Edinburgh International Festival music reviews: Yahya Hussein Abdallah and Jasser Haj Youssef | Belcea Quartet

MUSIC

Yahya Hussein Abdallah and Jasser Haj Youssef ★★★★☆

The Hub

As a musical experience, the pairing of Tanzanian devotional singer and reciter Yahya Hussain Abdallah with Tunisian classical viola d’amore player Jasser Haj Youssef was something to behold. Dressed all in black, Youssef proved an extremely skilful and versatile player, dancing out a rhythm as he bent his bow at right-angles across the strings, drawing out gorgeously sustained notes as he played the instrument more like a violin, and at one point plucking the strings like a guitar, tapping its body to add a light beat as the audience clapped along.

Tanzanian singer Yahya Hussein Abdallah (right) and Tunisian viola d'amore player Jasser Haj Youssef | Contributed

In places Abdallah, all in white with prayer cap on, sat silently, in others his voice broke in, and it was every bit as emotionally expressive an instrument as Youssef’s. Unfortunately deep context on each lengthy piece played was unavailable, as Abdallah sings in Arabic (with one song translated into Swahili) and, perhaps due to a lack of English fluency, did not address the crowd.

Youssef explained as best he could, informing the audience of the provenance of the Islamic classical music they were playing – the first trio of pieces, for example, came from the 13th century epic poem in praise of Muhammad, al-Burda, while the encore was an old invocation whose writer they had tried and failed to discover. What the anglophone listener was left with was the striking tone of Abdallah’s voice in all its operatic yearning and anguish, and that was more than enough to feel transcendental in the Hub’s former religious hall.

DAVID POLLOCK

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MUSIC

Belcea Quartet ★★★★★

Queen’s Hall

Mendelssohn, Beethoven and Mozart made for a strikingly mainstream programme from one of the world’s most respected and boundary-pushing quartets. But do concerts always have to challenge, provoke, offer startling revelations?

If new light was being shone, it was rather gently – on the granitic but lyrical counterpoint in two of Mendelssohn’s late and rarely heard Four Pieces for String Quartet, for example, given warm, spirited readings. Or on a particularly playful account of Beethoven’s final quartet, which glowed from within with a gentle light of warm acceptance. It was the telling detail of the Belcea’s assured, even aristocratic readings, too, that ensured the music’s freshness, from the sheer meaningful variety of tone and texture (especially in the Beethoven) through to the microscopic gradations of vibrato in the pensive opening that gave Mozart’s Dissonance Quartet its nickname.

Anyone hoping for more challenging repertoire, however, might have been delighted by the Belceas’ deeply moving and personal encore, a musical memorial to co-founding violinist Laura Samuel, for many years leader of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, who died in 2024. A mesmerisingly focused slow movement from Webern’s Five Movements for String Quartet offered muted colours, an undeniably sombre tone, but space for intimate reflection and consolation.

DAVID KETTLE

READ MORE: Edinburgh International Festival music reviews: Ryan Wang | Shostakovich Inside Out