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EIF 2024 Opening Concerts

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Taken at face value, the strap-line Nicola Benedetti has given to her second year’s programme – Rituals That Unite Us – would seem to suggest a familiarity to her offerings quite contrary to the aspirations of an exciting and inspiring International Festival.

Fortunately, there will be few among those who filled the Usher Hall on its opening weekend who knew much of  what they listened to, at least in the form we heard it.

Although the historically-informed performance movement has ensured that we can now enjoy Bach’s St Matthew Passion in something close to the version heard in Leipzig in Easter 1727, it may not have come down to us at all without the input of Felix Mendelssohn a century later. In revisiting Mendelssohn’s arrangement, performed by the BBC SSO under Ryan Wigglesworth, Edinburgh Festival Chorus and the RSNO Youth Chorus and a star cast of soloists, the Festival uncovered a fascinating work.

A victim of nothing more than changing fashions, Mendelssohn’s version achieves an enormous amount on its own terms. The balance between his more substantial orchestration – including four flutes, alongside the clarinets which were yet to be invented in Bach’s day – and the large choral forces, makes a great deal of musical sense. The soloists mostly dealt well with that, only mezzo Sarah Connolly occasionally sounding a little under-powered.

The later composer scores much for a smaller chamber orchestra within the ranks in any case, while the continuo for the recitatives benefits hugely from the involvement of a handful of string players. Even the forte-piano, which sounded plain weird at the start, became an acceptable part of the mix as the work went on. And it doesn’t go on quite as much, the fewer chorales working more like punctuating interludes, and the unfolding narrative altogether more integrated.

Ed Lyon and Neal Davies were a nicely contrasting pair as Evangelist and Jesus, and tenor Laurence Kilsby took his Part 1 aria especially well, with the accompaniment of oboe and a string quintet before the choir and fuller orchestration giving it a special character. Soprano Elizabeth Watts, on top form throughout, also benefitted from the Mendelssohn arrangements, although some did seem a little too “chocolate box”.

Osvaldo Golijov’s La Pasión según San Marcos was a commission for the celebrations of the 250th anniversary of J S Bach’s death at the Millennium, and the choir which debuted and has championed it, Schola Cantorum de Venezuela, were joined by soloists also closely associated with the work. Significantly, the bulk of the vocal forces was supplied by the National Youth Choir of Scotland, beyond much debate the only “local” chorus capable of performing it with such style.

All under the authoritative baton of Joana Carneiro, the instrumentalists were strings and brass from the RSNO, guest-led by Ania Safanova with the crucial addition of jazz trumpeter Ryan Quigley, alongside Latin American percussion, guitar, piano, accordion and bass, with two male dancers also part of the eclectic mix, culminating in an explicit representation of the crucifixion.

The movement that is integral to the score extends to the choir, and NYCoS dealt with those demands as effortlessly as the visiting choristers, “off the book” for the most mobile sections.

Goilijov’s sound-world is dizzyingly expansive, but everyone onstage took its twists and turns in their stride. The ritual of this Pasión constantly challenges expectations, the darkest moments of the story often set to the most rhythmic music, and the most lyrical writing – often for female singers Luciana Souza and Sophia Burgos – sitting alongside more abstract, extended vocal sonic techniques. The composer’s musical references are just as wide, taking in Handel (Messiah’s Behold and See, from Lamentations) as well as Bach and concluding with Kaddish from his own Jewish faith.

Cantorum de Venezuela shares their diverse repetoire from sacred hymns to Latin American pop culture at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh.

On Monday there was an opportunity to hear Schola Cantorum de Venezuela in their own right, at the Queen’s Hall under the direction of Maria Guinand and Luimar Arismendi. In assembling the programme, Guinand may well have defined that “Rituals” festival strap-line better than anyone, following a contemporary Christian music first half with an even more startling sequence after the interval, mostly of Latin American music but with Canadian R Murray Schafer’s Magic Songs – five of his slyly political “Chants” – at its heart.

Part of Venezuela’s globally-influential El Sistema music education initiative, Schola Cantorum sound and perform in a style all their own. James MacMillan’s slightly over-familiar O Radiant Dawn was one of their more easy-listening offerings, but it had an original visceral edge, while the two approaches to The Lamentations of Jeremiah that bracketed it – by Ginastera and Grau – showed the range of abilities among the 17 singers: stratospheric sopranos and sonorous basses, then slides, yelps and claps.

The lighter fare of the second half, also interspersed with trickier stuff, was often very funny indeed – but once again there can have been vanishingly few among the EIF’s faithful morning recital audience who had heard a single note of it before.

Keith Bruce

Pictures by Andrew Perry

SCO / Carneiro

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Portuguese conductor Joana Carneiro has become a familiar and popular figure on Scotland’s stages, and her relaxed and communicative style was an essential ingredient of the success of this well-attended concert. It is likely, however, that many in the audience were attracted by the accessible programme of music by Mozart, Chopin and Beethoven and the presence of piano soloist Benjamin Grosvenor, just a day after the RSNO had announced a season that includes the box office certainty of a gig featuring him with Nicola Benedetti and Sheku Kanneh-Mason.

He was playing Chopin’s Piano Concerto No 2 (actually Chopin’s first), of which he made a chart-topping recording with the RSNO and Elim Chan, and I’d wager that Carneiro shares Chan’s opinion that the view that the young Chopin was no orchestrator is exaggerated. In a performance that found Beethovian echoes in the opening of the first movement before Grosvenor had played a note, she was very aware that the work is all about the soloist, but made sure that the rest of the players had a share of the action. There may be long stretches, particularly in the Larghetto slow movement, when many of them are less productively employed, but the vivacity of the dance music in the finale was as much down to them as the piano.

Grosvenor’s playing was exemplary. The correct balance between rigour and passion seems to come naturally to him for this music, and it is not overstating the case to place him as the foremost interpreter of both Chopin concertos of our times.

On either side we heard composers who informed the Chopin’s style, with Mozart’s Symphony No 32 (really more of an overture, as Carneiro said) and Beethoven’s Sixth, the Pastoral.

With four horns and nearly 30 string players, the Mozart was a big opening statement, shaped by the conductor to wake up the ears. The clarity of her beat and signals of emphasis and dynamics are delightfully readable from an audience point of view, so she is a great asset in selling the music to those with less experience of orchestral concerts, as was perhaps the case here.

Not that the Pastoral needs much help. As probably the most popular of Beethoven’s symphonies, it resists attempts to intellectualise it, and what was clear here was how much it shares with the contemporaneous Fifth in the composer’s endlessly inventive re-working of his basic material – the difference being that Sixth’s is easier to like, prettier and more like Mozart.

Carneiro found a revelatory approach to the Andante second movement “Scene by the brook” with a balance that favoured the undercurrent of the low strings, the violins rippling more quietly on top, and the round-toned bassoon of Cerys Ambrose-Evans a crucial ingredient later. The rural partying that followed was full of fun, ended by a muscular, but not overpowering, storm.

Keith Bruce

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BBC SSO / Carneiro

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City Halls, Glasgow

Stravinsky’s Petrushka seemed the inevitable endpoint to a BBC SSO afternoon concert that had explored, en route, the defiant energy of Anna Clyne’s pulverising «rewind« and the iridescent intensity of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Piano Concerto.

It was a journey that sizzled under the charismatic, needle-sharp direction of Portuguese conductor Joana Carneiro. From her initial ebullient stage entrance, and a first downbeat fearsome enough to set the audience, never mind the players, on the edge of their seats, she had us completely under her spell.

Clyne’s opening work – a reworking of her original 2005 orchestra and tape version for Kitty McNamee’s Hysterica Dance Company – pulled no punches. Vigorous, uncompromisingly repetitive, and with glittering, intoxicating textures to offset the dry brutality of its punctuating chords, it was met with a blistering performance equal to its intent. The SSO was on red hot form.

They were joined by the South Korean pianist, Yeol Eum Son, for Salonen’s 2007 three-movement Concerto. Written originally for the Israeli-American pianist Yefim Bronfman, it is consequently robust, physically intense and fiercely virtuosic. Eum Son had no problems making it her own, matching its muscular demands with a gracefulness that was mostly effective in the numerous conversations the soloist engages in with single instruments.

Salonen, best known as a leading conductor, is no slouch when it comes to composition. Within a personal stye that is as soulful as it is viciously dissonant, he seamlessly ingests influences as varied as Bartok, Adams, Gershwin and Stravinsky in this work, which itself lends to an elusive circumspection – the constant flow of new ideas seemingly arising out of fresh air – that this performance highlighted.

Stravinsky’s Petrushka (1947 version) came as an inevitable resolution to these two foregoing works. And once again, Carneiro’s electric presence inspired a top-notch response. Incisive and impulsive from the outset, it was a performance heightened by kaleidoscopic sensitivities, rhythmic precision and an unrelenting sense of unanimity from an orchestra wholly reactive to this highly impressive conductor.

Ken Walton

BBC SSO/Carneiro

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City Halls, Glasgow

Popular Portuguese conductor Joana Carneiro, who directed this live broadcast season-opener by the BBC SSO – its first concert for a live audience in its home venue since March 12, 2020 – has no position with a UK orchestra. Might she take on this one, with its undeclared apparent vacancy in the top job with the continuing absence of chief conductor Thomas Dausgaard?

There is clearly a great rapport there already. Carneiro conducted a fine SSO concert of Sir James MacMillan’s music at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival and was in the pit for Scottish Opera’s production of Nixon in China, some of the players from which joined guests from the RSNO in this BBC Scottish line-up.

It was luxury casting indeed to have Carneiro joined by violinist Pekka Kuusisto for what was a clever celebration of the music of his native Finland to launch the orchestra’s return. Starting with a blast of Bach from a brass quartet, a very carefully-constructed programme featured the music of contemporary composer Magnus Lindberg and culminated in the last symphony of Sibelius. The brass was a continuing punctuating feature of the evening, whether in the choir stalls above the orchestra or offstage for Beethoven’s Leonora No.3, but it was leader Laura Samuel’s strings who were the sectional heroes of the day, from their combative then seductive dialogue with Kuusisto’s solo voice in Lingdberg’s First Violin Concerto through to the striking unison ensemble in the Symphony No. 7 of Jean Sibelius.

The Bach chorale that opened the concert began a sequence that ran through Lindberg’s arrangement of that material for full orchestra in his 2001 Chorale to his three-movement concerto, also scored for a very compact string section of 25 players. Early on they swamp the soloist just the same, until an accommodation is reached and Kuusisto was heard giving full expression to a fiery cadenza.

There are echoes of Sibelius in both the blossoming to resolution of Lindberg’s Chorale and the finale movement of the concerto, and the choice of the Beethoven to open the second half (after an actual interval, albeit with no bars open) also spoke of influences, even if the storm in the overture is perhaps more clearly heard in the Finnish composer’s final orchestral work, Tapiola.

Self-evident through all this cross-referencing cleverness was that this supremely versatile orchestra had a conductor of equal range on the podium. She may not be quite as animated as the SCO’s Maxim Emelyanychev, but Carneiro is a very physical conductor with a vast vocabulary of eloquent arm and hand gestures that leave her intentions in little doubt and her tempo and dynamic instructions absolutely clear. It would be a fine thing indeed if the SSO was to sign her up.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Joana Carneiro (BBC/Alan Peebles)