RSNO / Karabits
Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
UKRANIAN conductor Kirill Karabits opened his first concerts in Scotland for some years with a work that paralleled the Stravinsky classic that ended it. The classic was The Firebird, the Diaghilev-commissioned ballet music that established the composer, based on a Russian folk-tale.
Karabits has championed the work of Azerbaijan’s Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, who celebrates her 79th birthday in ten days’ time and is a leading musical voice in her homeland. Her Nagillar, premiered at the Lucerne Festival in 2002, is a musical telling of a magical adventure story from the 1001 Nights which requires an orchestra of similar size to The Firebird and also begins on the string basses, whose ensemble performance was one of the highlights of the night.
Stravinsky’s narrative is much longer and more spacious, with room for wind and brass soloists to show off their individual virtuosity, and Karabits made sure that the most propulsive music, which the composer would develop even more in The Rite of Spring, was driven and exciting.
Nagillar is just as intense and much more compact, the magic carpet of its orchestral riches keeping the tale flying from the big opening chord through to a subtler conclusion, with the strings and harp to the fore. Karabits’ enthusiasm for the piece is well-founded and it is a chunky programme-opener that the RSNO should keep in its library.
Fine though both these works were, it was Elgar’s Violin Concerto and soloist Nicola Benedetti that ensured the concert was a sell-out. Like The Firebird it also dates from 1910, but it is a peculiarity of its history since 1932, when a very young Yehudi Menuhun was the soloist, that its duration in performance is still a talking point.
Last year Christian Tetzlaff released a recording with conductor John Storgards that was as brisk as Elgar originally intended, and very different from one by Vilde Frang and Robin Ticciati from the previous year. Twenty years previously, Nigel Kennedy was also respectful of the more deliberate interpretation of Menuhin, as was – perhaps less surprisingly – Benedetti in her 2020 recording.
Karabits and she maintained that same approach live, although her playing made light of the enormous technical demands in both the first and third movements. They are the most captivating of the piece – especially the finale – and the Andante slow movement, while lyrical enough, lacks a big Elgar tune to make the whole work as popular as some of his other music.
For all its intricacies, however, the concerto does have a compelling arc to its shape, which both soloist and conductor communicated perfectly, with the RSNO responding superbly. The playing of the strings before, during and after the virtuosic third movement cadenza was instinctively complementary, and the reception unarguably as much for the music as for the star soloist.
Keith Bruce
Picture by Sally Jubb