VoxCarnyx

Usher Hall, Edinburgh | Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

We can argue till the cows come home over the “meaning” behind Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, written in the 1930s after the composer was publicly castigated for the so-called formalism of his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and presented enigmatically as “A Soviet composer’s response to just criticism”. In the end, it’s a great piece, questioning but resolute, quintessentially Russian, while conscious stylistically of a wider world picture. You make of it what you will.

It was the centrepiece of Monday’s Festival visit by the extraordinary Aurora Orchestra – notable, of course, for their performances by memory – and of a programme that echoed their earlier manifestation that weekend at the London Proms. What Edinburgh didn’t get was the fascinating theatrical preamble that cleverly offset the appeasement argument for the symphony with the now well-known theory of subterfuge through which the composer masked his true response to the authorities. Worth a watch on BBC iPlayer.

What London didn’t get was the colourful spectacle and spontaneous creativity of cellist Abel Selaocoe, whose first half performance of his own four-movement composition Four Rivers was anything but ambivalent. The cello, it has to be said, is only part of the armoury he engages with in its delivery. Rooted firmly in his South African upbringing and the rituals that shaped his young life, Selaocoe burst onto the platform in multicoloured traditional dress, said “hi” to the audience, before unleashing a menagerie of vocal exhortations – ecstatic chanting, stentorian growls, scat-like jabbering – interwoven with evocative tropes on cello.

It’s not the first airing of this work in Scotland – Selaocoe and the BBC SSO gave its world premiere two years ago in Glasgow – but this second showing projected strongly the scope for improvisational flexibility that gives each performance its distinctive allure. Energised by the ever-mobile composer, his goading interaction with both orchestra and audience (yes, he had us singing along), and electrifying interchanges with versatile guest percussionist Bernhard Schimpelsberger, this was pure showmanship, its galvanising power overcoming any potential lulls or disjointedness in the music.

Under founding conductor Nicholas Collon, Aurora played this one safe by adhering to the printed scores, but held nothing back in aligning with Selacoe’s protean enthusiasm, at numerous points singing with all the audience-directed charisma of a West End chorus line. All round conviction won the day.

That same instinctual quality characterised the Shostakovich, which earlier in the day had been subject to one of the Festival’s Inside Out programmes, the remnants of which were a beanbagged audience strewn leisurely across a temporarily seat-free Usher Hall stalls area. That hint of informality echoed the sight of an orchestra mostly on its feet (obvious instruments excepted, of course), playing without music, consequently free to sway, gesture and more physically respond to the music.

The results were immediate, the opening movement ignited by the opening motif’s incendiary dotted rhythms, and a haunting veil calling the sincerity of Shostakovich’s consequent melodic tropes into question. The prevailing sentiment harnessed much that was warm and beautiful, but a constant chill hovered ominously, inflamed fiercely and curtly in the gnarly distortions of the Allegretto, mystically reflected on in the expansive Largo, before the Finale’s ultimate explosion of triumphalism – or is it hollow rapture? 

The Dunedin Consort’s Queen’s Hall concert on Thursday raised its own salient question, which was to consider the merits of an early Handel cantata that, following its initial performance in 1707 Italy, had swiftly gone out of fashion. It did not, on the evidence of this performance, and despite some engagingly virtuosic constituent parts, suggest vintage Handel. As if to support that, Handel was to re-use several of the arias in more memorable later works.

Clori, Tirsi e Fileno tells the titillating story of a shepherdess and the two lovers she is loathe to choose between. “Why can’t I have my cake and eat it”, she effectively insists. The lovers huff and puff at the very thought of it. 

There was early promise of fun and games in Handel’s very serviceable Overture, at one point teeming with Purcellian intrigue and insistence. But a rather tame, to some extent nervous, opening sequence by soprano Nardus Willams (Tirsi), and Reginald Mobley’s initially unfocussed countertenor (Fileno), leant this concert’s first half a degree of dramatic impotence. It took the bouncy exuberance of soprano Julie Roset (Clori) to inject a palpable sense of fun and frolics, which gradually fired up the entire ensemble.

That the second half contained the best and most interesting music was a welcome consolation. Now Williams was on form, negotiating Handel at his most technically testing. Mobley grasped his character more firmly, and with that found greater depth and consistency of voice. Roset went into overdrive, her wild emotional extremes expressed in the increasing intensity of her arias. 

Director John Butt captained a firm ship, his period instrument players combining fluid reliability with stylistic sensitivity, everyone ultimately making the best of some uncharacteristically piecemeal Handel.

Ken Walton

(Photo: Jess Shurte)