Tag Archives: Karina Canellakis

EIF: BBC SSO | RSNO

Posted on by

Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Mendelssohn’s Elijah was an odd choice to end the 2025 Edinburgh International Festival and the 60th birthday season of the Festival Chorus. As a programme note online by Professor Eric Levi pithily explained, it is a work that has been as much lambasted as acclaimed, for musical as well as political reasons, since its Birmingham premiere in the mid-19th century, although the Victorians – and the Queen and her husband in particular – generally liked it.

And although performances are not that common in our time, it had been given a memorable one in the Usher Hall just over a year previously when it closed the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s 50th anniversary celebrations.

This one was on a larger scale, both vocally and instrumentally, but that meant that there were larger forces to manage, and the benefit was dubious, especially as it has been this choir’s skill in singing quietly with intensity that has impressed this year.

There is a lot of choral content in the structure of the work, but it is in two different voices (narrative and of “The People”), which is only one of the difficulties in story-line which follows the prophet’s life-story chronologically (Baal in Part 1, Jezebel after the interval) but uses texts from across the Old Testament and some of Matthew’s Gospel as well.

The soloists were the stars, Christopher Maltman magnificent in the title role, mezzo Karen Cargill adding a more dramatic performance than soprano Mari Eriksmoen and tenor Ben Bliss in powerful voice as Obadiah. Martha Johnson delivered The Youth authoritatively but the four Rising Stars singers took a moment to settle into an ensemble for their first quartet.

While there were some fine solo voices in the orchestra too, and the brass and horns were on dependable form, this wasn’t a classic performance from the RSNO, great at the choral climax of the work but with a few dips in coherence along the way.

The Festival Chorus had a much finer showcase three days previously with the rather briefer Chichester Psalms by Leonard Bernstein, and the team with whom they had closed the 2023 Festival, conductor Karina Canellakis and the BBC SSO.

That they had to sing in Hebrew rather the English mattered little, the choir dealing with the music’s challenging rhythms with aplomb. Countertenor soloist Hugh Cutting, with his part memorised, was just as commanding as Maltman would be, and first cello Rudi De Groote took his solo as beautifully as RSNO principal Pei-Jee Ng did in the Mendelssohn.

Sadly, the EIF’s Rising Stars were disadvantaged here too, the (different) SATB quartet located next the orchestral percussion between choir and instrumentalists and initially barely audible.

With the choral feature bracketed by Messiaen and Stravinsky, the concert was also a great opportunity for the SSO.  In Les Offrandes oubliees we heard string playing just as quiet and demanding of attention as the smaller numbers of Poland’s NFM Leopoldinum had demonstrated ten days earlier, and Petrushka was a delight from start to finish. Canellakis was absolutely on it for the frantic moments of the score, but equally happy to give soloists enough leeway to make the theatrical musical jokes as rewarding as really good players can tell them.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Jess Shurte

BBC SSO / Canellakis

Posted on by

Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Conductor Karina Canellakis has some big opera projects on both sides of the Atlantic in the coming season, with Janacek’s Makropoulos Case, The Damnation of Faust by Berlioz and Wagner’s Siegfried in the Netherlands where she is based, and Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss at Santa Fe Opera. She may have begun musical life as a violinist, but her conducting career shows an affinity with singers.

That was very evident at the Closing Concert of this year’s Edinburgh Festival, when she was clearly enjoying the performance of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus in the work that brought this year’s classical music programme to a close, Rachmaninov’s The Bells.

It was also the work that concluded the tenure of Aidan Oliver as Chorus Director, as he moves to Glyndebourne and is succeeded by James Grossmith. The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland conducting graduate inherits a choir on very fine form indeed, wonderfully crisp in their opening utterances in the work’s “Sleigh Bells” start and then in lock-step with the orchestra for the climactic third movement.

The soloists – tenor David Butt Philip and then soprano Olga Kulchynska – have relatively smaller roles until the funereal finale when the chorus partners the baritone, Alexander Vinogradov.

If the symphonic arc of The Bells covers nothing less than human existence from cradle to grave, the two works of the first half were more basic in their concerns. The strings of the BBC Scottish gave Canellakis their best work as she shaped the distinctive sound of Wagner’s Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde. This trailer for his opera features the famous Tristan chord, but after hanging in the air for much of the piece, it reached a glorious climax at the end.

For the work in between, Scriabin’s Le Poeme de L’Extase, extra horns and trumpets, harps, celesta, organ and even, handily, bells were added. The composer sometimes referred to this 17-minute tone poem as a symphony, but it really has more in common with the Wagner or modernist works to come in the 20th century.

For all Scriabin’s mystical leanings, the wave upon wave of instrumental climaxes and cascading orchestration in the music seemed to suggest activity rather more physical than cerebral. Canellakis and the SSO paced the work beautifully to its orgasmic last bars.

Keith Bruce