Brendan Glen

Chorus Member at Edinburgh Festival Chorus

I’m a Chorus Member of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus. We meet weekly throughout the year from September to December, then January to the end of May. We meet every Tuesday evening and rehearse the repertoire for the Festival in August. We’ll perform three to five concerts during the festival season.

I’ve been with the Chorus since 2012, eight years now. I’ve been brought up on choral singing since I was very young and performed in choirs since I was seven. I was in the National Youth Choir of Scotland but getting too old to be a part of it. The then-Chorus Director Christopher Bell encouraged me to apply and give it a shot – I loved it. It’s choral singing on a scale that you rarely get in any other place in the country.

What is your favourite festival memory? 
Performing Mahler’s Eighth Symphony with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2018. It’s an absolutely monstrous piece with a 100 strong orchestra, full brass, eight soloists, two choirs – quite astonishing.

And the Usher Hall, there’s no place quite like it. It’s got great acoustics for performing. You can have the quietest sound travel so far, all the way up to the very back bench. In terms of performance spaces there’s not many that can beat it.

What makes you proud to be a Festival City citizen? 
So many people come from all over the world and share this experience. It doesn’t matter if you’re from Edinburgh, Sweden, America, all these places – you can never have met these people before the performance, but you get to make art together and enjoy the music, the art of it.

One of the great strengths of the festivals is that they bring people together.

Now that’s our biggest threat… hopefully we’ll soon be able to be together again and remember these great shared experiences – we have so much more in common than what divides us.