list.co.uk/festival The Harmonium Project | FESTIVAL FEATURES
PHOTO © 59 PRODUCTIONS
SWEET HARMONY
This year’s Edinburgh International Festival opens with The Harmonium Project, a one-off outdoor spectacle of music and lights at the Usher Hall. Yasmin Sulaiman spoke
to its co-creators to fi nd out more
N ot content to nab the starry likes of Juliette Binoche and Sufjan Stevens for his inaugural programme as EIF director, Fergus Linehan has set himself a big, unpredictable challenge for his i rst August in charge. As the International Festival marks its new, earlier start date – bringing it in line with the Fringe – it opens this Friday with The Harmonium Project, a free outdoor visual spectacle at the Usher Hall.
‘THIS IS A ONE-TIME-ONLY EXTRAVAGANZA’
‘I often think that the Usher Hall is a building that architecturally should have a big square in front of it,’ Fergus Linehan tells me, a week before his i rst EIF programme kicks off. ‘It should be almost cathedral-like with a huge open public space. But it isn’t; it’s got this incredibly narrow space in front of it and then a very busy road, so no one really looks at that building and it’s actually very beautiful. That space in front of the Usher Hall is probably the least touched by the festival of anywhere in Edinburgh. And I love that.’ It won’t be that way on the i rst Friday of the festival, when The Harmonium Project will transform the outside of the Usher Hall into a canvas of moving images celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus. Since its foundation in 1965, the chorus has featured some of Scotland’s best amateur singers, performing alongside
the world’s most respected musicians (this year, they perform at the Opening Concert, alongside the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Donald Runnicles).
The section of Lothian Road opposite the Hall will be closed to trafi c, allowing spectators to occupy a makeshift version of the square that Linehan thinks the building so deserves. But what exactly will they see there? Essentially, The Harmonium Project is a complex musical science experiment, a collaboration between the International Festival and 59 Productions, working with the University of Edinburgh’s Informatics Department.
Although 59 have just won a Tony Award for their video work on Broadway show An American in Paris, the company – whose aim is to push the boundaries of technology within the arts – are no strangers to Edinburgh. In 2006, they designed the video set for the phenomenally successful Black Watch and since then have worked on War Horse, the London 2012 Opening Ceremony and Lighting the Sails, an installation at Sydney Opera House, which is where Linehan i rst worked with them. ‘This is kind of a unique project for us,’ admits 59’s Richard Slaney, who co-created The Harmonium Project with Linehan, ‘and we do some really crazy projects. It happens once, and hopefully it will be fantastic and the audience will love it. We don’t get to revise it or change it, like a theatre 6–13 Aug 2015 THE LIST FESTIVAL 23