Tag Archives: Lawrence Power

SCO / Power

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City Halls, Glasgow

With the caveat that it had not occurred to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s management team (and that I have never been especially good at sums), I calculate that the SCO’s charismatic and popular Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev will become the longest serving in the orchestra’s history when he reaches the end of his latest contract extension – to 2031 “at least”.

That was the headline announcement in Chief Executive Gavin Reid’s unveiling of the orchestra’s new season before Friday’s concert – a season that will include the first four Beethoven symphonies and the composer’s Violin Concerto as the SCO’s contribution to the joint Beethoven 200 celebrations with the RSNO, BBC SSO and Scottish Opera.

Those future plans were tinged with sadness, however, as the funeral had taken place earlier in the day of Brian Schiele, a member of the viola section for more than 30 years who had resumed playing after major surgery only for his cancer to return. This season’s closing concerts next month, conducted by Emelyanychev, will be dedicated to his memory.

As it happened, this programme appropriately featured his instrument, in the hands of soloist Lawrence Power and in three of the compositions in the programme he directed. Its linking of Baroque music with more contemporary works was very much in Emelyanychev’s line, and Power’s selections made for just as interesting a listening lesson.

French Baroque pieces opened each half, Couperin’s Les barricades mysterieuses in a haunting quintet arrangement (bass clarinet, clarinet, viola, cello and bass) by Thomas Ades, and Rameau’s much more familiar Les Sauvages – which also started life on the harpsichord – performed in a style a little like that of Jordi Savall,  if more “salon”.

Power followed the Couperin with part of the Suite for Viola and Small Orchestra by Vaughan Williams which references Bach and also prefigured the Rameau in its rusticity. As well as some virtuoso stuff for the viola, it has a crucial role for harp in the Moto Perpetuo, which closed Power’s selection and traveled a long way from its Baroque inspiration.

Michael Tippett’s Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli was an especially fascinating inclusion, originally commissioned by the Edinburgh International Festival and part of a programme assembled by director Ian Hunter for the summer of 1953 that was little short of astonishing. Back then, the orchestra of Italian radio had played the original Corelli from which Tippett took his ingredients for a piece performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Here it required very specific deployment of the strings on the platform, which had very audible sonic significance, and solo roles for orchestra leader Stephanie Gonley and first cello Philip Higham as well as Power.

That 1953 EIF programme also included a new Viola Concerto for Scottish violist William Primrose by Paul Racine Fricker, and this programme concluded with the Scottish premiere of Magnus Lindberg’s new Viola Concerto, dedicated to Power. If it was difficult to hear Baroque antecedents there were certainly echoes of later classical composers in a very approachable piece.

As in the Tippett, there was a lot for the orchestral violas to do as well as the soloist, who has a real showpiece cadenza towards the end of a work that follows conventional structure but with real wit, and lovely symphonic swell and coda to finish.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Lawrence Power by Giorgia Bertazzi

BBC SSO / Glassberg

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City Halls, Glasgow

The fingerprints of the BBC SSO’s chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth were all over this Thursday matinee programme, but the man himself was not there, having called off unwell.

That was very sad for him, not least because a concert in which only the concluding work, Ravel’s La Valse, was at all well known, attracted a good-sized audience for what was a very thoughtful programme, with no fewer than three featured soloists, in which everything spoke eloquently to everything else.

Conductor Ben Glassberg, who stepped up to the podium at a week’s notice, can take a great deal of the credit for that success. He has built his growing reputation in the opera houses of Europe – most recently with Deborah Warner’s staging of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw in Rome – and will be back in the City Halls in March to conduct the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in a concert featuring saxophonist Jess Gillam.

Glassberg’s energetic marshalling of the huge forces required for some of the music was as impressive as his precision direction of the musical haikus of the last completed work by Oliver Knussen, O hototogisu!, for just two dozen musicians.

It paired soprano Claire Booth with the SSO’s principal flute Matthew Higham. Beginning and ending his evocation of the bird of the title (a Japanese cuckoo with an altogether more extensive vocabulary than the European one) by making his notes resonate beneath the lid of a concert grand, Higham’s duet with Booth was a conversational delight. This sort of thing may be meat and drink to her, but there are precious few sopranos who could tackle Knussen’s demands with such relaxed confidence.

The piece closed a first half which had begun with Knussen’s friend, Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, looking to Europe, and specifically Debussy, in his 1967 piece, Green. Ear-grabbing from the start with bold opening statements from the winds, brass and percussion in turn, Glassberg set out his stall in the opening bars and maintained his tight grip on the dynamics of the music throughout.

Maurice Ravel’s three-song cycle Scheherazade followed, setting texts by his contemporary Tristan Klingsor (aka Leon Leclere) that were inspired by Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral suite. That lineage reflected the structure of this concert programme in some ways, but there was also an audible kinship with the Knussen that followed, which also directly referenced the work of Takemitsu.

Booth was on imperious form in the Ravel, which is not often enough heard, moving from an opening role where she was almost part of the wind section (her carefully calibrated singing matched by the measured playing of first horn Chris Gough) to a terrific climax in the long first song when the executioner wields the “great curved sabre of the Orient”.

In an orchestra with many impressive guests in key front-desk positions (viola, trumpet and percussion among them) guest leader David Guerchovitch and first flute Eilidh Gillespie made telling contributions, while the hugely affecting closing song was all Booth, her French diction immaculate.

In what was luxury casting, the first work in the second half featured viola virtuoso Lawrence Power playing a work he has championed, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s On Opened Ground. With a big orchestra onstage once more, and further sonically-fascinating tuned percussion, this was another side of the composer from his operatic triumphs, although it was easy to hear Power as a characterful protagonist and the other instrumentalists as the chorus in the opening exchanges. The soloist produced a huge sound from his instrument, but the colourful orchestration was often just as arresting in the opening movement, Cadenza and Scherzino.

The second part, Interrupted Song and Chaconne, was more contemplative with Glassberg embodying the liquid rhythm to which it returns after an intense gun-shot climax.

That structure in some ways mimicked the closing Ravel. If La valse was originally intended as a tribute to Johann Strauss II, whose bicentenary has lately been marked, it travelled a long way to its very French finished form. With superb playing from the SSO strings, Glassberg shaped the work perfectly, from the basses’ opening pulse to the sparkling complex finish.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Claire Booth

SCO / Storgårds

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City Halls, Glasgow

Finding a truly unique voice among living composers is not a guaranteed occurrence, but that’s what SCO audiences were treated to last week in the UK premiere performances of a new Viola Concerto by the Canadian-born, UK-based Cassandra Miller. 

It was unique enough, in that concertos for this instrument are – and have been throughout its occasionally maligned history – a testing challenge. But what of the fascinating novelty of the music itself, a language and style governed by adventurous free-thinking and explorative self-confidence, that was so completely original and absorbing. 

“I cannot love without trembling” – a title borrowed from the writings of the early 20th century French philosopher Simone Weil – was written for, and performed by, the exceptional Lawrence Power, whose musical persona was as much the impulse as the vehicle of its success. He lives up to his name, but more than that, Power extracts a purity of tone from his instrument – no doubt a very good one – across the full range of its possibilities, possibly even beyond.

Take the fingered harmonics that lend the opening its ethereal intensity, piercing through a gathering underscore; or the gauche succulence of exaggerated vibrato and trembling oscillations that, in sultry interaction with the orchestra, spiral up to the highest reaches of the fingerboard. Throughout the work’s five sections, which blossom with expressive intensity despite Miller’s deliberate compositional containment, Power’s free-flowing virtuosity was spellbinding.

The concerto, Miller tells us, is “about the basic human need to lament”, its flickering ornamental language drawn from improvised moiroloi compositions by the early 20th century Greek folk violinist Alexis Zoumbas. Both the resulting work and its performance under conductor John Storgårds fully captured a spirit of gnawing ecstasy.

The other fascination in this programme was, itself, a well-worn work, Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. The obvious question is, why was a chamber orchestra tackling such hefty symphonic repertoire? The answer is, they weren’t, at least not in the form we know it. 

Instead, Storgårds introduced us to a reduced chamber orchestra version by conductor/arranger George Morton which may have played havoc with listener expectations – the single wind all-too-often smacked of a lo-fat alternative, not their fault, and the inevitable thinning of textures led to uncomfortable imbalances – but much of which drew focus to aspects of Tchaikovsky often overlooked. The performance, itself, was admirably lithe and perceptive.

More satisfying all round was the opening work, Sibelius’ Suite No 2 extracted from his incidental music to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Here was a sequence of scene-setters and character sketches richly portrayed by a composer prepared to enrich a theatrically-prescribed musical response with his own enigmatic, sharp-edged personality. Storgårds’ casual authority ensured an illuminative performance. 

Ken Walton