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.
It is customarily Pekka Kuusisto who springs the surprises on his annual visits to direct the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, but in Edinburgh on Tuesday – where his popularity with the audience assured not a seat was unsold – the crowd turned the tables.
Kuusisto’s programme also involved Dreamers’ Circus, a three-piece Nordic traditional music group who have been appearing at Glasgow’s Celtic Connections festival for over a decade but, surprisingly, were making their Edinburgh debut.
Pianist Nikolaj Busk introduced their second half opener as “a tune from Switzerland from 1532”. It turned out to be from the Geneva hymn book and known to Scots from its number in their old hymnary as The Auld Hundreth, All People That On Earth Do Dwell. The Queen’s Hall duly treated it as a Lutheran chorale and joined in, to the initial surprise, but gratification of the band.
Beethoven would have recognised the response as exactly what Bach would have expected from a church congregation, and that was fitting because the whole evening was built around Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.
The much-quoted summary of that work by Richard Wagner as “the apotheosis of the dance” is not especially useful to understanding it, and even putting that remark in the context of its entire sentence, as the programme did, doesn’t help a great deal. What Kuusisto did was to parse the symphony, preceding and interspersing its movements with music from the trio, much of it of their own composition, although traditional in style, and a fair amount of it orchestrated.
Those arrangements for the SCO to play were a million miles from Beethoven, and not only in details that meant the horn and brass players discarding their period instruments for modern ones. In style they were a little like the film scores of Bryce Dessner or Jonny Greenwood, and the most interesting of them, played before the interval and after the second movement of the Beethoven, transcended its song basis to become a fascinating contemporary passacaglia with a filigree piano figure.
When performing on their own, Dreamers’ Circus were always fascinating, Busk playing accordion as much as the Steinway, Rune Tonsgaard Sorenson the violin soloist of the night, and cittern-player Ale Carr, who played with Kuusisto and the SCO in a similar excursion on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons two years ago, doubling on fiddle himself. Small wonder the conductor felt able to concentrate on directing the orchestra, only picking up his own fiddle to join in the symphony’s boisterous stop-start rhythmic fourth movement.
And hugely exciting that last movement was, while the stop-start nature of this performance of Beethoven 7 never really impaired appreciation of the detail of Kuusisto’s individual reading of the score, full of colour with interesting pauses and tempo adjustments.
Even the separation of the end of the Scherzo from the Allegro con brio finale, which looked potentially problematic, worked, and the prefacing of the opening movement made a very different listen of its slow start before the symphony bursts into vigorous life. In this performance the slow march of the second movement was never likely to seem at all funereal.
As well as the featured soloists, plaudits should go to two of the guests in the orchestra ranks, Frenchman Yann Thenet at first oboe and American Nivanthi Karunaratne, whose playing of the demanding low line on natural horn made the third movement.
Keith Bruce
Concert repeated at GlasgowCity Halls tonight and Aberdeen Music Hall on Saturday.
Although the wide range of age in the audience and a DJ working in the foyer are not unusual at Scottish Chamber Orchestra Friday evening concerts, there was a fresh and unfamiliar feel to this one with saxophone star and broadcaster Jess Gillam the soloist.
The conductor on the podium was Ben Glassberg, last seen in the City Hall stepping in at short notice to deputise for Ryan Wigglesworth for a BBC SSO programme in the autumn that was very much of the chief conductor’s devising. The orchestra itself, although led by Stephanie Gonley, had just five principals in their places, and the many guests on the platform made sure that none of the regular faces were missed.
The programme began with a work of the SCO’s recent illustrious past. Sound and Fury was written for the orchestra early in the tenure of Anna Clyne as its Associate Composer and premiered with Pekka Kuusisto conducting. It is a wonderful piece that begins as a rethinking of early classical music – Haydn in particular – and contains some rich string writing, including a beguiling Eastern melody, and culminates in a taped reading of Macbeth’s last soliloquy in Shakespeare’s play.
That sounds an odd journey in print, but makes wonderful sonic sense as a musical score, and one clearly written for chamber orchestra forces.
The other two works without Gillam were for the 24 string players alone. George Walker’s Lyric for Strings has a genesis oddly adjacent to that of Samuel Barber’s better-known Adagio, as the two were students together. Walker’s work is also elegiac but more varied within a tighter time-span. It made a lovely interlude in the concert’s first half.
The second half began with Caroline Shaw’s Entr’acte, which also nods to Haydn (and Beethoven) and has become a very popular modern piece in its string ensemble version. With a lovely harmonics solo from Gonley and a guitar-like one from guest principal cello Caroline Dale, its pizzicato passages, ranging from robust to very quiet, present a particular ensemble challenge for this number of musicians – one to which Glassberg and this group rose with ease.
Entr’acte is a work in the repertoire of the Scottish Ensemble, and the central piece of Gillam’s trio of works was written for them in the mid-1990s when Dave Heath was a very busy composer-in-residence. The Celtic has since had a second life in a version for soprano sax rather than violin soloist, which suits the music very well, which is a sort of three-movement love-letter to Scotland.
The opening one, Ceilidh, clearly owes a debt to the most pictorial music of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, while the slow Lament for Collessie, which should be the proud boast of the Fife village where the Heath family made their home, featured an exquisite duet between Gillam and guest first viola Jessica Beeston. The boisterous finale, The Cooper of Clapham, links Fife with the London home of a craftsman maker of flutes (Heath’s own instrument) but also serves extraordinarily well as a celebration of the range of the soprano sax.
The other two pieces Gillam played were composed especially for her. She closed, save a party-piece encore of Pequena Czarda by Pedro Itturalde, with Rant!, written by her teacher John Harle, whose role as populariser of classical sax she has taken on with gusto. Following nicely on from the Heath, its uses folk melodies from her native Cumbria, and also, unmistakably, a chord sequence from The Beatles’ Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
The newest work in the programme was Dani Howard’s 2024 Saxophone Concerto, which closed the first half and proved to be another delightfully bespoke composition. With a central slow movement of defiantly unresolving ambience, its scoring cleverly emulated the sound of the larger members of the saxophone family, with a particular role for Maximiliano Martin and William Stafford, resonantly playing their clarinets in the low chalumeau register.
What promised on paper to be an enjoyably unpretentious programme by the SCO proved to be exactly that. A bubbly Rossini overture, Beethoven’s emotive concert aria Ah, perfido!, the set of Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge that set Britten on course to international fame, and Beethoven’s perfunctory Eighth Symphony benefitted more from the dynamic self-motivation of their delivery than the routine miscellany of their grouping.
Much of that dynamism came from Italian violinist/director Lorenza Borrani, quite the fireball, whose energetic, edge-of-the-seat presence was a visible inspiration injecting heated interaction into so much of the delivery. It’s a mode of performance the SCO excels at – vital elements of the music flitting from section to section, instrument to instrument, like a seamless passing of the parcel. It’s wonderful to watch, even better to listen to.
As an opener, Rossini’s overture to The Barber of Seville struck a joyous note, its marshalling opening chords a rip-roaring wake-up call before the expectant warmth of the slow introduction and ever-increasing exuberance of its dash to the finish line. Besides the ensemble’s bright-lit incision, it was especially revealing to hear solo lines emerge with such unique character, not least those comic effects – whether deliberate or not – emanating from the raw animalistic trilling of the natural horns.
What followed was a world away from Rossini’s boisterous opera: the torment of Greek princess Deidamia, abandoned by her lover Achilles, expressed through anguished soliloquy in Beethoven’s early-composed Ah, perfido!. American soprano Robin Johannsen was a gripping presence centre-stage, her vocal delivery as trenchant as it was heartfelt, her timbre blessed with a defining edge that oozed vibrance and character. The reactiveness of the orchestra was as supportive as it was reflective, even if the errant mobile phone erupting in the final bars was a spooky, jarring intervention.
Britten’s 1937 Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge – in many ways a portrait compilation of his teacher’s complex personal traits – offered a substantial conclusion to the concert’s opening half. It was also where Borrani exerted her most memorable influence. The kaleidoscopic nature of this performance was its greatest strength, the vigorous pungency of the Introduction and Theme boldly preemptive of a sequence variously tossed between the wistful wrong-note waltzing of the Romance, the brusque galumphing of the Wiener Waltzer, the sobriety of the Funeral March, the high-spirited Aria Italiana, the time-travelling Bourée classique and dizzying Moto Perpetuo. The spectral weirdness of the penultimate Chant was especially magical.
The Beethoven symphony in a short second half was the evening’s least successful enterprise. That’s not to say the pliability of this interpretation was any less stimulating; there was still a sense of genuine spontaneity at play. But there were awkward issues with tempi, occasional lapses in exact coordination, a palpable nervousness at times, a general sense that the big picture was not wholly within sight, that rather killed the emphatic impact of this eccentric symphony.
For logistical reasons, the version of this season’s Scottish Chamber Orchestra concert with Nicola Benedetti that Inverness heard at Eden Court Theatre was radically different from that played in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
The only common ingredient was the violin concerto Benedetti played, the one by Mendelssohn which she recorded with the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields 20 years ago, at the age of 18. It was at the centre of an all-Mendelssohn programme in Inverness, opening with the Hebrides Overture and with the ‘Scottish’ Symphony in the second half.
Perhaps because that option was less appealing to BBC Radio 3, whose recording of the Glasgow performance is broadcast this evening, the Central Belt concerts opened with the much larger forces required for the Academic Festival Overture by Brahms, and had the same composer’s Fourth Symphony after the interval.
Most unusually for the normally adept SCO, the programme flowed less well than might have been guessed at, and presumably than the one heard in Inverness a day later.
It did get off to a splendid start with the Overture though, Brahms’s seamless assemblage of borrowed tunes now much better known than any of the ingredients, save perhaps the climactic “Gaudeamus Igitur” Latin hymn to the joys of youth. This is not a chamber orchestra work by any measure – and by specific design on the composer’s part – and conductor Maxim Emelyanychev revelled in the sonic potential of a vastly augmented SCO, who duly gave it laldy, although with no loss of detail in the performance.
The band was slimmed down, without losing any of the string strength, for the Mendelssohn, and natural horns and trumpets replaced modern instruments. The result was an impeccable balance between orchestra and soloist, for which Benedetti should take as much credit as the conductor. The rich sonorities of her lower string playing cut through as clearly as the nimbly fingered high notes on the E string, even when there was some glorious swells of ensemble playing from the SCO strings.
Obviously this is a work Benedetti has had under her fingers for at least half her lifetime, but the detailed thought she brought to the pivotal first-movement cadenza, the emotional heft audible in the Andante and the lightness of touch in the exchanges with the woodwinds in the finale were all the work of her mature talent.
The orchestrated version of Elgar’s Salut d’amour was an obviously appropriate encore, given that it, like the concerto and some of the music on her recent Violin Café small group album, revisits music she learned in her student years.
Perhaps it was chosen for another reason too, because the opening theme of the first movement of Brahms 4 turned out to be an eerily close cousin. Did Elgar have the Brahms in his head at the time he wrote it?
In other ways, however, the symphony followed on less well from the music in the first half. While there was still some excellent string playing and the SCO’s seasoned clarinet partnership were on stellar form, Emelyanychev seemed most in his element when the music most resembled the Academic Festival Overture, which it doesn’t very often. So the declamatory scherzo third movement was a burst of exuberance, and the clever chaconne or passacaglia form of the finale was at its best in the liveliest of the 30 variations.
Keith Bruce
The concert, sponsored by Quilter Cheviot, was recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Monday, March 2, and available on BBC Sounds for 30 days thereafter.
It is not yet an imminent problem, but there are two succession issues that the Scottish Chamber Orchestra will have to address, and they both look challenging.
Scottish composer Jay Capperauld has set a very high bar for whoever follows him as the orchestra’s Associate Composer, in providing bespoke works that suit every aspect of the SCO’s multi-faceted schedule. He was at it again last week with the world premiere of his Stylus Scarlatti, arrangements for chamber orchestra of four keyboard sonatas from the first half of the 18th century by Domenico Scarlatti, precision-tooled to fit Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev’s now-annual “Baroque Inspirations” concerts.
In those, the conductor, often leading ensembles from the keyboard and throwing in some wind instrument playing during the interval, matches classic early music with more recent works that draw on that era. Capperauld’s new work was perhaps one the most straightforward pieces he has supplied to the SCO library, but in its nods to the way other modern composers – like Michael Nyman – have visited the same territory it was characteristically knowing, as well as containing music tailored to specific solo talents in the orchestra.
The other challenge will, of course, be the eventual departure of Emelyanychev himself. It is almost inconceivable that there may be someone else with his combination of talents and enormous, infectious, energy waiting in the wings.
On Sunday afternoon at the Queen’s Hall, “Maxim & Friends” teamed him with the SCO’s string section leaders for two Schumann chamber works from 1842: the Piano Quartet, Op 47 and the Piano Quintet, Op 44.
With the string players using gut strings, Emelyanychev’s keyboard was a London-built 1888 instrument from French piano-makers Erard, borrowed from Glasgow University. Its distinct ringing tone – absolutely clear even if it lacked the muscle of a modern concert grand – combined beautifully with the string sound in a performance that may have been very close to how the works were originally heard, but refreshed them bracingly for modern ears.
These demanding pieces, composed for Schumann’s virtuoso wife Clara and the top string players in Germany at the time, are among the sunniest he wrote, particularly the Quartet, with its lovely Andante Cantabile movement – set up here by a startlingly brisk account of the Scherzo.
Both are in E flat, but the Quintet is more epic in scale as the composer explores and reworks his material with the thoroughness of a Beethoven symphony. The performances of both, with Emelyanychev’s keyboard skills matched by those of violinists Stephanie Gonley and Marcus Barcham Stevens, Max Mandel on viola and Philip Higham on cello, were absolutely first rank.
At Glasgow’s City Halls on Friday evening, there was a very specific chamber approach to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No 3, played by just ten strings, opening a programme again played entirely using gut strings. Both warm and rustic-sounding, the sound gave a particular quality to an expanded ensemble for Britten’s youthful Simple Symphony which suited its folk-influenced music well.
For Handel’s Water Music, it was a more hybrid band on stage, with modern rather than natural horns joining the ensemble. Perhaps that was simply a pragmatic decision, for reliable accuracy of pitch, but the result was more than satisfactory, and the little harpsichord flourishes at the start of some movements were a characteristic Emelyanychev addition.
SCO Principal Condustor Maxim Emelyanychev directs the orchestra in a programme of Baroque Inspirations, featuring works by Bach, Handel, Britten and Schnittke, plus the world premiere of an arrangementt of Scarlatti keyboard sonatas for orchestra (‘Stylus Scarlatti’) by the SCO’s Associate Composer, Jay Capperauld.
As was the procession of a few of the players to the foyer during the interval, heralded by a drum beat and led by the conductor himself playing a selection of early flutes and recorders. Perhaps this ingredient had more impact when it was a complete surprise to the audience and front of house staff, but it was still great fun, even if the SATB choral Spanish work handed out on hymn sheets for audience participation was a challenge too far for many ticket-holders.
Friday’s programme ended with a work from the conductor’s native Russia that was composed by Alfred Schnittke just eight years before Emelyanychev was born.
There is indeed “Baroque Inspiration” to be heard in Schnittke’s Gogol Suite, a sequence of eight short pieces based on short stories by the writer, but there is also the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Mozart’s Overture to The Marriage of Figaro. At other times, however, it sounds as much like the Merry Melodies of Warner Brothers cartoons or the pantomime of Spike Jones and his City Slickers.
With the players still gut-strung, the band included perhaps the most integrated use of electric guitar and bass guitar that any composer has achieved, a vast panoply of percussion from the whole toy box to tubular bells, and no fewer than four keyboard players. Simon Smith was imperious on concert grand, Stephen Doughty and Andrew Forbes covered harpsichord, celesta, and something invisible in between, and Emelyanychev himself handled the centre-stage prepared piano which played out the ominous “Testament” at the end.
The expression “multi-tasking” barely hints at what the SCO’s Principal Conductor brings to the job.
Keith Bruce
Portrait of Maxim Emelyanychev by Andrej Grilc; picture from City Halls foyer by Christopher Bowen
The attendance was no disgrace, but really there should have been no empty seats in the Usher Hall for a Mozart gala featuring back-to-back performances of his last three symphonies. Written in a remarkable few summer weeks of 1788, it is still unclear for whom the cash-strapped composer dashed off the masterworks, and all sorts of theories have been advanced, some more credible than others.
Veteran German conductor and musicologist Peter Guelke, in his 1998 book Der Triumph der neuen Tonkunst, made the case for seeing them as a deliberate triptych, “a world in a cycle”, and the SCO’s energetic Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, seemed persuaded by that thesis.
He opened Symphony No 39, K543, with a strong statement of the opening theme, but one that was far from loud. The conductor had clearly worked on a very specific string sound for this programme, with extra players in every section, aiming for a rich intensity rather than volume, and the mellow sound of the first movement was a clear indication of what was to come.
Elsewhere on the platform, the forces were as usual, and the changes Mozart makes in the wind scoring (no oboes in No 39, no clarinets in No 41) and the role of timpanist Louise Lewis Goodwin – crisp but very quiet in No 39, absent in No 40 – seemed especially significant.
Although there were historically-informed ingredients in all the playing, this was a hybrid performance, best illustrated by the cello section where the front desk hugged their instruments with the knees, Baroque-style, with the three players behind using spikes.
If Emelyanychev was indeed focused less on authenticity than on an arc of performance that ran from the rich grandeur of the opening chords of the E-flat major symphony to the grand double fugue that concludes the Jupiter, it was an interpretation that embraced many contrasts and illuminated many parallels along the way.
The pace of the opening of No 40, one of the best-loved pieces in all Mozart but played in a wide range of tempi over the years, was not as fast as might have been expected but that allowed its dotted rhythms to shine as echoes of the bolder syncopation of the finale of No 39. Just as fascinating was the progression of the writing in the triple-time third movement, from the folksy clarinets in No 39 through a very fresh up-beat reply to the Andante in No 40 to the remarkable complexity of the ensemble scoring in No 41, again with a boldly quiet beginning.
There was, however, rather more exuberance and a sense of being off the leash in much of the Jupiter, as if the conductor had been keeping his powder dry until after the interval. That perhaps explains why it was the central G Minor work, K 550, that seemed to lack quite the verve it deserves and requires, but that reservation about No 40 may well have been remedied for the repeat performances in Glasgow and Aberdeen.
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra has more “showbiz” personalities on its list of regular guest leader/directors, but Italian violinist Lorenza Borrani achieves a richness of string sound from just 24 players which immediately distinguished the opening bars of Haydn’s Symphony No 56 in C Major.
Hers was an approach to the composer of daringly deliberate tempi, with the fullest expression of every dynamic contrast – and there are many – in its four movements, underlining how Haydn was setting a template for his successors.
Occasionally a player ran a little ahead of her animated indications from the concert-master’s chair, and the intonation of the natural horns took a while to settle, but the contribution of the reed soloists to the slow movement was superb and the ensemble engagement with the music’s playfulness was always captivating.
That sense of fun is also crucial to Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso No 1, written 200 years later, even if the frolics are often veiled in darkness. The six movements range fantastically widely, with the more obvious ingredients including the baroque music of Vivaldi and Corelli suggested by the title, South American dance music and the prepared piano experiments of John Cage.
Jan Waterfield was in the place the composer himself filled for the earliest performances, at the harpsichord and an electric keyboard and lap-top set-up producing a digital version of the prepared piano part. Those opening and closing utterances are among the more sombre moments in the work, which is hugely virtuosic for the two violin soloists – Borrani partnered by the SCO’s Marcus Barcham Stevens – particularly in the climactic fourth movement cadenza. After that the slide into tango-time is a happy relief, but it did not seem in the least odd.
With the pizzicato exchanges by the violinists calling to mind duelling banjos, principal bass James Kenny contributing a fine jazz bass passage and the slow movement employing a chromatic descent similar to those found in music from Henry Purcell to Led Zeppelin, the work leaves few potential avenues unexplored. The quality of this performance of what is a hugely demanding score was its best advocate.
A fascinating balanced programme was completed by the two movements of Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony No 8. The opening in the cellos and basses again impressed for their resonance in the City Hall and there was nothing less precise about Borrani’s Schubert than there had been in the Haydn.
Only the three (crucial) trombones made this an unusually large SCO on stage, but it lacked nothing symphonically at all, just as the composer’s two movements stand perfectly well on their own.
Accuracy in pacing and dynamic expression was again the director’s way, and there was no playing to the gallery from the SCO’s excellent wind soloists, although all were on finest form.
With the exception of the four stalwarts of the cello section – whose leader Philip Higham was one of the evening’s first solo voices – there was an unfamiliar look to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra on Friday evening, in the strings as well as in the additional instrumentalists required for the programme.
The evening was entirely made up of music composed by John Adams and – given that it was all written in the last century, and necessarily excluded his largest works – it was a very useful introduction to his style for the uninitiated.
We began in the 1970s with the demanding performance challenge of Shaker Loops, clearly influenced by the music of his American minimalist colleagues but already finding original pathways from that inspiration. The glissandos of the second section and Higham’s solo in the third were evidence of that, and conductor Andrew Manze ensured that work’s finale was more dramatic and dynamic than might have been anticipated from the work’s somewhat hesitant, sotto voce beginning.
If Shaker Loops can be an austere listening experience, Gnarly Buttons is an entertainment, albeit a hugely challenging one for the clarinet soloist. The SCO’s principal clarinet Maximiliano Martin was equal to the task but he and his colleagues possibly left some of the humour in the score unexpressed, with the exception of the unmissable cattle noises in the keyboard samples.
The scoring for the piece is always ear-catching, and Manze ensured every detail was clear from the early combination of trombone, cor anglais and bassoon, through viola and pizzicato basses to the guitar and four-hands piano in the altogether simpler, plaintive finale. Of the many guest musicians onstage over the evening, it was Robert Carillo-Garcia who was crucial here, moving on to the guitar after his equally essential contributions on banjo and mandolin.
For the final work, 1988’s Fearful Symmetries, Stephen Doughty sat at the grand piano while Simon Smith and John Cameron exchanged keyboard riffs and four saxophonists joined the brass and woodwinds. If Gnarly Buttons is close kin to the symphonic Naïve and Sentimental Music, Fearful Symmetries shares orchestral similarities with the music played from the pit in Adam’s first huge opera success, Nixon in China.
There may be fewer exotic time signatures to negotiate in this score than in the other two works, and the through-written half hour supplied the most elegantly-played music of the programme, with by far the largest forces on stage. Here the individual elements, like the saxophone quartet and the sampling keyboards, were less startling individual ingredients than parallel elements, integrated with the brass and strings in a coherent whole which Manze communicated as one compelling narrative.
It was hard not to be impressed by the chutzpah of the programming: two of the finest Mozart Piano Concertos, Nos 21 and 24, with one of the most admired soloists of our time, Yeol Eum Son, and between them Anton Webern’s Symphony Op 21, a two-movement expression of Schoenberg’s 12-tone method that is reckoned to be among the most perfect, concise examples of that system.
With the aim of helping an audience that had – obviously – turned up in good numbers to hear the Mozart, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s Principal Guest Conductor Andrew Manze preceded the Symphony with an extended introduction, full of musical illustrations, with the 12 violinists who would later be half the ensemble that played it physically embodying those 12 notes.
It was an explanation of admirable clarity, leavened with humour, but it was probably as long as the ten-minute work itself, and it did not land well with everyone in the Grand Hall. Some perhaps felt patronised, others thought Manze’s closing remarks about Webern’s death at the end of the Second World War in poor taste. An earlier joke referencing the current troubles of the house of Windsor was also bold, given that the SCO recently gave a private concert for its royal patron, King Charles.
Putting the introduction to one side – and it was a mixed blessing at best – the programming conceit worked. There is an enormous journey between the prolific Mozart’s 1785 concerto and Webern’s 1928 Symphony, but its interpolation made more obvious the distance between the up-beat C major concerto and the more complex, darker C minor one Mozart composed just a year later.
Yeul Eum Son was the soloist on the last recording Sir Neville Marriner made, of that earlier work, K467, at the beginning of her ascendancy, and almost ten years later she plays it with an elegance and effervescence few can match. This was a partnership, though, and we had already heard some top playing from the SCO before her first entry.
The articulacy of her playing in the first movement and the powerful left hand she brought into play in the closing cadenza were balanced by a willingness to step back and share the limelight. The understated way she approached the familiar slow movement, after an absolutely on point statement of the opening theme by the first violins, seemed ideal, and the closing Allegro vivace assai was a lively conversation between soloist, conductor and orchestra.
Son’s last appearance with the SCO was in May, when she performed Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto. It has been suggested that the composer modelled his C minor work on Mozart’s, which he is known to have admired, and the finale of No 24 is certainly a long way from the music that closes the earlier concerto, and much nearer the music that Beethoven would write.
The increased volume of a larger orchestra brought no superfluous fireworks from the South Korean pianist. Her first entry was a model of restraint and the phrasing of her playing, long sentences of notes unfolding with their meaning effortlessly conveyed, was always beautiful. Once again, she took a back seat in much of the Larghetto, with the different combinations of wind soloists making as much of an impression, so that the return of the quintet of winds in the finale was especially obvious.
The structural language of the later concerto was also very clear to ears that had been honed by the Webern before the interval. The Symphony’s particular ensemble, with bass and regular clarinet, harp and a pair of horns joining the 20 strings, makes an individual sound to match the meticulous use of the work’s 12-tone row. The ever-adaptable SCO players handled the shift of gear with masterful ease, and the inclusion of the 20th century piece was, musically at least, a fascinating decision.
ALINA Ibragimova’s schedule over the next few months is remarkable. She is on tour with Ivan Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto before a run of chamber music dates with her piano partner Cedric Tiberghien and then the period instrument Chiaroscuro Quartet she founded, playing a long list of repertoire.
The quartet also has dates in Europe at the end of January, playing different music, before which she performs the Stravinsky Concerto in Montreal with conductor Robin Ticciati. And before that she is in Minnesota, playing with and directing the St Paul Chamber Orchestra.
Alongside a Mozart concerto, there’s a Haydn symphony in those US concerts, but it is a different one from the “Drum Roll”, No 103, that featured in the programme she directed from the violin with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra last week. The other work in her SCO programme, Karl Hartmann’s hugely challenging Concerto funebre, has just one further scheduled performance, in Leipzig in the middle of November.
That massive workload does not appear to stop Ibagrimova being very much an ensemble player, but finding a third work to complete the programme for her three Scottish dates presented the SCO with a challenge to its usually deft concert-compilation skills.
Although a comparison of the conduct of Hartmann and Richard Strauss during the Second World War made for an interesting programme note, Strauss’s early Suite in B-Flat major for winds, Op 4, was perhaps an odd way to start. The composer won praise, and a job, for his conducting of the premiere of the work, but the SCO’s wind soloists needed no direction with the orchestra’s top class principals – specifically Andre Cebrian and Maximiliano Martin – cueing their colleagues when required.
Strauss may have been inspired by a Mozartian model, but his quartet of horns and contrabassoon produced a sonorous underscore that was a long way from Mozart, prefiguring the composer’s own orchestral tone poems. In fact the 13 players often sounded like a much larger group, while the solo playing, and especially the oboe of Miriam Pastor, was exquisite.
Much stage shifting, and mental reset, was required for the Hartmann, scored for strings and virtuoso violin soloist and a tough piece for players and listener. Composed in 1939 (although revised twenty years later), it is full of grim foreboding of the calamity about to unfold in Europe, even if the funereal hymn with which it closes seems to embrace glimpses of light.
There was not a lot of direction required of Ibragimova here either, with the SCO strings eloquently responsive to her expressive, robust playing with muscular performances of their own. The ensemble is a very creative partner in the work’s conversation, regardless of the technical range required of the soloist, in what is a powerful, if mostly unremittingly dark, work.
The musical fun of the Haydn symphony was a welcome contrast after the interval, with Ibragimova in the concert-master’s chair, giving a beautiful performance of the cadenza-like solo in the slow movement. Other notable contributions came from the first oboe once again, and, of course, timpanist Louise Lewis Goodwin with those crisp drum rolls that give the work its nickname.
Usher Hall, Edinburgh / Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra entitled the opening of its new season From Darkness to Light and that idea was just as audible in the concerts that began the seasons of both the BBC SSO and the RSNO.
At Glasgow City Halls the previous week, it was undoubtedly behind the celebratory strings of Ryan Wigglesworth’s tribute to the SSO’s former leader Laura Samuel, and applied just as well to the trajectory of Schumann’s Violin Concerto, as performed by Daniel Lozakovich.
In the SCO programme it clearly worked for both the opening and closing works. The famous fate motif that opens Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was predictably not laboured by Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev in a pacy and detailed interpretation of the work, following on from a much-lauded BBC Proms performance. It was in the transition from the Scherzo to the finale that the sense of emerging into brightness was most obvious, but this was a far-from-simplistic reading of the symphony with refreshing changes of power and tone in the slow movement as well as in the unfolding of its conclusion.
The concert had begun with Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen in a compact and intense version that was truly “chamber” music, with some excellent solo playing from the string front desks and carefully controlled ensemble that always kept a little in reserve. It was a performance that is well worth listening out for when the BBC recording is broadcast.
So too, it hardly needs saying, is the orchestra’s playing of Veni, Veni Emmanuel with soloist Colin Currie, even if the trajectory of the piece arguably defies the Darkness-to-Light equation. Currie must have given a fair proportion of the remarkable number of performances MacMillan’s early percussion concerto has enjoyed since the SCO premiered it with Evelyn Glennie at the 1992 Proms.
It is still one of the most thrilling works in the composer’s now extensive catalogue, and it was good to be reminded that the brasher music is more than balanced with much gentler, melodic, and equally virtuosic, music. The closing bars, when the soloist moved to tubular bells at the back of the stage and the whole orchestra adding tinkling percussion was movingly evocative of the Ascension, so perhaps the SCO’s concert title did work here as well.
‘From darkness to light’ is only one interpretation of the complexity of Mahler’s Symphony No.7, the major work of the RSNO’s season-opener as Music Director Thomas Sondergard continued his commitment to a full cycle of the composer’s symphonies. It’s a valid one, nonetheless, and the conductor certainly suggested as much in his dynamic marshalling of the large orchestra through its long structure. The two Nachtmusik movements emerged especially well, the horn calls in the former, and the sequence of solos – violin, guitar, mandolin and oboe among them – in the latter beautifully calibrated.
There is much operatic about the work’s conclusion, and Sondergard was in his element with the theatrical changes of pace leading up to the dramatic bells that also punctuate this work’s ending.
In a great run of concert openers, the RSNO began its season with Oliver Knussen’s terrific miniature, Flourish with Fireworks, which has long transcended its specific commission by the LSO at the end of the 1980s to become an emblem of the composer’s infectious enthusiasm.
The concerto that followed was Ravel’s in G Major with Francesco Piemontesi the perfect partnership soloist, embracing his dialogues with orchestra members and as eloquent in the lush Romanticism of the central Adagio as in the more 20th century jazzy rhythms of the contrasting outer movements.
At the March launch of the 2025 Edinburgh International Festival programme, the Festival’s Head of Music, Nik Zekulin, conceded that the opera content was slighter than in other years.
On paper that may have looked the case, but the reality has felt rather different, and not only through the presence of opera in concert. Whether it inspired or consoled, or simply wore you down, the Festival opener, Tavener’s The Veil of the Temple, was in many ways operatic in scale and style. Its structure, in less epic form, found echoes in both the works presented as staged operas in the Festival programme, even if their music was very different.
With no opera at all in the Festival Theatre, given over to runs of theatre and dance productions, the big event was the use of Edinburgh Playhouse for Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice, recreating an Opera Australia production by the director of physical theatre company Circa, Yaron Lifschitz, and his troupe.
Soprano Samantha Clarke, who sang Eurydice and Amor, personified this venture in that her career bounces between Australia and the UK. The Australian performers were joined on stage by the Chorus of Scottish Opera, whose set-builders also made the staging, and Handel specialist Lawrence Cummings conducted the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in the pit.
Clarke was excellent, as were the chorus, but the star vocal turn of the show was counter-tenor Iestyn Davies, an EIF favourite who sang with extraordinary power and also engaged with the physical action, if not to quite the personally perilous degree the superbly-choreographed acrobats displayed.
Far from being in any way gimmicky, they told the story as eloquently as the text and music, from the dramatic trapeze descent of Eurydice to the Underworld to a nicely ambiguous interpretation of Gluck and librettist Calzabigi’s grafting of a happier ending on to the classical tale.
Although none of the forces involved were huge, the production needed the vastness of the Playhouse, and – just as importantly from the EIF’s point of view – attracted an audience that filled all of the seats.
Ancient Chinese myths inspire Huang Ruo’s opera, confronting humanity’s complex relationship with nature.
It is more debatable whether Huang Ruo’s Book of Mountains and Seas was any more “opera” than The Veil of the Temple had been. If one of the delights of the Gluck had been the realisation of the rich orchestration, Ruo’s music is sparer, if never quite as austere as Tavener’s often was.
The Chinese-born American resident is a composer of operas – and it will be interesting to see if this work was paving the way for an EIF run of a larger work – but this was a work for chamber choir and puppetry, using four of the ancient Chinese stories from the titular book.
Basil Twist, designer of the National Theatre’s Studio Ghibli adaptation My Neighbour Totoro, was director and his puppetry is of the modern school familiar from The Lion King and War Horse, and in the global perambulations of Little Amal and The Herd. If not so gasp-inducing, his six-strong team, who created galaxies of lantern suns, a bird princess, an archer god and a sprinting giant, supplied the parallel technical expertise to the Circa team in the Gluck.
The dozen singers of Ars Nova Copenhagen were in the Theatre of Voices mould, and directed by counter-tenor from that ensemble, Miles Lallemant. The constant flow between the male and female voices and between honed ensemble and some glorious solo singing was compelling, and Ruo’s music is delightfully hard to pin down, with a global range of influences but a voice entirely his own.
Often the most identifiably “Chinese” element of the sound came from the two percussionists, the only instrumental content and played with quite startling virtuosity. Even there, however, there were Latin American and African elements in what was truly the sound of “world music”.
Although he made a very brief one of opposition to the war in Ukraine at the beginning of March 2022, no-one looks to the SCO’s Russian Principal Conductor for political statements. Maxim Emelyanychev is a musician with every fibre of his being: “I live for the creation of music and art” he said in that same bulletin.
Nonetheless, it would be easy to see a message to belligerent leaders across the world in his odd choice of La clemenza di Tito for the third of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s concert performances of Mozart Opera’s at the Edinburgh Festival.
Not so many years ago the merciful titular Roman emperor, prepared to forgive betraying consorts as readily as would-be assassins, was seen as a bit of a sap in the canon of opera heroes; in 2025 his lack of vindictiveness looks like something we could use a deal more of.
That’s not the only reason that La clemenza is rarely seen as of the same rank as The Magic Flute and Cosi fan tutte, the operas Emelyanychev and the SCO have presented in the last two years. Dating, like the Flute and the Requiem, from the last year of the composer’s life, it was composed at astonishing speed to a lucrative commission from Prague, is thought to contain some recitatives that he farmed out to a pupil, and has had a very uneven performance history since 1791.
This EIF performance featured the unmistakable roar of the RAF Red Arrows adding a flypast to the Castle Esplanade’s Tattoo around fifteen minutes in, but everything else was under the firm, charismatic direction of the conductor, whose Mozart readings are now easily escaping the long shadow cast by the SCO’s partnership with Sir Charles Mackerras.
Emelyanychev worked his socks off in this concert, playing eloquent fortepiano continuo as well as directing orchestra and chorus and – just as assiduously – the cast of soloists.
And what a terrific cast he had. The opening partnership of mezzo Angela Brower as Sesto and soprano Tara Erraught as Vitellia – dramatic, full of character and powerfully sung – only hinted at the riches to come, even if those two deserved the prize laurels at the end. A little later in Act One, the uncannily parallel duet by Maria Warenberg’s Annio and Hera Hyesang Park’s Servilia is one of the score’s best tunes and the singers made the most of it.
If bass Pater Kalman’s Publio has an onstage musical partner it is not Tito but the Chorus, he the voice of the Senate and they that of the citizens. If he was authoritative, with a nice suggestion of perplexity at turns of events, Gregory Batsleer’s SCO Chorus was as marvellous as it reliably is, to the extent of prompting the wish that they had had more to do.
More of an unknown quantity in Scotland – although he will sing Germont at Covent Garden next year – was tenor Giovanni Sala, who brought a troubled vivacity and palpable vexation to his portrayal of Tito, as well as a very fine voice that was never at all strained by the demands of the score.
Those are considerable on the soloists, but Brower and especially Erraught were more than equal to the huge vocal range that they were required to demonstrate.
There may still be elements of the plot of La Clemenza that are hard to swallow, but that is true of many operas. Emelyanychev and this ensemble made a cast iron case for the music being of the very first rank.
Once pipped for pop stardom, Iestyn Davies opted instead for success as a classical “yodeller”. The award-winning countertenor stars with Australian circus ensemble Circa in Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice. KEN WALTON reports.
It’s 30 years since the blistering Summer of Britpop, when Blur and Oasis led a hungry pack battling for pole position in the charts. Iestyn Davies was 15 that year, a musically-gifted pupil at the specialist Wells Cathedral School. He and three school pals – collectively the wannabe Britpop band Cage – were faced with a tempting offer to sign up for a record deal they were assured could easily lead to chart-topping success.
“Yes, the pop world lost out,” says the now 45-year-old Davies, who eschewed pop fame to become one of the world’s leading classical countertenors. He’s currently in Scotland to sing the male title role in director Yaron Lifschitz’s circus-led production of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice at the Edinburgh International Festival.
“We were huge fans of Blur then and all the other bands with one-syllable names, and were actually about to be victims of what would become a kind of Britain’s Got Talent thing, where the A&R people wanted to manufacture something cool rather than just let us do our own thing.
“It was a big deal,” Davies recalls. “Atlantic Records, a branch of Sony, came to our school, we got selected, and against thousands of other bands got down to the last two. They said we’re really interested in you guys because you’re all really good musicians. We played songs to the A&R guy in our studio at school and he said with the right financial backing we could go to number one. Sure, we’d have made lots of money, but in the end it wasn’t for us.” In time, the constituent members of Cage went their separate ways to pursue careers in classical music.
For York-born Davies, there was an undeniable logic to his choice. By the age of eight, he’d experienced the hothouse choir school environment of the Oxbridge chapel, at St John’s College, Cambridge. It was a baptism of fire, he recalls, “a bit like being taught to swim. You’re thrown in at this early age to perform daily in this thing called choral evensong, initially imitating the boy next to you to pick things up. But the musicality I picked up there was invaluable: the ability to learn music quickly, sight read, be a good team player, be a professional musician. It’s why I’m doing what I do now.”
It stood him in good stead when, on leaving secondary school, he took up a choral scholarship at Cambridge, studying archeology and anthropology, before honing his singing technique – he once compared the rarefied countertenor voice to “yodelling” – at the Royal Academy of Music. Prestigious awards followed in a career that has combined leading opera appearances (the New York Met and Covent Garden included) to acclaimed worldwide concert performances and prize-winning recordings.
He’s no stranger, either, to the Edinburgh International Festival, though one previous visit lingers painfully in his memory. “I woke up the morning of a Queen’s Hall concert with absolutely no voice, nothing,” he recalls. He struggled in to the pre-concert run through, managing to squeeze out a sound. “The old chorister mentality hit in: if you can still sing a bit you’re doing it.” A friend who’d attended the same programme a few weeks earlier, and having heard the Edinburgh live broadcast, called him up to say it was even better than the York performance. “It just goes to show, you can never second guess the audience!”
Circa in Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice (Image: West Beach Studio)
Did Davies ever envisage having to perform his first ever staged production of Gluck’s seminal opera Orpheus and Eurydice engaging so physically with a fully-functioning circus troupe? That’s the challenge facing him in this week’s unconventional Gluck production, unveiled with its original cast in Brisbane in 2019, now restaged for a European premiere at Edinburgh Playhouse that draws together the original combined resources of Circa and Opera Queensland with Opera Australia, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Scottish Opera Chorus, conducted by period music specialist Laurence Cummings.
When we spoke, Davies’s only inkling of the task in hand was via a video of an earlier Australian performance. “I saw immediately how amazing Circa are. You can hear the audience gasp right at the beginning as they do this tumbling thing from a great height. What’s amazing is that their acrobatics are as fluid as dancing. The hardest thing that I have to do physically comes late in the show, when I stand on someone’s shoulders, surrounded by three or four people who are anchoring my ankles. I can tell from the performer on the video – whom I know, and who’s very athletic – that it’s a scary moment.”
Davies has since come to realise that, for his part, the physically of his role comes mostly in a more concentrated, more conducive form. “Yes, I have to carry quite a lot of the drama in my body, but a lot of that can be done standing still,” he explains. “Until I meet Eurydice in the underworld it’s just me and the chorus, but not in dialogue. Under such prolonged spotlight you have to find ways to project energy through stillness, which in itself is such a high-pressured thing because its very easy to slip unintentionally into concert mode.
“This is such a psychological piece – really, it’s about what’s going on in Orpheus’s head – which is what Yaron is particularly trying to demonstrate in his production,” Davies says. “I asked him why he has conflated the two female roles of Eurydice and Amore, played by the same singer [Australian soprano Samatha Clarke], and the answer I got was that Orpheus has murdered Eurydice and wakes up in this fractured state, maybe in a prison, maybe an asylum.”
This, Davies reckons, is where the “unworldliness” of the countertenor voice can really work its magic, closer in character to the castrato that Gluck originally intended than later tendencies to cast a female mezzo soprano in the role. Think Janet Baker, for whom this became a signature role.
“There is something disembodied about the countertenor that is close to the castrato in terms of pitch, and of course we’re seeing a man play the hero,” Davies explains. “But equally it stretches the countertenor’s capabilities beyond that of the choral world, presented with a meaty chunk of singing, on stage for an hour and a quarter. It feels very different from singing even a Handel role where you’re one of five or six characters. You’re on stage all night; that challenges you to be interesting with your voice. You can’t rely on just ethereal beauty. There has to be pain, anger, melancholy, all range of emotions. That is what Gluck is asking. That’s the challenge to me.”
Whatever the physical demands placed on him, Davies is readying himself. “I’m generally very conscious of trying to stay healthy and fit at the moment anyway,” he says. Besides addressing “the odd creak on the knee or shoulder”, that means looking good too. “I’m playing David in [Handel’s] Saul at Glyndebourne at the moment. At the beginning I’ve just defeated Goliath and the whole show opens with me covered in blood, half-naked with a sling and a shot. I’ve been going to the gym three times a week, and trying not to enjoy myself too much. It’s a real pain, but in the long run it’s good to keep on top of these things.”
As for his relationship with Gluck’s most famous opera, it is dominating his working life at the moment. Davies previously sang the Orpheus role In a 2018 Edinburgh Festival concert performance with The English Consort, later recording it with La Nuovo Musica for Pentatone. “I was originally booked to debut in this current production with Circa in Melbourne in November/December, but that was before the Edinburgh dates came up; and now, between those, in September/October I’ll be performing in a Robert Carsen production with Canadian Opera in Toronto. It’s full on up to Christmas, but I doubt I’ll be sick of it.”
Nor can he get too much of the Edinburgh Festival. “I love coming to Edinburgh. It’s the most worthwhile place to sing in Britain, a great set-up and great audiences. They let me do things I want to do.” Including, perhaps, his new circus repertoire?
Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice is at the Edinburgh Playhouse on 13, 15 & 16 August. Full information at www.eif.co.uk
At the Opening Concert of this year’s East Neuk Festival, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s Principal Guest conductor paused between the first and second movements of Lars-Erik Larsson’s Pastoral Suite to allow a raucous posse of motorcyclists to pass the Bowhouse before the music continued, but Andrew Manze could do nothing to mitigate the noise of a helicopter overhead during the Andante of Schubert’s Symphony No. 6.
Perhaps the pilot was a Stockhausen fan at the wrong gig, because at the closing concert in the same venue, composer Sally Beamish contrived an event as fascinating as the German’s late 20th century experiment with the Arditti Quartet playing in separate aircraft.
Her piece, Field of Stars, had inspiration every bit as complex, and the demanding task of employing four faithful visiting ensembles in a single work. The Belcea, Castalian, Elias and Pavel Haas Quartets were behind the audience as well as onstage, and each cellist was furnished with a tuned bell-cymbal as a call sign for the group’s location.
Just as the farm building was impressively effective for the SCO’s opener – the programme completed by Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez with the soloist another faithful friend of ENF, Sean Shibe – Beamish made her commission a site-specific triumph to end the 20th edition of the festival.
Weaving a tapestry of international melodies into her compact creation, and exploiting many of the techniques of which the string players are capable along the way, it ended with a medieval hymn-tune that vaguely recalled La Vie En Rose. The composition may have been tailor-made for the space, but thoughtful music producers should surely be able to adapt it to other contexts.
The programmatic setting for its premiere could scarcely have been richer. All 16 players made a luxury string orchestra for the Andante Festivo by Sibelius at the start, with the Castalian’s Finnish first violin Sini Simonen appropriately in the position of concert-master.
Her quartet combined with the Belcea for the performance of Mendelssohn’s youthful Octet that closed the concert, with Corinne Belcea in imperious command and the Belcea’s cellist Antoine Lederlin bossing the start of the Presto finale.
The first half had seen the completion of the festival’s cycle of the Late Quartets of Beethoven, the Pavel Haas showing that the complexity of the second and fourth movements of Opus 135 in F defy its “contract-filler” reputation. The emotive slow movement was admittedly waiting in the composer’s bottom-drawer, but we already knew that from the Belcea’s equally heart-breaking rendition of it as an encore to the huge Opus 131 (for which it had failed to make the cut) in Crail Church two days earlier.
The Beethoven journey had begun in Kilrenny Kirk on Thursday with the Elias playing Opus 127 in E-flat, its big opening chords a bit of a red-herring given the intimacy of the long central Adagio and the inventive playfulness of the music in the later movements. Like the Belcea in Crail, the Elias prefaced the Beethoven with Mozart, but the Castalian opened their concert, of Opus 139 with the Grosse Fuge, with Thomas Ades’s seven-movement Arcadiana, Natalie Loughran’s viola leading the way in water-themed music which takes a beguiling turn into the world of tango half way through.
The quartets were far from the only excursion of the festival programme, the most literal being Saturday’s “Shibe Trail” to three places in Anstruther and through music from the early 1600s to the year before last, played on lute, classical guitar and electric guitar and electronics. Each recital was relatively brief but the range of composition, and multi-disciplined virtuosity Sean Shibe demonstrated was fantastic. From John Dowland to Meredith Monk might not actually seem so far in vocal music terms, but to be taken from one to the other instrumentally was a different journey altogether.
The brief life of Franz Schubert was another thread of the 20th East Neuk, including performances of the song cycles by baritone James Newby and tenor Mark Padmore with pianist Joseph Middleton. Newby’s performance of Die Schone Mullerin was too dramatic for some, but his animated storytelling surely cast fresh light on the familiar sequence.
Employing an impressive range of tone and timbre, Newby’s theatrical reading was clearly addressed to listeners and objects alive in his imagination and it was all too easy to see the babbling brook at his feet in Crail Church. The portrait he drew of the protagonist in these poems was often a disturbing one, the fickle girlfriend ultimately incidental to his existential crisis and bitter and disturbed character.
He and Middleton had clearly worked precisely on the pacing and pauses of the recital, and the pianist’s picture-painting was as essential in what was an unforgettable performance.
So too was the Pavel Haas Quartet’s of Schubert’s Quintet from the last year of his life, cellist Ivan Vokac joining the great collaborators. His line was often at the bottom of the instrument’s range and a little like that of a rhythm section string bass, and the whole work was revealed to be as muscular as this group can be relied upon to find in any music. If that was especially true of Janacek’s String Quartet No 1, which opened the quartet’s Crail recital – and of which they are surely the finest exponents – it was revealing how much the Schubert benefitted from the same approach.
Earlier on the Festival’s last day, a gathering of yet more familiar festival faces celebrated the event’s genesis, inspired by the success of a one-off chamber concert at St Ayle in Cellardyke, featuring Beethoven’s Septet of 1800. A supergroup of chamber musicians gathered in the same place to play the same work, the occasion also remembering cellist and teacher David Watkin, and only slightly diminished by some technical difficulties with the instrument of violinist Alexander Janiczek, which discombobulated even this most experienced of players.
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s former principal cellist David Watkin was not just a hugely respected musician but also a man much loved by his colleagues and then by students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland when illness curtailed his playing career.
His death last week occasioned a tribute online from his SCO desk partner Su-a Lee and another from his successor in the first cello chair, Philip Higham, at the start of this concert, which was dedicated to his memory.
The most affecting memorial, though, was the piece conductor Maxim Emelyanychev and the chamber orchestra’s strings added at the end of their programme, the second of Edvard Grieg’s Two Elegiac Melodies, the wistful Last Spring.
It is of exactly the same era as Brahms’ Violin Concerto, the work that had opened the programme and which attracted a capacity audience, including many younger faces, because of its soloist, Nicola Benedetti. For many in the hall it may have been the first opportunity to see her in a while, following her maternity leave break in performing, and the work is one with which she has long been associated.
The composer and its dedicatee, violinist Joseph Joachim, created a concerto that balances its virtuoso moments in the opening movement, including its closing cadenza, and in the fiery dance of the finale with long conversations with the orchestra, especially the first oboe in the Adagio. Benedetti and Emelyanychev delivered a beautifully integrated account of the work, his relationship with the orchestra evident in the precise dynamic calibration of the score and her familiarity with the piece clear in the accuracy of her double- and triple-stopping as much as her intensity of expression.
With extra numbers in the strings, totalling 32 players, and four horns, this was an enhanced edition of the SCO, which was even more crucial to the conductor’s account of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No 3, the “Scottish”. His tempi were brisk but he took pauses before the second and third movements in a reading that seemed – even more than the Brahms – focused on sonic balance. Maximiliano Martin’s clarinet was perfectly clear in its statement of the first movement theme, but far from dominant, and when the six cellos took up the tune of the slow movement it was with ensemble richness rather than volume.
It is sometimes suggested that the symphony, written a long time after Mendelssohn’s visit to Scotland and a long way away, is not very “Scottish” at all, but this performance had ample dour climatic colour and stress on the traditional and country dance music rhythms to please its Highlands-loving dedicatee, Queen Victoria.
Visits to Scotland by pianist Yeol Eum Son – who has appeared with the BBC SSO, as an EIF Queen’s Hall recitalist, as a guest soloist in the Usher Hall’s Sunday concert series, and at the East Neuk Festival as well as with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra – are to be treasured.
The opportunity to hear her play Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto would be an added incentive for many and for that work to be presented in the context of this programme, with the peerless SCO Chorus singing Haydn’s Nelson Mass in the second half, completed an unmissable bingo card that predictably attracted a good audience.
That the conceit of the programme – all three works being linked to Haydn – did not stand up to much scrutiny, as the programme notes acknowledged, was neither here nor there. The brief student/teacher relationship between Beethoven and Haydn was long over by the time of the concerto, and had never amounted to much in the face of both composer’s driven agendas anyway.
The opening work, Brahms’ Variations on a theme by Haydn, we now know to be based on tune that had nothing at all to do with the earlier composer, whatever Brahms believed at the time. Nonetheless, the St Anthony Chorale was worthy of his attention and his set of orchestral explorations of that raw material, employing an early music device on a piece of early music, was an ideal beginning.
The symphonic scoring makes full use of the range of pitch available from contrabassoon to piccolo and the flow of ideas comes swift and fast – ideal music for conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, always fleet of musical thought.
He and Yeol Eum Son had agreed a brisk tempo for the Beethoven too, and it was in that context that her first entry, phrased with conversational pauses, was so immediately arresting. Her playing was captivating from start to finish, precision filigree ripples and runs married to a mighty left hand and technical mastery always at the service of emotional expression. Beethoven had recently emerged from a time of documented personal turmoil and a sense of that ran through Eum Son’s performance as well as a delight in the musical artistry – radical as it was at the time – inherent in the work.
If Beethoven was pushing the envelope with the Third Piano Concerto, Haydn was ever the opportunist in (re)naming his Nelson Mass in honour of the victorious English Admiral who attended an early performance. Originally it had been his “Missa in angustiis” or “Mass for troubled times”, and perhaps reinstating that title would suit our own times.
It needs a terrific soprano soloist, and had one in this performance in Anna Dennis, on stellar form. There was nothing at all wrong with the rest of the vocal front line either, and mezzo Katie Bray, tenor Anthony Gregory and bass baritone Neal Davies took their briefer moments in the spotlight well and also combined beautifully, notably on the Benedictus quartet.
As usual, Emelyanychev had thought carefully about the placing of his musicians, with the vocal soloists in front of the chorus but behind the players, and the bass instruments split across the platform, a returned Nikita Naumov partnered by bassoonist Cerys Ambrose-Evans stage right and the other pair of double basses stage left.
The result was an integrated sound which showcased the orchestra as much as it did the choir, immaculately prepared by Gregory Batsleer.
Paradoxically, one thought prompted by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s performance of Schubert’s Symphony No 4 was whether the orchestra and Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev intend to complete a survey of Schubert symphonies, having already recorded three of them for Linn.
What would Emelyanychev bring to this one, once labelled the “Tragic” and sometimes dismissed as lightweight and derivative by comparison with others in the composer’s catalogue? Without a conductor on the podium, the SCO, under the minimal direction of leader Stephanie Gonley, produced a dynamic interpretation that gave the lie to that opinion, and grew in stature as the work unfolded.
For a small orchestra, the players managed to produce a mighty sound at times, particularly in the finale, which combined impact with clarity. Before that the Scherzo was fleet and fun, even if it does owe a debt to both Beethoven and Haydn, and the Andante, wonderfully resonant from the lower pitched instruments, had a profound edginess.
Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante, on the other hand, is agreed to be an early masterpiece, and was the headline piece of the concert, which was originally scheduled to be directed by Lorenza Borrani, leader of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. Instead it was Gonley who partnered first viola Max Mandel as soloists, with the pair communicating equally with their colleagues in a performance for which a conductor would have been superfluous.
There is an equal division of labour between violin and viola throughout the work and this reading really shifted up a gear with the dialogue of the cadenza at the end of the opening movement, a conversation that continued in a very moving account of the central Andante. If the Presto finale sounds at times like the overture to an opera the young composer had yet to write, the slow movement is to all intents and purposes the hit aria.
The overture to this concert programme was a world premiere, no less, and another fine new work from the orchestra’s prolific Associate Composer, Jay Capperauld. Carmina Gadelica, or “Song of the Gaels”, takes its inspiration from the rich musical traditions of Scotland’s Western Isles, including the unaccompanied Psalm-singing of the Free Kirk, the metronomic work rhythms of Waulking Songs and, finally, country dance music.
Composed for a ten-piece wind ensemble in five distinct movements, Capperauld’s imaginative scoring is as beguiling as always, even if this is one of his less esoteric works. In fact it is easy to imagine it becoming the entry point for many new listeners to appreciate his music, although having wind soloists of the quality of those in the SCO was a huge advantage for its first performances.
Over a few hours on the Saturday at the start of Easter week, it was possible to bask in the calibre of choral singing of which Scotland can boast.
In the afternoon, at St Michael’s Church by Linlithgow Palace, the NYCOS National Boys Choir revealed the fruits of their residential course at Gartmore. The hiatus of the pandemic has produced an odd imbalance where the older Changing Voices cohort currently outnumbers the trebles and altos of the NBC itself, but the varied programme still boasted a confident, if unseasonal, This Little Babe from Britten’s Ceremony of Carols alongside some Schubert and fine arrangements of sea shanties and spirituals.
In time, some of these older lads may find themselves on the Young Singers programme that refreshes the superbly-balanced Scottish Chamber Orchestra chorus where two of those currently keep the tenor section at a strength most amateur choirs can only dream of.
It does seem unfair on both sides to pitch the SCO Chorus into such a competition, however, as their concert that evening demonstrated. Director Gregory Batsleer’s ensemble are simply in a different league, as their opening motets by Renaissance composer William Byrd immediately proved. This is repertoire we usually hear in concert from small professional chamber choirs, and to hear the overlapping text in the closing “Jerusalem desolata est” sung by nearly 50 voices in the glorious acoustic of Greyfriars was a joy.
A cannily-chosen Scottish premiere of Daniel Kidane’s Be Still – inspired by the experience of the Covid pandemic – provided a string interlude to set the stage for the combination of SCO strings and singers in James MacMillan’s Seven Last Words from the Cross.
If the work is quintessential MacMillan, it now seems astonishing that he composed it so early in his career, and disappointing that such a masterwork is not heard more often.
Sharing some material with his equally bold clarinet work, Tuireadh, that is partly because it requires great skill in the voices, and indeed in the technical precision of the string playing. One of the things that distinguished this immaculate performance was the interplay between the two. That is to the fore in the dialogue between stratospheric sopranos and the low strings in the third part, Verily, I say unto thee, today thou shalt be with me in Paradise, with its parallel solo from the orchestra leader, but it is a continuous process in the work.
The writing for the choir inevitably remains foremost in the memory – beautifully resonant bottom notes as well as those high frequencies, immaculate ensemble singing from the altos and those remarkable tenors. But the instrumental playing is only a hairs-breadth behind, and after the representation of the nails being driven into the cross, it is the violins who have the moving last bars of Christ’s dying breath.
