The other day I wrote about getting a ‘behind-the-scenes’ tour of the Fireworks Concert, so here is the follow up. By way of a quick background, for those who are feeling too lazy to read the first post, the Fireworks Concert happens every year to celebrate the end of the Edinburgh International Festival. This year its new sponsorship deal made it the Virgin Money Fireworks Concert. To put it in a nut shell it is basically a 45 minute concert performed by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra which happens to have over 100,000 fireworks launching from Edinburgh Castle to go along with it.
One of the great things about the fireworks is that you don’t actually have to be in Princes Street Gardens to see them, being on a hill in the centre of town they are actually visible throughout most of the city (and a bit of Fife as well). We decided though that this year we would get in on the action and watch from Princes Street. Apart from the obvious benefits of being so close (getting your eardrums blown out, etc.) you also get the concert live as there are speakers along the edge of the Gardens.
We got an uninterupted view of the entire show from our vantage point at the bottom of Fredrick Street and although there were fewer people there than I thought there might be the crowd was still pretty large. Before leaving for the show I discovered that one of my cameras actually has a setting for fireworks on it, so I dutifully used it throughout. Sadly, however, it seems that it isn’t exactly wonderful (or I was doing something wrong, both of which are equally possible) and so the photos aren’t the best.
The display was absolutely spectacular this year (as it always is) and the music was excellent – I’m not entirely sure how Tchaikovsky’s Russian and Arab Dances from The Nutcracker fit with the ‘Far East’ theme, but we’ll gloss over that fact (and that the Nutcracker reminds me of Christmas) – even if drowned out by the pyrotechnics on occasion. I also really enjoyed the couple behind us who, four and a half pieces in (there were six in total) announced that they thought the fireworks were being set to the music.
To make up for the slightly sub-par photos, I decided to go a little more multimedia about half way through the concert, so if you weren’t one of the many people watching the show (estimates say that over a quater of a million people watch it every year) you can experience a little bit of it below. Do be warned it does contain some flashing images (if that wasn’t going to be a little obvious).
If you are ever in Edinburgh at the end of the festival I would thoroughly recommend that you ensure that you are here for the fireworks concert as well.
