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Scotsman
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
The Edinburgh Cup Raceday is weekend tonic for Musselburgh racing fans
Musselburgh Racecourse is preparing for one of its most competitive race days of the summer season - The Edinburgh Cup in partnership with Edinburgh Gin - on Saturday 7 June. Sign up to our daily newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Edinburgh News, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... A thrilling day of top-class horse racing, live entertainment, and premium hospitality is on the cards at the seven-race meeting with prize money of almost £160,000 on offer. The feature race, the £50,000 Edinburgh Cup, run over 1 mile 1 furlong, is complemented by the equally prestigious £50,000 Edinburgh Gin British EBF Queen of Scots Stakes, which showcases the finest fillies and mares over seven furlongs. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The Queen of Scots event - a Class 1 Listed race - has become a key stepping stone for horses targeting Royal Ascot and the major summer festivals during the flat racing season and this year's renewal is expected to attract another stellar field. Action packed and glamorous - The Edinburgh Cup is staged this weekend at Musselburgh Racecourse. Musselburgh Racecourse director, Bill Farnsworth, said: "The Edinburgh Cup has established itself as one of the standout fixtures in Scotland's racing calendar, consistently attracting high-quality fields from leading trainers across the UK, and this year promises to deliver the same exceptional standard of racing that has made this meeting so popular with both racing enthusiasts and social racegoers alike." For racing fans keen to keep up with the action at the Betfred Derby, screens around the course will show the world's greatest Flat race live from Epsom Downs. Away from the track, Musselburgh's Main Stage will feature live music entertainment, building up to the legendary After Racing Party hosted by Forth One's popular Boogie in the Morning, which is open to all racegoers after the final race. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Best dressed racegoer of the day could win a £500 clothing voucher and four Pimm's Enclosure tickets to Musselburgh's sell-out Ladies Day on 8 August, courtesy of Slater Menswear, who are the official Men's Fashion Partner to The Edinburgh Cup Raceday. Fashion is to the fore and the best dressed racegoer at Musselburgh's Edinburgh Cup meeting will win a £500 Slater Menswear voucher plus tickets to Ladies Day in August. Open to both ladies and gents, other prizes include £250 and £150 Slater gift vouchers and admission tickets to the popular Oktoberfest Raceday or Friday Night at the Races events. Head to the Style Standout fashion wall by the Main Stage to enter and the winner will be announced before the final race by radio presenter Boogie. Food enthusiasts can indulge in offerings from Scotland's finest street food vendors, with options carefully selected to cater to all dietary requirements and The Edinburgh Gin Botanical Bar will serve refreshing, botanical-inspired cocktails, perfectly complementing the summer racing atmosphere. "We've created an event that appeals to everyone - from serious racing fans who appreciate the quality of our racing, to groups of friends looking for a fantastic day out," added Farnsworth. 'The combination of top-class sport, excellent food and drink, live entertainment, and our beautiful Links setting makes for an unbeatable experience." Gates open at 11.15am, and the first and last races are scheduled for 1.20pm and 4.55pm, respectively. Tickets and hospitality packages are available through the Musselburgh Racecourse website.
Edinburgh Reporter
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Edinburgh Reporter
Edinburgh Cup raceday is weekend tonic for Musselburgh racing fans
Musselburgh Racecourse is preparing for one of its most competitive race days of the summer season – The Edinburgh Cup in partnership with Edinburgh Gin – on Saturday 7 June. A thrilling day of top-class horse racing, live entertainment, and premium hospitality is on the cards at the seven-race meeting with prize money of almost £160,000 on offer. The feature race, the £50,000 Edinburgh Cup, run over 1 mile 1 furlong, is complemented by the equally prestigious £50,000 Edinburgh Gin British EBF Queen of Scots Stakes, which showcases the finest fillies and mares over seven furlongs. The Queen of Scots event – a Class 1 Listed race – has become a key stepping stone for horses targeting Royal Ascot and the major summer festivals during the flat racing season and this year's renewal is expected to attract another stellar field. Musselburgh Racecourse director, Bill Farnsworth, said: 'The Edinburgh Cup has established itself as one of the standout fixtures in Scotland's racing calendar, consistently attracting high-quality fields from leading trainers across the UK, and this year promises to deliver the same exceptional standard of racing that has made this meeting so popular with both racing enthusiasts and social racegoers alike.' For racing fans keen to keep up with the action at the Betfred Derby, screens around the course will show the world's greatest Flat race live from Epsom Downs. Away from the track, Musselburgh's Main Stage will feature live music entertainment, building up to the legendary After Racing Party hosted by Forth One's popular Boogie in the Morning, which is open to all racegoers after the final race. Glamour on the gallops at Musselburgh Racecourse's Edinburgh Cup Raceday Best dressed racegoer of the day could win a £500 clothing voucher and four Pimm's Enclosure tickets to Musselburgh's sell-out Ladies Day on 8 August, courtesy of Slater Menswear, who are the official Men's Fashion Partner to The Edinburgh Cup Raceday. Open to both ladies and gents, other prizes include £250 and £150 Slater gift vouchers and admission tickets to the popular Oktoberfest Raceday or Friday Night at the Races events. Head to the Style Standout fashion wall by the Main Stage to enter and the winner will be announced before the final race by radio presenter Boogie. Food enthusiasts can indulge in offerings from Scotland's finest street food vendors, with options carefully selected to cater to all dietary requirements and The Edinburgh Gin Botanical Bar will serve refreshing, botanical-inspired cocktails, perfectly complementing the summer racing atmosphere. 'We've created an event that appeals to everyone – from serious racing fans who appreciate the quality of our racing, to groups of friends looking for a fantastic day out,' added Farnsworth. 'The combination of top-class sport, excellent food and drink, live entertainment, and our beautiful Links setting makes for an unbeatable experience.' Gates open at 11.15am, and the first and last races are scheduled for 1.20pm and 4.55pm, respectively. Tickets and hospitality packages are available through the Musselburgh Racecourse website More than £160,000 on offer at The Edinburgh Cup Raceday – pic by Alan Raeburn Like this: Like Related
Daily Record
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
Netflix's award-winning movie hailed as incredible but viewers have just days left to watch
Netflix is set to remove a popular Oscar-winning film that has been hailed as "absolutely incredible", "fantastic" and "harrowing" by fans. The streaming giant routinely updates its catalogue, which involves adding new titles and removing existing ones. In May, several award-winning movies will be taken off the platform, including one with an impressive near-perfect Rotten Tomatoes score. Subscribers have until May 16 to watch BlacKkKlansman before it departs from Netflix. This title is among various others scheduled to leave on the same day, such as Mary, Queen of Scots (2018), Penguins of Madagascar: The Movie (2014), Sisters (2015), and Zero Dark Thirty (2012). BlacKkKlansman boasts a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 96%, reflecting widespread acclaim from hundreds of critics, as reported by the Express. The 2018 release tells the story of a detective who sets out to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan to expose its activities. The film features John David Washington and Adam Driver as the detectives who join forces to dismantle the notorious hate group. Upon its release, BlacKkKlansman garnered praise from audiences and critics alike, winning the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2019. It was nominated for a total of six Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actor for Adam Driver's performance. Fans have lauded the film for its portrayal of the extremist faction and the specific era of US history it covers. A critic expressed: "Absolutely incredible film. Very chilling. Spike Lee sending a clear message and telling a great story. Whilst still keeping some of his infamous camera work." Additionally, another viewer was impressed, stating: "Wow! Just wow! Very fascinating film with stunning acting and that scene with the speech blew me away." Elsewhere, Netflix fans have an exciting new host of shows to look forward to coming to the streaming giant within the next few weeks. As The White Lotus has shown, vacations can be heaven or hell. In this new Netflix comedy series The Four Seasons, co-created by veteran comedian Tina Fey, the latter is explored, with the show following three couples who traditionally vacation together four times over the course of one calendar year. A remake of the 1981 movie starring Alan Alda. It boasts a stacked and star-studded cast that includes Fey and her SNL castmate Will Forte as Kate and Jack, who go on multiple trips with their longtime couple friends, played by Steve Carell and Kerri Kenney-Silver, as well as Marco Calvani and Colman Domingo. Later on in the month, Meghann Fahy is also returning to screens, once more spending time at a luxurious beach house. In Sirens, which comes to the platform on May 22, Fahy plays Devon DeWitt, a worried woman who thinks her little sister, Simone (Milly Alcock), has a creepy relationship with her new boss, an enigmatic socialite played by Julianne Moore. The dark comedy series from Molly Smith Metzler takes place over the course of one explosive weekend at Moore's character's lavish beach estate.
The Guardian
22-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The week in classical: Mary, Queen of Scots; Academy Symphony Orchestra/ Wilson; James MacMillan: Ordo Virtutum
In the madness of royal succession, a baby in a buggy is proclaimed king, his mother robbed of the crown and banished. Mary, Queen of Scots (1977), a three-act opera by Thea Musgrave, focuses on the seven years leading up to that moment of exile. History is rewritten in the telling, but the atrocity of Mary's story burns through. Sexual politics, shattered trust and religious turbulence eddy and seethe, all to a huge orchestral score and the actions of four earls, two lords, a cardinal and the rabble-rousing people of Scotland, as well as the queen's household of women. In a move as plucky as it was, in some ways, baffling, English National Opera presented Mary, Queen of Scots in a modest semi-staging by director-designer Stewart Laing (woolly hats, anoraks, railings and a dismal, half-built frame marquee). Cast, chorus and orchestra, under the baton of Joana Carneiro, had mastered Musgrave's complex score and wordy text (the composer's own) to the highest standard. The regret was that this exhaustive effort, for whatever reasons of cost or nerve, resulted in only two performances – both sold out. Making her ENO debut in the title role, the American soprano Heidi Stober gave a ferocious account of a power-hungry monarch determined to follow her own path when her drunken husband, Darnley (Rupert Charlesworth), half-brother James (Alex Otterburn) and the seedily rapacious Bothwell (John Findon) prove useless. After the slow explication of the first act – a full production might have clarified all the patrician comings and goings – the pace quickens. Intimate scenes have dramatic force. The noisy, roaring volleys of brass, keening woodwind and outbursts of orchestral menace grip the attention, gathering speed and volume towards the finale. The 96-year-old composer, Edinburgh-born but living in America for more than half a century, had travelled to the UK for the occasion. Taking her bow, she was greeted by an ovation from the enthusiastic audience. Musgrave has managed to bypass the withering nullification of female composers prevalent for most of her career, admired and played if never having the limelight she deserves. An exact contemporary of Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007), she harnessed her talent to deft instrumental writing when electronic experiment was monster king. She has lived long enough to see that taste has moved on, female composers released from perpetual anchorage and (nearly) properly valued. After this performance, a co-production with San Francisco Opera, she might see, too, that her own work will live on. Lack of money, loss of morale, the effects of Brexit: these issues dog the lives of professional musicians, however determined they are to give their all as artists. At the Royal Academy of Music last week, a new generation of players, average age 20, demonstrated a can-do determination riven into every note they played. The intake at the RAM is still around 58% British, a number to monitor as UK music education continues to unravel. Fewer students come from Europe, post-Brexit, many from farther afield. Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, a wise and inspired principal of the academy as well as a practising musician, is fervent in his belief that a positive mantra can bring about change. He instils this in his students and will not countenance compromise. Nor, too, will the conductor John Wilson, who holds the Henry Wood chair in conducting at the academy. After working together for an intensive week, six hours a day, Wilson and the Academy Symphony Orchestra gave an outstanding concert of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto and a suite from Prokofiev's ballet Romeo and Juliet. One aspect of the ensemble was immediately clear: the quality of the string sound. This defining section of any orchestra is the hardest in which to achieve blend and expressivity: 50 or so players, with instruments of different quality, using different fingerings or bowing techniques, all able to play the notes but doing it their own way. Wilson, known for his meticulous scrutiny of detail, has introduced them to the sacred principle, which sounds easy enough, of listening. The results were formidable. There was risk here too. The Tchaikovsky, with a first-year student from Texas, 18-year old Adriana Bec, the virtuosic soloist, was a wild, hair-raising ride, Bec clearly revelling in the chance to pour her energy into a Stradivarius, on loan to her from the academy. The strength of her playing prompted me to ponder the weight of a violin bow: average 60 grams, about the same as an egg. Bec made it at once granite-like and featherlight. She still has three years of study left. Watch for the name. A short word, because if I get going on Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) it may turn out long, on a work inspired by her morality play Ordo Virtutum (Order of the Virtues). James MacMillan has created a choral drama, luminous, contrapuntal and ecstatic, out of the German nun-mystic's 12th-century chant. The BBC Singers and National Youth Voices conducted by Sofi Jeannin, with percussionist Andrew Barclay adding sonic colour, gave the UK premiere at Milton Court. Humility, chastity and the rest of the heavenly virtues conquer the Devil. You'd better believe it. Hear it on BBC Sounds and live in hope. (Star ratings) out of five Mary, Queen of Scots ★★★★ Academy Symphony Orchestra/Wilson ★★★★ James MacMillan: Ordo Virtutum ★★★★
The Guardian
16-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Mary, Queen of Scots review – trouser suits and relentless tension in Musgrave's bleak opera
The final new production of English National Opera's season is Thea Musgrave's Mary, Queen of Scots, directed by Stewart Laing and conducted by Joana Carneiro. It was last heard in London at Sadler's Wells during a 1980 tour by Scottish Opera, who premiered it in Edinburgh in 1977. It's a bleak, uncompromising piece, in many ways. Musgrave is having none of the still prevalent Romantic view of Mary as the passionate martyr of Fotheringhay, focusing instead on her years in Scotland between 1561 and her abdication in 1567, and probing her relationships with the three men who jostled to control her: her illegitimate half-brother James, a fierce Protestant, whose fixation with his sister, it is implied, may have been incestuous; Henry Darnley, her profligate second husband; and Bothwell, the Catholic mercenary, whose ostensible loyalty masks a tendency to coercion and sexual violence. The score has a certain unyielding hardness of edge. Musgrave is good on plots and counter-plots, as alliances are formed and dissolved in ballrooms, and omnipresent slithering woodwind suggest there is no firm ground anywhere. Arguably the finest scene in the entire work, relentless in its tension, comes when the earls of Ruthven (Ronald Samm) and Morton (Jolyon Loy) conspire with Darnley (Rupert Charlesworth) to murder Riccio (Barnaby Rea). Elsewhere, much of the drama is advanced in a mixture of recitative and arioso, with vocal lines turning notably angular at moments of crisis. Lyrical passages are beautiful but rare, and a lovely chorus marks the arrival of Mary in Scotland. Darnley later woos her to music at once impressionistic and exquisitely insubstantial. Laing, meanwhile, reimagines the piece in terms of 20th-century sectarianism. Protestants and Catholics, fanatics alike, are effectively indistinguishable from each other until allegiances are declared, but are also tacitly united by suspicion when Heidi Stober's Mary arrives, elegant yet out of place in a couture trouser suit. It's a telling idea, but can obscure our awareness of the underlying power dynamics: in particular, Mary's insistence on a divine right to absolute monarchy doesn't carry as much weight here as it should. Sung and acted with blazing conviction across the board, though, the performance itself is tremendous. The title role lies high, and Stober is all thrilling top notes and terrific moments of defiance or self-assertion. Alex Otterburn makes a charismatic, lethally persuasive James. You really understand Mary's initial attraction to Charlesworth's elegantly sung if vapid Darnley, and the dissipation and degradation of his later scenes are disquietingly vivid. John Findon's Bothwell masks steely brutality beneath the trappings of heldentenor heroism, while Rea makes a sonorous, unusually sympathetic Riccio. Carneiro, meanwhile, drives it all forwards with inexorable momentum, and the playing and choral singing are both superb. It's not always an easy work to like, but it's powerfully done. At the Coliseum, London, until 18 February
