Posts tagged press
Edinburgh International Festival

This role is the honour and responsibility of a lifetime. The support I have received from colleagues, friends and all our wonderful employees has been deeply moving. Everyone’s pride in the Festival’s achievements is tangible and infectious, both with respect to its long history and traditions, and in more recent times with the enormous success of its 75th anniversary year under Fergus Linehan. I am grateful and energised to work alongside such expertise and dedication.

Over the coming years I will be committed to providing the deepest possible experience, through the greatest level of art, to the broadest possible audience. We will sit in the centre of these objectives, each one compelling us to honour its importance. Even as a child, I never believed the greatest things were for keeping to ourselves.

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Hannah Kingpress
Nicola Benedetti becomes the Director Designate of the Edinburgh International Festival

Nicola Benedetti becomes the Director Designate of the Edinburgh International Festival

It has been difficult to keep quiet about this. Today I am delighted to have been announced as the Director Designate of the Edinburgh International Festival, beginning the role on 1 October 2022. I am proud to become the first Scottish and first female since the Festival began in 1947.

I am deeply honoured to contribute to the long and rich history of the Edinburgh International Festival and the cultural landscape of Scotland. This festival was founded on principles of reconciliation and the ideals of art transcending political and cultural fracture. Following in the footsteps of the wonderful achievements of Fergus Linehan and his predecessors, I will uphold these values and greatly look forward to serving this festival, its mission of cultural exchanges, and the people of Scotland.

https://www.eif.co.uk/news-and-blogs/nicola-benedetti-to-become-next-edinburgh-international-festival-director

#EdIntFest Edinburgh International Festival

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Hannah Kingpress, News
Review: Benedetti, CSO dazzle in U.S. premiere of Simpson Violin Concerto

Violinist Nicola Benedetti soared fearlessly through the agitated finale of Mark Simpson’s Violin Concerto with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra on Friday, and cheers erupted in Music Hall. It was a thrilling finish to a substantial new piece that seems destined to enjoy life long after these performances.

The CSO morning concert, which opened with the U.S. premiere of Simpson’s Violin Concerto, was led by the orchestra’s associate conductor François López-Ferrer, who stepped in this week for music director Louis Langrée. Langrée has contracted the flu, the orchestra said. The program also included Richard Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier” Suite, and Ravel’s “La valse.”

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reviewHannah Kingpress
Evening Standard Review: LSO, Barbican, Daniel Harding

Gosh it was good to hear the violinist live again in a concerto tailored to her strengths

Far from silenced by the pandemic, the violinist Nicola Benedettihas been using it to support young musicians, posting dozens of Zoom sessions and hundreds of videos to players of all standards round the world. It was good to hear her live again, though, and in a concerto tailored to her strengths: Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No.2 in G minor.

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reviewHannah Kingpress
The Times: Review. The Soldier's Tale, Edinburgh Festival

Simon Thompson

★★★★☆
When Stravinsky wrote The Soldier’s Tale in 1918 he scored it for miniature forces because enormous economic dislocation and a global pandemic had made it impossible for a large orchestra to perform together on stage. Sound familiar?

His distillation of the Faust legend, where a soldier unwittingly sells his soul to the devil, certainly fits the slimmed-down resources of both his time and ours, with only seven musicians and three actors to tell the story through narration and music.

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reviewHannah Kingpress
The Times Review: First Night - Edinburgh Festival residency

Simon Thompson

★★★★★


I haven’t asked her, but I’d stake money on the idea that, if the star violinist Nicola Benedetti felt butterflies in her tummy about any of the concerts in her Edinburgh International Festival residency, it was this one.

That’s not necessarily because it’s more virtuosic than her others: it’s because it’s so exposed. This concert was her alone on stage for an hour, with nothing but a violin for company, playing some of the most fiendishly challenging works in the violin literature. The technical obstacles are forbidding enough, but the real challenge for any violinist in this music is to find the beauty lurking behind the bravura.

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reviewHannah Kingpress
Edinburgh Music Review:The Story of the Violin

Brian Bannatyne-Scott

Nicola Benedetti is the gift that keeps on giving. Not only is she young and charismatic, one of the world’s finest violinists, and Scottish to boot, she is this year effortlessly dominating the Edinburgh International Festival, and this lunchtime recital in the airy space of the Old Quad’s new Festival venue was a treat.

Taking us on a historical journey through the solo violin repertoire of the last 400 years, Ms Benedetti proved an excellent guide. Playing the “Gariel” Stradivari violin of 1717, she conjured marvellous sounds from this small and versatile instrument.

Firstly, she played a Passacaglia in G Minor which forms the final movement of Heinrich Biber’s extraordinary Rosary Sonatas for solo violin, written about 1676. Based on a descending scale of four notes, which never cease to appear, Ms Benedetti wove a magical web of sound around them of ever-increasing complexity. In its remarkable, repetitive form, it can change character so subtly that one forgets the four notes, until suddenly, there they are again, unembellished, before vanishing into the texture once more. The Estonian composer, Arvo Pärt, must have been aware of Biber, as I certainly heard clear echoes of his own style in this work.

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Hannah Kingpress
The Herald, Scotland : Nicola Benedetti on Vivaldi and finding her voice

NICOLA Benedetti and I are playing a word association game. If I say the word “success” I say to her, what comes to mind? In her home in London the Scottish-born violinist goes quiet. And stays quiet. For so long that I start to speak.

“I’m still here,” she interrupts. “I’m thinking.”

Another beat. And then she begins.

“Success, I think, is clearly defining for yourself what you think is a challenge and difficult to achieve that you then can achieve. Or what brings you a level of integrity and satisfaction, perhaps happiness. But not in an escapist way … I mean a fulfilment.

“And then being able to have the discipline and determination to execute that set of values.”

The achieve of, the mastery of the thing, in short. As one of the country’s most recognisable classical musicians, someone who has played the last night of the Proms, Carnegie Hall, and all points in between, Benedetti knows all about that, of course.

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Evening Standard Interview: ‘It’s hard when you feel you’re doing your part, but others aren’t doing theirs’

Some people quit when faced with lockdown. Others don’t. When the pandemic abruptly smothered live music, the violinist Nicola Benedetti threw her considerable energy into finding new ways to connect people online to music and, through that, to one another. Now the Scottish star soloist is preparing for a Prom, where she will perform Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain and, at last, a real, live audience.

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Review: The Telegraph, Beethoven, Aurora Orchestra, Royal Festival Hall ★★★★★

Beethoven’s violin concerto may be among the most frequently played of all violin concertos, but it was a fair bet that in the hands of the country’s favourite violinist Nicola Benedetti and our most stylish and innovative orchestra it would come up fresh and new. And so it did. This was the most exciting performance of the concerto I’ve heard in years....

Full article here.

PHOTO: Mark Allan

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The Times: Review ★★★★★ Mark Simpson Violin Concerto/ LSO/ Noseda

★★★★★
Mark Simpson’s new Violin Concerto deserves audiences far and wide. Not only the unseen online viewers on their sofas at home, but people in a concert hall, close enough to feel this music’s thrilling pulse and soak up its visceral energy. A real crowd that will no doubt clap long and loud when they hear this piece, which, even streamed, left me reeling. This was a terrific premiere.

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reviewHannah Kingpress
Review: Prom 12 The Guardian: NYO/ Benedetti/ Wigglesworth review – glowing strings and a touch of Marsalis

Soloist Nicola Benedetti had been working with the orchestra during their week-long course and the rapport showed. For herself, Benedetti shaped a secure and expansive performance, giving a real kick to the dance sections of the finale. Her encore, from the Fiddle Dance Suite written for her by Wynton Marsalis, kept on swinging as she walked slowly offstage.

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reviewHannah Kingpress
Interview: Country Life Magazine

In Focus: How the violin virtuoso Nicola Benedetti is changing the way we teach music

The violinist Nicola Benedetti speaks to Claire Jackson about virtual teaching, playing Elgar and lobbying the government.

A patchwork of string players waves and smiles at the camera. The participants, aged two to 92, are dotted across the world, from Scotland to Siberia. A cat peers over a music stand as one young musician wrestles with a tricky phrase, trying to emulate the posture demonstrated by the violinist on his phone.

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The Times: Review ★★★★★ Elgar Album Decca

★★★★★
When Nicola Benedetti came across Elgar’s early, memorable little tune-spinner Salut d’amour, the fledgling violinist was just six. It made her cry. And she has certainly not lost her feeling for the piece, which was featured last month in her YouTube tutorials for young musicians and is given a typically soulful performance on the final track of this incandescent album (a streaming or download-only release at the moment). Yet it took until she was skirting 30 before Benedetti began exploring and playing the album’s big beast, Elgar’s Violin Concerto of 1910, which is emotionally and technically one of the repertoire’s most taxing.

The delay was wise and maturity’s fruits are everywhere in this ardent account, recorded late last year with the London Philharmonic

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Review: ★★★★★ The Times Edinburgh Festival/Academy of Ancient Music/ Vivaldi & Telemann

The Times, Academy of Ancient Music, Queens Hall Edinburgh  Queen’s Hall ★★★★★ ‘Nicola Benedetti is on such sensational form at present that she could play the Midlothian Yellow Pages and still mesmerise a crowd.’ With due respect to Simon Rattle et al, I will be amazed if the music programme at this year’s Edinburgh International […]

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reviewGuest Userpress