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.
As its freshly-printed new season brochure further demonstrates, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra is currently a pace-setter in concert programming, and this was another superb example.
Opening and closing with two first symphonies, one box fresh, the other from nearly 150 years ago but strangely overlooked, the ostensible link in the programme was that everything was written when the composers were in their teenage years. Dig a little deeper and you might also note the common influence of their fathers on these early works.
The concluding, older Symphony No 1 was by the 16-year-old Richard Strauss and although it doesn’t sound parodic of its influences, and especially the Beethovian Scherzo, the opening of the Finale could easily be heard as too obviously ‘in the mould’. A canon in the strings then seems to hark back to an earlier era before the suitably grand ‘classical’ last bars. Was the mind that subsequently created those complex tone-poems already dabbling in irony? It is hard to say.
Either way, the work was new ground for the SCO players and well worth the hearing, as was, beyond any argument, the startling new Symphony No 1 that opened the concert. Georgian wunderkind Tsotne Zedginidze is from a family of musicians and also just 16 now, and he was 15 when he wrote the piece, co-commissioned by the SCO. It had its first performance in Salzburg at the end of January, which Francois Leleux also conducted.
There is no insincerity in Zedginidze’s symphony, dedicated to his late mother and ending in a few bars of aching loss. What happens in the half hour before that it quite remarkable, however, from the opening music in the violas, which sets out a clear debt to Second Viennese School serialism.
The precocious composer has taken that early 20th century starting point and then ploughed his own furrow with music that changes direction dizzyingly often, but never in a disorientating way. In fact the work becomes more insistently charming as it develops, with fascinating voicings in the winds, some Romantic strings and a solo for the principal bass before its poignant conclusion. Leleux and the SCO communicated the symphony’s complexities with style as well as fierce concentration. To say that Zedginidze is a talent to listen out for is to damn him with faint praise.
The meat in the symphony sandwich was just as carefully selected, the Strauss preceded by his Serenade for 13 winds, from 1881 when the composer was still 17, and the best known music in the programme.
The first half had ended with a showcase for one of those splendid SCO wind players, Cerys Ambrose-Evans, the first bassoon stepping out in front of her colleagues to play the only extant Bassoon Concerto by Mozart, composed for the Salzburg court when he was an ancient 18. The combination of the animated conducting of Leleux and the soloist’s lively approach to her instrument made the performance a delight. We already know she has the lightest and richest tone, and her articulacy and breath control on the cadenzas was a wonder.
Pairing a box office favourite with harder-to-sell new music is familiar enough in classical programming, but the tactic rarely makes as much sense as it did in this concert from the SCO, which featured impressionistic music separated by two centuries without any of the “Impressionism” that happened in between.
Aaron Jay Kernis’s Musica Celestis was the most speculative of those impressions, the young American’s work for strings an instrumental evocation of the holy choir of angels, whose eternal praise he sums up in 10 minutes.
A student of John Adams, that debt is detectable but not overstated in a piece that uses subdivisions of the string sections, with the front desk players as featured soloists, and builds to a (very high) pitch before a pause and a recapitulation of its more sedate beginning.
It was a perfect hors d’oeuvre for the UK premiere of Peter Eotvos’s Aurora, a concerto for double bass and string orchestra with accordion. The Hungarian composer wrote the work five years before his death exactly a year ago, and the Covid pandemic was the major factor in the delay in this performance by the SCO, who co-commissioned it.
Much more recently, the orchestra’s principal double bass has defected to lead the basses of the RSNO but Nikita Naumov returned as soloist, and won an enthusiastic reception for doing so. As it turned out, the conductor was also a much-missed figure in recent SCO seasons, Richard Egarr stepping into to replace Mark Wigglesworth, directing the concert as advertised.
The fresh score he took on stipulates that the two string basses of the orchestra take up positions on opposite sides of the platform, and are tuned differently from each other and the soloist. The exchanges between them and with Naumov, who had to produce the really virtuosic stuff at the front of the stage, was the theatre of the piece.
Inspired by a view of the Aurora Borealis from an aircraft window, the work covers a lot of ground in its 20 minutes. The triple basses add slap punctuation to the swirl of sound from the strings and squeeze box in the opening movement, and the role of the front-stage soloist grows more prominent and complex as the composition develops.
There must be very few feasible techniques on double bass left unexplored, in bowing and pizzicato, fast fingering and delicate harmonics. Naumov gave a masterclass in all of it, including a glorious melodic passage in the second movement that followed propulsive work from strings and accordion reminiscent of John Adams’s A Short Ride in a Fast Machine.
The finale was a showcase of every skill heard from the soloist so far, only at twice the speed, with the strings and accordion now providing the punctuation. Naumov capped it off with an encore that required him to become an entire Bulgarian folk band.
If it was an accident that his extra treat chimed with the third movement imitation of a peasant dance band in the Pastoral Symphony, it was a very happy one. Beethoven’s Sixth is the most impressionistic, and arguably the most popular, of his symphonies, and Egarr and the SCO made it the perfect culmination of the evening.
Orchestra leader Charlotte Saluste-Bridoux, who plays alongside Alina Ibragimova in the Chiaroscuro Quintet, was a very active partner in Egarr’s delivery of a delightful Pastoral, everyone on stage – and not only the playful bird-imitating wind soloists – clearly having a ball.
Entitled “Parabola” for reasons that were never entirely clear, this concert was all that survived of this SCO season’s planned residency with the orchestra by charismatic Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto – and pianist Simon Crawford-Phillips, with whom he shared conducting responsibilities as well as soloist status, was equally essential to its realisation.
The programme had its own arc, certainly, beginning with the young Benjamin Britten’s Young Apollo, from 1939, and ending with the mature Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No 88, from 150 years earlier, with three contrasting works by living composers in between. Everything in it was well worth the hearing, and immaculately performed. If the works shared anything at all it was a rigorous sense of purpose, not a note wasted or added as superfluous garnish, and none over-long.
It’s assumed that Britten withdrew the vibrant compact tone poem for piano, string quartet and string orchestra Young Apollo because it celebrated a pre-Peter Pears infatuation. Separated from that context by the better part of a century and 50 years on from the composer’s death, it shines as a brilliantly-shaped use of its ingredients as well a showcase for a virtuoso pianist.
Crawford-Phillips was just as impressive on the podium for the work that followed, Marchentanze by Thomas Ades, his meticulous direction revealing a work ideally suited to Kuusisto and the SCO. The first movement’s crisp dialogue between the violin soloist and the winds (with guest players at first clarinet and oboe) was followed by a gorgeous melancholy folk fiddle tune, a third movement evocation of birdsong as eloquent as any, and a rhythmically-challenging finale that recalled the late ’60s experiments of jazz trumpeter Don Ellis.
After the interval, Crawford-Phillips conducted Sally Beamish’s Whitescape, co-commissioned by the SCO with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, and associated with her Frankenstein opera, Monster. The details here were in the percussion, mortar and pestle and strummed upright piano among Louise Lewis Goodwin’s armoury, alongside contrabassoon and overblown flute.
Kuusisto led the orchestra for that piece and did so as well as directing in the Haydn, which emerged as fresh and original as anyone who has heard his way with earlier music might expect. There were some terrific contradictory touches in his interpretation – sturm und drang in the Largo, and abrasive natural horn from returned former SCO principal Alec Frank-Gemmill in the third movement.
The most unusual work of the evening, however, was the one bang in the middle, closing the first half. Timo Andres is a Brooklyn-based post-minimalist and he was in the balcony to hear his Piano Concerto “The Blind Banister”. With Kuusisto conducting and Crawford-Phillips at the keyboard, it began in a manner that owed something to Philip Glass but quickly established a direction very much of its own.
As in the Beamish, the percussion section was crucial to the sound-world, and the conversation between soloist and strings also recalled the Britten. Kuusisto’s more organic conducting style suited the work, while the pianist’s cadenza before the closing third movement was bravura stuff – partly inspired by the one Beethoven wrote to rejuvenate his Second Piano Concerto apparently, but very much the composer’s own.
Keith Bruce
Picture of Pekka Kuusisto at Glasgow City Halls by Alan Peebles
Funding austerity has shaped this year’s International Festival, writes Keith Bruce
Politically-astute EIF director Nicola Benedetti prefaced the media briefing revealing her third Festival programme with an enthusiastic acknowledgement of the recent funding announcement from Creative Scotland.
It increased support for an expanded list of client organisations and assured many more arts companies of multi-year funding. Far and away the largest sum goes to the Festival itself, £3.25m in the coming financial year, rising to £4.25m in 2027/28, and Benedetti described the news that came at the end of January as “pivotal” for the whole sector in Scotland.
It did, however, come too late for this year’s Festival, which she would later describe as “more compact” than those of her first two years, and which clearly took shape in a restricted financial climate.
The black cover of the 2025 programme has a cut-out in it that reveals the theme the director has given to this year, The Truth We Seek, printed on page three inside. That gap at the front is, unfortunately, mirrored by the holes in the grid at the back of the brochure that everyone uses to plan their Festival-going.
A new play starring Brian Cox, Make It Happen, is the first event, at the Festival Theatre, but after its run nothing happens there for nearly a week, until Scottish Ballet unveils its new Mary, Queen of Scots for four performances, which is followed by another four days with no Festival programming in the theatre.
The smaller Lyceum is also “dark”, in terms of International Festival shows, for over a week of the EIF’s three. Its shows include three performances in this year’s much-reduced opera programme, of Huang Ruo’s Book of Mountains and Seas, directed by the Olivier Award-winning designer of My Neighbour Totoro, Basil Twist. The other staged opera, three performances of an Australian staging of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice, is the only use the Festival makes of Edinburgh Playhouse this year.
That makes for a lot of gaps on the fold-out venue grid in the brochure. The only venues without big empty spaces in their calendar are the Usher and Queen’s Halls and the EIF’s Hub home.
There are two more operas in concert at the Usher Hall, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and conductor Maxim Emelyanychev continuing their journey through Mozart with La clemenza di Tito and a residency by the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Antonio Pappano including Puccini’s Suor Angelica.
The EIF’s new Head of Music, Nicolas Zekulin, told Vox Carnyx that the event’s commitment to presenting opera hadn’t changed but the year-to-year reality always showed fluctuations.
“The opera offer this year fits in to what had been an ebb and flow. Last year’s was significant and substantial but the year before was less, so there has been a natural ebb and flow and I think this year fits into that pattern.
“Opera has multiple facets and this year has two unconventional productions, and sometimes those are the ones you want to show. The production in the Playhouse is about opening up that repertoire in a new way.”
It is the European premiere of the Opera Queensland production, made with the acrobatic troupe Circa, whose reputation was built at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This incarnation will have the SCO in the pit, Iestyn Davies as Orpheus and the Chorus of Scottish Opera, prepared by Susannah Wapshott.
In fact, as Benedetti noted in her presentation to the press, the 2025 Festival features all five of Scotland’s directly-funded national companies: the National Theatre of Scotland is Dundee Rep’s producing partner for playwright James Graham’s new Make it Happen and the RSNO performs both the Opening Concert of John Tavener’s epic The Veil of the Temple and the Closing Concert of Mendelssohn’s Elijah, where Scots mezzo Karen Cargill is one of the soloists.
Both of those also feature the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, which celebrates its 60th anniversary with a total of five concerts. It joins the LSO and Pappano for two concerts, performing in Vaughan Williams’ Sea Symphony and the Puccini opera, and the BBC SSO under Karina Canellakis for Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms.
With the National Youth Choir of Scotland’s now-regular contribution to the Festival being that Opening Concert and one with the London Philharmonic under Edward Gardner and the RSNO Youth Chorus also involved in Suor Angelica, there is no shortage of local talent in this year’s line-up – perhaps a case of thrift, rather than charity, beginning at home.
Zekulin said that he was under no illusions about the realities of the Festival’s position when he took up his post.
“I was aware of the constraints from the start, and the need to be creative within a budget. Working within certain parameters is something we all do all the time, but this is an international festival so I still get to do amazing stuff – I can’t complain!
“What’s a gift for us with the recent funding announcement is that 2027 is the 80th anniversary of the Festival. That’s a signature moment and works out well for us. We can look at ’26 and ’27 in parallel and think about what that anniversary means.”
Other musical visitors this year include residencies by the youth orchestra from New York’s Carnegie Hall, NYO2, and Poland’s NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra from Wroclaw, with whom Benedetti will appear as violin soloist. There are also concerts by the orchestra of the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing, Ivan Fischer’s Budapest Festival Orchestra, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the Monteverdi Choir with the English Baroque Soloists and the Aurora Orchestra under Nicholas Collon.
The Queen’s Hall programme kicks off with the intriguing combination of percussionist Colin Currie and The King’s Singers and includes an equally promising programme from mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo, as well as more familiar names including baritone Florian Boesch, Benedetti’s former trio partners Leonard Elschenbroich and Alexei Grynuk, the Dunedin Consort and the Belcea Quartet.
Public booking for EIF 2025 opens at noon on March 27 eif.co.uk
Picture of Nicola Benedetti in the Usher Hall by Ryan Buchanan; Orpheus & Eurydice by West Beach Studio
Faure’s Requiem is a popular choice for amateur choirs: not too long and requiring limited contributions from just two soloists, it is very often heard with organ or piano accompaniment. Predictably, the honed precision of the SCO Chorus, as prepared by director Gregory Batsleer, was in another league altogether, but it was the partnership with the orchestra itself that made this a revelatory performance.
Faure’s spare orchestration, completed a decade after the work’s composition, is substantially in the hands of the low strings, so SCO Principal Guest Conductor Andrew Manze had the orchestra re-positioned with principal viola Jessica Beeston in the orchestra leader’s seat opposite first cello Su-a Lee, and the violins centre stage but further back.
The effect was crucial aurally as well as visually, the front stage musicians’ combination with horns and organ in the Introit emphasising the movement’s affinity with early music, and the entry of the harp and violins in the Sanctus answered by the lovely counterpoint line given to the violas. For the Pie Jesu that followed, soprano Julia Doyle sang from high in the organ gallery, and the pizzicato cellos and basses in the Libera Me seemed absolutely essential to the anguish of the baritone’s plea for deliverance.
That soloist was Roderick Williams, and the conductor had also put his participation in an excellent broader context. If Gabriel Faure brought something of an outsider’s eye to the rituals of the Catholic church, that perspective could also be detected in everything else in the concert.
Berlioz’s devotion to Shakespeare – albeit in the person of one actress in particular – still seems odd for a man with limited command of the English language, but his Overture, Beatrice and Benedict, is unmistakably a work of the theatre. The combinations of wind instruments were a sparkling part of his dramatic narrative.
Then it was the turn of the SCO strings to shine in music from a century later, and an Essex woman’s impressions of the Lake District. The SCO is in the vanguard of championing the neglected Ruth Gipps and her Cringlemire Garden both harks back to the architectural era of the country house of its title and shows the influence of her teacher, Vaughan Williams, whose own composition of exactly that time – the beginning of the 20th century – followed.
His Five Mystical Songs set the Christian lyrics of early 17th century metaphysical poet and priest George Herbert, and Williams and the SCO Chorus found the sort of respectful distance to the words that the composer surely intended. The best-known of the five is the choral closer, entitled Antiphon, but familiar from its couplet “Let the world in every corner sing, My God and King!” That hymn and the opener, Easter, bracket more personal statements of faith, the central “Love bade me welcome” perhaps the loveliest.
The way Vaughan Williams combines soloist and choir is full of interest and invention, with wordless underscores as well as the fuller choral writing, and Williams is a superb interpreter of this music.
Tickets are now on general sale for the 20th East Neuk Festival, on Fife’s picturesque Forth estuary shoreline, which includes a celebration of the Elie Church concert that inspired its first programme, featuring some of the players involved in that event. A group led by violinist Alexander Janiczek, former leader of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and including ex-SCO players Ursula Leveaux on bassoon and Alec Frank-Gemmill on horn and current SCO first cello Philip Higham, plays Beethoven’s Septet on the festival’s closing day, June 29. The 2025 performance is at noon in St Ayle’s, Cellardyke.
The main threads of this summer’s bill of fare are the late quartets of Beethoven, the compositions of Schubert and the versatile musicianship of festival regular Sean Shibe.
The Edinburgh guitarist is the soloist for the opening Bowhouse concert by the SCO under principal guest conductor Andrew Manze on the evening of Wednesday June 25. Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez is followed by Schubert’s Sixth Symphony. Shibe also gives three intimate recitals in Anstruther venues on Saturday June 28, playing lute, classical guitar and electric guitar.
Three Schubert song cycles are performed over three days in Crail Parish Church, pianist Joseph Middleton accompanying baritone James Newby for Die Schone Mullerin, tenor Mark Padmore for Wintereise and both for Schwanengesang.
The Beethoven quartets are in the hands of the Elias, Castalian, Belcea and Pavel Haas Quartets, all four of whom come together for the closing concert at the Bowhouse, which includes a new commission from composer Sally Beamish, written for four string quartets.
Other attractions include festival debuts for London saxophonist Tom Smith and his Septet and traditional musician Katherine Tickell with her band The Darkening, oud virtuoso Nizar Rohana and jazz pianist Euan Stevenson.
Full details and booking information is available at eastneukfestival.com
There were a couple of extra gifts under the tree at the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s last Glasgow concert of 2024. At its end, conductor Maxim Emelyanychev added an encore at the harpsichord and at the beginning of the second half he preceded Eine kleine Nachtmusik with the recently unearthed “Ganz kleine Nachtmusik”, discovered in Leipzig a few months ago.
That chamber work by the teenage Mozart sat well in a programme that framed one of the composer’s best-known works with music of his peers that is much less familiar. It began with an opera overture from Haydn, written for the Esterhazy court. His shipwreck tale, L’isola disabitata, may be a rarity on stages now, but the music was theatrical enough.
We were in Vienna for the rest of the programme, beginning with Franz Krommer’s first double-clarinet concerto, one of a number of pieces the prolific Moravian composed for the wind instrument that was then a single-reed novelty. Mozart and Brahms were similarly inspired by the clarinet, but Krommer was clearly like a kid with a new toy, and the E-flat Concerto for two Clarinets is a glorious exploration of the instrument’s capabilities, and particularly how its range can be used by the duetting voices.
Other players – the strings, flute, horns and trumpets – have a share of the score, but the focus is always on the soloists, and SCO players Maximiliano Martin and William Stafford brought the tune-packed work vibrantly to life. The energy level of the performance was, however, just as clearly emanating from Emelyanychev at the keyboard.
The SCO strings played Eine kleine standing, all eyes on the conductor at the keyboard, and there are few ensembles in the world who could take such a well-known work and make it seem so fresh and new. Emelyanychev used his resources carefully, stripping things back to a central quintet for the more contemplative sections and taking the whole work at often bracing speed.
The fuller forces required for Paul Wranitzky’s Symphony in D meant that it could only really sit at the end of the evening, but that did the piece few favours. He may have been an important figure in Vienna at the time, but Wranitzky’s music lacks the musical meat to support the repetitions in the early movements of the symphony. The second movement gavotte may have the best melody in the work, but it seems under-developed, as does the tune in the Polonaise, although the trumpets and horns liven things for the finale.
If there are different formats in which Handel’s Messiah works for concert-goers, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio is much less adaptable, which may explain why there are fewer opportunities to hear it.
With Czech Baroque specialist Vaclav Luks in charge, this was a performance not to miss. The key ingredient was the SCO Chorus, again proving itself in another league from the choirs associated with most orchestras. Chorus director Gregory Batsleer had prepared a perfectly balanced unit with as many men as women, equal numbers of singers in each section, and enough young recruits to guarantee a freshness in the sound alongside the wisdom of the voices of experience.
Luks had clearly thought carefully about how to present this priceless asset, arraying them close behind the instrumentalists, and arranging the players in a way that was as singularly effective. Immediately in front of him were the harpsichord and chamber organ, the latter a notably sweet-toned instrument played by Michael Bawtree. With most of the strings on the conductor’s left, only the cellos and basses were on the right hand half of the stage, with all the winds and brass in front of them.
Of the vocal soloists, only tenor Robin Tritschler, in the narrative role of the Evangelist, remained at the centre of the platform, with the other three seated in the wings between their contributions. All of this helped the narrative of the music, while asking the instrumental soloists to stand in their places when partnering the singers was also an important contribution to the story.
After the introductory chorus, with the pure-toned sopranos making an immediate impression, Tritschler led the drama. His delivery was matched by the animation of bass-baritone Florian Stortz, making his SCO debut, and soprano soloist Julia Doyle. Mezzo Helen Charlston, singing the role of the Virgin Mary, was a more sedate presence as suited her arias of lullaby and contemplation.
This concert presented the first three cantatas of the six in the full oratorio (shepherds and angels, but no magi), and was full of memorable moments: the chorus sopranos joining Stortz, the continuo and reeds in Cantata 1, Tritschler duetting with first flute Andre Cebrian in Cantata 2, and Cantata 3’s duet of Doyle and Stortz and a trio of winds among them.
Luks made every detail crystal clear, while the SCO Chorus continued its magnificent form. Cantata 2’s brief unaccompanied Chorale, Schaut hin, dort liegt im finstern Stall, was quite exquisite, their German diction was immaculate throughout, and there was always a clear tonal distinction between the brisk Choruses and more measured Chorales.
Although it is a habit that persists, it is never useful to compare Mozart’s “hackwork” with pieces he wrote to no apparent commission. It is unarguable that he couldn’t help but put his best efforts into everything he wrote, musically.
Both the composer’s works in this programme were written to specific commissions from wealthy patrons and supposedly under protest. The truth is that Mozart’s words, as they have come down to us in his letters, are less reliable than his music, so Symphony No 35, the “Haffner”, composed for a Salzburg family after Mozart had de-camped to Vienna, and the Flute Concerto, written for an instrument he once claimed to dislike, are full of distinctive writing.
Conductor Andrew Manze, safely back in the SCO fold, his flirtation with the BBC Scottish now ancient history, found all the light and shade in the symphony, its first few bars an opening of ear-catching gradation and the whole package so poised and well-balanced. The finale owes an audible debt to Mozart’s contemporaneous commitment to opera composition, specifically the recently-completed Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serial, and that theatricality reflected the work that preceded it in the concert.
Johann Heinrich Schmeltzer’s Serenata was composed in Vienna over a century earlier, possibly to score a drama. Manze’s new arrangement of the Baroque music sat well in his programme in many ways, not least in his colourful orchestration’s parallels with the Schoenberg Chamber Symphony No 2 with which the concert had begun. The range of dynamics and tempi in both works were exquisitely captured by the SCO players, the Schoenberg displaying an emotional depth that his technical complexity can obscure and the Schmeltzer close to heart-rending in its closing Lamento.
The SCO’s principal flute Andre Cebrian made his own persuasive case for Mozart’s Flute Concerto, his golden-toned playing burnished across the full range of the instrument and his cadenzas quite captivating soliloquys. It was the conversations across the platform that revealed the best of the piece however. In the opening movement the exchanges are between the soloist and oboe and horns and the Adagio is all about the flute, the two in the orchestra under-scoring the soloist’s fleet fingering. They return again in the middle of the witty finale, the flute trio bars following some sparkling writing – and playing – in the violins.
Cebrian’s encore was of a folk tune from his native Spain, preceded by an appeal for donations to help those afflicted by the flooding in Valencia. Fund-raising purchases of his recent CD in the foyer at the interval were rewarded with some excellent home listening: his duo with guitarist Pedro Mateo González, Cartografia de mar, is a very fine recording.
A programme of new music is not what Scottish Chamber Orchestra patrons have come to expect from the visits from Andrew Manze, but perhaps this contribution by the orchestra to the Nordic Music Days weekend suggests a broader remit since his appointment as Principal Guest Conductor.
The obvious reason for his presence on the podium was the Scottish premiere of Swede Anders Hillborg’s Viola Concerto, as he also conducted its first performance three years ago by its dedicatee, Lawrence Power, with the Royal Liverpool Phil.
The virtuoso violist is in a class of his own, and the work demands all his skill as it knocks any preconceptions about the capabilities and tonal colour of his instrument out of the park. As Manze mentioned, the work’s Covid-era composition can be heard in much of the writing, particularly the furious “Rage” of the opening movement, which has a reprise at the end.
It is redolent of Appalachia as much as Scandinavia, and there is an appeal to the work that suggests a global audience in mind, not least the closing string crescendo’s resemblance to The Beatles’ A Day in the Life, accompanied by a vocal cry from the players. That Hillborg took his bow wearing an Abbey Road album cover t-shirt was presumably no coincidence.
Behind the frantic bowing of the solo part, there is some very specific scoring throughout the concerto from slapped string basses to sustained chords on piano and SCO principal viola Max Mandel’s drone note beneath Power’s later cadenza.
The composer’s Swedish contemporary Madeleine Isaksson provided the short work that began the second half. Flows (Tornio) is the central part of a geographical triptych and much more recognisably “Nordic” with a compelling narrative arc in which its rich scoring dissolved to something much simpler.
There is nothing simple about James MacMillan’s Symphony No.2, which closed the concert. It is 25 years since the SCO gave its premiere and the piece is not ready to give up all its secrets yet. It’s a peculiar sort of symphony, the main course of the second movement framed by two much briefer – although hardly slighter – sections. Much of it would not readily be identified as bearing the composer’s signature at all and the audible influences range dizzyingly wide.
To the Wagner, Boulez and Berio he acknowledges, one could add Shostakovich and Messiaen, and – much less predictably – hints of Ravel and even a few bars akin to John Williams’ score for Star Wars. Manze brought an expansive intelligence to this performance which kept revealing its more fascinating depths. It is well worth tuning into the BBC Radio 3 broadcast of the concert for this work as much as anything else in the programme.
The composition that is likely to keep most listeners by their wireless sets, however, is the work that opened the evening. Jay Capperauld’s Death in a Nutshell was first performed by the SCO three years ago (shortly after the premieres of both the Swedish composers’ pieces, curiously), with MacMillan conducting. Capperauld was then made SCO Associate Composer (as MacMillan has once been), and has made an exemplary contribution in that role thus far. If this work was a factor in his appointment that would be no surprise.
Perfect Hallowe’en fare, its inspiration in the dioramas of crime scenes made by Frances Glessner Lee is remarkable and the programme notes which accompany it are a compelling read. They are far from compulsory, however, as the six-movement work is simply terrific music, and its Cluedo/Hitchcock vibe, complete with hints of Herrmann, comes with bits of theatre (percussionist Louise Goodwin’s claw hammer) and some glorious melodic material, often to match the grisliest stories.
Keith Bruce
This concert was recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Wednesday November 6, available thereafter on BBC Sounds.
Like Mozart and Haydn, although closer to the successful marriage of the former than the matrimonial disaster of the latter, Dvorak settled for the sister. And like Wolfgang’s Constanze, Anna seems to have coped with Antonin’s initial hopes of the hand of her older sibling; perhaps the success of her husband’s Cello Concerto helped.
Its deeply moving central slow movement, is, however, an elegiac statement of lasting affection for Josefina, who was gravely ill at the time it was written. Was Steven Isserlis’s performance of it with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra as heart-rending as it can be? Not really, but the strengths of the all-Dvorak programme that launched the SCO’s new season were not always emotional ones.
Introducing the concert, the orchestra’s own first cello, Philip Higham, praised Isserlis’s peerless way with the story of the concerto. It is a narrative he’s been giving with other orchestras in France and Germany recently, and to which he’ll return in Paris next month. What lifted this telling was the partnership with the SCO, conductor Maxim Emelyanychev perfectly supportive but also characteristically imaginative in his highlighting of details of the orchestral writing.
The opening bars on the winds enticed the ear in a “once upon a time” way, and the pacing and dynamics of the opening movement were such a secure foundation that Isserlis seemed to respond with more expression as the work unfolded. It was a reading that built in impact so that the moment of wistfulness from first violin Marcus Barcham Stevens, in dialogue with the soloist near the end, was especially effective.
Emelyanychev was even more persuasive on the composer’s Eighth Symphony, its robust outer movements bracketing a memorably spacious Adagio and a sparkling triple time Allegretto. The SCO winds – especially first flute Andre Cebrian and principal clarinet Maximiliano Martin – were on stellar form from the start, and the balance the conductor achieved in Perth’s fine acoustic on the slow movement was magical while the waltz became the definitive statement of Dvorak’s skill in making orchestral music from folk ingredients.
The real indulgence of the programme was the opener, the largest forces being required for the briefest piece, the 1891 Carnival Overture. The three chaps on tambourine, triangle and cymbals deservedly took a bow for their part in the pin sharp rhythms, but the low brass and double basses made as distinctive a contribution to what was a most memorable beginning to the chamber orchestra’s new season.
Keith Bruce
The SCO’s Celebration of Dvorak is repeated on Thursday and Friday, September 26 & 27 at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall and Glasgow City Halls.
The librettos Lorenzo Da Ponte wrote for Mozart pose problems for modern audiences which opera directors love to wrestle with, not always to the benefit of the works or, indeed, the ticket-buyers. As SCO Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev has mischievously said, one of the benefits of concert performances is the absence of that input.
Directing Cosi fan tutte from the fortepiano, he and his cast of six absolutely top-notch soloists demonstrated that the work not only survives but thrives without the benefit of a full production. The quality singers, led by Golda Schultz as Fiordiligoi and Angela Brower as Dorabella with Christopher Maltman as superb as you’d expect in the role of Don Alfonso, could not overshadow the fact that this was musically Emelyanychev’s show.
From the distinctive pacing of the familiar overture to the oddly ambivalent sextet at the work’s close, when Da Ponte undoubtedly pulls his punches even if Mozart is still at full throttle, the conductor was all over the score. Many conductors leave star soloists to get on with it and concentrate on their orchestra in such performances, but that is not Emelyanychev’s way and he was rewarded with full engagement from his singers, playful flirting and playground joshing included.
A particular strength of Cosi is that the whole story, in all its ludicrous detail, is sung with great clarity, so the absence of full costuming and silly disguises matters not a jot if the audience is listening (and reading the surtitles). The singers did enough in the costume department, but were crucially all highly mobile. That was especially true of the clowning of Josh Lovell and Huw Montague Rendall as Ferrando and Guglielmo, but also of Maltman and especially Hera Hyesang Park as Despina, who perhaps pushed the boat out too far at times with her brusque characterisation of the mercenary chambermaid.
The singing from all six, and by the SCO Chorus in their contributions, was consistently superb. For all the animation onstage, the cast contrived to disappear into the wings to give each other full focus during many of the solo arias, while the ensembles, whether huddled together as Don Alfonso sympathises with the deserted women or scattered across the platform for the Act 1 sextet, were all excellently well balanced.
The augmented SCO was on similarly stellar form, the quality of playing undoubtedly lifting the singers to their best game. How they managed not to giggle at some of the more outrageous keyboard ornamentation Emelyanychev added to his continuo playing remains a mystery.
As chorus director and conductor Gregory Batsleer pointed out, the performers on stage in the restored, if slightly jaded, splendour of the Great Hall of Stirling Castle have an excellent view to the National Wallace Monument and the Ochil Hills which matched the heaven and skywards theme of most of the works he had programmed.
He conceded, however, that the audience is not in the same privileged position, so it was down to the choir to communicate that. Thankfully the SCO Chorus is capable of reaching heights other ensembles can only aspire to.
The two newest works in the programme were, perhaps, furthest from that theme as well as closest to home. Andrew Carvel is a tenor in the choir as well as a composer and wrote his setting of Psalm 150, which lists a suggested instrumentation for the Lord’s Praise, for a BBC broadcast from St Andrew’s and St George’s Church in Edinburgh. With its fluxing music, it is recognisably hymn-like, but a long way from congregational.
The SCO’s current Associate Composer, Jay Capperauld, contributed a setting of a contemporary poem by Fife-based Niall Campbell. The Night Watch is about the joyous sleeplessness of caring for a newborn, a sort of inverse lullaby which Capperauld has set to use the individual and sectional talents of the choir, especially the pure-toned sopranos.
Less than a month after the Dunedin Consort singers gave a memorable performance of Tarik O’Regan’s Scattered Rhymes, it was a joy to hear another of his choral pieces, The Ecstasies Above. Setting Edgar Allan Poe’s Israfel, which recognises the beauty of the archangel but also his otherworldliness, the piece is full of rhythmic challenges as well as shifts in dynamics. With instrumental support from a quartet of SCO players – violinists Gordon Bragg and Amira Bedrush-McDonald, violist Brian Schiele and cellist Philip Higham – those sopranos were once again on star form.
They did not have the whole show to themselves, however, and the full-voiced basses sounded remarkably Russian for John Tavener’s Syvati, the choir’s drones and Eastern intervals complemented by Higham’s cello from the minstrel’s gallery, from where he also played Tavener’s contemporaneous cello solo, Chant.
The other liturgical works in the programme were Roxanna Panufnik’s Kyrie after Byrd, inspired by the 16th century composer and less than a decade old, and the opener from James MacMillan’s Strathclyde Motets, from 2007 and ideally voiced to introduce the sound of the choir in this historic venue.
If there was an enticement for the uninitiated to buy tickets, it was in Ralph Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, regularly voted the public’s favourite classical piece. Few, however, would have heard it in this arrangement by Paul Drayton, in which Bragg’s violin had a choral accompaniment and the instrumental soloist only had our full attention in the closing bars.
Using a brutally condensed version of the George Meredith poem that inspired the composer (fewer that a tenth of the lines of verse), the score is mostly wordless and demands a broad range of techniques from both the full choir and a number of individual voices within it. Like much else in the recital, it proved a demonstration of the technical mastery of the SCO Chorus.
It’s extraordinary what Vaughan Williams achieved with his 1950 Concerto Grosso, a work for strings conceived on several levels of player competency, from adept professionals to beginners on open strings, that somehow sounds as if no compromises have been made in achieving the ultimately wholesome, intense musical result.
It’s also remarkable that this particular assemblage of mixed-ability musicians – seasoned members of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra outnumbered by youngsters from the City of Edinburgh Council Instrumental Music Service, Glasgow CREATE and St Mary’s Music School – produced a performance that never once fell below the level of consummate artistry. “These are the future,” declared conductor Andrew Manze from his rostrum. Let’s hope our political masters were listening and provide them with one.
Then there was Manze himself, newly appointed as principal guest conductor of the SCO, and already, in his second week, proving how generous a figure he is on top of his energising musical prowess and affable communication skills.
Clearly his influence over the SCO Academy players – they and their tutors had worked together over the past two weekends rehearsing this music – was both penetrating and inspiring. From the very opening of the Concerto Grosso, a baked blanket of instantly identifiable Vaughan Williams, the quality of sound and alertness of response was magical and captivating. Beyond that curtain-raising Intrada came an edgy Burlesca Ostinato, a central Sarabande loaded with ruminating calm, a fleeting Scherzo, and a final March and Reprise whose jaunty opening bars could so easily have passed as the pawky soundtrack to an Ealing comedy.
The rest of the programme remained with Vaughan Williams but without the youngsters, now seated as observers in the choir balcony. First up was, as Classic FM would have it, everyone’s favourite VW, The Lark Ascending. Even for doubters, this was an enlightening and refreshing performance, thanks to the innate musicality of violin soloist, SCO leader Stephanie Gonley. There was nothing pressurised in her languid vision of the work, just a natural response to its poetic essence. Manze obliged accordingly, colouring its luscious orchestral textures in pastel shades, but not without reference to unexpected detail. I can’t recall ever noticing the triangle’s pertinent presence before.
In the Fifth Symphony, its flowing persona at odds with its composition during World War II, Manze’s attention to detail was again a compelling feature. Against an overriding effortlessness, driven also by the modal fluidity of Vaughan Williams’ writing, the Prelude was intensified by Manze emphasising its harmonic juxtapositions, and the Scherzo bristled with spiralling, at times ephemeral, impatience. In the Romanza, with its heart-tugging cor anglais solo, time stood magically still, before the final contentment of the Passacaglia finale and the quiet fulfilment of its closing bars.
Manze is an inspired addition to an already powerful SCO artistic team. Only good can come of it, surely.
Ken Walton
(Photo: Christopher Bowen)
This performance was recorded for the BBC’s Radio 3 in Concert Series, due for broadcast on 11 June.
The manufacturers of conductors’ batons may be the only people upset by the appointment of Andrew Manze as Principal Guest Conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Like Maxim Emelyanychev, he often eschews their use in favour of a pair of expressive hands. Also like the SCO’s Principal Conductor, Manze started out as a Baroque specialist but now ranges across much wider repertoire, paralleling, to some extent, the orchestra’s own journey.
His first programme of a fortnight’s work with these musicians focused on Ravel, with Steven Osborne the soloist in the G Major Piano Concerto and the composer’s earlier Pavane pour une infante défunte preceding the last of Haydn’s Paris Symphonies, No 87. It began, however, with another of the French capital’s Les Six group of composer, Arthur Honegger, and his Pastorale d’été.
Composed in the Swiss Alps in the summer of 1920, it is a very lovely work for strings and just five winds – all of whom have solo spots – that deserves to be heard more often. In the context of this programme it was a substantial hors d’oeuvre to the Ravel Concerto, very different in style but sharing some of the jazz influence that was in the air at the time.
Osborne is, of course, a pianist who delights in the prediction of jazz music to be found in a late Beethoven sonata, who plays Gershwin to perfection (as the BBC Proms will hear later this year), and who chose to encore this performance with his own transcription of a piece by American jazz pianist Keith Jarrett. That said, he did not labour the bluesy ingredients of the opening movement, and its kinship with Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. In fact this was a very relaxed Osborne throughout the work, delivering the most virtuosic music with casual grace and delighting in the furious pace of the finale. The central Adagio was arguably the highlight though, the SCO wind soloists once again on top form in the duets with the pianist and Osborne himself wonderfully poised and expressive in the elegiac melody that distinguishes what would be the composer’s final big piece.
It is not, however, a tune that most people would recognise in the hum-along way they would Ravel’s earlier Pavane. As a piano piece it made the name of the young composer and its orchestrated version begins, like the Honegger, with a solo horn – beautifully played here by George Strivens.
There is something operatic about Haydn’s 87th Symphony, also heard less often, because, Manze claimed, it lacks a nickname. The work for the section principals is very characterful and it is not hard to imagine the solos as vocal ones, and the ensemble work as dances. That is only explicit in the third movement Minuet, which the conductor took at a very deliberate pace although it was still light on its feet.
On paper Haydn had looked an odd choice to end this programme. In execution, Manze and the SCO made it the perfect one.
Alongside world class musicianship and a breadth of programming that leaves few ears unengaged, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s 50th anniversary season has been distinguished by very thoughtful and original programming. This concert, built around the world premiere of a new choral work by Sir James MacMillan, was a stunning example of that.
MacMillan’s Composed in August – not a diary note but the real title of the Robert Burns lyric known mostly by its first line Now Westlin Winds – is an SCO commission with partner organisations in Estonia and Sweden. Once they have had their premieres, it is likely to become a very popular piece with choirs, challenging in parts but tune-filled, and unusual in being a secular work from MacMillan for these forces.
The singers have to employ a range of techniques and the excellent SCO Chorus members were as assured in their diction of the rhythmically overlapping phrases as in the wordless music at the gentle finish. The instrumental music is for the SCO’s standard set-up, with the odd extra string player, and echoes the pastoral music of the Baroque era in the strings, horns and woodwind birdsong while still bearing the clear signature of the composer. With a wealth of different music over the five stanzas, it is an exquisite piece.
The work of two Ayrshire lads was followed by a Mancunian’s impression of Orcadian celebration, with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s perennially popular An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise. There are few conductors who so obviously enjoy their work as Maxim Emelyanychev, but the young Russian was in ecstatic form here, enjoying all the theatre of the piece with foot-stomping enthusiasm. That included a tray of drams being brought on for himself and leader Stephanie Gonley as the work slides into inebriation, greeted with a hilarious massed “slanj” of hipflasks from the chorus, still seated in the choir stalls.
If the larks set up the arrival of piper Robert Jordan, in full regalia, from the back of hall to perfection, there was also a characteristic precision in every detail of their performance – especially the “tuning up” moment, which Emelyanychev surely recognised as being a gag partly at his own expense.
The programme began with a French composer’s way with Scots romanticism, Berlioz’s Rob Roy overture, which takes Burns’s tune Scots Wha Hae and finds a lot of different things to do with it. With some period instrumentation, it is a curious and fascinating response to Sir Walter Scott’s novel, full of colour and a reminder, perhaps, that the melody makes a strong claim to National Anthem status.
The overture teed-up a superb performance of the same composer’s La mort de Cleopatre with mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill on her best form. Rather than a soloist at the front of the stage she was embedded in the music, but at the same time gave an expressive reading that was straight off the opera stage. The low string pulse that sets up her welcoming of death sounded startlingly contemporary, and emblematic of how this orchestra and its associates span the centuries.
Time and Tides was no ordinary Scottish Chamber Orchestra gig, nor was it a typical SCO audience. But then, when has the versatile Finnish musical phenomenon Pekka Kuusisto – violinist, director and funky entertainer – ever made claims to doing things the traditional way? In this, the last of his current four-programme residency with the orchestra, it was anything but business as usual.
Nor were we short-changed. As well as two astonishing UK premieres – former SCO associate composer Anna Clyne’s violin concerto and a new song cycle by Helen Grime, written 2023 and 2021 respectively – Kuusisto, doubling on violin and miniature harmonium, teamed up with Scots fiddler Aidan O’Rourke to introduce some of the traditional melodies used by Clyne in her concerto. Thus, perhaps, the reason for the wider-sourced audience, one that was encouragingly young and vocal. And there was more besides.
First and foremost, this was a programme devised with arched intent. It began with a hint of provocation, the curved-ball dissonant writing of Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür as witnessed in his orchestral piece Lighthouse. Its combination of harshness, meatiness and slithery translucence, also its retro-Baroque inflexions, makes for an atmospheric gem. Under Kuusisto, and with the assured SCO strings, it had a beguiling, delirious impact.
At the other end of the evening came Einojuhani Rautavaara’s avian curiosity Cantus Arcticus, surreal in the way he overlays a luscious orchestral landscape with a cacophony of recorded birdcalls, but also a kind of traditional night cap bringing us back to earth after the concert’s central highlights.
As previously mentioned, Kuusisto’s plan was to ease us into the Clyne Concerto – Time and Tides – by way of a stylistic gear change, he and O’Rourke intimately calming the air with folk tunes from Scotland and Finland, joined ultimately by some upper string backing in close harmony. If physically it wasn’t the smoothest transition, it served its purpose, sharpening the sensitivities required to appreciate the multiplicity of Clyne’s folk-inspired creation.
Written especially for Kuusisto, his eccentricities were exploited – his knack of whistling while playing, his unlimited vocabulary of violin/non-violin skills – and built into a glittering suite of five movements that embraced everything from zany pastiche and wit to reflective soulfulness and airy pastoralism. Within this, the integrity of Clyne’s chosen folk songs – from Scotland, Finland and America – remained hauntingly intact, especially when the players added their own singing voices to the closing mix.
Helen Grimes’ It Will Be Spring Soon – optimistic texts by Philip Larkin, Sandra Cisneros and Jane Hirshfield set to luminous, opulent music – was delivered engagingly by one of its dedicatees, soprano Ruby Hughes (the other being violinist Malin Broman, whose obligato role was conveniently taken here by Kuusisto). Written with echoes of Britten, Grimes creates a magical relationship between the sprightly strings/harp scoring and the soprano’s controlled intensity.
Just how effective the foyer presence of DJ Dolphin Boy (Andy Levy) was during the interval likely depends on personal experience, but with him tucked almost anonymously into a tight corner along from the interval drinks, I’m guessing his efficient efforts may have passed some people by. Good idea; more a venue issue perhaps.
THREE centuries on from its first publication, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons has withstood any number of revisions and re-interpretations. At the end of May, the Perth Festival of the Arts has a concert by Il Giardino d’Amore which includes the responses of Astor Piazzola and Max Richter alongside the original, and Nigel Kennedy, who took it to the top of the charts in 1989, revisited it again a decade ago.
Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto is 20 years Kennedy’s junior, and his soloist foil in this concert with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Swedish cittern-player Ale Carr, is not yet 35. They share the sort of eclectic musical experience straddling the classical and traditional music worlds that made this version of the old warhorse work as fresh and vital as anyone might wish.
With the SCO string players around them, mostly standing, Kuusisto and Carr turned the suite into a folk session, combined with the rhythmic rigour of the best baroque ensemble practice. With the support of the SCO front-deskers, Marcus Barcham Stevens (concert-master this week), Max Mandel, Philip Higham and Gordon Bragg, Kuusisto’s direction moved seamlessly between the music Vivaldi wrote and a varied selection of other tunes, some from Nordic traditional sources as advertised, but others from nearer home or familiar in the concert hall. Unpicking this tapestry would be complex and pointless – the intention was to present the result as a whole, Kuusisto’s “shoplifting”, as he styled it, creating additional cadenzas for the 18th century Venetian suite.
Kuusisto is not the first musician to think that Vivaldi might benefit from the addition of a rhythm guitar, but Carr’s contributions on cittern went far beyond that, looking every bit the axe-hero in his leather trousers. The Finn’s additions to the score also included some choreographed page-turning and humming by the ensemble and gleefully embraced a car revving in Albion Street outside.
The Italian composer’s representation of bird song in The Four Seasons shaped the rest of the concert programme. Only listeners as old as this writer will immediately associate the opening of Respighi’s suite Gli ucelli (The Birds), which itself repurposes earlier music, with Arthur Negus and the BBC TV antiques show Going for a Song.
When Grieg’s Holburg Suite is so regularly trotted out, it is strange that we don’t hear this colourful work more often. It is a perfect partner for the Vivaldi, full of colourful pictorial writing, with lovely solos for flute and oboe in particular and harp and celeste decorating the superb orchestration you would expect from this composer.
The icing on the cake of this clever programme was Andrea Tarrodi’s Birds of Paradise. Daughter of trombonist and composer Christian Lindberg, the Swedish composer has, in fact, written a Four Seasons of her own. The orchestrated version of Birds of Paradise, originally for strings, requires some extended techniques on strings and winds alongside bowed percussion to produce startlingly accurate ornithological imitation.
It begins, contrastingly, with specific subdivisions among the string players in a structure of overlapping phrases that alludes to American minimalism but produces a very different sonic result. As a contemporary addition to the musical aviary the piece was a fascinating seven minutes.
