A Mass of Life – Edinburgh festival review

Usher HallThe international festival officially opened with Delius's A Mass of Life – a heady, Dionysian piece that gets under your skin despite its perversities. Completed in 1905, it's a setting, in German, of extracts from Also Sprach Zarathustra. Nietzsche's quasi-poetic magnum opus, with its emphasis on self-determination in a metaphysically bankrupt universe, had a colossal impact around the turn of the 20th century, providing the inspiration for Strauss's tone-poem and Mahler's Third Sy...

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