Tag Archives: Kristiina Poska

RSNO / Poska

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Estonian conductor Kristiina Poska, once a regular visitor with the SCO and now a guest conductor with the RSNO, has a distinctive style as well as immaculate tailoring on the podium. She uses a baton in her left hand but just as often her rigorous time-keeping is indicated with her right: Poska may be ambidextrous, but she is never ambiguous.

The RSNO gave her an interesting challenge in the middle of her latest programme – the world premiere of Elena Langer’s The Lives of Birds, the latest of a sequence of works the orchestra has championed by the Russian-born British composer.

The concert began, however, on more familiar turf for the conductor with Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten by her compatriot Arvo Part. It is an emblematic work from the Estonian composer, instrumental but rooted in early choral music and the sound of bells.

A single tolling bell signals the dense writing of the canon for strings, and – in partnership with RSNO leader Maya Iwabuchi – Poska had the RSNO players produce an intensity of sound from the first bars that was perfect for the piece. A work of elegant simplicity, it packed a punch in this performance.

Fortunately perhaps, a brief explanation of her new work from Elena Langer separated the Part from her new piece. Like Jonathan Dove, Langer brings a fondness for the comedic to her composition, and The Lives of Birds, which imparts human characteristics to her avian subjects, is no exception.

These birds are stalked by their vision of the Grim Reaper, a white cat, and their brief existence is concerned with territorial mastery and preening in the mirror, as well, of course, as singing.

The soloist was soprano Anna Dennis, like librettist Glyn Maxwell a regular associate of the composer, and a singer whose ability to master a difficult modern score and perform its huge demands of pitch and range with something approaching effortless ease is very well known.

Dennis sang to her usual high standard, her enunciation of Maxwell’s excellent text conversationally precise, and her imparting of distinct personalities to Ashleaf, Moss and Robin Red the best the work could want.

The music itself is far from light, and as well as the work of the singer, the ingredients for the orchestra are sumptuous, filled with bird calls in the percussion as well as the winds, depictions of the landscape and the ticking of that threatening clock measuring the cycle of life.

If the narrative of those works was never obscure, that of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony has been worried over since its composition. Not by Poska and the RSNO in this performance however – what they gave us was a celebration of the score as superbly orchestrated music.

The Fourth is full of brilliantly simple ideas given the fullest possible expression, from the “fateful” minor-key fanfare with which it begins, through the lovely melodious Andantino slow movement to the demanding pizzicato Scherzo and the gloriously expressive finale.

Poska shaped that musical story superbly, and the players added the details of solo exuberance and ensemble cohesion to what was a thrilling performance.

Keith Bruce

Rehearsal picture by Clara Cowen

RSNO / Poska

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

As well as soloist Rachel Barton Pine and guest conductor Kristiina Poska (already well known across Scotland through her work with the SCO), the other star of this programme was the first clarinet – not the RSNO’s principal player Timothy Orpen on this occasion, but Yann Ghiro, on loan from the BBC SSO.

The sotto voce opening of Copland’s Appalachian Spring, played with great sensitivity by Ghiro, was just the first of a series of solos across the evening, and it set the tone for what was a superb performance of the work in which its quietest moments were the most exquisite. Too often performed in an expansive, Hollywood soundtrack style, this ballet suite is much subtler than that and Poska was meticulous in her approach, as if applying rigorous early music practice to this mid-20th century masterpiece.

Her strict-time left hand baton is a distinctive tool in her armoury, and that precision was reflected in the response of the orchestra, with principal trombone Davur Juul Magnussen’s entry later in the work also beautifully measured.

By contrast, Florence Price’s Violin Concerto No2 is often clearly redolent of the Golden Age of Hollywood and film scores at their most appealing and decorative – and quite “old school” for the era of its composition (early 1950s). Under a quartet of an hour long, it is not a big work, and much of the interest in it is due to the difficult tale of how it has come down to us now. Barton Pine’s championing of the work has included partnership with the RSNO on a new recording, and she ceded the limelight in much of this performance, while quietly dispatching the most virtuosic elements. At points it was the brass underscore that proved the most compelling ingredient, and Ghiro popped up again to contribute tellingly to the closing bars.

Arguably more memorable of the soloist’s contribution to the evening was her encore – inspired by her participation in a traditional music session after the previous night’s Edinburgh concert – of Mark O’Connor’s Caprice No 1, a glorious mash-up of Bach and Appalachian fiddle.

The RSNO’s guest first clarinet was in the spotlight once more for the improvisatory beginning of the First Symphony of Sibelius, a brooding solo that is actually statement of a theme that recurs throughout the work. This was more or less home turf for the Estonian conductor, and her precision was again crucial. The front desks had their feature moments but it was the rhythmic pulse of the low strings that was most impressive.

There is something cinematic about the symphony’s slow second movement, but from the swing of the Scherzo through the rich orchestration of the Finale to the distinctive ending, it becomes a crash course in the unique compositional language that Sibelius enthusiasts love in his later works.

The RSNO, of course, has a distinguished history in the performance of Sibelius, from nearly a century ago and through the era of conductor Sir Alexander Gibson. In Kristiina Poska the orchestra has found another fine partner for his music.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Rachel Barton Pine at Usher Hall, Edinburgh by Leighanne Evelyn