Classical music meets bagpipes
The Berliner Philharmoniker in Edinburgh Classical music meets bagpipes The Berliner Philharmoniker in Edinburgh

In summer, otherwise grey Edinburgh bursts into colour. That’s when the Edinburgh International Festival brings the stars of music, dance and theatre to the city. But anyone with a taste for the quirky and alternative will find plenty to enjoy too. 20 years on, the Festival welcomes the Berliner Philharmoniker back.

A striking castle dominates Edinburgh’s skyline, while below, winding lanes and steep streets thread between dark facades before suddenly opening onto sweeping views across town. The effect is dramatic, and maybe a little forbidding. Come summer, though, the city is transformed. The Edinburgh International Festival presents concerts, opera, dance and theatre, and over the years, a whole ecosystem of other festivals has grown up around it, devoted to literature, film and jazz, among other things. Then there is the famous Edinburgh Festival Fringe, with its anything-goes spirit – think street theatre, or even Hamlet staged in a bouncy castle.

The Edinburgh International Festival, meanwhile, draws leading names from around the world. This year marks the Berliner Philharmoniker’s first appearance at the Festival in 20 years. With chief conductor Kirill Petrenko, the orchestra performs Elgar’s Enigma Variations and Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, among other works, while Augustin Hadelich takes the solo part in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto.

The Edinburgh International Festival

The Edinburgh International Festival was founded in 1947 with the aim of bringing people back together through art after the devastation of war – to create, in the founders’ words, “a platform for the flowering of the human spirit”. One of the most moving moments of that inaugural year was a concert by the Vienna Philharmonic, appearing for the first time since the war with Bruno Walter – a conductor with deep musical and personal ties to the orchestra, who had been forced to flee Europe as a Jew in 1939.

Two years later, the Berliner Philharmoniker’s own festival debut was likewise intended to help heal the wounds of war. For the first time since 1945, a British conductor stood on the podium in front of the orchestra: Sir John Barbirolli. That musicians from countries so recently at war should perform together carried enormous symbolic weight. It also marked the beginning of a wonderful friendship between the Berliner Philharmoniker and Barbirolli, who would go on to conduct the orchestra no fewer than 70 times over the following two decades.

Back after 20 years

Between 1955 and 1972 in particular, the Berliner Philharmoniker were regular guests at the Edinburgh International Festival, appearing under celebrated conductors such as Eugene Ormandy and Rudolf Kempe, and above all under chief conductor Herbert von Karajan. The soloists brought along for these visits reveal just how determined the orchestra was to make a lasting impression in Edinburgh: audiences heard the baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and the violinist Henryk Szeryng, and when Karajan conducted Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde in 1972, it came with a luxury cast of vocal soloists in Christa Ludwig and René Kollo.

After that, however, the Berliner Philharmoniker’s appearances at the Edinburgh International Festival became far less frequent. Claudio Abbado conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in 1998, and Sir Simon Rattle led Mahler’s Fourth Symphony at the orchestra’s last visit, in 2006. High time, then, for a reunion. This return also gives the Berliner Philharmoniker the chance to present their partnership with Kirill Petrenko in Edinburgh for the very first time – and, in turn, to experience a little of what makes the festival summer so special. Because the festival spirit is impossible to miss in Edinburgh: not least the almost nightly Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo in front of Edinburgh Castle, where some 180 pipers and drummers bring each day to an unmistakably loud close.