The second of our Festival weekend events in association with the exhibition Music & Migration in Georgian Edinburgh: The Story of Felix Yaniewicz, celebrating the co-founder of the first Edinburgh music festival of 1815.
In a colourful illustrated talk John Halliday tells the story of Edinburgh's first music festival in 1815, the most ambitious event of its kind in Scottish history to date. Felix Yaniewicz, a Polish-Lithuanian violin virtuoso,who settled in Edinburgh, led a star-studded ensemble of singers and instrumentalists in a programme of magnificent concerts in Parliament Hall. The Festival was even marked by the first ‘fringe’ spectacle of a hot air balloon flight! The 1815 festival was hailed as a turning point in Scottish musical culture in the direction of a newly cosmopolitan outlook, embodied by Yaniewicz and his European musical colleagues.
