Author Archives: VoxCarnyx

Steven Osborne & Martin Kershaw

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Linlithgow Academy

ENCORES from the catalogues of jazz piano masters, often in his own transcriptions, have long been a feature of the practice of Linlithgow’s international classical piano star, Steven Osborne. In this recital that side of his musical personality was given free rein in a duo with the alto and soprano saxophones of Martin Kershaw.

The recital began, however, in more familiar solo piano mode, with a first half “based around the waltz” presented in informative and witty style for Osborne’s home crowd. That meant a very thorough explanation of the narrative of Schumann’s theatrical Papillons and a fascinating sequence that began with a plangent Gymnopedie No 3 by Eric Satie melding into Lily Boulanger’s D’un Jardin Clair.

The pianist’s mother, who lives in Linlithgow, cast a long shadow over the evening, her absence explained, if I understood correctly, because her philatelic expertise was required elsewhere. It was a jewellery box she owned that explained the young Osborne’s early enthusiasm for Anatoly Liadov’s A Musical Snuffbox, but more crucially her antipathy to jazz that partly prompted her son’s mission to explain it to a classical audience.

In his solo set it was Bill Evans’ Waltz for Debby and Osborne’s transcription of a live performance of Gershwin’s I Loves You Porgy that introduced the music, before the rollercoaster-ride that is Frederic Rzewski’s Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues, a composition filled with socialist protest song anger that embraces industrial noise as readily as any recognisable style of music.

After the interval, Osborne was joined by jazz saxophonist and stalwart of the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra Martin Kershaw for a duo set that, apart from Kershaw’s ballad reading of Someday My Prince Will Come, primarily featured arrangements by Osborne.

The pianist was at pains to stress how Kershaw had brought the required jazz sensibility to their rehearsals, but it was notable that Osborne was mostly playing from memory (as he had performed the first half) while it was the improvising saxophonist who had a music stand.

There was familiar ground in the music of Duke Ellington and Jerome Kern – the pair swapping 8-bar phrases in All The Things You Are – but esoteric choices as well, including a version of Will Stratton’s Tokens, the opening track on the American singer-songwriter’s acclaimed 2021 album The Changing Wilderness, and Scots saxophonist Rob Hall’s Across the Sound, from his 2005 set with pianist Chick Lyall, The Beaten Path.

If that tune is punningly titled, it was nothing to the rhythmic mayhem Osborne and Kershaw went on to create in a singular version of Gershwin’s perennial I Got Rhythm.

The bold choice of encore, on the day Ireland had thwarted the Scots at rugby, was another Osborne arrangement, of the altogether gentler Londonderry Air.

Keith Bruce

Steven Osborne and Martin Kershaw play in Dundee’s Marryat this evening and then tour to Peebles (Thursday) and Nairn (Saturday).

Portrait of Steven Osborne by Ben Ealovega

SCO / Glassberg

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City Halls, Glasgow

Although the wide range of age in the audience and a DJ working in the foyer are not unusual at Scottish Chamber Orchestra Friday evening concerts, there was a fresh and unfamiliar feel to this one with saxophone star and broadcaster Jess Gillam the soloist.

The conductor on the podium was Ben Glassberg, last seen in the City Hall stepping in at short notice to deputise for Ryan Wigglesworth for a BBC SSO programme in the autumn that was very much of the chief conductor’s devising. The orchestra itself, although led by Stephanie Gonley, had just five principals in their places, and the many guests on the platform made sure that none of the regular faces were missed.

The programme began with a work of the SCO’s recent illustrious past. Sound and Fury was written for the orchestra early in the tenure of Anna Clyne as its Associate Composer and premiered with Pekka Kuusisto conducting. It is a wonderful piece that begins as a rethinking of early classical music – Haydn in particular – and contains some rich string writing, including a beguiling Eastern melody, and culminates in a taped reading of Macbeth’s last soliloquy in Shakespeare’s play.

That sounds an odd journey in print, but makes wonderful sonic sense as a musical score, and one clearly written for chamber orchestra forces.

The other two works without Gillam were for the 24 string players alone. George Walker’s Lyric for Strings has a genesis oddly adjacent to that of Samuel Barber’s better-known Adagio, as the two were students together. Walker’s work is also elegiac but more varied within a tighter time-span. It made a lovely interlude in the concert’s first half.

The second half began with Caroline Shaw’s Entr’acte, which also nods to Haydn (and Beethoven) and has become a very popular modern piece in its string ensemble version. With a lovely harmonics solo from Gonley and a guitar-like one from guest principal cello Caroline Dale, its pizzicato passages, ranging from robust to very quiet, present a particular ensemble challenge for this number of musicians – one to which Glassberg and this group rose with ease.

Entr’acte is a work in the repertoire of the Scottish Ensemble, and the central piece of Gillam’s trio of works was written for them in the mid-1990s when Dave Heath was a very busy composer-in-residence. The Celtic has since had a second life in a version for soprano sax rather than violin soloist, which suits the music very well, which is a sort of three-movement love-letter to Scotland.

The opening one, Ceilidh, clearly owes a debt to the most pictorial music of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, while the slow Lament for Collessie, which should be the proud boast of the Fife village where the Heath family made their home, featured an exquisite duet between Gillam and guest first viola Jessica Beeston. The boisterous finale, The Cooper of Clapham, links Fife with the London home of a craftsman maker of flutes (Heath’s own instrument) but also serves extraordinarily well as a celebration of the range of the soprano sax.

The other two pieces Gillam played were composed especially for her. She closed, save a party-piece encore of Pequena Czarda by Pedro Itturalde, with Rant!, written by her teacher John Harle, whose role as populariser of classical sax she has taken on with gusto. Following nicely on from the Heath, its uses folk melodies from her native Cumbria, and also, unmistakably, a chord sequence from The Beatles’ Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

The newest work in the programme was Dani Howard’s 2024 Saxophone Concerto, which closed the first half and proved to be another delightfully bespoke composition. With a central slow movement of defiantly unresolving ambience, its scoring cleverly emulated the sound of the larger members of the saxophone family, with a particular role for Maximiliano Martin and William Stafford, resonantly playing their clarinets in the low chalumeau register.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Christopher Bowen

BBC SSO: Wigglesworth / Gerhardt

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City Halls, Glasgow

Cross-connections played a part in making sense of Thursday’s matinee programme by the BBC SSO under its chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth. Take Shakespeare for a start. Thea Musgrave’s brief concert piece, Aurora, extracts its titular inspiration from a mention in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, while Elgar’s symphonic study Falstaff hones in on that eponymous rogue’s mixed fortunes in the Henry plays. Mention of A Midsummer Night’s Dream reminds us of Benjamin Britten, whose substantial Cello Symphony and Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra closed both concert halves respectively. Thus a tenuous tangled web was woven.

In the end, though, it was the conflicting essence of the programme’s components that created a sense of unity-in-diversity, a journey of incongruous stop-offs. That said, there was more than a whiff of Brittenesque imagery in Musgrave’s Aurora – a hugely self-contented work written in 1999 by the Scots-born composer, now two years short of her 100th birthday, for the awakening minds of Los Angeles’ Colburn School of Performing Arts students – that gave it context as an appetiser to Britten’s Cello Symphony.

This was the softer, less clinically acerbic side to Musgrave, a ravishing viola solo (movingly introduced by principal violist Andrew Berridge) giving rise to an enchanting reverie that also featured prominent solos by leader Emma Steele and lead cellist Rudi de Groote. The full ensemble caressed the music, its rise and fall exquisitely measured, its single-note ending profound in its simplicity. Once or twice the detailed textures seemed to slacken in purpose, but only momentarily. 

It was therefore an easy step from that scene-setter to Britten’s 1963 masterpiece, the substantial Cello Symphony written originally for Rostropovich and performed here by German cellist Alban Gerhardt. This orchestra and soloist were no strangers to the concerto, having collaborated in a recording under Andrew Manze in this very hall back in 2013. 

Self-assured authority made its presence felt instantly, Gerhardt responding to the amorphous lower strings with growing belligerence, the intensity escalating before the opening movement’s exhaustive final breath. The ensuing Scherzo released a frenzy of nervy hyperactivity before the dark entanglements of the Adagio, the complex introversion of Gerhardt’s cadenza (partly in fiery combination with Gordon Rigby’s timpani), and a finale touching on the burlesque and resolving in splendour and resolve. Wigglesworth captained a mostly impressive SSO display.

Elgar’s Falstaff rarely sees the light of day, which seems perplexing in a performance that so effectively captured the multi-faceted persona of the enigmatic hero, yet at the same time reflected Elgar’s insistence that “Falstaff is the name, but Shakespeare – the whole of human life – is the theme”. For there is a universal spirit to this music that is forever Elgar – a complexity of pompous themes, chattering humour and aching sentimentality – and that is what Wigglesworth and an expansive SSO observed.

From arrogance to debauchery, drunkenness to practical jokiness, sentimentalist to banished fool, the musical outcome was riveting. The SSO responded with tingling virtuosity, from gushing warmth and heraldic grandeur to febrile vivacity. As such, though possibly by accident, it was the perfect preparation for the more clinical orchestral dissection of Britten’s Young Person’s Guide. In what was veering towards an overlong concert, the masterful succinctness and sheer dexterity of Britten’s musical ingenuity secured a refreshing finale. And, unlike the Elgar, one that ended on a high note.

Ken Walton

This concert was recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in Concert, after which it will be available via BBC Sounds for 30 days

Scottish Opera: Tristan und Isolde

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

It has become a convenient cliché for cash-strapped companies that the operas of Wagner are best served by minimalist stagings, and Tristan und Isolde is probably the work where that approach is most established.

Concert performances have the huge advantage of the visibility of the orchestra at work, and – especially in this one – those crucial moments when the musicians, singers as well as players, are not visible, but audible from offstage.

In fact this staging was much more than a concert, fully costumed in quasi-medieval style by Scottish Opera’s Lorna Price (in her last show before moving to Glyndebourne), directed by Justin Way, and performed on an apron stage built out from the platform. A second conductor (Toby Hession) was working for the singers from a specially-constructed prompt box, to supplement main man Stuart Stratford’s video-relayed  direction on the podium behind them.

If it was a compromise, it was a hugely successful one. There was just one moment in Act 3 when tenor Gwyn Hughes Jones struggled to make himself heard over the swell of the score, and the balance between singers and orchestra, off-stage and on-stage elements, solo instrumental voices and ensemble precision (particularly all sections of the strings and Sue Baxendale’s horns) was nigh-on perfect all night.

Tristan und Isolde is remembered for its set pieces – the Act 1 Prelude and Act 3 Liebestod and the rapturous duet of Act 2 – but those are part of a narrative flow of music that was, and should still sound, revolutionary, as it did here. Stratford’s shaping of the whole work, every note serving the story-telling, was always captivating; longeurs were there none in over four hours of music.

The cast had lost its King Marke – Richard Wiegold, a veteran in the role, stepping in – and was vocally superb from title roles to the smaller parts, and not excepting the boisterous twenty seamen of the male chorus in Act 1.

Katherine Broderick was imperious as Isolde, consistently delivering those high notes in Wagner’s demanding music from her first entrance to the final scene, seemingly without effort. If the voice was astonishing, the nuances of her acting performance were just as remarkable. This was a fully realised, and deeply flawed, Isolde.

Matching her was mezzo Khatuna Mikaberidze’s Brangane, similarly characterful and powerfully sung, allied to accomplished handling the staging’s few essential props.

If Gwyn Hughes Jones initially seemed to be holding something back, his stoic, even cynical, performance also hinted at an intriguing Tristan that never quite emerged. Perhaps that ambiguity was deliberate, however, as a counterbalance to the ebullient loyal enthusiasm for his master from his batman, Kurwenal – a terrific turn from Korean baritone Hansung Yoo.

Leaving the hall’s platform to the orchestra, the principals made all their entrances and exits to their playing area via the stage-side auditorium doors, and a plinth that incrementally lost sets of steps on either side to become Tristan’s death-bed in Act 3 was the only additional staging. It was also the excuse for the only slacking of pace in the drama when Hughes Jones or Weigold sat on it and there was a suspicion that it was not their characters who were taking the weight off their feet.

For those of us sitting out in the auditorium, this was a five hour feast (including two longer intervals) that passed with remarkable swiftness. The suggestion is that the company plans more Wagner presented in similar style in seasons to come, and that is an enticing prospect.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Khatuna Mikaberidze as Brangane and Katherine Broderick as Isolde, credit Christopher Bowen

All Rise for EIF 2026

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After a thinner programme last year, the Edinburgh International Festival boasts a return to full strength on the road to its 80th anniversary celebrations next year, writes KEITH BRUCE.

Orchestral residencies from the Los Angeles and Berlin Philharmonics and Wynton Marsalis’s Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, and the world premiere of Missy Mazzoli’s new post-pandemic opera The Galloping Cure are headline attractions in the full Edinburgh International Festival programme for August 2026, unveiled today.

The Mazzoli opera follows the acclaimed Breaking the Waves at EIF 2019 and reunites the composer with librettist Royce Vavrek, stage director Tom Morris and conductor Stuart Stratford in a production from Scottish Opera and Opera Ventures.

The cast is headed by Argentinian mezzo Daniela Mack, British soprano Susan Bullock and German baritone Justin Austin.

It joins the already-announced Zurich Opera production of Verdi’s A Masked Ball, a revival of Adele Thomas’s acclaimed 2024 staging, as the staged operas bookending the programme at the Festival Theatre.

Operas in concert at the Usher Hall are Mozart’s Don Giovanni from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Maxim Emelyanychev, with Konstantin Krimmel as Giovanni, Louise Alder as Donna Anna and Brindley Sherratt as the Commendatore, and Strauss’s Elektra from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and conductor Karina Canellakis with Irene Theorin in the title role, Vida Mikneviciute as Chrysothemis and Nina Stemme as Klytamnestra.

The Festival has a focus on work from across the Atlantic and its theme, All Rise, is the title of Marsalis’s epic Symphony No 1, whose 12 movements will be the Opening Concert at the Usher Hall on Saturday August 8, teaming the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and its founder, featured soloist and composer with the Edinburgh Festival Chorus and the Jason Max Ferdinand Singers, under the baton of James Gaffigan.

During the following week, the orchestra plays Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige with conductor Chris Crenshaw and then gives two concerts on the evening of August 12 with Yuja Wang at the piano in what is a world premiere collaboration. Marsalis, who is married to Festival director Nicola Benedetti, with whom he has a daughter, has recently announced that he will step down as artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center in the summer of next year.

The LA Phil residency comes in the final year of its conductor Gustavo Dudamel’s tenure as Music Director. Three concerts include two Beethoven symphonies, Nos 7 and 6, and a family concert teaming the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles with Sistema Scotland’s Big Noise musicians.

Zurich Opera brings Verdi’s A Masked Ball

The Berlin Phil and conductor Kirill Petrenko close the Festival on Sunday August 30 with Scriabin’s Symphony No 3, preceded by Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with soloist Augustin Hadelich. The previous evening the programme is Elgar’s Enigma Variations and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 4. A sextet from the orchestra gives the Queen’s Hall chamber music recital on the morning of Saturday August 29.

Other highlights at the Usher Hall include two concerts by the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal, the first of which is a rare modern-day performance of the full three-hours of Coleridge-Taylor’s The Song of Hiawatha with the Festival Chorus and tenor Nicky Spence among the soloists, and Sir Donald Runnicles conducting his old friends the BBC SSO and the Festival Chorus in Mahler’s Das klagende Lied, with soloists including mezzo Catriona Morison.

The Royal Scottish National Orchestra is in the pit at Edinburgh Playhouse for the visit of San Francisco Ballet. The European premiere of choreographer Aszure Barton’s Mere Mortals is danced to a score by Floating Points (Sam Shepherd), conducted by Martin West.

Colin Currie and his group play an all-Steve Reich programme, John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London celebrate the Golden Age of Hollywood, and Jordi Savall and Hesperion XXI perform an Atlantic-spanning early music programme.

A day of Bach at the Usher Hall on Saturday August 22 starts with an invitation to “Come and Sing” Chorales, and has Alisa Weilerstein playing all the cello suites and pianist Vikingur Olafsson giving a late evening concert.

There is a tribute to the late Scottish trumpeter John Wallace from the band he founded, The Wallace Collection in partnership with the Cooperation Band and musicians from all three Scottish orchestras under conductor Clark Rundell, and the Queen’s Hall programme includes a tribute to pianist Alfred Brendel in three recitals of music associated with the great stalwart of Festivals past by Steven Osborne, Paul Lewis and Pierre-Laurent Aimard.

Debuts at the Queen’s Hall include those of mezzo Beth Taylor and guitarist Sean Shibe and that series opens with Dunedin Consort performing Tansy Davies’s new work Passion of Mary Magdelene with Anna Dennis and Marcus Farnsworth. Scottish Ensemble combines forces with small-pipes virtuoso Brighde Chaimbeul in another world premiere collaboration.

A full jazz, traditional music and folk programme at the EIF’s Royal Mile home, The Hub also includes Benedetti’s Classical Jam and a return visit from the global stars of the Aga Khan Music Programme.

Introducing her fourth Festival, Benedetti said: “Marking 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, we put America firmly in the spotlight. The American story is filled with innovation and ingenuity, perseverance and prejudice – tensions that have fuelled some of the most extraordinary artistic achievements in history.

“Our 2026 Festival is an invitation to All Rise together, and in doing so we celebrate not only artistic excellence but the resilience and flourishing of the human spirit.”

Tickets for EIF 2026 are on sale from noon on Thursday March 26 with priority booking for members and friends opening a week earlier. Full details at eif.co.uk

Picture of Zurich Opera’s A Masked Ball by Herwig Prammer; Nicola Benedetti and Wynton Marsalis by Carl Bigmore

Dunedin Consort / Shibe

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Perth Concert Hall

Viola de gamba virtuoso Liam Byrne is the most recent recipient of the valuable Glenn Gould Bach Fellowship which supports musicians with ambitious plans pertaining to the exploration of Baroque music, and he brought that expertise to the table for this recital which teamed Sean Shibe’s lute with four string players.

Byrne was paired with the Dunedin Consort’s Learning and Participation Manager Lucia Capellaro on the viola de gambas, sitting opposite two Dunedin regulars, Huw Daniel and Rebecca Livermore on baroque violins, with Shibe’s lute in the middle.

It was an interesting, and unusual, line-up, and a fascinating development of a side of the guitarist’s multi-faceted practice that may have its origins in his residency at the East Neuk Festival.

It was there we first heard Shibe explore the early music found in the collections of Fife country houses, scores that revealed how well-travelled the gentry of Scotland had been in the 16th and 17th centuries and how the music they collected, especially in France, was performed at home alongside that of their native land.

So it was here, in a programme that pivoted around a Suite in D by Marin Marais, brought to Scotland in a manuscript in the composer’s own hand that now resides in the National Library of Scotland and pre-dates its French publication. That work encapsulated where the researches of Byrne and Shibe overlap, as well as illustrating why their explorations are far from being of mere academic interest but are chiefly about bringing very fine early music back into performance.

This programme was all about clever juxtapositions and segues from one country to another, all within that earlier era. There was music that is much better known than the Marais – notably Jean Baptiste Lully’s Airs and Dances from Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, which closed the concert, and John Dowland’s Lachrimae Pavan.

The latter ran straight into a suite by English composer Christopher Simpson and another of those had opened the programme – beautiful works whose requirements had undoubtedly shaped the line-up on stage and which were indicative of the early work Byrne champions. As with the Marais, which reduced the quintet to duo and trio ensembles, this was vintage music soulfully played, in Byrne’s case on an original instrument of the period.

Shibe’s selections from the Panmure, Bowie, MacFarlane and Rowallen manuscripts in the collection of the National Library of Scotland often sounded more recognisable to ears used to Scots traditional music, especially the solos for Huw Daniel to demonstrate his folk fiddle expertise.

Byrne describes himself as a player of very old and very new music  (David Lang, Nico Muhly and Donnacha Dennehy have all composed for him), and that is not so unusual among Early Music players. Shibe’s musical life is less easily compartmentalised, but once again he has found, in the Dunedin Consort, ideal collaborators for his musical excursions.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Stuart Armitt

SCO / Borrani / Johannsen

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City Halls, Glasgow

What promised on paper to be an enjoyably unpretentious programme by the SCO proved to be exactly that. A bubbly Rossini overture, Beethoven’s emotive concert aria Ah, perfido!, the set of Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge that set Britten on course to international fame, and Beethoven’s perfunctory Eighth Symphony benefitted more from the dynamic self-motivation of their delivery than the routine miscellany of their grouping.

Much of that dynamism came from Italian violinist/director Lorenza Borrani, quite the fireball, whose energetic, edge-of-the-seat presence was a visible inspiration injecting heated interaction into so much of the delivery. It’s a mode of performance the SCO excels at – vital elements of the music flitting from section to section, instrument to instrument, like a seamless passing of the parcel. It’s wonderful to watch, even better to listen to.

As an opener, Rossini’s overture to The Barber of Seville struck a joyous note, its marshalling opening chords a rip-roaring wake-up call before the expectant warmth of the slow introduction and ever-increasing exuberance of its dash to the finish line. Besides the ensemble’s bright-lit incision, it was especially revealing to hear solo lines emerge with such unique character, not least those comic effects – whether deliberate or not – emanating from the raw animalistic trilling of the natural horns. 

What followed was a world away from Rossini’s boisterous opera: the torment of Greek princess Deidamia, abandoned by her lover Achilles, expressed through anguished soliloquy in Beethoven’s early-composed Ah, perfido!. American soprano Robin Johannsen was a gripping presence centre-stage, her vocal delivery as trenchant as it was heartfelt, her timbre blessed with a defining edge that oozed vibrance and character. The reactiveness of the orchestra was as supportive as it was reflective, even if the errant mobile phone erupting in the final bars was a spooky, jarring intervention.

Britten’s 1937 Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge – in many ways a portrait compilation of his teacher’s complex personal traits – offered a substantial conclusion to the concert’s opening half. It was also where Borrani exerted her most memorable influence. The kaleidoscopic nature of this performance was its greatest strength, the vigorous pungency of the Introduction and Theme boldly preemptive of a sequence variously tossed between the wistful wrong-note waltzing of the Romance, the brusque galumphing of the Wiener Waltzer, the sobriety of the Funeral March, the high-spirited Aria Italiana, the time-travelling Bourée classique and dizzying Moto Perpetuo. The spectral weirdness of the penultimate Chant was especially magical.

The Beethoven symphony in a short second half was the evening’s least successful enterprise. That’s not to say the pliability of this interpretation was any less stimulating; there was still a sense of genuine spontaneity at play. But there were awkward issues with tempi, occasional lapses in exact coordination, a palpable nervousness at times, a general sense that the big picture was not wholly within sight, that rather killed the emphatic impact of this eccentric symphony.

Ken Walton

SCO / Emelyanychev

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City Halls, Glasgow

For logistical reasons, the version of this season’s Scottish Chamber Orchestra concert with Nicola Benedetti that Inverness heard at Eden Court Theatre was radically different from that played in Edinburgh and Glasgow.

The only common ingredient was the violin concerto Benedetti played, the one by Mendelssohn which she recorded with the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields 20 years ago, at the age of 18. It was at the centre of an all-Mendelssohn programme in Inverness, opening with the Hebrides Overture and with the ‘Scottish’ Symphony in the second half.

Perhaps because that option was less appealing to BBC Radio 3, whose recording of the Glasgow performance is broadcast this evening, the Central Belt concerts opened with the much larger forces required for the Academic Festival Overture by Brahms, and had the same composer’s Fourth Symphony after the interval.

Most unusually for the normally adept SCO, the programme flowed less well than might have been guessed at, and presumably than the one heard in Inverness a day later.

It did get off to a splendid start with the Overture though, Brahms’s seamless assemblage of borrowed tunes now much better known than any of the ingredients, save perhaps the climactic “Gaudeamus Igitur” Latin hymn to the joys of youth. This is not a chamber orchestra work by any measure – and by specific design on the composer’s part – and conductor Maxim Emelyanychev revelled in the sonic potential of a vastly augmented SCO, who duly gave it laldy, although with no loss of detail in the performance.

The band was slimmed down, without losing any of the string strength, for the Mendelssohn, and natural horns and trumpets replaced modern instruments. The result was an impeccable balance between orchestra and soloist, for which Benedetti should take as much credit as the conductor. The rich sonorities of her lower string playing cut through as clearly as the nimbly fingered high notes on the E string, even when there was some glorious swells of ensemble playing from the SCO strings.

Obviously this is a work Benedetti has had under her fingers for at least half her lifetime, but the detailed thought she brought to the pivotal first-movement cadenza, the emotional heft audible in the Andante and the lightness of touch in the exchanges with the woodwinds in the finale were all the work of her mature talent.

The orchestrated version of Elgar’s Salut d’amour was an obviously appropriate encore, given that it, like the concerto and some of the music on her recent Violin Café small group album, revisits music she learned in her student years.

Perhaps it was chosen for another reason too, because the opening theme of the first movement of Brahms 4 turned out to be an eerily close cousin. Did Elgar have the Brahms in his head at the time he wrote it?

In other ways, however, the symphony followed on less well from the music in the first half. While there was still some excellent string playing and the SCO’s seasoned clarinet partnership were on stellar form, Emelyanychev seemed most in his element when the music most resembled the Academic Festival Overture, which it doesn’t very often. So the declamatory scherzo third movement was a burst of exuberance, and the clever chaconne or passacaglia form of the finale was at its best in the liveliest of the 30 variations.

Keith Bruce

The concert, sponsored by Quilter Cheviot, was recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Monday, March 2, and available on BBC Sounds for 30 days thereafter.

Picture credit: Christopher Bowen

BBC SSO / EIF Chorus / Runnicles

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Fundamental to this awesome Usher Hall performance of Mahler’s Symphony No 2 ‘Resurrection’ was the element of control: utter control, visceral and monumental. And the figure exercising it over a full-blooded Edinburgh Festival Chorus and hyper-receptive BBC SSO was the Edinburgh-born maestro Sir Donald Runnicles, whose track record for such epic occasions goes before him. There’s just something you can read from his physique – the bulk of a tighthead prop combined with the wily intelligence of a playmaker and masterful composure – that translates into electrifying, match-winning euphoria.

That this would be an unforgettable adventure was clear from the outset. From the lower SSO strings, biting rhythms prophesied the epic and volatile journey ahead, melodies caked in mournful heroism emerging from the woodwind, the initial gripping climax becalmed by magically whispered string reflections. The entire movement – the funeral rites of the dead hero – exposed its argument forcefully, Runnicles’ effortless need-to-know gestures gleaning crystalline details that knew their place in the grander scheme of things. 

Then came the charm, firstly with the gentle minuet that opens the second movement, tender and spirited before engaging in more fulsome pursuits, utterly bewitching in its eventual manifestation for pizzicato strings, like serenading mandolins. If the brief timpani wake-up call shocked the life out of one audience member near me, the third movement’s ensuing cheery Ländler, with its intermittent diversions, remained charged with acid humour and effervescent character to the point of its screaming climax and subsequent quiescence. 

Thus the ground was prepared for that melting opening phrase of Urlicht (Primal Light from Mahler’s own Das Knaben Wunderhorn), a moment savoured with bestirred ecstasy by mezzo soprano Karen Cargill. Her voice seemed especially ripe in this short but transformative setting, the engagement multiplied by her memorised performance, setting the scene for an ultimately ecstatic finale.

Here we first encountered the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, also performing off score, and as a result of which projecting with profound distinction. Whether in the muted mystery of their opening utterances (“Rise up”), or the effusive waves of crescendo that culminated in the symphony’s resplendent peroration, this was a chorus, rigorously trained by chorus director James Grossmith, that was sure in its purpose and magnificent in execution, topped by the transcendent finishing touches of solo soprano Jennifer Davis and Cargill.

Most of all, however, this was a BBC SSO in genuinely gripping form. It’s all about the person waving the stick and the chemistry that accompanies the partnership. There was a truly heroic flavour to this performance, superbly and intuitively paced by Runnicles, but above all driven by a charisma that – going by a tumultuous reaction – impacted every soul in a packed Usher Hall.

(Picture credit: BBC/Martin Shields)

Ken Walton

This performance was recorded for later broadcast on BBC Radio 3, after which it will be available on BBC Sounds for 30 days.

RSNO / Widmann / Eberle

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

If any single memory is destined to linger from this RSNO programme it will surely be Jörg Widmann’s extraordinary cadenzas for Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. To say the composer/conductor has gone full tonto in his mission to subvert the stylistic equilibrium of such a substantial Classical masterpiece is no exaggeration. 

Nor is that necessarily a criticism, given that for every listener addled by Widmann’s dissonant anarchy, manic deviation, eccentric theatre and unharnessed prolixity, there were undoubtedly others intoxicated by the sheer bravado of his off-the-wall confections, not least the time-travelling transitions that bridge Beethoven’s 18th century to Widmann’s 21st.

Widmann wrote the cadenzas during Covid for the German violinist Veronika Eberle, who subsequently performed and recorded her novel version of the concerto with Simon Rattle and the LSO. She was, once again, the protagonist on Saturday, this time with Widmann on the podium and an RSNO eager to champion such a mind-bending curiosity. 

It began as Beethoven intended, the opening timpani strokes presenting an enticing challenge for an orchestra whose strings were pared down to classical proportions, thus enabling the woodwind to explore infinite subtleties. Eberle’s playing was similarly clean, an unaffected precision that lent lyrical purity and finesse to the musical discourse. So far so good.

Yet even in these moments there was a sense that she and Widmann were not always on the same wavelength. Whereas Eberle seemed intent on pushing the momentum onwards, Widmann favoured a more mannered approach, holding tempi back and creating repetitive hiatuses through his tendency to overextend silences. The habit became irksome and led to audible uncertainties in attack. The ultimate outcome was one of the longest Beethoven Violin Concerto performances I’ve heard in a long time.

The extensive cadenzas didn’t help. Sure, they were entertaining as well as radical. That of the opening movement – the soloist joined by timpani and double bass – hurtled us into a world of weird pizzicatos, crepuscular ponticellos, violent incursions, even stabs at jazz, before winding ingeniously back to Beethoven. In the slow movement Eberle left us gasping with a moment of fantasy that soared to unimaginable heights before connecting tortuously, but magically, with the finale. For the final movement cadenza, Widmann went for bust with an explosion of pastiche and parody that had the soloists foot-stamping, bassist Nikita Naumov now in full jazz mode. All good fun, but a sense that Beethoven was being taken for a ride, at times going AWOL.

In light of all that, an encore might have proved too much had it not been such a snappy, pizzicato caprice for which Eberle enlisted the expert duo partnership of RSNO leader Maya Iwabuchi.

The second half opened with one of Widmann’s own short works, Con brio. It also revelled in Beethoven connections, using the latter’s themes to create something between a skit and a serious attempt, as the composer himself puts it, “to combine tradition with innovation”. The same musical psychedelia as the earlier cadenzas applied – a sea of cacophonous explosions, rapid cartoonesque mania, amorphous clusters and hard-edged quotes – yet this time with a self-contained purpose.

The programme ended with Mendelssohn’s Reformation Symphony, interesting in the sense that Widmann heavily inflicted his own personality on its tempi, shadings and rhetoric. Where that offered rare insights into the innermost details of the scoring – the contrapuntal writing was strikingly revealing – the momentum of the performance was frequently stalled by overindulgence. As with the Beethoven concerto, this was more about Widmann than Mendelssohn.

Ken Walton

(Picture credit: RSNO/Clara Cohen)

SCO / Emelyanychev

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City Halls, Glasgow/Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

It is not yet an imminent problem, but there are two succession issues that the Scottish Chamber Orchestra will have to address, and they both look challenging.

Scottish composer Jay Capperauld has set a very high bar for whoever follows him as the orchestra’s Associate Composer, in providing bespoke works that suit every aspect of the SCO’s multi-faceted schedule. He was at it again last week with the world premiere of his Stylus Scarlatti, arrangements for chamber orchestra of four keyboard sonatas from the first half of the 18th century by Domenico Scarlatti, precision-tooled to fit Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev’s now-annual “Baroque Inspirations” concerts.

In those, the conductor, often leading ensembles from the keyboard and throwing in some wind instrument playing during the interval, matches classic early music with more recent works that draw on that era. Capperauld’s new work was perhaps one the most straightforward pieces he has supplied to the SCO library, but in its nods to the way other modern composers – like Michael Nyman – have visited the same territory it was characteristically knowing, as well as containing music tailored to specific solo talents in the orchestra.

The other challenge will, of course, be the eventual departure of Emelyanychev himself. It is almost inconceivable that there may be someone else with his combination of talents and enormous, infectious, energy waiting in the wings.

On Sunday afternoon at the Queen’s Hall, “Maxim & Friends” teamed him with the SCO’s string section leaders for two Schumann chamber works from 1842: the Piano Quartet, Op 47 and the Piano Quintet, Op 44.

With the string players using gut strings, Emelyanychev’s keyboard was a London-built 1888 instrument from French piano-makers Erard, borrowed from Glasgow University. Its distinct ringing tone – absolutely clear even if it lacked the muscle of a modern concert grand – combined beautifully with the string sound in a performance that may have been very close to how the works were originally heard, but refreshed them bracingly for modern ears.

These demanding pieces, composed for Schumann’s virtuoso wife Clara and the top string players in Germany at the time, are among the sunniest he wrote, particularly the Quartet, with its lovely Andante Cantabile movement – set up here by a startlingly brisk account of the Scherzo.

Both are in E flat, but the Quintet is more epic in scale as the composer explores and reworks his material with the thoroughness of a Beethoven symphony. The performances of both, with Emelyanychev’s keyboard skills matched by those of violinists Stephanie Gonley and Marcus Barcham Stevens, Max Mandel on viola and Philip Higham on cello, were absolutely first rank.

At Glasgow’s City Halls on Friday evening, there was a very specific chamber approach to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No 3, played by just ten strings, opening a programme again played entirely using gut strings. Both warm and rustic-sounding, the sound gave a particular quality to an expanded ensemble for Britten’s youthful Simple Symphony which suited its folk-influenced music well.

For Handel’s Water Music, it was a more hybrid band on stage, with modern rather than natural horns joining the ensemble. Perhaps that was simply a pragmatic decision, for reliable accuracy of pitch, but the result was more than satisfactory, and the little harpsichord flourishes at the start of some movements were a characteristic Emelyanychev addition.

SCO Principal Condustor Maxim Emelyanychev directs the orchestra in a programme of Baroque Inspirations, featuring works by Bach, Handel, Britten and Schnittke, plus the world premiere of an arrangementt of Scarlatti keyboard sonatas for orchestra (‘Stylus Scarlatti’) by the SCO’s Associate Composer, Jay Capperauld.

As was the procession of a few of the players to the foyer during the interval, heralded by a drum beat and led by the conductor himself playing a selection of early flutes and recorders. Perhaps this ingredient had more impact when it was a complete surprise to the audience and front of house staff, but it was still great fun, even if the SATB choral Spanish work handed out on hymn sheets for audience participation was a challenge too far for many ticket-holders.

Friday’s programme ended with a work from the conductor’s native Russia that was composed by Alfred Schnittke just eight years before Emelyanychev was born.

There is indeed “Baroque Inspiration” to be heard in Schnittke’s Gogol Suite, a sequence of eight short pieces based on short stories by the writer, but there is also the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Mozart’s Overture to The Marriage of Figaro. At other times, however, it sounds as much like the Merry Melodies of Warner Brothers cartoons or the pantomime of Spike Jones and his City Slickers.

With the players still gut-strung, the band included perhaps the most integrated use of electric guitar and bass guitar that any composer has achieved, a vast panoply of percussion from the whole toy box to tubular bells, and no fewer than four keyboard players. Simon Smith was imperious on concert grand, Stephen Doughty and Andrew Forbes covered harpsichord, celesta, and something invisible in between, and Emelyanychev himself handled the centre-stage prepared piano which played out the ominous “Testament” at the end.

The expression “multi-tasking” barely hints at what the SCO’s Principal Conductor brings to the job.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Maxim Emelyanychev by Andrej Grilc; picture from City Halls foyer by Christopher Bowen

Westbourne Music: Meraki Duo

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Glasgow Art Club

The art deco gallery interior of Glasgow Art Club provided an apposite setting for the intimate flute-guitar coupling of the Meraki Duo. This Westbourne Music recital by the young British duo – Meera Maharaj on flute, James Girling on guitar – also happened to be their first ever Scottish appearance, marking the start of a wider Scotland/UK tour that culminates with the launch of their debut Delphian album in September. It was a programme perfectly suited to the lunchtime slot: light, varied, charming, even revelatory in the rare choice of repertoire.

Much of that required adaptation for this specific combo, clearly a role enjoyed by Girling, whose arrangements of works by William Grant Still, Dominique Le Gendre and Olivier Messiaen projected a personal imprint on the performances. 

Still’s Three Songs (he was an American composer who played in Blues legend W C Handy’s band, but studied composition with Varèse) echoed the composer’s eclectic tendencies, combining soft “soirée” appeal – emphasised by the oaken sensuousness of Maharaj’s alto flute – with a deftness of simple construction. Le Gendre’s Songs and Dances of the Island’s Suite, inspired by his Trinidad and Tobago heritage, upped the vibe, not least in the animated and exotically-coloured Biguine. Especially fascinating were the three miniatures selected from Messiaen’s 5 Leçons de solfège, essentially pedagogical works, yet masterfully conceived in a manner more akin to the fluid brushstrokes of Debussy than the composer’s more ecstatic modernist signature.

Takemitsu’s Toward the Sea for alto flute and guitar, written for Greenpeace in the 1980s with inspiration from Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, was equally illustrative of that composer’s more tonal proclivities. Its three sections – Moby Dick, The Night and Cape Cod – were warmly embraced by a performance honouring the music’s mellifluous sweep and undulating dynamic. Again, the voluptuousness of the alto flute was spell-binding, entwined with the expressive dexterity of Girling’s versatile guitar.

To close, the Duo turned to Bosnian guitarist/composer Miroslav Tadić’s Four Macedonian Pieces for alto flute and guitar. Besides evoking the folk essence of these songs and dances, Maharaj and Girling struck a convincing balance between the sardonic and the ebullient. In response to the reflectiveness of the song-based Zajdi, Zajdi, the quintuple-time Pajdushka bristled with energy. The melancholic undertones of Jovka Kumanovka were swiftly swept aside by the wild Bagpiper’s dance Gajdarsko Oro, a fitting finale to Meraki’s enjoyable Scottish debut.

Ken Walton 

Other Scottish performances by the Meraki Duo are at West Kilbride (20 Feb), Hawick Music Club (21 Feb) and Moffat Music Society (22 Feb). Further details at https://meeramaharaj.co.uk/meraki-duo

Scottish Opera: The Great Wave

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Theatre Royal, Glasgow

There’s no denying the ambition behind The Great Wave, a substantial full-length opera by composer Dai Fujikura and librettist Harry Ross that aims to project the extraordinary biography of 18th/19th century Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai as a universal embodiment of the creative spirit. At Thursday’s premiere of this undeniably bold co-production between Scottish Opera and Japanese concert agency KAJIMOTO (it travels to Tokyo after a mere four Scottish performances across Glasgow and Edinburgh) such dual ambition struggled to justify its two-hour presence in our lives.

Hokusai’s iconic Ukiyo-e printmaking and book illustrations effectively revolutionised the industrial scale commercialisation of art. He is best known for The Great Wave off Kanagawa, a dynamic man-against-nature, Persian blue image of fishermen battling a mountainous wave with Mount Fuji stoically set in the background. It later inspired Debussy’s La Mer, not to mention the popular Apple emoji for “wave”. Somehow, the image’s symbolic omnipresence in this production reflects more the opera’s resistance to momentum than any promise of compelling magnetism.

The Great Wave begins with Hokusai’s death, the lengthy silence surrounding his coffin broken by the devotional keening of his daughter Oi (soprano Julieth Lozano Rolong) and the release of his spirit musically scented by the ethereal breathiness of the Shakuhachi, a traditional Japanese flute. Episodes in his long life – he died approaching 90, was struck by lightning on two occasions and expected to live to 110 – are revisited in a sequence of flashbacks that attempt to substantiate his creative immortality. 

Some magical elements emerge in the process. By and large, Satoshi Miyagi’s stage direction is sharply expressive, stylised in a quasi-ritualistic sense, softened by genuinely compassionate interactions, if prone to weird bouts of silliness. Odd snatches of humour are underplayed or too compartmentalised to produce much more than a hesitant audience titter. 

Similarly Akiko Kitamura’s choreography makes effective use of the cast’s professional dancers and mechanically-synchronised chorus, but submits now and again to self-caricature. More consistent, and aligning persuasively with Miyagi’s figurative simplicity, are Junpei Kiz’s vivid set designs and their interaction with Sho Yamaguchi’s morphing video effects and Kayo Takahashi Deschene’s mono-toned costumes.

What disappoints repeatedly, though, is the impotency of Fujikura’s vocal writing and his struggle to sustain organic development: that sense of prolonged musical journey, of heightening lyrical tensions, of inevitably reaching a destination. That, in itself, may have accounted for some inconsistent performances on opening night. 

As Hokusai, Daisuke Ohyama struggled to project his lower register, but had no problem with the hysterical falsetto that animated a rather manically divergent scene about a “smelly fart”. After a shaky start, Lozano Rolong’s Oi grew in confidence. Tenors Shengzi Ren (doubling as Mr Tozaki and Hokusai’s publisher Yohachi) and Luvo Maranti (the artist’s grandson), along with Chloe Harris as Hokusai’s second wife Koto, provided the most sustained and memorable performances. Edward Hawkins (Toshiro) and countertenor Collin Shay (von Siebold) were relatively incidental, but needful presences nonetheless. 

The Chorus, engineered in a blunt reactive fashion, delivered a gutsy compulsive edge, purposefully motivated despite the occasional and repetitive banality of their bullet-point utterances. At one point, joined by children’s voices, an ecstatic leaning to Benjamin Britten informed one of The Great Wave’s most uplifting scenes.

But the winning key element of this new opera is surely to be found in the orchestra pit, where music director Stuart Stratford and the Orchestra of Scottish Opera issue a side to Fujikura’s creativeness that really does sing. His orchestral score harnesses a passion and narrative momentum absent from much of the vocal writing, presenting a captivating menagerie of detailed, magical imagery that rides atop a thrusting cinematic undercurrent. It’s just not quite enough to offset the weaknesses of substance and prolixity that surround it.

It’s worth mentioning, too, that Thursday’s opening performance was dedicated to the memory of Scottish Opera founder Sir Alexander Gibson, born 100 years ago this month. Who knows what he would have made of The Great Wave? At the very least he would have applauded the sincerity of the effort bravely undertaken by a company he loved.

Ken Walton

Further performances of The Great Wave are at the Theatre Royal Glasgow (14 February) and Edinburgh Festival Theatre (19 & 21 February)

(Photo credit: Mihaela Bodlovic)

RSNO / Sondergard

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

It would be foolish to ignore an obvious reason why Brahms’ Double Concerto for Violin and Cello is less often heard – it necessitates the paying of two quality soloists rather than just one. Yet there is something in the genesis of the work, the last orchestral piece the composer wrote, which also explains its comparative lack of success.

When the violinist for whom Brahms composed his immediately successful and perennially popular violin concerto, Joseph Joachim, suspected his wife of an affair, the composer’s sympathies lay with the woman, and a letter he wrote expressing them was cited in the divorce court. Unsurprisingly, that led to a rift between virtuoso and composer, which, three years later, the Double Concerto sought to heal, involving the cellist in Joachim’s quartet as a sort-of intermediary.

Perhaps that whole background could be painted as the story of the work’s first and most fascinating movement which begins with an orchestral statement, features long solo passages for cello and violin before the two join forces and become partners with the whole ensemble, but it is probably fruitless to pursue such an analogy.

What is true is that there is a lot of fascinating music for the soloists to play from the very start of the work, and it helps if they know one another’s style well. For this performance, the RSNO and conductor Thomas Sondergard had the American First Violin of the Berlin Philharmonic, Noah Bendix-Balgley and his Principal Cello colleague Bruno Delepelaire, an A-team by any standards.

They were superb, too, and – as orchestral musicians – supremely sensitive to their relationship with the players around them. It is possible that this was as fine a performance of the work as you are likely to hear, and the intricacies of that opening movement were the most fascinating part. Later it becomes a little more like the Brahms everyone knows and the RSNO horns and woodwind were on top form for the richly harmonic Andante, while the dotted rhythms and changes of pace in the folk-flavoured finale are the most obvious nod to the earlier violin concerto.

What is also true, however, is that there is no big tune in the whole work to compare with those in earlier Brahms concerti and symphonies, and that is surely a more compelling reason why it was poorly received in Cologne in 1887 and struggles to find a place in the repertoire today.

In this concert it was the first-half prelude to Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, and that was an exemplar of the fine, disciplined work that the RSNO and Sondergard do together.

Played not especially fast – although there are certainly longer Tchaik Fives available – there was a pace and energy about the performance that only helped communicate the restless ambiguity of the work. Although he wrote a lot of prettier music, the Fifth is where the composer works his material most thoroughly, and if Sondergard’s reading perhaps lacked a little warmth, the wonderful craftsmanship of the music could not have been clearer.

There is great music for clarinet, notably at the start with the low strings and in the counter melody in the slow movement. Principal horn Amadea Dazeley-Gaist was superb as the main soloist there, and her whole section was magnificent throughout.

There were no weak links on stage, however, the full might of the orchestra’s strings in absolutely top ensemble form and the brass as disciplined as the RSNO brass now always is.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Noah Bendix-Balgley by Nikolaj Lund

Hebrides: Music for Time

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Adelaide Place, Glasgow

All credit to British composer Arthur Keegan, not least for accepting an Olympian challenge to conceive a partner piece to Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. The latter, as iconic for its unique language and timeless spirituality as for the fascinating back story that led to its initial creation within a German prisoner-of-war camp, remains one of the 20th century’s most seminal, moving masterpieces.

What Keegan has produced – as demonstrated in its premiere performances by the Hebrides Ensemble while touring Cumnock, Edinburgh, Skye and Glasgow over the past week – does complete justice to the such a formidable task. Coalesce: Quartet for the Start of Life, commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society, is as much a homage to the Messiaen as a springboard from which Keegan’s imagination takes full independent flight. He addresses the genesis of time – “both biblical and biological” – as opposed to Messiaen’s Book of Revelations-inspired deliberations on the end of time.

As such, Coalesce’s impact in opening Hebrides’ “Music for Time” concert was instantly spellbinding. Scored for the same forces as the Messiaen – clarinet (Yann Ghiro), violin (David Alberman), cello (William Conway) and piano (James Willshire) – and initiated by a simple theatricality (two of the players processing from offstage during the opening bars), we witnessed what amounted essentially to a potent “atomised” splintering and reconstitution of the Messiaen sound world. 

From its fragile elemental opening, rich in atmosphere and awe, it was only a matter of time before Keegan’s purposeful writing revealed cleverly-integrated pre-echoes of Messiaen – snatches of exquisite birdsong and overall glittering euphoria. The performance keenly acknowledged these references, but equally embraced the genuine originality in Keegan’s writing, his solid command of texture, ingenious filtration of referenced material, and ability to surprise. What seemed like an added electronic backing towards the end, for instance, turned out to be the players muted vocalising. A magical closing moment.

At that point, would an instant segue into the Messiaen have added to the power of the musical coupling? Possibly. Instead, Keegan received well-earned applause, the players also requiring that moment to retune, leaving that question hanging teasingly in the air. Maybe worth a try at a future performance?

That said, the spell cast had lingered long enough to touch the opening of the Quartet for the End of Time, the subdued complexity of Liturgie de cristal acting like a mystical reset before the frenetic ecstasy of the Vocalise and Yann Ghiro’s agile monologuing in Abîme des oiseaux. If the Interlude proved more safety conscious than daringly playful, and despite some momentary lapses in absolute synchronisation, the onward journey offered up kaleidoscopic delights: Conway’s immutable cello playing in Louange à l’Eternité; the surreal sonic inventiveness of Fouillis d’arcs-en-ciel; Willshire’s supportive pianism; the infinite enchantment of Alberman’s solo violin in Louange à l’Immortalité climbing to its stratospheric sign-off.

More than anything, this was an inspired piece of programming. When the end result constitutes something much greater than the sum of its parts, you know you’ve witnessed a very special event.

Ken Walton

BBC SSO / New

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City Halls, Glasgow

AFTER the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s programme brochure went to press, someone must have done the sums and realised that Thursday’s concert as initially conceived would not fill its Radio 3 live broadcast slot.

The addition of Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin proved a truly excellent concert-opening bonus, but the sequence it began, while full of good things, made less sense than the published plan. The original opener, John Adams’ “fanfare for orchestra”, Short Ride in a Fast Machine, instead began the second half and was the weakest ingredient of the evening, its demanding percussion part not as precise as it needs to be – regardless of conductor Gemma New’s meticulous direction. She at least ensured that the engine never threatened to stall.

That blip was in contrast to the work that it had been intended to precede in the first half, Samuel Barber’s Symphony No 1. Almost exactly 90 years on from its completion, it remains an uncategorisable piece of Romanticism with a Modernist edge, bowling through the structure of a Classical symphony in a single arc, and ending with a nod to early music in a con moto passacaglia, its repeated bass-line building the tension superbly under New’s baton before being passed to the brass for the explosive finale.

Earlier delights in the performance included the variety of tone and dynamics in Gordon Rigby’s timpani and his three-way conversation with the basses and tuba, which followed a compelling cross-stage dialogue between trumpets and horns. A plangent solo from guest first oboe Emily Pailthorpe, a featured soloist in everything bar the Adams, was a highlight of the Andante tranquillo section.

The symphony is a full-orchestra work-out but the large string section (26 violins, 10 violas, 8 cellos and 6 basses) was on the platform throughout and as immaculately drilled in the Ravel, where the other voices included the crucial single trumpet in the third movement Menuet. New was true to the memorial purpose of the work – for friends lost in the First World War as much as Ravel’s composition predecessor – while never losing a crispness in the music, especially notable in her direction of the closing codas of the movements.

The concert culminated in Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2 with Italian soloist Alessio Bax, whose career flourishes on both sides of the Atlantic. The composer’s most integrated work for these forces, it saves any keyboard fireworks for the Allegro finale and Bax was not of a mind to put much showmanship into them. Instead this was a real ensemble performance, the pianist always attentive of his orchestral colleagues and the communication between himself and the conductor seamless, notably in the flurry of tempo changes at the end of the opening movement.

It was a beautiful account of a familiar work, if never heart-stopping, and Bax added a modest encore in a piece of Scriabin for left hand only.

Broadcast live on Radio 3 and available for 30 days on BBC Sounds. Concert repeated at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh on Sunday at 3pm.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Alessio Bax by Marco Borggreve

Orchestra of Scottish Opera

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Ayr Town Hall

The Orchestra of Scottish Opera summons a tangible sense of release when given the opportunity to feature centre stage rather than customarily hidden within the cloistered confines of the orchestra pit. Such euphoria was manifest in Ayr Town Hall on Wednesday, where the players were in full view for an Operatic Gala concert that coasted its way through a sequence of sundry operatic excerpts ranging from Mozart to Puccini.  

Swedish conductor Tobias Ringborg had no less a part to play, visibly consumed by the music, yet relaxed enough to give the band sufficient leeway to steer its own course through the more detailed expressive niceties. It was these nuances – reactive and instinctive support to the spontaneous whims of the evening’s vocal double act – that introduced a sense of adventure to mostly well-known operatic numbers.

That double act consisted of former Scottish Opera Emerging Artists Catriona Hewitson (soprano) and Ross Cumming (baritone) featuring variously in tandem as duettists, and individually in solo arias. Bristling with personality, their performances – if occasionally subsumed by the heft of the orchestra – oozed charm and instant adaptability. 

Music from just two operas took us up to the interval: Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro and Donizetti’s Don Pasquale. It provided a neat complement, the graceful good humour of Mozart thrust viciously aside by the restive bombast of Donizetti. The respective overtures brought mixed results, the orchestra more at home with the fulminating Pasquale than the rakish precision of Figaro. It was the starry adaptability of Hewitson and Cumming, self-assured in their animated characterisations, that captured the moments.

The second half introduced a wider miscellany. From Gounod’s Faust, the wild exuberance of Phryne’s Dance and sweet-scented Dance of the Trojan Women set the scene for Cumming’s noble vision of Valentin’s Act II aria Avant de quitter ses lieux. Howitson responded with the joyous  gymnastics of Je veux vivre from the same composer’s Roméo et Juliette. This French segment ended with Ernest Guiraud’s orchestral Suite No 1 from Bizet’s Carmen, the seductive spirit of the music more consistently conveyed than some of the instrumental detail. 

Thereafter, the focus shifted to Italy, firstly in a pairing of Puccini arias that occupied either end of the popularity scale. Love’s frustrations found a lofty emotional outlet in Cumming’s rapt performance of the lesser-known Questo amor, vergogna mia from Edgar, an early Puccini opera often considered his “biggest flop”. Gianni Schicchi’s O mio babbino caro, on the other hand, required no justification. Hewitson’s unaffected delivery bowed respectfully to its natural and popular appeal.   

Lusciousness prevailed in the instrumental Intermezzo from Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, before the duettists struck up a whimsical show stopping finale with Quanto amore from Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore. Except that wasn’t the end. It was back to Mozart for a well-earned encore, the instantly recognisable duo La ci darem la mano from Don Giovanni. 

Ken Walton

Dunedin Consort / Gordis

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Adelaide Place, Glasgow

The Dunedin Consort has been a unique part of the Scottish musical landscape for three decades now, not always in its current format as a flexible, all-encompassing Baroque ensemble capable of mixing and matching its instrumental and vocal resources to order. Nor has it escaped the occasional threat of extinction in the face of funding wrangles. That’s all in the past. Today’s Dunedin is well and truly fit for purpose, with a performance strategy that combines world-leading scholarship, tip-top performance standards, international prominence and award-winning recognition.

That applies even to the most intimate of presentations, such as Thursday’s French Connection programme (repeated Friday in Edinburgh’s Greyfriars Kirk), which featured a mere four players led by American guest harpsichordist Lillian Gordis, charged with tracing the seminal evolution of instrumental chamber music across the first half of the 18th century.

It amounted to a glowingly affectionate and eminently stylish musical soirée. The visual intimacy of these performances was matched by an easeful conversational interaction among the players – Gordis joined by Matthew Truscott (violin), Jonathan Manson (viola da gamba) and Rosie Bowker (flute). A quintessentially restrained and collaborative virtuosity, besides resonating with the simple soft-lit ambiance of this former baptist church venue, connected meaningfully with an assortment of illustrative pieces by Bach, Telemann, Rameau and the earliest of the featured composers, one Elisabeth Jaquet de la Guerre.

La Guerre’s Trio Sonata in B flat, despite dating from 1695, bore clear signs of where the forthcoming half-century was heading, its bright and breezy opening punctuated by quirky rhythmic hemiola, later tempered by deliciously deviant chromaticism. It followed Rameau’s Premiere Concert from his 1741 Pièces de clavecin en concerts, a thing of refinement if more of a slow burner than his Cinquième Concert that was later to close the programme.

That later Rameau’s liberating use of the viola da gamba, Manson now free to indulge in pungent double stopping and explore the topmost extremes of his instrument, proved a powerfully dramatic summation to the Bach and Telemann that preceded it. In Bach’s Trio Sonata from The Musical Offering, besides being the most substantial work in the programme, Gordis and her team dug deep into its polyphonic complexities and chromatic ambiguities. The musical interchange, refined yet movingly expressive, was as instinctive as it was disciplined.

Bach’s Trio Sonata in C major (organists will know it in its solo version for that instrument) provided a lithe opening to the concert’s second half, its slow movement tinged with neatly-aligned sensuousness. Then to Telemann’s Paris Quartet, an intriguing complement, suggesting perhaps that – of the two composers – he may have been much more of a party animal than Bach. A performance that fully embraced its whimsy, its menagerie of brightly-lit counterpoint, its exploration of instrumental freedom, its joie-de-vivre, was a potent reminder of Telemann’s equal standing in the fiercely-competitive German High Baroque.

If anything, this was a presentation that could perhaps have done with a little more informality, some words (Gordis spoke briefly once) to further contextualise the music. Then again, these inspired performances (let’s just forget the momentary confusion that led to one player starting the wrong piece) had plenty to say by themselves.

Ken Walton

SCO / Emelyanychev

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

The attendance was no disgrace, but really there should have been no empty seats in the Usher Hall for a Mozart gala featuring back-to-back performances of his last three symphonies. Written in a remarkable few summer weeks of 1788, it is still unclear for whom the cash-strapped composer dashed off the masterworks, and all sorts of theories have been advanced, some more credible than others.

Veteran German conductor and musicologist Peter Guelke, in his 1998 book Der Triumph der neuen Tonkunst, made the case for seeing them as a deliberate triptych, “a world in a cycle”, and the SCO’s energetic Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, seemed persuaded by that thesis.

He opened Symphony No 39, K543, with a strong statement of the opening theme, but one that was far from loud. The conductor had clearly worked on a very specific string sound for this programme, with extra players in every section, aiming for a rich intensity rather than volume, and the mellow sound of the first movement was a clear indication of what was to come.

Elsewhere on the platform, the forces were as usual, and the changes Mozart makes in the wind scoring (no oboes in No 39, no clarinets in No 41) and the role of timpanist Louise Lewis Goodwin – crisp but very quiet in No 39, absent in No 40 – seemed especially significant.

Although there were historically-informed ingredients in all the playing, this was a hybrid performance, best illustrated by the cello section where the front desk hugged their instruments with the knees, Baroque-style, with the three players behind using spikes.

If Emelyanychev was indeed focused less on authenticity than on an arc of performance that ran from the rich grandeur of the opening chords of the E-flat major symphony to the grand double fugue that concludes the Jupiter, it was an interpretation that embraced many contrasts and illuminated many parallels along the way.

The pace of the opening of No 40, one of the best-loved pieces in all Mozart but played in a wide range of tempi over the years, was not as fast as might have been expected but that allowed its dotted rhythms to shine as echoes of the bolder syncopation of the finale of No 39. Just as fascinating was the progression of the writing in the triple-time third movement, from the folksy clarinets in No 39 through a very fresh up-beat reply to the Andante in No 40 to the remarkable complexity of the ensemble scoring in No 41, again with a boldly quiet beginning.

There was, however, rather more exuberance and a sense of being off the leash in much of the Jupiter, as if the conductor had been keeping his powder dry until after the interval. That perhaps explains why it was the central G Minor work, K 550, that seemed to lack quite the verve it deserves and requires, but that reservation about No 40 may well have been remedied for the repeat performances in Glasgow and Aberdeen.

Keith Bruce

SCO / Borrani

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City Halls, Glasgow

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra has more “showbiz” personalities on its list of regular guest leader/directors, but Italian violinist Lorenza Borrani achieves a richness of string sound from just 24 players which immediately distinguished the opening bars of Haydn’s Symphony No 56 in C Major.

Hers was an approach to the composer of daringly deliberate tempi, with the fullest expression of every dynamic contrast – and there are many – in its four movements, underlining how Haydn was setting a template for his successors.

Occasionally a player ran a little ahead of her animated indications from the concert-master’s chair, and the intonation of the natural horns took a while to settle, but the contribution of the reed soloists to the slow movement was superb and the ensemble engagement with the music’s playfulness was always captivating.

That sense of fun is also crucial to Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso No 1, written 200 years later, even if the frolics are often veiled in darkness. The six movements range fantastically widely, with the more obvious ingredients including the baroque music of Vivaldi and Corelli suggested by the title, South American dance music and the prepared piano experiments of John Cage.

Jan Waterfield was in the place the composer himself filled for the earliest performances, at the harpsichord and an electric keyboard and lap-top set-up producing a digital version of the prepared piano part. Those opening and closing utterances are among the more sombre moments in the work, which is hugely virtuosic for the two violin soloists – Borrani partnered by the SCO’s Marcus Barcham Stevens – particularly in the climactic fourth movement cadenza. After that the slide into tango-time is a happy relief, but it did not seem in the least odd.

With the pizzicato exchanges by the violinists calling to mind duelling banjos, principal bass James Kenny contributing a fine jazz bass passage and the slow movement employing a chromatic descent similar to those found in music from Henry Purcell to Led Zeppelin, the work leaves few potential avenues unexplored. The quality of this performance of what is a hugely demanding score was its best advocate.

A fascinating balanced programme was completed by the two movements of Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony No 8. The opening in the cellos and basses again impressed for their resonance in the City Hall and there was nothing less precise about Borrani’s Schubert than there had been in the Haydn.

Only the three (crucial) trombones made this an unusually large SCO on stage, but it lacked nothing symphonically at all, just as the composer’s two movements stand perfectly well on their own.

Accuracy in pacing and dynamic expression was again the director’s way, and there was no playing to the gallery from the SCO’s excellent wind soloists, although all were on finest form.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Christopher Bowen

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