Tag Archives: Gemma New

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

BBC SSO / New

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City Halls, Glasgow

On the eve of International Women’s Day, here was a celebration of female artists, as well as a showcase for New Zealand (home of conductor and soloist) and of youth – the soloist and programme’s living composer both being in their 20s.

For those who could not be there in person, the concert was filmed for future screening on BBC4 as well as being broadcast live on Radio 3. That meant attention was paid to the lighting, with a back projection that vaguely suggested art nouveau roses, all of which mostly added to the occasion rather than being in any way distracting.

The opening orchestral collage by American composer Sarah Gibson, warp & weft, matched that floral image well. It is a celebration of domestic creativity, inspired by the artist Mirian Schapiro and full of original colours in the way it combines the instruments. With orchestral pianist Lynda Cochrane playing a treated Steinway, her hands inside the instrument as well as flying around the keyboard, principal percussionist Dave Lyons was also kept very busy. The opening tuneful flute line, underscored by the bass winds, was followed by equally prominent roles for clarinet and oboe, and the SSO strings needed to come up with a big rich sound to match all this activity – which they did.

That set the pattern for the rest of the evening, with conductor Gemma New encouraging some big screen welly from the strings for the vistas of Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto. It might be best to draw a veil over the initial shortcomings of the concert lighting on soloist Geneva Lewis, because that’s what it did to her face. Lewis is a tall young woman, and clearly that had been missed in the lighting design, although she was bathed in a lovely rosy glow. The 26-year-old is not a demonstrative player, but showed herself assertive enough as the piece unfolded, through the slow movement dialogues with the wind principals and especially in her crisp performance of the very fast finale.

New and Lewis observed distinct and deliberate pauses between the movements of the concerto and the conductor continued that practice after the interval in Brahms’ Symphony No 4. This was big-boned Brahms, but not missing any dynamic subtlety, and distinguished by the warmth of the SSO’s string sound in the City Hall when it is on its best form. Utterly different from the way the Scottish Chamber Orchestra played the same work in the same hall under Robin Ticciati, it was a magnificent success on its own terms.

New is a marvellously lucid conductor, fond of big gestures and quite balletic on the podium, but the most memorable moments of this interpretation were when she was almost still: in the questioning opening of the slow second movement and for the initial statement of the chords that will be the basis of the variations in the finale. Every work in this concert had a dramatic finish, but the tension created within the last movement of the Brahms reached a particularly cathartic climax in its coda.

Keith Bruce

RSNO / New

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Whatever the full house in Edinburgh’s big hall came for on Friday evening, they surely got it in spades. It may have ended at a very respectable half past nine in the evening, but the music began at 6pm, with the RSNO providing a showcase for young musicians from St Mary’s Music School as it marks its 50th birthday.

The pre-concert concert stole a march on the symphony orchestra by having an opening just as sonically bold as the Ligeti we would hear an hour-and-a-half later, as sixth former Carlo Massimo let loose the might of the Usher Hall organ on Olivier Messiaen.

That was a precursor to a varied bill of chamber music that included a senior string quartet playing a movement of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, but shone in the duos. Those nearing the end of their studies at the school gave us Rautavarra (violinist Anias Kroeger and pianist Alexander Kwon) and Sorensen (fiddler Hester Parkin and Kirsty Grant on accordion), but the star turn was a Tchaikovsky Nocturne by first year cellist Paul Oggier and his attentive S3 piano partner Michelle Huang.

The RSNO’s opening salvo was the Prelude and Intermezzo from Gyorgy Ligeti’s Le Grande Macabre, a rather grand title for the madcap fun of three members of the percussion section employing hands and feet to parp a dozen old-school bulb horns for a fanfare that, apparently, parodies Monteverdi.

It was a skilled, if bonkers, start, and the best joke was that it preceded Gershwin’s An American in Paris which famously features the same “instrument” to soundtrack the bustling traffic of the city.

There are fewer car horns required for that work, but they are as crucial as the trumpets, trombones and tuba in the overall sound of the work. This was an evening in which the brass section shone throughout the programme, first trumpet Chris Hart the most obvious soloist, but tuba player John Whitener, and trombonist Davur Juul Magnussen, doubling on euphonium, not far behind.

Making her debut as conductor, New Zealander Gemma New, whose grandmother was once an RSNO violinist, was the other crucial ingredient in the vibrancy of the music. A musician who clearly delights in the power and majesty of the symphony orchestra – and especially one garnished with extra instruments like saxophones – she drew superb work from everyone on stage.

Also making her RSNO debut was the night’s soloist, saxophonist Jess Gillam, and a dynamic duo the two certainly were on Gillam’s pair of pieces. Those came from the 1930s, in an exclusively 20thcentury programme: Glazunov’s Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Strings and Milhaud’s Scaramouche, which has given Gillam the theme music for her award-winning Radio 3 show, This Classical Life.

The sax may have been in its early years as a soloist in classical music, but both are splendid virtuoso pieces, the Milhaud arguably having the edge in its application of the possibilities of the instrument.

Colourful though Gillam and her music were, there was even more to come in this busy night. Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition is a popular work in any of its incarnations and the RSNO enhanced the Ravel orchestration with actual picture-making by artist James Mayhew.

If there was a suspicion that all this might become a bit much, all credit goes to conductor, musicians and to Mayhew, who made the whole thing work so well. The work was as varied, big and bold as it can be, and the artistic skill with which it was illustrated, in time with the score, was quite remarkable.

Using the titles from Viktor Hartmann’s works that the composer deployed in tribute to his friend, Mayhew created ten swift, literal, images of as much vibrancy and colour as the music. It was a multi-media triumph every bit as old-school as those car horns.

Keith Bruce