Sarah Brightman -- Concert in Edinburgh
5 September 1997

Already for a long time I was looking for an opportunity to go to a concert of Sarah Brightman, and then preferably one where she sings the musical-like number of her CDs The songs that got away, Surrender and Timeless.

Quite by accident, but in time, I discovered on a Web page of Elden [who stopped his website in Nov. 2005] that Sarah gave a series of concerts with The English National Orchestra (conducted by Paul Bateman) in Britain in September 1997 and the first one would be closed to where I live: on 5 September she would perform in the Playhouse Theatre in Edinburg went there.

And I am very glad I did, for it was a wonderful concert! Sarah and the Orcherstra performed classic and musical numbers -- see the programme of the concert -- some of which are on her CDs Surrender and Timeless, others are not recorded by her (to my knowledge, at least). The first part had mostly rather classic numbers, the part after the interval was more modern and musical like. Some numbers of the first part were a bit too classic for my taste, but on the whole I enjoyed the concert very much and I loved to see and hear her sing life with that magnificent voice of hers.

Photos of the pages of the concert program brochure [with thanks to Héctor Müller].

Photos of the concert

I have taken some photos of Sarah during the concert. For this I used a very sensitive film in an automatic camera with a zoom lens. Most of the photos are not so good, because the lighting was not good enough for taking photos, but some of them turned out not too bad. See the separate

[photo page] page with seven photos of the concert (41 kb).

During the first part of the concert I sat on the fifth row to the right of the centre, and Sarah was standing to the left of the centre, but I had a pretty good view at her. Since some seats to the left were empty, I moved to the third row almost in front of Sarah, which gave me an even better view. In both cases, however, I could only see a part of the orchestra and no-one of the choir behind the orchestra.

While I was scanning these photos, I also scanned the leaflet of the concert, which looks like this:

[GIF picture] GIF picture (229 kb) / JPEG picture (67 kb)

This leaflet lists data of the concert series in the UK; there was a small change in this programme and there were some concerts in Germany in October 1997; click here for a copy of the list made on 15 September.

The concert was, unfortunately, shorter than I expected. Officially it started at 8pm, but in fact it was 20:10. There was an interval of 20-25 minutes and at 22:05 I was outside the theatre again, in the fresh September air. The other thing that disappointed me a bit was that Sarah did not sing with all numbers, as the programme of the concert shows. Is that to give the Orchestra also a chance to present itself, without all attention going to Sarah? I don't know. I hardly ever go to concerts, so this may be usual, who knows.

Video / DVD

On 24 September, Sarah gave a similar concert in the Royal Albert Hall in London. The songs Sarah sang during that concert are available on a 80 minute video / DVD.

<=== The Sarah Brightman main page / concerts page / CD index / lyrics index

or go directly to one of her CDs, concerts or videos on these pages: