Gershwin and Bartok – Usher Hall

Sometimes during the Edinburgh festivals, you simply need a little space.

After days spent rushing between Fringe venues, squeezing into small rooms and watching theatre at increasingly close quarters, there is something wonderfully restorative about walking into the Usher Hall and finding the stage filled by the National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America.

And I mean filled.

Under conductor Karina Canellakis, this remarkable collection of young American musicians produces an enormous, confident and wonderfully optimistic sound. The scale of the string section alone is extraordinary, stretching seemingly endlessly across the stage.

They look magnificent too. Black jackets sit above striking blood red trousers, the whole orchestra beautifully colour coordinated, while row after row of bright, youthful faces shine under the Usher Hall lights. There is something immediately optimistic about the sight of them, the youth of America assembled on an Edinburgh stage, looking every bit as vibrant as they sound.

Samuel Barber’s Overture to The School for Scandal opens proceedings. Written when Barber was only 21, it is an effervescent and appropriately youthful introduction to both orchestra and evening, allowing different sections to announce themselves before the arrival of pianist Kirill Gerstein for Gershwin’s Concerto in F.

For me, this is the revelation of the night.

Most audiences will know Rhapsody in Blue. The Concerto in F, completed the following year in 1925, deserves considerably more attention. Gershwin had already demonstrated that American jazz and European concert traditions didn’t have to inhabit separate worlds. Here he develops that conversation into something more substantial, structured across three movements but still pulsing with unmistakably American rhythms.

And how it moves.

Gerstein is superb, technically dazzling without ever making the concerto simply about the pianist. What makes the performance particularly exhilarating is the conversation happening across this enormous orchestra. Piano, strings, brass, woodwind and percussion answer and interrupt one another. Rhythms bounce between sections and the music continually seems to rediscover its own momentum.

There is swagger here, but sophistication too.

You can hear the jazz age without Gershwin ever simply imitating jazz. There are blues inflections, syncopation and that wonderfully difficult to define sense of American urban energy which makes his music sound as though the classical concert hall doors have suddenly been thrown open and another musical world has wandered inside.

Performed by some of America’s most gifted young musicians, that feels particularly appropriate.

There is one final surprise before the interval when Canellakis temporarily exchanges the conductor’s podium for her violin and joins Gerstein for the Blues movement from Ravel’s Violin Sonata No. 2.

It is beautifully played, although in the grandeur and vastness of the Usher Hall this intimate little duet seems almost to disappear into the room.

As it happens, although I don’t know it yet, I am destined to hear the piece again later in the night in the much smaller surroundings of The Hub, where intimacy completely transformed it.

But that is for another review!

After the interval comes an entirely different proposition.

Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra was written in 1943, while its composer was living in American exile, ill, financially troubled and separated from a Europe being consumed by war.

You can feel something of that fractured world within it.

Where Gershwin seems to look forward with extraordinary confidence, Bartók’s music feels more complicated. There are moments of wit and beauty, certainly, but also unease, interruption and something darker underneath. It is less immediately accessible than the Gershwin, but perhaps that is exactly what it should be.

It is also a magnificent vehicle for this particular orchestra.

The title itself contains something of a contradiction. A concerto normally places a soloist against an orchestra. Here, the orchestra becomes the soloist. Individual sections step forward, converse, compete, collide and retreat before being absorbed once again into the whole.

That allows us to appreciate just how accomplished these young musicians are. Woodwind, brass, percussion and that extraordinary mass of strings each get their opportunity before Canellakis pulls everything back together.

And Canellakis is fascinating to watch.

There is youth on the podium as well as in front of it, but nothing tentative about her command of this enormous musical machine. Her conducting is energetic, physical and precise, and the response from the orchestra is immediate.

Perhaps that is what I take most strongly from the evening.

At a Festival which brings established orchestras, conductors and soloists from across the world to Edinburgh, there is something particularly exhilarating about watching musicians whose careers largely still lie ahead of them. This isn’t youth being indulged or showcased for its own sake. The playing is formidable.

After several intense days at the Fringe, I arrived at the Usher Hall looking forward to a change of pace, some space and, perhaps, a little relaxation.

What I got was something better: Barber’s youthful sparkle, Gershwin’s glorious collision of classical music and jazz, Bartók’s darker European complexity and a stage overflowing with young American musical talent.

Reviewer: Greg Holstead

Reviewed: 10th August 2026

North West End UK / Theatre Muse UK Rating: