VoxCarnyx

Usher Hall | Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

In the competition among London’s five orchestras, if the London Symphony Orchestra still claims superiority it could be because of the responsiveness of its musicians. The final concert of the LSO’s Edinburgh Festival residency was very much new conductor Sir Antonio Pappano’s show, and the orchestra sounded very different from under his predecessor Sir Simon Rattle.

This was a big sumptuous pit band onstage, playing Italian music of more than a century ago with poise, style and no little swagger, and it was a delight to listen to. The main feature was a concert performance of Puccini’s Suor Angelica, the central part of his late Il Trittico, currently enjoying a global revival of fortune.

Before that, however, we heard two cracking concert openers. Puccini’s youthful work, Capriccio Sinfonico (1882), sets out his stall so comprehensively that it includes music that would be re-deployed in his operas, notably La boheme. The tapestry of themes featured beautifully measured brass and horns and signed off with the composer waving goodbye to orchestral writing in the strings.

Victor de Sabata is perhaps a role model for Pappano, although the distinguished Italian conductor may well have wanted to be better known as a composer. His Juventus (1919) is a feast of lush strings, rippling harps and Romantic winds that starts off sounding like a Hollywood score of 20 years later before taking a much darker turn and becoming more akin to the experimental writing of its own era. Conductor and players revelled in the orchestral colour in its packed 15 minutes.

The focus inevitably shifted to the singers for the opera, and Pappano’s team were almost all selected from his previous post at the Royal Opera House, many of them recruited through the Jette Parker Artists Programme. Both Patrick Barrett’s RSNO Youth Chorus and James Grossmith’s Edinburgh Festival Chorus acquitted themselves well, but the front line – 12 roles for women – inevitably grabbed the limelight.

In the lighter opening scenes the smaller parts had an opportunity to shine, and there was no weak link in this line-up, but the burden of the piece lay with soprano Carolina Lopez Moreno in the title role and Kseniia Nikolaieva as the Principessa. Their performances were rousingly and rightly acclaimed, but following fine staged productions of the work in Scotland recently, it was disappointing that only the mezzo had her part memorised.

Days later, at the Queen’s Hall, there was a chance to hear another group of emerging singers, these nurtured by the Festival itself under its “Rising Stars” banner, and mentored by teacher and pianist James Baillieu.

There were three Scots among the young men – tenors Euan McDonald and James McIntyre, both familiar to British audiences, and baritone Luke Terence Scott, who has largely worked elsewhere. English bass Peter Edge perhaps made the more coherent repertoire choices with his two Michael Head songs, but the others all had memorable inclusions in works by Reynaldo Hahn, Buxton Orr, Francis George Scott and the tradition Jacobite lament Yon The Castle Wa’.

Soprano Maryam Wocail’s recital-opener of Ivor Gurney’s Tears memorably set the melancholic tone for much that followed, with mezzo Nancy Holt’s All You Who Sleep Tonight, by Jonathan Dove, another interesting highlight. Soprano Emily Christina Loftus perhaps took the prize for boldness with one of Strauss’s Four Last Songs, while mezzo Camilla Seale provided the dramatic highlight with the Brecht/Weill Surabaya Johnny.

Keith Bruce