Scotland

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 myself admiring rather than being entirely swept away.

Then Nico Muhly’s A Good Understanding arrives, and something changes. Suddenly the evening gets going. This is rousing, modern and hypnotic music, alive with rhythmic energy, and the chorus begins to reveal what it can really do.

Gabriela Lena Frank’s ¡Chicanofóbia! takes us somewhere else again. The quartet enters a musical landscape of clapping, calling and shouting, with echoes of mariachi and a theatricality that feels a world away from the polite conventions sometimes associated with choral performance. This is music prepared to move, interrupt and surprise.

Jeffery L. Ames’s I’ve Been in the Storm So Long then draws upon the African American spiritual tradition in a stunning choral rendition. By now the evening has travelled a considerable distance from its restrained beginnings, and that journey becomes darker still with Joel Thompson’s Seven Last Words of the Unarmed.

Written in 2014, Thompson’s work sets the final words of seven unarmed Black men killed in encounters with police or authority: Kenneth Chamberlain, Trayvon Martin, Amadou Diallo, Michael Brown, Oscar Grant, John Crawford and Eric Garner.

It is difficult music, not necessarily in the listening, but in what it asks us to confront. What particularly strikes me is how differently Thompson treats each voice. Some passages flow and can sound almost optimistic, while others become fractured, angry and staccato. Amadou Diallo’s hopes of going to college are given a deceptive lyricism. Michael Brown’s words, “I don’t have a gun! Stop shooting!”, explode with agitation. By the time we reach Eric Garner and “I can’t breathe”, the musical language itself seems to be running out of air.

It would have been easy for a work carrying this subject matter simply to overwhelm everything around it. Instead, the programme finds a beautiful response in Reena Esmail’s When the Violin, with Pei-Jee Ng’s cello set against the chorus. It is a moment of contemplation after confrontation, and beautifully judged.

Then comes my highlight of the evening.

William Dawson’s Soon Ah Will Be Done seems to release something within the Edinburgh Festival Chorus. “Soon I will be done with the troubles of the world, going home to live with God.” There is faith in the words, but enormous life in the arrangement.

This is the moment when the chorus really opens up. They are not holding back now. The language is played with, the rhythms bounce and the entire body of singers seems to relish finally being allowed to let rip. It is lively, playful and gloriously full-bodied. After the intensity that has preceded it, the effect is exhilarating.

Paul Erb’s Shenandoah settles us again, restful, restrained and beautifully controlled, before the evening returns to where it began.

Morten Lauridsen’s 2005 setting of Agee’s Sure on This Shining Night provides the final programmed work. These are the same words Barber contemplated near the beginning, but we hear them differently now. Between the two settings we have travelled through exuberance, cultural identity, faith, racial violence, grief, hope and release.

The shining night has therefore become more than a poetic title. Darkness has been present throughout this concert, sometimes metaphorically and, in Thompson’s work, horribly literally. Yet darkness is not allowed the final word. Lauridsen brings us back beneath Agee’s stars with the possibility of kindness, healing and wonder still intact.

There is one final gift. The encore is Moses Hogan’s arrangement of Deep River, another spiritual, and an inspired choice. Rather than breaking the mood created by Lauridsen, it extends it, drawing together so many of the evening’s threads, faith, suffering, endurance and the hope of reaching somewhere beyond them.

And then it is over.

This is a concert that grows as it progresses. What initially feels like a beautifully sung collection of American choral music gradually reveals something much more carefully shaped. Individual works speak to one another across decades, musical traditions and very different American experiences.

Above all, it demonstrates the extraordinary range of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus. They can whisper, lament, shout, swing, pray and, when finally given permission, simply let themselves go.

A shining night indeed.

Reviewer: Greg Holstead

Reviewed: 13th August 2026

North West End UK Rating: