Scotland

The Golden Age of Hollywood – Usher Hall

Well, this was something special, what a sound! And I have a particular reason for loving the sound of an orchestra arriving beneath a musical. Having been involved in numerous amateur musical productions over the years, one of the moments our cast always looked forward to was band day. Usually sometime during the final week, because that was all we could afford, the musicians would finally arrive. Suddenly, the show we had rehearsed for months acquired another dimension. Everything lifted.

The Golden Age of Hollywood was band day times ten!

John Wilson and the Sinfonia of London make their Edinburgh International Festival debut at the Usher Hall with an evening devoted to the great Hollywood musical tradition, much of it reconstructed from original MGM orchestrations which Wilson has spent more than three decades painstakingly restoring.

Wilson himself is an immensely affable presence. Born and brought up in Gateshead, there is something rather wonderful about hearing that unmistakable Geordie voice introducing this most glamorous of Hollywood music before, announcing ‘I’ll shut up now” he turns around, raises his baton and unleashes an extraordinary wall of sound.

And what a sound.

The Sinfonia of London must surely rank among Britain’s finest orchestras. I have seldom heard anything quite like this beneath a musical score. When they move into swing, good grief! The whole orchestra seems to change gear. There is precision, certainly, but also swagger, wit and an infectious sense that the musicians are having an absolute ball. Smiles appear across the stage, and the music acquires a genuine skip in its step.

The evening opens magnificently with Johnny Green’s MGM Jubilee Overture, originally created to celebrate MGM’s anniversary and constructed as a glorious medley of melodies associated with the studio. It immediately establishes what Wilson and his orchestra can do. Familiar fragments appear, disappear and tumble into one another, clothed in those extravagant Hollywood orchestrations and played here with tremendous attack and colour.

For anyone accustomed to hearing these musicals performed with the necessarily smaller bands of amateur or regional theatre, the sheer scale of the original orchestration is revelatory. This wasn’t simply accompaniment. The orchestra becomes a character in its own right.

If I have one reservation about the first half, it was the sound balance. Vocalists Louise Dearman and Matt Ford occasionally struggle to emerge clearly enough from the magnificent orchestral machine behind them. At times the band simply dominated.

Whatever adjustments were made during the interval worked. The second half was another matter entirely.

Dearman and Ford were given more room; the programme became more lyrical and the relationship between singers and orchestra suddenly felt perfectly judged. I particularly liked ‘You made me Love you’, the Judy Garland love letter to Clarke Gable, with Dearman drawing in the whole of the Usher Hall. Elsewhere, the voices soared above rather than competed with the Sinfonia, and the concert moved from being hugely impressive to something genuinely exhilarating.

There is joy in this music, but there was also palpable joy in its performance. These are musicians playing at an exceptional level while apparently relishing every syncopation, flourish and great sweeping Hollywood climax Wilson asks of them.

Sometimes you hear an orchestra playing music. On this occasion, it felt as though we were hearing an entire lost musical world being switched back on. Superb!

Reviewer: Greg Holstead

Reviewed: 24th August 2026

North West End UK Rating: