Tag Archives: Elena Langer

RSNO / Poska

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Estonian conductor Kristiina Poska, once a regular visitor with the SCO and now a guest conductor with the RSNO, has a distinctive style as well as immaculate tailoring on the podium. She uses a baton in her left hand but just as often her rigorous time-keeping is indicated with her right: Poska may be ambidextrous, but she is never ambiguous.

The RSNO gave her an interesting challenge in the middle of her latest programme – the world premiere of Elena Langer’s The Lives of Birds, the latest of a sequence of works the orchestra has championed by the Russian-born British composer.

The concert began, however, on more familiar turf for the conductor with Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten by her compatriot Arvo Part. It is an emblematic work from the Estonian composer, instrumental but rooted in early choral music and the sound of bells.

A single tolling bell signals the dense writing of the canon for strings, and – in partnership with RSNO leader Maya Iwabuchi – Poska had the RSNO players produce an intensity of sound from the first bars that was perfect for the piece. A work of elegant simplicity, it packed a punch in this performance.

Fortunately perhaps, a brief explanation of her new work from Elena Langer separated the Part from her new piece. Like Jonathan Dove, Langer brings a fondness for the comedic to her composition, and The Lives of Birds, which imparts human characteristics to her avian subjects, is no exception.

These birds are stalked by their vision of the Grim Reaper, a white cat, and their brief existence is concerned with territorial mastery and preening in the mirror, as well, of course, as singing.

The soloist was soprano Anna Dennis, like librettist Glyn Maxwell a regular associate of the composer, and a singer whose ability to master a difficult modern score and perform its huge demands of pitch and range with something approaching effortless ease is very well known.

Dennis sang to her usual high standard, her enunciation of Maxwell’s excellent text conversationally precise, and her imparting of distinct personalities to Ashleaf, Moss and Robin Red the best the work could want.

The music itself is far from light, and as well as the work of the singer, the ingredients for the orchestra are sumptuous, filled with bird calls in the percussion as well as the winds, depictions of the landscape and the ticking of that threatening clock measuring the cycle of life.

If the narrative of those works was never obscure, that of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony has been worried over since its composition. Not by Poska and the RSNO in this performance however – what they gave us was a celebration of the score as superbly orchestrated music.

The Fourth is full of brilliantly simple ideas given the fullest possible expression, from the “fateful” minor-key fanfare with which it begins, through the lovely melodious Andantino slow movement to the demanding pizzicato Scherzo and the gloriously expressive finale.

Poska shaped that musical story superbly, and the players added the details of solo exuberance and ensemble cohesion to what was a thrilling performance.

Keith Bruce

Rehearsal picture by Clara Cowen

RSNO / Diakun

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Carmina Burana is one of those crowd-pulling pieces for which the greatest challenge is often finding the ideal partner piece. The RSNO succeeded on both counts at the weekend, in that Glasgow’s 2000-seater hall was packed to the gunnels, and Russian-born, London-based Elena Langer’s The Dong with a Luminous Nose (a titular crowd-puller if ever there was one!) shared something of the sparkling absurdity of Carl Orff’s racy cantata.

Langer’s music is entertaining, laced with the same wry humour she exhibits in her wider demeanour (her whimsical spoken introduction was stand-up material). The words from Edward Lear’s eponymous nonsense poem are deliciously nuts, and this particular piece, written last year for the LPO and Boston Symphony Orchestra, usefully includes the same combination of adult and children’s choruses required for Carmina. But add to that its conception as a cello concerto – the RSNO’s principal cellist Pei-Jee Ng took the solo honours – and you have something delightfully alternative to chew on.

It was that latter dimension that felt most comfortable in a performance directed by Polish conductor Marzena Diakun, her debut appearance with the RSNO. Out of nowhere, Pei-Jee’s solo opening incantation cast a “once-upon-a-time” spell, like unaccompanied Bach with a mouth-clenching twist of citrus, in the same way his accomplished solo presence dominated the close. In other moments his easeful musicianship projected poignantly and eloquently like a probing commentary. 

As for the literal story-telling – the tale of the Dong who affixes a lantern to a prosthesis on his nose to allow him to search endlessly for his beloved Jumbly Girl – this didn’t always feel like the most comfortable sing for the RSNO choruses. Where it did click, the impact was uplifting – a parodic waltz episode filled with joyous effervescence, and a final star-spangled meteor shower spelt out in sparkling vocal terms. There were moments, though, where the voices sounded a tad anxious. The male chorus, alone at the start, struggled to project. The most assured highlights came from the RSNO Youth Chorus.

It’s a tricky piece, but was such apprehension emanating from Diakun? There was certainly something in her ensuing Carmina Burana that suggested a lingering unease all round – unsynchronised orchestral attacks, some drowning out even of the full chorus, and an overriding lack of hunger and immediacy in the choral delivery. Interesting to note that the children’s chorus, singing from memory, sang with thrilling lustre, while the main chorus, where its heads visibly took refuge in the scores, occasionally lost its biting edge.

Make no mistake, underlying proficiency ensured this Carmina proceeded without incident, in many cases capturing both the sensuousness and irreverence of the piece, most notably the Court of Love and rumbustious Tavern scenes. The children were magnificent, the orchestra sourcing oodles of exquisite colouring. Among the soloists, baritone Ben McAteer (hilariously gross as the beer-swilling abbot) and tenor Adrian Dwyer (sense the comical pain of his Roasting Swan) were truly characterful. Fflur Wyn didn’t quite hit the spot in what should have been her utterly rapt soprano numbers. 

For a work designed to fully intoxicate from start to finish, this performance left in this listener a yearning for a further night cap or two.

Ken Walton

Russian Opera Double Bill

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Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow

Moscow-born and UK-based composer Elena Langer had the suite she made of the music for her Welsh National Opera hit Figaro Gets a Divorce performed by the BBC SSO at Glasgow City Halls on the eve of the pandemic, just weeks after it had been premiered by Maxim Emelyanychev in Seattle.

Nicholas McGegan will conduct a performance of that work with the Cleveland Orchestra in August, and the composer’s ongoing connection with the wider Scottish musical community was cemented this week when the Alexander Gibson Opera School presented a beautifully clear and lively staging of her earlier piece, Four Sisters.

Commissioned by Dawn Upshaw specifically for students to perform, the piece borrows three characters (Masha, Irina and Olga) from Chekhov’s play and transplants them to New York City with a Gianni Schicchi-like plot of the lost will and testament of their deceased father.

His was the final coffin in a procession of them in Max Hoehn’s clever staging of three works for the Masters singers at the Conservatoire. If that was tempting fate, the production survived the gremlins and found a serendipitous context.

Partnering the Langer in the double-bill was Cesar Cui’s A Feast in Time of Plague. Setting a short Pushkin play about London’s 1665 Plague with a group of hedonists partying in the face of the pandemic and in defiance of religious disapproval, it has had a few revivals around the globe prompted by the Covid emergency. That this one played as Boris Johnson faced a parliamentary committee could not have been planned, but that was perhaps some recompense for the wave of illness that afflicted the cast during rehearsals.

That resulted in Masha in Four Sisters being sung from the wings by Northern Irish soprano Rebecca Murphy while an indisposed, and masked, Rosalind Dobson walked the part on stage. Perhaps that prompted the rest of the cast to work a little harder through their own chest infections, but they certainly rose to the occasion. Megan Baker and Hannah Bennett, in the mezzo roles of Irina and Olga, and baritone Ross Cumming as their father’s executor, Krumpelblatt, were a fine ensemble and took their solo arias well, although soprano Marie Cayeux almost stole the show with the Maid’s anti-New York song.

Cumming – as strong a performer here as in the Nyman/Bryars double-bill last year – was the key character in A Feast in Time of Plague as the “President” who sings of the encroaching disease and death as an impetus to enjoy life to its fullest extent. Both pieces mix ensemble work with solos to rewarding effect for the casts, and returning graduate Wiktoria Wizner had the pastoral aria as Mary, while the Gothic visions of Louisa were in the hands of Cayeux.

In the pit, guest conductor Lada Valesova found all the colours in both scores, including some fine harp in the Cui and stretching to swanee whistle in Langer’s fun music. There was a prologue to the double-bill in the form of Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes during which tenors William Searle and Sam Marston and baritone Pawel Piotrowski demonstrated their mime skills with a little narrative of the relationship between old music and new. 

Like everything else in this inventive hour and a half of clever work, it spoke as lucidly as it was played, acted and sung, in an evening that was chock-full of parallels and resonances.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Marie Cayeux by Duncan McGlynn