Some distance had built up between the concert the Edinburgh international festival detailed when the 2024 programme was unveiled and what the audience heard at Usher Hall, but the essential foundations remained: Brazil’s São Paulo Symphony, under the baton of its music director, Thierry Fischer, visiting Europe for the orchestra’s 70th anniversary with a rich and colourful library of music.
As advertised, we heard the epic tone-poem of Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony after the interval, every inch of the platform filled with the huge cast of players the composer desired, some horns, doubling on Wagner tubas, off stage when required, and the huge percussion section framed by a very new-looking wind machine on one side and thunder-sheets on the other, with the two timpanists in the middle.
