VoxCarnyx

Caird Hall, Dundee

In December of 2023, a very colourful RSNO programme began with Icarus, a concert piece extracted from the Symphony No 1, Chimera, by Lera Auerbach, which the composer was at the Glasgow performance to hear.

Some 18 months later, Music Director Thomas Sondergard has programmed the complete work and the surprise is that this was its UK Premiere, because it was first performed back in 2006 and turns out to be every bit as colourful as that single section suggested.

One of its many fascinating characteristics is the inclusion of a theremin in the orchestra, very much integrated into the sound of the strings, and played with startling precision by Charlie Draper, from a place at the back of the first violins. It is less a solo instrument than an additional texture, but there are plenty front desk solos sprinkled through the seven-movement work, and particularly from orchestra leader Maya Iwabuchi.

As that structure suggests, Chimera is not a conventional symphony, but it is of symphonic scale in its instrumentation and in the way its development is always engaging. Percussion, tuned and untuned, is crucial to the tonal palette, and so is the brass, with a lovely swell of sound from the trombones early on and a fine solo for muted trumpet. Although the piece sounds very much of the present era, it has no shortage of attractive tunes sprinkled through it, and if its musical narrative is not especially clear – as the composer’s own programme note almost concedes – the flow of ideas is very seductive.

This concert began with a more familiar work that is surely among Chimera’s antecedents – Debussy’s Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune. If it is a showpiece for an orchestra’s first flute, the RSNO’s Katherine Bryan resisted any temptation to overstate the opening bars, and Sondergard made sure every detail of the score was heard in a wonderfully atmospheric reading that the fine acoustic of Dundee’s big hall enhanced.

The featured soloist of the evening was the RSNO’s Artist-in-Residence this season, Randall Goosby, playing Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. Of the four main repertoire classical concertos for his instrument, a strong case could be made that it is even finer than those of Beethoven, Brahms and Bruch, and this measured, unflashy performance made that argument eloquently.

Goosby’s quiet first entry intimated that this was a collaboration and even his cadenzas were quite restrained, and not in a bad way. In fact it was the ensemble approach to the central slow movement that was the highlight, when the soloist seemed to be pushing the tempo and the RSNO trumpets and strings were in delicious conversation.

The violinist’s encore was some bluesy fiddle from the pen of Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, and even that was played without superfluous flamboyance.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Martin Shields