VoxCarnyx

Perth Concert Hall

AN RSNO concert programme of recent vintage ticks a lot of boxes and make its appeal to the widest of audiences. This one began with the participation of young musicians from the Sistema Scotland Big Noise projects in Stirling’s Raploch and Fallin, playing music from the hugely popular video game Plants vs Zombies.

Composer Laura Shigihara is a big name in this world and her catchy Grasswalk is typical of her talent. It is enormous fun music that you instantly think you already know, and as it happened some of the Big Noise players were also already known to the RSNO musicians they were playing alongside in every section of the orchestra. As the RSNO’s new studio in Glasgow has been making music for games as well as for films, this is a relationship and repertoire ripe for further exploration.

The remainder of the concert, guest conducted by Alexander Shelley (son of pianist and conductor Howard Shelley) focused on the big screen. Composer James Newton Howard, now in his mid-70s, has had a hugely successful movie score career since 1990’s Pretty Woman, notably on the films of M Night Shyamalan and Disney animations – and before that he played keyboards and arranged strings for Elton John amongst others.

His Violin Concerto No 2 was written for fine Canadian violinist James Ehnes and co-commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, who gave the world premiere in June, and the RSNO; this was its first UK performance.

Ehnes was required to demonstrate some fast fingering at the start, his hemidemisemiquavers swiftly echoed by the orchestral strings, but the piece does not give him a lot of virtuosic music to play until a cadenza near the end. It is in classic concerto form, with a slow central movement that featured the wind section and a theatrical climax in the finale, and the conductor underlined that by taking pauses between the movements, although the programme note suggested a continuous performance.

In Washington it had been presented alongside film music by Korngold, Copland, Rota and Bernstein and the RSNO went down a similar route with a programme that included the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth (Death in Venice) and Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings (Platoon), both works now more inescapably funereal than the composers intended. Shelley’s versions failed to save them from being shorn of context, uncertain of tempo and never really as moving as they want to be.

The title piece of the concert, Also sprach Zarathustra, was another story altogether. Here it was clear that the conductor had no need of a score because it was all in his head, and every detail of Richard Strauss’s marvellous orchestration was meticulously cued.

The RSNO responded with its best playing, from the rock’n’roll approach of guest timpanist Adrian Bending of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the precision of Percussion Principal Simon Lowden and his colleagues to orchestra leader Maya Iwabuchi on stellar form with her solos, partnered by Pippa Tunnell’s harp.

With four flutes (terrific in the seventh section, Der Genesende), four clarinets, four trumpets and seven horns, maximum strings, and Lynda Cochrane and Michael Bawtree on piano, celeste and organ, this over half an hour of big music, of which only the first two minutes (as heard in 2001: A Space Odyssey) is often heard.

The Viennese waltz then tolling bell and pizzicato strings that bring the work to an end are every bit as ominous as that doomy fanfare beginning. Whether or not it presents a Nietzschean narrative, it is terrific music.

Keith Bruce

Picture of James Ehnes and Alexander Shelley in rehearsal by Clare Cowen/RSNO