Tag Archives: Emilia Hoving

BBC SSO / Hoving

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City Halls, Glasgow

A little more than a year ago, young Finn Emilia Hoving made an instant impression conducting a demanding and colourful programme with the RSNO. Now here she was at the helm of the BBC Scottish for another testing concert of new music alongside an established repertoire favourite which was an unqualified triumph. It would be good to think that she might become a more regular feature on the podium in Scotland.

We can assume the opener was her choice. Finnish composer Outi Tarkiainen’s The Rapids of Life is a majestic piece of contemporary orchestral expressionism that has its inspiration in her own experience of giving birth and as a memorial to her illustrious kinswoman composer Kaija Saariaho, whose death occurred during the process of composition and to whom it is dedicated.

The BBC SSO co-commissioned The Rapids of Life and this was its UK premiere, for which Tarkiainen was in the audience. The audience – filling the lower level of the Grand Hall on Sunday afternoon – loved the piece, which is full of great organic swells of sound and delicious details from cello, flute and trumpet as well as contrabass clarinet, harp and celesta.

Its ten minutes or so would have been a normal serving of freshly minted music in many an orchestral programme, but it was the appetiser for the new accordion concerto written for Ryan Corbett by Jay Capperauld that followed. Almost all the work we hear from the Ayrshire composer at the moment is for and by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, where he is Associate Composer, but this piece was premiered last year by Corbett with the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland, and was richly deserving of this second hearing.

Capperauld’s fascination with the darker corners of science history are to the fore in Galvanic Dances, starting from the 18th century experiments of Luigi Galvani and the effects of electricity on moribund organic material, which also led to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

John Dowland, Tchaikovsky and Gregorian chant get the nod in a work that is quintessential Capperauld, which is to say both dramatic and often funny, albeit in a dark way. With four microphones on his instrument, the BBC were taking no chances in capturing the virtuosic work of the soloist, which will be well worth catching when the concert is broadcast.

Capperauld has written Corbett a very testing score, which he despatched, from memory, with unflustered poise. The unusualness of the accordion as a concerto instrument was immediately irrelevant, although there were bars recalling Jimmy Shand, Astor Piazzolla and Jack Emblow if you wanted to hear them. With widescreen cinematic orchestral scoring, but there were also moments that resembled American post-minimalism and Hoving clearly revelled in her job, with all the changes in tempo and dynamics of the work.

Corbett had a number of cadenzas, and one gently arpeggiating figure introduced the calmest section of the piece, although its delicacy still seemed a little sinister in the composer’s style.

Capperauld was also in the hall to be cheered to the rafters at the work’s end, and the confident swagger of his composition found an apposite echo after the interval in the “Montagues and Capulets” opening of Hoving’s selection from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet ballet music.

It was a generous one, opening and closing with pairs of movements from the composer’s Suite No. 2, bracketing five from the Suite No. 1. With minimal pauses, Hoving made the full three-quarters of an hour flow symphonically and there were too many solo turns of quality from the SSO players to name, but Gareth Brady’s tenor sax was an essential addition and punctuation from the snare drum absolutely on point.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Ryan Corbett by Andrej Grilc

RSNO / Hoving

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Perth Concert Hall

As readers of VoxCarnyx know, the first Scottish performances of Anna Clyne’s cello concerto DANCE are not being given this weekend, as the RSNO attests. They were heard almost exactly two years ago at the Govan Music Festival, when Bartholomew LaFollette was the soloist with the Glasgow Barons under conductor Paul MacAlinden.

That spurious claim aside, the programme the RSNO built around its first performance of the work was delightful, and its liveliness was substantially down to the fresh faces on stage.

In this context, Clyne, whose work has found plenty of champions in Scotland, was the veteran. The soloist and conductor, Senja Rummukainen and Emilia Hoving, are both Finns born in 1994, and between them they shaped the fascinating five movement piece with assurance.

Inspired by five lines of verse by 13th century mystic Rumi, it begins at the top of the cello’s range, echoed by flute and bowed percussion, before the rest of the winds come in with counterpoint. The ethereal opening is followed by a much more emphatic second movement when maintaining a balance between soloist and orchestra is more of a challenge, and then a central section concentrating on the familiar capabilities of the instrument in a concerto context – and features a lovely brief clarinet solo.

The fourth movement begins with a statement of ground bass from the soloist, taken up by the basses, and then develops as a stately canon, with crucial roles for gong and brass. The sweeping melody of the finale is shared around democratically, as are the solo duties, with orchestra leader Maya Iwabuchi having a few bars in the spotlight.

It is a partnership piece, and although Rummukainen had plenty to do, it was also good to hear her solo in her encore of Theme and Variations for Solo Cello by Jean Sibelius.

The programme was more of a showcase for her countrywoman, and Emilia Hoving is certainly a young conductor to watch. She steered Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales with a light touch, dancing on the podium through the suite of short waltzes that transcend their piano origins in the composer’s brilliant orchestration. This is modernism doing what it does best, throwing out lots of ideas rather than worrying the essence out of a few.

After the interval, Hoving’s way with Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances was even more dynamic. There is a no-nonsense clarity about her conducting style and in her hands this was the gloomy Russian at his colourful best. The hesitant waltz of the second dance was especially good, its swing a nod to the composer’s American exile as much as the cinemascope expressiveness of the movements on either side.

The wildcard that Hoving was dealt for the Perth performance (the rest of the programme repeated in Edinburgh and Glasgow) was the presence of a cohort from Big Noise Raploch, the original Stirling project of Sistema Scotland. Performing side-by-side with RSNO players, they opened the concert with a bespoke work from Lisa Robertson, a Scots composer of the same generation as the two Finnish women.

With some vocal effects and extended instrumental techniques, and rhythmic challenges as it develops, Change is Coming required performance concentration rather than individual virtuosity of the youngsters, and they proved more than equal to its demands. Hoving’s very clear baton kept the work’s complexities firmly on track.

Keith Bruce

Pictured: Senja Rummukainen