EIF: Breaking Bach
Usher Hall, Edinburgh
AS Nicola Benedetti’s personal tribute to Yehudi Menuhin with the NFM Leopoldinum and Alexander Sitkovetsky recalled, the famous violinist had a close relationship with the Edinburgh Festival. He performed the Beethoven Violin Concerto in the 1950s and again in 1971, when he waived his fee as the cash-strapped event celebrated its 25th anniversary, having been awarded the Freedom of the City of Edinburgh in 1965.
At the 1985 Festival he was part of a series with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, built around Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, conducting in the Queen’s Hall and playing the Double Violin Concerto with John Tunnell in the Usher Hall. Memories of the engagements suggest that he was beyond his peak as a soloist and no great shakes as a conductor, but the Usher Hall concert also included a real curiosity in a performance by cellist Will Conway of the Solo Cello Suite No 3, danced by Rudolph Nureyev to choreography created for him by Francine Lancelot.
It was a piece that the then ailing Nureyev took around the world, and although the Benedetti tribute referenced those concerts in her choice of encore, Edward McGuire’s Fiddler’s Farewell, premiered at that time, it appears to be just a remarkable coincidence that this year’s Festival also featured dancing to J S Bach’s music for solo cello.
The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s first cello Andrew Skidmore played movements from the First, Second and Fifth Suites in the middle of Breaking Bach, the OAE’s project with choreographer Kim Brandstrup. They were a showcase for the professional dancers in a performing ensemble that also included young people with street-honed hip-hop skills: a balletic trio to the Prelude from Suite No 1 and eloquent solos to the Courante from No 2 and Sarabande from No 5. The latter was especially effective, using the language of break dancing but performed in slow motion, and incorporating a staggered falling motif that had been introduced in the fast-pace movement earlier.
It was only one instance – although a particularly clear one – of Brandstrup’s choreography precisely echoing the shape of Bach’s writing. The music selection was very much a “greatest hits”, with the Double Violin being the first dance ensemble feature and Brandenburg No 3 its climax, when robotic walking gave way to movement that looked like “freestyling” but was anything but – again exactly reflecting the score.
Playing for dancers meant that the compact OAE, directed from the violin by Margaret Faultless, was metronomic, and that discipline only jarred in the Oboe Concerto in G minor (soloist Leo Duarte) where the requirements of the dancers and the flow of the music sometimes seemed at odds. With movements from the Orchestral Suites as interludes between the choreographed music – including, inevitably, the “Air on a G string” – there was some respite for the instrumentalists from the rigours of the beat, but the danced music was inevitably more compelling.
Keith Bruce
Picture by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan