This Shining Night – Usher Hall
The concert begins and ends beneath the same shining night, Samuel Barber first contemplating James Agee’s stars, Morten Lauridsen returning us to them at the conclusion. Much has happened in the darkness between.
This Shining Night, part of the Edinburgh International Festival’s celebration of choral music, brings the Edinburgh Festival Chorus to the Usher Hall under conductor Sofi Jeannin for a journey through American choral music. It is an intelligently constructed programme; one whose dramatic shape only becomes fully apparent as the evening unfolds.
It starts quietly enough. Barber’s Sure on This Shining Night, his 1938 setting of Agee’s poetry, establishes the idea which will eventually bring us full circle. There are beauty and restraint here, but initially I find my...