VoxCarnyx

Usher Hall, Edinburgh

For many of a generation older than Nicola Benedetti’s (specifically, mine) the question the new director of the Edinburgh International Festival is posing on the cover of her first programme and in the title of this concert, Where Do We Go From Here?, is less the last book completed by the Rev Martin Luther King before his assassination, and more a line from the debut hit single five years later by David Essex, Rock On.

It is not too flippant to add that in the case of the final work in this short concert, Three Screaming Popes by Mark-Anthony Turnage, the name of the teen heart-throb’s chart-topper would not be an inaccurate answer. Turnage’s youthful, visceral response to the paintings of Francis Bacon was by far the oldest work of the four the BBC Scottish played under the baton of Chief Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth, and its power and intensity, and dramatic conclusion with a referee’s whistle and  dying piano chord could only really have been placed at the end of the programme.

Where we journeyed before that, as Benedetti, writer and broadcaster Tom Service and the conductor guided us through a trio of 21^st century pieces, was no less musically rewarding, especially the longest and most recent work, Hans Abrahamsen’s Let Me Tell You, with soprano Jennifer France.

The soloist has the commanding starring role in this three-part song-cycle which gives voice to Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, drawing inspiration from music writer Paul Griffith’s experimental novel. France was superb, but Wigglesworth’s introduction, deconstructing the composer’s method with the help of the SSO musicians, ensured that this audience was also paying close attention to the instrumental score.

Although no-one mentioned it – in an event that had clearly drawn a good audience partly because of its verbal component – Griffith’s other work as a librettist, on Tan Dun’s EIF-commissioned Marco Polo and Elliot Carter’s sole opera, What Next?, also chimed rather fortunately with this year’s Festival.

Between those two works, the presentation team employed the established tactic of having the orchestra play a new work twice to give the least well-known piece a chance to win us over. Elizabeth Ogonek’s vibrant as though birds is just four minutes long, so that was eminently feasible, and to my ears it sounded sharper, not in pitch, but in precision of performance, the second time around – but that could equally have been my ears.

The concert had begun with Virga by Helen Grimes, a modern pastoral piece which has at its heart some exquisite string-writing – and playing in this performance – decorated by harp, celeste and percussion and more robust brass and wind colouring.

Of the quartet featured, she was the only composer present in the audience. Would I have preferred to hear her talk about the work? Perhaps. But without the Benedetti attraction, this programme – an encapsulation of the director’s whole approach to her new job – would surely never have put so many bottoms on Usher Hall seats.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Jennifer France by Nick Cutts