SCO / Kuusisto & Crawford-Phillips
SCO / Kuusisto & Crawford-Phillips
City Halls, Glasgow
Entitled “Parabola” for reasons that were never entirely clear, this concert was all that survived of this SCO season’s planned residency with the orchestra by charismatic Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto – and pianist Simon Crawford-Phillips, with whom he shared conducting responsibilities as well as soloist status, was equally essential to its realisation.
The programme had its own arc, certainly, beginning with the young Benjamin Britten’s Young Apollo, from 1939, and ending with the mature Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No 88, from 150 years earlier, with three contrasting works by living composers in between. Everything in it was well worth the hearing, and immaculately performed. If the works shared anything at all it was a rigorous sense of purpose, not a note wasted or added as superfluous garnish, and none over-long.
It’s assumed that Britten withdrew the vibrant compact tone poem for piano, string quartet and string orchestra Young Apollo because it celebrated a pre-Peter Pears infatuation. Separated from that context by the better part of a century and 50 years on from the composer’s death, it shines as a brilliantly-shaped use of its ingredients as well a showcase for a virtuoso pianist.
Crawford-Phillips was just as impressive on the podium for the work that followed, Marchentanze by Thomas Ades, his meticulous direction revealing a work ideally suited to Kuusisto and the SCO. The first movement’s crisp dialogue between the violin soloist and the winds (with guest players at first clarinet and oboe) was followed by a gorgeous melancholy folk fiddle tune, a third movement evocation of birdsong as eloquent as any, and a rhythmically-challenging finale that recalled the late ’60s experiments of jazz trumpeter Don Ellis.
After the interval, Crawford-Phillips conducted Sally Beamish’s Whitescape, co-commissioned by the SCO with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, and associated with her Frankenstein opera, Monster. The details here were in the percussion, mortar and pestle and strummed upright piano among Louise Lewis Goodwin’s armoury, alongside contrabassoon and overblown flute.
Kuusisto led the orchestra for that piece and did so as well as directing in the Haydn, which emerged as fresh and original as anyone who has heard his way with earlier music might expect. There were some terrific contradictory touches in his interpretation – sturm und drang in the Largo, and abrasive natural horn from returned former SCO principal Alec Frank-Gemmill in the third movement.
The most unusual work of the evening, however, was the one bang in the middle, closing the first half. Timo Andres is a Brooklyn-based post-minimalist and he was in the balcony to hear his Piano Concerto “The Blind Banister”. With Kuusisto conducting and Crawford-Phillips at the keyboard, it began in a manner that owed something to Philip Glass but quickly established a direction very much of its own.
As in the Beamish, the percussion section was crucial to the sound-world, and the conversation between soloist and strings also recalled the Britten. Kuusisto’s more organic conducting style suited the work, while the pianist’s cadenza before the closing third movement was bravura stuff – partly inspired by the one Beethoven wrote to rejuvenate his Second Piano Concerto apparently, but very much the composer’s own.
Keith Bruce
Picture of Pekka Kuusisto at Glasgow City Halls by Alan Peebles