VoxCarnyx

Usher Hall, Edinburgh

In the year that the London Symphony Orchestra has a residency at the Festival under its new conductor, Sir Antonio Pappano, it is only realistic to suggest that a sell-out concert by the rival London Phil at the Usher Hall is probably down to the choice of repertoire and the popularity of conductor Edward Gardner, whose decade with the Bergen Philharmonic included acclaimed EIF appearances, including of opera in concert.

With a shared hinterland at Glyndebourne, Gardner and the London Philharmonic are a good fit, but the conductor continues to be based in Norway, where he is now music director of the national opera and ballet. Arguably the pre-eminent English conductor of his generation, the parallel with Pappano’s predecessor, Sir Simon Rattle, from the previous one, in finding life more conducive away from his homeland is interesting.

There was no opera music in this programme, but it featured some of the most colourful and popular orchestral music in the catalogue. Holst’s The Planets transcends its place as an early 20^th century period piece – although it remains fascinatingly that as well in some of its thematic and musical detail – because it is packed with glorious melodic writing.

If everyone knows Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity, the big tune at the heart of the suite, most also recognise the threatening five-time march of Mars, the Bringer of War, that opens it and probably the ethereal choir in Neptune, the Mystic at its end. The offstage voices in this performances were those of the National Youth Choir of Scotland, its rigorously-trained young people for once spared the discipline of uniform.

As its earliest critics complained, The Planets can be seen as a derivative musical selection box, but that surely accounts as much for its popularity, the flavours of Wagner, Berlioz, Elgar, Dukas and Debussy all to be savoured in Holst’s rich orchestral score. Gardner ensured that all of those details, and unusual combinations of instruments, were perfectly served, and the arc of the suite as immaculately presented, but the louder moments seemed to lack a little verve in a performance that was faithful to all the ingredients but never more than the sum of its parts.

The LPO’s programme had begun with a much newer showcase for orchestra, Judith Weir’s Forest, a 1995 piece that has become quite a popular concert-starter. It fitted that role perfectly here, the ear-grabbing solo viola opening expanding into an exploration of the sounds of every section, an object lesson in making a small amount of melodic material go a long pictorial way.

As that work is also scored for a large band, some considerable stage re-setting was efficiently dispatched to accommodate the concert grand for Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Soloist Beatrice Rana plays the same work at the Proms at the end of the week, but there was no sense of a preparatory run-through in her beautifully-measured performance. Nor was there any chance of her succumbing to the temptations of showboating that the work offers; this was “rhapsodic” playing in the best sense of that word, crisp and clean when required but also beguilingly languid and lyrical.

Keith Bruce