Tag Archives: Francois Leleux

SCO / Leleux

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Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

As its freshly-printed new season brochure further demonstrates, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra is currently a pace-setter in concert programming, and this was another superb example.

Opening and closing with two first symphonies, one box fresh, the other from nearly 150 years ago but strangely overlooked, the ostensible link in the programme was that everything was written when the composers were in their teenage years. Dig a little deeper and you might also note the common influence of their fathers on these early works.

The concluding, older Symphony No 1 was by the 16-year-old Richard Strauss and although it doesn’t sound parodic of its influences, and especially the Beethovian Scherzo, the opening of the Finale could easily be heard as too obviously ‘in the mould’. A canon in the strings then seems to hark back to an earlier era before the suitably grand ‘classical’ last bars. Was the mind that subsequently created those complex tone-poems already dabbling in irony? It is hard to say.

Either way, the work was new ground for the SCO players and well worth the hearing, as was, beyond any argument, the startling new Symphony No 1 that opened the concert. Georgian wunderkind Tsotne Zedginidze is from a family of musicians and also just 16 now, and he was 15 when he wrote the piece, co-commissioned by the SCO. It had its first performance in Salzburg at the end of January, which Francois Leleux also conducted.

There is no insincerity in Zedginidze’s symphony, dedicated to his late mother and ending in a few bars of aching loss. What happens in the half hour before that it quite remarkable, however, from the opening music in the violas, which sets out a clear debt to Second Viennese School serialism.

The precocious composer has taken that early 20th century starting point and then ploughed his own furrow with music that changes direction dizzyingly often, but never in a disorientating way. In fact the work becomes more insistently charming as it develops, with fascinating voicings in the winds, some Romantic strings and a solo for the principal bass before its poignant conclusion. Leleux and the SCO communicated the symphony’s complexities with style as well as fierce concentration. To say that Zedginidze is a talent to listen out for is to damn him with faint praise.

The meat in the symphony sandwich was just as carefully selected, the Strauss preceded by his Serenade for 13 winds, from 1881 when the composer was still 17, and the best known music in the programme.

The first half had ended with a showcase for one of those splendid SCO wind players, Cerys Ambrose-Evans, the first bassoon stepping out in front of her colleagues to play the only extant Bassoon Concerto by Mozart, composed for the Salzburg court when he was an ancient 18. The combination of the animated conducting of Leleux and the soloist’s lively approach to her instrument made the performance a delight. We already know she has the lightest and richest tone, and her articulacy and breath control on the cadenzas was a wonder.

Keith Bruce

SCO / Leleux

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City Halls, Glasgow

A familiar presence at Scotland’s orchestral concerts into his 90s, Hedley Wright, who died last year, was also one of Scottish music’s great philanthropists, both in cash and in gifts for performers and promoters of the Springbank whisky produced in Campbeltown by the family firm.

Last week’s Scottish Chamber Orchestra concerts were dedicated to his memory and, as he sponsored the orchestra’s first oboe chair for many years, appropriately featured that instrument. French oboist Francois Leleux was conductor and soloist but it was the holder of that chair, Robin Williams, who had the first solo word in Mozart’s Symphony No 25, the G Minor work he wrote on his return to Salzburg from Vienna in 1773.

If, as has been suggested, the piece documents the teenage composer’s first heartbreak, Leleux certainly made the case for the symphony as an early Romantic work, but without sacrificing any of the SCO’s Classical precision.

Leleux’s own arrangements of arias from Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute opened the second half of the concert, a delightful bit of bold appropriation of the music for his own instrument. The two Papageno songs in particular were treated in a theme-and-variations fashion, becoming show-off party-pieces for oboe – part juke box, part musical box.

The other soloist in the programme was soprano Carolyn Sampson, in absolutely unmatchable form on the Berlioz cantata Heminie. As theatrical as everything the French composer wrote, it provided the musical theme for his masterwork, the Symphonie Fantastique, but is fascinating in its own right. Setting text by poet and playwright Pierre-Ange Vieillard it is the monologue of the titular Muslin princess, in love with Christian crusader Tancredi, the enemy of her people – Romantic story-telling that ranges from dramatic exclamation to anguished prayer. Sampson’s delivery of the composer’s response to the words was masterly, at ease with abrupt changes in tempo and bold leaps across her range. The cantata has an exquisite musical arc too, and the linking of its discrete sections by Leleux and Sampson became persuasively more fluid as the work progressed.

That sense of narrative continuity was also present in Leleux’s account of Ravel’s Ma mere l’oye (Mother Goose) which brought the concert to an end. Ravel’s response to the fairytales of Charles Perrault and Madame d’Aulnoy may be individually readable, with details like the clarinet as Beauty and contrabassoon as The Beast, but it is the use of the full range of instrumentation, including percussion details, harp and celeste, and solos from flute, piccolo and front desk strings, that make the orchestration of the whole work a compelling tale.

Leleux took a symphonic approach to the suite so that the full orchestral climax was a glorious finish to a very colourful, clever programme.

Keith Bruce

SCO / Leleux

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City Halls, Glasgow

At some point between my childhood and my teens the weirder offerings on television for young people stopped being from Eastern Europe and became programmes from Japan. Among those was Monkey, a sometimes impenetrable adaptation of a 16th century Chinese book, Journey to the West. French composer Laurent Petitgirard’s new concerto for his countryman Francois Leleux, entitled SOUEN WOU K’ONG, takes its inspiration from the same tale, with the oboe soloist cast as the Monkey King.

In the global journey that was the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s programme this week, however, our first, unscheduled, stop was in Eastern Europe with the addition of a work that may soon become very familiar. Mykola Lysenko’s Prayer for Ukraine dates from 1885 and first became popular during the country’s War of Independence after 1917. It has been part of the national liturgy ever since and has been sung often there, and across the globe, recently. The anthemic hymn prefaced the SCO’s concert after the orchestra’s Russian Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev had issued a statement making explicit his opposition to the war in Ukraine.

The orchestration, wherever the SCO sourced it, made use of the large ensemble required for the French music with which Leleux had intended to open the concert. Bizet’s L’Arlesienne Suite No 1 is the concert platform success of the music for a less celebrated play, and notable for being the first orchestral score to use one of those new-fangled saxophone things in 1872, played here by young Scottish virtuoso Lewis Banks.

Before we reached his eloquent solo, the performance had already been memorable for the driving, staccato strings of the opening bars in the conductor’s interpretation. This may be a piece that asks for a substantial orchestra, but it was as notable for the delicacy of much of the playing, and the drama in the contrast between the two.

Petitgirard’s new concerto calls for smaller forces in the brass and horns, but there was no diminishing the fullness of the sound, or the dramatic content of the work. With contrabassoon and bass clarinet at one end of the spectrum and delicate finger cymbals among the vast array of percussion deployed at the other, Leleux put in a big double-shift directing the musicians and as soloist. His oboe was most often in dialogue with the strings in a fascinating and vibrant narrative, and he was the Pied Piper drawing us all through the story to the plateau of contentment it reaches at the end.

After all that, it would have been asking a lot to expect the conductor to produce an exceptional account of Beethoven’s Second Symphony, and his historically-informed performance approach to the first two movements did struggle to follow such full-fat fare. With the Scherzo, however, there was a return of his fascinatingly idiosyncratic approach to some familiar phrasing, setting the tone for a finale that sounded more like a trial run for the conclusion of the Fifth than is usually revealed.

It was a powerful conclusion to an excellent programme that deserved a larger audience.

Keith Bruce