FOREWORD

A WARM WELCOME TO SCO NEWS

FOREWORD

I hope you have had an opportunity to enjoy the Orchestra’s online performance of Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto with Paul Lewis as part of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival. We were thrilled to be invited to take part in My Light Shines On, the Festival’s imaginative response to the challenges of 2020. If you have not seen the film, do look it up on the Festival’s website. (www.eif.co.uk/whats-on/2020/ sco-paullewis) As well as Beethoven, you will find several other specially recorded Festival performances featuring SCO principal players.

These very welcome projects have given us all a huge boost, as well as great hope and optimism that there will be many more opportunities to perform for you in the coming weeks and months. Indeed, hope and optimism have become bywords as we continue to plan and re-plan both our forthcoming Winter Season and our extensive Creative Learning programme.

We have been working hard with our players to create an autumn programme that showcases their skills as chamber and orchestral musicians. As restrictions hopefully start to ease in the coming weeks and prospects for a return to live performance become more of a reality, we look forward to sharing both our plans and our music-making with you, just as soon as we can. In many ways this will be a SCO Season like no other. As usual, it will have musical brilliance, creativity and joy at its very heart. However, to ensure as many people as possible can share in our performances, our autumn programme will be a mix of both live and online events.

To that end, I could not be happier that to open our new Season, Nicola Benedetti and Maxim Emelyanychev will join the SCO for a specially filmed performance of Bruch’s much-loved Violin Concerto No 1, kindly sponsored by Quilter Cheviot. Please do join us online on Thursday 24 September.

These are of course unsettling and difficult times for everyone. For those of us involved in the arts it is clear the route back to safe ground has some way to go, with many challenges still ahead. So, I should like to reiterate my enormous gratitude and appreciation to all those people who have been so generous and supportive over the last few months. Your donations have been most welcome and very gratefully received. Thank you.

I do hope you enjoy reading our news.

Gavin Reid Chief Executive