Edinburgh International Festival: Transforming Princes Street Gardens for a celebration of music-making

Martyn Bennett’s legacy to be honoured in ‘Opening Fanfare’ event

It is nearly a quarter of a century since the late composer and musician Martyn Bennett’s work was performed in Princes Street Gardens to mark the reopening of the Scottish Parliament.

Now his legacy is about to be honoured in the same location this weekend when an orchestra created to perform his ground-breaking albums rounds off one of the biggest ever celebrations of music-making in the gardens.

The performance by the Grit Orchestra - an 80-strong collective of 80 leading Scottish folk, jazz and classical musicians - on Sunday afternoon will be the culmination of the “Opening Fanfare,” a free two-day event launching Edinburgh’s main summer festivals season.

Instigated by new director Nicola Benedetti and supported by the Scottish Government, the Edinburgh International Festival’s two-day celebration will encompass a series of free performances across three stages in West Princes Street Gardens showcasing emerging talent drawn from multiple genres of music.

Saturday’s curtain-raiser will see around 15 different groups – including brass and street bands, folk musicians, choirs, rappers and pipers – showcased before more than 300 participants are brought together for a mass performance.

Edinburgh-based Oi Musica, the Mull Music Makers, North Ayrshire Strings, Glasgow’s Sound Lab Project and Dundee-based Soundlab will be in Saturday's line-up, which will also feature music and song refugees and aylum seekers currently living in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Edinburgh’s Tinderbox Collective, which has programmed the day with the Music Education Partnership Group, has jointly written a piece of new music inspired by one of Benedetti’s major themes for her first festival, “community over chaos.”

The Grit Orchestra set up by composer and conductor Greg Lawson will be staging a free concert in Princes Street Gardens on the opening weekend of the Edinburgh International Festival. Picture: Gaelle Beri

Sunday will see the National Youth Pipe Band of Scotland and the National Youth Brass Bands of Scotland stage performances before the Grit Orchestra joins forces with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, where Bennett studied in the early 1990s before recording a series of critically acclaimed albums.

He was at the height of his fame when he was commissioned to write a special piece of his music for the centenary of Edinburgh’s Broughton High School, where Bennett had studied at its specialist music school. Its pupils performed the piece in Princes Street Gardens in July 1999 one of the highlights of a memorable day of celebration in Edinburgh.

Bennett halted all live performances the following year after being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and he passed away in 2005 at the age of 33, just as the finishing touches were being made to a long-awaited recording by Broughton’s music students of Bennett’s piece.

Violinist, composer and conductor Greg Lawson, a long-time friend of Bennett’s who was involved in that recording, would go on to form the Grit Orchestra in 2014 to perform his final album, Grit, on the opening night of the following year’s Celtic Connections music festival, where the young musician had staged some of his most memorable concerts.

The Grit Orchestra will be staging a free concert in Princes Street Gardens on the opening weekend of the Edinburgh International Festival. Picture: Mihaela Bodlovic

Nearly 25 years on from the parliament opening, Lawson has been working on a brand new piece of music which will be performed by more than 100 musicians on Sunday afternoon, the first outing for the Grit Orchestra in more than three and a half years, which see see an extended stage built at the Ross Bandstand arena.

The students from the RCS who will be performing with the Grit Orchestra in the gardens have been working with Lawson since last year on his reworked versions of Bennett’s music that have been given a new lease of life over the last decade.

Sunday’s concert, which is expected to feature a guest appearance from Benedetti, will feature new music originally developed by Lawson in his classes in Glasgow, as well as highlights from Bennett’s back catalogue.

He said: “The new piece I’m working on very much came out of my relationship with the RCS. Working on the Grit Orchestra pieces was a huge thing for the students – they were suddenly allowed to be be in a large group playing music of scale and thought, and being able to be free and enjoy themselves.

The Grit Orchestra set up by composer and conductor Greg Lawson will be staging a free concert in Princes Street Gardens on the opening weekend of the Edinburgh International Festival. Picture: Gaelle Beri

"The students actually went mental over it – there was actually a point where I thought I had opened the door too wide and too much had been released, but they just loved it.

“I asked them if they would get involved in writing a larger piece of music together rather than splitting off into groups. We started working to gather ideas together on a very low-key basis initially.

“The students could see that writing for an orchestra was a possibility, what ideas that they could expand on and what ideas were limited. It was a very relaxed process and we got a load of ideas.

"It was then that Nicky got in touch about this year’s festival, but at that point the piece was a bit like a cardboard box full of bits.

"It will have a lot of big, chunky ingredients and space to allow us to bring in lots of different elements to play with the orchestra, including choirs, brass players and pipers.

"Most of the students who were part of that original process of providing suggestions for the piece are going to be performing.”

Members of the Grit Orchestra, who will be staging a free concert in Princes Street Gardens on the opening weekend of the Edinburgh International Festival. Picture: Paul Devlin

The Opening Fanfare weekend in the gardens is one of several new innovations introduced in Nicola Benedetti’s first EIF line-up, including opening the festival up to a younger demographic, breaking down barriers between audiences, performers and musical genres, and championing new musical talent in Scotland.

Lawson said: “Nicky is trying to make a real commitment to bring change about by actually doing it properly. She desperately wants to create stronger connections with people and is absolutely sincere about it.

"The concert we’ll be doing in the gardens will be something of a taster.

"I hope that next year that we’ll be able to not just use that space in the gardens for one event or one weekend.

"If you’re going to spend money building a stage in the gardens you may as well have a series of things running throughout the festival.”

Tinderbox Collective founder Jack Nissan said: “Community Over Chaos is an extraordinary collaboration and one-off performance with over 300 musicians of all ages for the festival’s opening event.

“The new piece of music has been written collectively by a number of the groups that are performing on Saturday in their own slots and will then come together.

“The piece will weave together a mix of genres featuring verses, melodies, rappers and riffs. It’s a bif of an experiment.

“We’re going to pull everyone together into a very unorthodox 300-piece band. The piece will then be performed (and rehearsed) together for the first time as a live workshop and concert at the Ross Bandstand.”