VoxCarnyx

Edinburgh Academy Junior School

It was not the fireworks-accompanying with which the SCO usually winds up its Festival commitments, but there was excitement nonetheless in the orchestra’s sole outing at full strength in the 2021 programme.

Scarcely longer than a fireworks concert, that brevity was in part explained by the late substitution of conductor with the withdrawal of Japanese Kazushi Ono due to quarantine-related travel complications. In one of remarkably few such changes this year, French conductor, and former Music Director of the Tonhalle-Orchester Zurich, Lionel Bringuier, took on the bulk of the pre-announced programme.

The casualty was Takemitsu’s Tree Line, but Toshio Hosokawa’s Blossoming II survived, surely because it was already known by many of the players, who premiered the EIF commission a decade ago under Robin Ticciati. The precisely-titled piece starts with a single unfolding note on the strings which opens out to embrace the rest of the orchestra before acquiring a bolder rhythmic pulse through bass drum, bass clarinet, double bassoon and string basses, with some virtuosic flurries from the string and wind principals.

There is also blossoming orchestration in Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin with its teasing first movement before the delayed arrival of the Forlane tune in the second. In this most lyrical of memorials, there was some beautiful oboe playing and Bringuier brought a particular finesse to the final bars of the Menuet, perfection not quite repeated at the conclusion of the Rigaudon.

Prokofiev’s contemporary “Classical” Symphony suggested further encounters between orchestra and conductor should be eagerly anticipated. Although there will always be a suggestion that the precocious composer was winding up the musical establishment with his referencing of old forms, there is no pastiche in his Symphony No 1. From the opening Allegro it was played here with real vigour and emphasis, and at pace, with an especially physical performance from the ensemble of strings. Hopefully there is much more to come from Bringuier with the SCO.
Keith Bruce