VoxCarnyx

Edinburgh Academy Junior School

Argentinian cellist Sol Gabetta is something of a favourite in Edinburgh, having wowed Festival audiences in chamber music and orchestral settings and appeared in the Usher Hall’s international orchestral seasons. This was probably her first time in a tent in the capital though.

She was also in familiar company with RSNO principal guest conductor Elim Chan, as the pair have worked together at Chan’s Antwerp Symphony Orchestra – and with the Cello Concerto No 1 of Saint-Saens. Like Steven Isserlis, she has championed the Frenchman’s work, and here – and not for the first time – it did seem baffling that the piece is less often heard than those of Elgar and Dvorak. It is a flowing delight of a work with some sparkling fast-fingered passages for the soloist to demonstrate her virtuosity and beautiful tone. Only on the opening page did the tricky sound issues in this venue leave her temporarily swamped by what was a small RSNO.

Chan’s programme opened with a work by the current hippest name in US composition, Caroline Shaw, the 39-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner from North Carolina whose contact book includes collaboration with Kanye West. There was not a lot of hip-hop in her Entr’acte, a piece for strings that toys playfully with neo-classicism, references Haydn, and teeters teasingly on the edge of losing its way before culminating in a solo for the RSNO’s guest first cello.

Perhaps that looking to the work of earlier composers was intended to be echoed in Beethoven’s Symphony No 1, a work that period bands and chamber orchestras speed through as his tribute to his predecessors. In Chan’s hands, however, it was more a statement of intent for what was to come. It was a point at times too deliberately, even ponderously, made in her reading, but not without its rewards. The arc that the conductor drew from the work’s distinctive opening bars to the beginning of the finale could not have been clearer, although she did seem to be holding the orchestra on a tight rein until the dynamic pace of that closing movement.

Keith Bruce