section. At one point the delicate chamber music finds itself competing with the distant thump and rumble of activity from the Castle, presumably the Tattoo finishing for the evening.

Noisy neighbours.

Benedetti then takes on Wynton Marsalis’s Nicola’s Strathspey, from his Fiddle Dance Suite for Solo Violin. It is ferociously complicated, deliberately abrasive in places and technically formidable, drawing classical virtuosity and fiddle traditions into the same musical argument.

Which leads rather neatly towards Dàna.

The young Glasgow based quartet, Anna Robertson, Eleanor Tout, Laura Penman and Alex Wotherspoon, bring Scottish traditional music into an evening already happily bouncing between classical music, jazz, blues and American history. Their Scallywags is followed by the beautiful Blackford Hill, for which, inevitably, Benedetti is back.

You simply cannot keep this woman off the stage.

But why would you want to!?

By now First Night at The Hub has stopped feeling remotely like a conventional concert. It is a gathering of musicians who happen to be world class, moving between styles, joining one another, listening, responding and apparently having as much fun as the audience.

Then the Jason Max Ferdinand Singers arrive.

Having performed at the Queen’s Hall earlier in the day, this extraordinary gospel inspired ensemble provides the evening with another gear entirely. The intimacy of The Hub, which had transformed the Ravel earlier, now works in the opposite direction. Instead of drawing us quietly towards the performers, the room seems barely capable of containing the sound.

By the time we reach All Rise, I’m ready to obey the instruction literally.

Come on Nicola, get us up.

For a moment I think she is going to. Apparently, however, the instruction is directed towards the musicians rather than the audience. A missed opportunity. There is a sizeable portion of The Hub now quite prepared to stand up and have a boogie, although perhaps Benedetti has taken one look at us and made a sensible assessment of the demographic.

The advertised 90 minutes has long since become theoretical.

Eleven thirty passes.

Then midnight.

Somewhere down the hill, trains are slipping quietly out of Waverley without several members of this audience.

Nobody seems particularly concerned.

That is the pleasure of First Night at The Hub. Benedetti creates something which feels spontaneous without ever feeling careless, bringing together musicians who may inhabit completely different musical worlds and asking what happens when those worlds are allowed to overlap.

America and Scotland, jazz and classical, gospel and traditional music, young musicians and established international artists all occupy the same room.

And after hearing Canellakis and Gerstein in both the vast Usher Hall and this intimate space within the same evening, I am reminded again that music doesn’t exist independently of where we hear it. Rooms matter. Audiences matter. Proximity matters.

Place changes music.

Nicola Benedetti had started another party.

The only difficulty, as usual, was persuading her to end it.

Reviewer: Greg Holstead

Reviewed: 10th August 2026

North West End UK / Theatre Muse UK Rating: