Bassem Akiki conducts the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony at the Usher Hall.
The Royal Scottish National Orchestra are at Usher Hall on Friday 30 October, with Bassem Akiki conducting Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony. It's a big, heavy piece of music, and the RSNO are the ones taking it on.
If you're not familiar with the Seventh, it's one of Shostakovich's most famous works, written during the Second World War. It's a long, sweeping symphony, and having the RSNO on it means you've got a full orchestra behind it. Akiki will be leading them from the podium, so the whole evening is built around that one piece.
It's being played at Usher Hall, on Lothian Road, which is the city's main venue for visiting national and international orchestras. The hall has been the primary home of the Edinburgh International Festival since 1947, and it goes back even further than that — it dates from 1896, when Andrew Usher gave £100,000 to the City of Edinburgh to found a concert hall. The Beaux Arts building was completed in 1914 and is still one of the city's architectural gems, with acoustics that are praised as being among the best in Europe. It's a proper space for a symphony like this, where the sound has room to open up.
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So, it's the RSNO, Bassem Akiki, and Shostakovich's Seventh at Usher Hall on Friday 30 October. If you've been wanting to hear this one live, this is your chance.
