SCO / Bancroft
City Halls, Glasgow
Although there have been some notable exceptions – particularly the commitment which Opera North has made to performing his stage work – composer Kurt Weill is still not taken seriously enough by the classical music world, which is strange given what a perfectly 20th century life he managed to lead, having fled his native Germany in good time.
Perhaps that can be traced back to the Amsterdam premiere of his Second Symphony, conducted by Bruno Walter at the Concertgebouw no less, which failed to please the modernists. Weill effectively turned his back on the concert hall, and made sophisticated Broadway music instead.
American Ryan Bancroft has a Glasgow fan club as one of the most successful graduates of the conducting course at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and for this guest appearance with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra he set the symphony in a very telling, thoughtful context of music both hugely more popular and much less well-known of around the same time.
The box-office stuff was by Weill’s younger US contemporary Samuel Barber, his Violin Concerto and the screen and memorial-service favourite, the Adagio for Strings.
The latter featured 23 players, possibly the ideal number for the piece in this space, and the SCO’s guest leader Maia Cabeza – who played beautifully all night – is an alumnus of Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute where Barber studied and became professor of composition. She, Bancroft and the players ensured that this was an immaculately phrased rendition, far removed from any mawkishness.
The soloist for the violin concerto was Korean Clara-Jumi Kang, chamber music partner of pianists Sunwook Kim and Yeol Eum Son, who brought that sort of collaborative approach to the dialogue with the orchestra in her reading of a work that is similarly in danger of becoming overfamiliar but which was perfectly paced by herself and Bancroft.
The concert began with the real curiosity that is Erwin Schulhoff’s Suite for Chamber Orchestra from 1921. It shares some vocabulary with Weill’s early stage work with Bertolt Brecht, but Schulhoff was a one-off, with a taste for sonic eccentricity that was provocative rather than comic, although it is still fun. With the six percussionists having one of the six movements to themselves (hooters, horns and all) and the prologue being a declamatory poem from Bancroft himself, it featured some great solo playing from Cabeza and many others on the platform.
Weill’s Symphony No 2 emerges from the distance of years as less self-consciously radical but also less dated. He embraced tuneful music as enthusiastically as Barber but combined it with contemporary voicings and an ever-present sense of the dramatic.
The symphony’s central Largo may be a funeral march, but it is one for a state occasion (oddly, as Barber’s Adagio has become just that in the USA) and with something of a Hitchcock soundtrack about it. Bancroft’s enthusiastic direction was rewarded with very fine ensemble work from the SCO across all three movements, and the coherent arc of the work could not have been expressed more clearly.
Keith Bruce
Portrait of Ryan Bancroft by Per Morton