Tag Archives: Sheku Kanneh-Mason

EIF: Emelyanychev; Kanneh-Mason; Bostridge

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Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

As a constant presence in the Edinburgh International Festival, the Queen’s Hall 11am concerts have once again proved a regular comfort blanket at that brunch time of the day. But there’s a change this year that seems hard to justify, and which has lessened the completeness of the experience. 

For whatever reason – and I’m guessing production and commissioning costs may be a factor – the Festival has ditched its comprehensive programme booklets and replaced them at the extreme with skimpy free leaflets. The programme listings are skeletal, any notes to clarify context are either minimal or non-existent. Okay, you can unfold it to reveal a frankly useless poster, but there has to be a happy medium where better quality information can be articulated.

So thank goodness for the music. 

Tuesday was pure entertainment with a touch of class. This was Maxim Emelyanychev & Principals of the SCO, in other words conductor and players, but with the effervescent Russian maestro swapping his baton for a fortepiano. The music was exclusively Mozart – at least that’s what the meagre programme sheet told us – whereas Emelyanychev chose to insert Haydn’s acrobatic Fantasia in C where an Improvisation was indicated, albeit personalised by him turning Haydn’s “lunga” pauses into pure Victor Borge moments where endless waits – twiddling of thumbs – drew the laughter as intended.

But that was the magic of this programme, good-humoured repartee mixed with classy music-making. Emelyanychev was joined firstly by violinist Stephanie Gonley, violist Max Mandel and cellist Philip Higham in Mozart’s Piano Quartet in G minor, a work constructed around intricate interplay that was playfully realised by the ensemble: a robust opening Allegro and spring-like Rondo finale separated by one of the composer’s most heart-stopping Andantes.

Clarinettist Maximiliano Martin brought contrasted texture to the ‘Kegelstatt’ Piano Trio in E flat, a performance in which he and Mandel jostled lyrically, initially reflectively, and ultimately with heightened spirit. After the Haydn intermission came the meat of the programme, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 12, K414 – the smaller A major compared to the later K488 – in a string chamber version that expanded the original group to include violinist Marcus Barcham-Stevens and double bass Nikita Naumov.

It was a triumph of scale, the sparkling delicacy of Emelyanychev’s fortepiano an integral yet dominant answer to the intimacy of the wider ensemble – a tasteful protagonist. In truth, it was also a much more cleanly assured performance than the concert opener, in which the apparent use of gut strings required some settling in.

For the following day’s cello-piano duo recital by Sheku Kanneh-Mason and Harry Baker, the repertoire was a lighter mix, founded on the principle that Bach’s influence threaded through it, and that his influence straddled the worlds of classical and jazz. In the latter camp, Baker’s velvety jazz persona held sway, adapting the coolest of numbers by Bill Evans (Waltz for Debby – Kanneh-Mason striking up a mean walking bass), Pat Metheney (the gentle whimsy of James) and the upbeat soul of Laura Mvula’s Green Garden. Kanneh-Mason collaborated in a laid-back arrangement of La Havas’ Sour Flower. 

Two Janacek works – more Baker arrangements in a steely selection of Moravian Folksongs and a straight but expansive reading of the Czech composer’s Pohádka – and the pair’s jointly composed Prelude and Fugue (a mixed success in the style of Shostakovich) completed the opening half.

Bach’s solo Cello Suite No 1 wove a binding thread through the second half, Kanneh-Mason’s warm performances (if occasionally rocked by ill-tuned double-stopping) sitting prettily with the stylistic offshoots of he and Baker’s free-flowing improvisation on Bach’s chorale “Ich ruf zu dir”, the heightened rhythmic idiosyncrasies of music from Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras No 2, and a dizzy sign-off duo arrangement of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D flat minor.

Thursday’s Lieder recital promised its own curiosity factor, the combination of Ian Bostridge and Steven Osborne in a programme that wrapped Schubert’s song cycle Schwanengesang around four miscellaneous settings of appropriate verse. It was often painful to watch. How on earth does Bostridge pull such agonised facial contortions, as if Munch’s The Scream has come horrifyingly to life? Neither Rellstab’s or Heine’s poems necessarily warrant such histrionics, yet away from the visual agony there was considerable depth and lyrical poignance in the tenor’s delivery. 

Indeed, he and Osborne made a profound coupling, the Scots pianist complementing Bostridge’s intensity with deep, searching tone production and instinctive responses to the singer’s expressive freedom. From the calm of Liebesbotschaft to the literary cuckoo in the nest – the breezy closing setting of Seidl’s Die Taubenpost – it was the sense of unwavering conviction that won the day. The centrally inserted songs offered a breath of fresh air in the midst of the heat.

Ken Walton

RSNO / Sondergard

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

With two weeks of the RSNO’s season to go – and Jorg Widmann’s way with Mozart and the RSNO Chorus taking on Verdi’s dramatic Requiem still to come – this “All-Star Gala” was nonetheless a pinnacle of the orchestra’s year, coming immediately after its European tour. The presence of a trio of popular names as soloists – violinist Nicola Benedetti, cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, and pianist Benjamin Grosvenor – guaranteed a packed auditorium, including many for whom it was probably an unusual way to spend a Saturday night.

For those who had bought their first concert ticket, Scotland’s national orchestra laid on a terrific value-for-money programme – as fine an advert for classical concert-going as any seasoned fan of the music might hope for.

The programme culminated in Brahms’ First Symphony, the conclusion of a cycle of the Brahms symphonies RSNO Music Director Thomas Sondergard has conducted since the beginning of the year. Coming after recent performances and recordings of the works by chamber orchestras, Sondergard has made the case for big Brahms, and the Symphony No1, which was so long coming in the composer’s life, is arguably the work most suited to this approach, with its large slow statements at the start of the first and final movements.

The weight of those passages was beautifully contrasted with moments like the dialogue between leader Maya Iwabuchi’s solo violin and the oboe of Adrian Wilson in the slow movement. He was a star of this immaculately-calibrated reading, with other wind principals, including flautist Katherine Bryan (marking her 20th birthday in the post) and guest first horn Olivia Gandee, also on top form.

The Beethoven-like ending to the symphony was an interesting counterpoint to the younger, lighter Beethoven to be heard before the interval. Although this clever programme made more use of them, those star soloists were primarily contracted to play his “Triple Concerto” for piano trio and orchestra, composed in 1804.

It is a delightful work, the breezy conversation between the front-line voices rather disguising the fact that Kanneh-Mason was playing the more virtuosic part, with Benedetti riding shotgun and Grosvenor’s piano in a supporting role. The work has a lovely structure, particularly in the way the Largo second movement speeds up to segue into the dance of the finale. With the RSNO strings on sparkling form, this was smile-inducing stuff, and there were plenty of grins on the platform – and of course there was an encore lollipop, Fritz Kreisler’s arrangement of the Londonderry Air.

The concert had begun with a showcase for the RSNO Youth Chorus, under its director Patrick Barrett, with each of the soloists providing accompaniment in turn. This was the real bonus treat for those new faces in the audience: three works composed in the past decade and performed by the coming generation, proving that “classical” music is in the peak of condition in the modern age.

The longest piece of the three was Russell Hepplewhite’s The Death of Robin Hood, a captivating narrative for young voices, setting a Eugene Field poem, with opportunities for solo voices as well as ensemble singing. It was performed with superb expression and clarity and followed on beautifully from a work the choir had learned for COP 26 in Glasgow, Errollyn Wallen’s specially-composed Inherit the World, with Grosvenor at the piano. It concluded the season’s valuable “Scotch Snaps” strand of performances of contemporary music.

The late addition to the concert brought together Benedetti and the Youth Chorus for American composer Caroline Shaw’s Its Motion Keeps. With the violinist supplying the work’s clever revision of early music continuo, this reworking of a 19th century shape-note hymn would be demanding fare for a professional choir of any age, but these young singers rose to its dynamic and tonal challenges with astonishing poise.

Keith Bruce

Picture, from Usher Hall performance, by Sally Jubb

RSNO In Full Season

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As the RSNO launches its first full season in two years, KEN WALTON sounds out the dynamic duo behind its conception

To sit down with RSNO Music Director Thomas Søndergård and Chief Executive Alistair Mackie is to witness first hand the sharp collective minds that are shaping an exciting future for the Orchestra as it emerges from the frustrations of Covid.

Central to their shared vision is ‘trust’. ‘It’s a two-way conversation,’ says Søndergård, who values any opportunity to sit down with his players, listen to their ideas and concerns, and impart his own in return. Mackie, for his part, is fully behind that approach. ‘Every single one of us in this great organisation holds a personal responsibility for shaping its success,’ he believes. ‘Meaningful dialogue is essential in making that happen.’

Such an approach was always in Søndergård’s sights. ‘One of the things I really wanted to do differently, when moving from being Principal Guest Conductor to becoming Music Director, was actually to meet the musicians eye to eye,’ he explains. He initiated these conversations, firstly with individual principal players, but always with a long-term intention of widening that ‘to everyone involved in “the project”.’

‘That’s what happens out there in society. We started doing this here before the pandemic, but when it hit we weren’t even allowed to be in the same room. So we couldn’t continue those talks, which I find so important in terms of actually developing a dialogue about what ensemble playing is, and not just about players coming through the door in the morning, getting through the music, then going back home. The joy of playing comes from the trust that we have together.’

The real test, of course, is how such behind-the-scenes personal development translates into what audiences ultimately witness in live RSNO performances. That’s not a challenge lost on either Søndergård, a former timpanist, or Mackie, himself a former top-ranking orchestral player.

In the forthcoming Season, which marks the midpoint in Søndergård’s second three-year contract as Music Director, the emphasis, he says, will be on moulding the sound of the Orchestra, and the principal vehicle for that will be the symphonies of Brahms, all four of which will feature as a core integral series spread over the latter half of the Season. 

Why this obsession with sound? ‘When I talk to the players we inevitably get round to discussing the things that are really key to the ensemble, and central to that is the quality of the collective sound,’ he explains. ‘For me, Brahms is number one for that, and it so happens that when the pandemic hit, and I realised I was not going to be doing very much conducting, it was to Brahms that I instinctively turned for in-depth study and quiet contemplation.’

Søndergård took the Third and Fourth Symphonies to his seaside home near Copenhagen, where it became clear to him that this was a composer he simply had to revisit. ‘I’d left him aside for a while, but here I was suddenly falling passionately in love with this music. I’d forgotten how beautifully he writes.’

But is there anything new he can bring to a composer that Scottish audiences have plentiful experience of, in a country whose main orchestras have tackled the symphonies from numerous interpretational angles? Views have differed over the years on the appropriate size of orchestra, the quantitative relationship between wind and string numbers, the style of playing (some conductors even prescribing no string vibrato) and such basic defining issues as tempi.

‘This will be no revolution,’ he insists. But it will be a product of serious consideration and informed preparation. ‘I want to present a broader Brahms to our audiences, not necessarily in the way I first conducted these symphonies, which was to adopt a Schumann-like approach with more flow and not so heavy a German tradition. I don’t know if it’s the grey hair, but now I actually want to sink into the music and see if there’s a reason for that luxurious tradition, that expansiveness.’

Søndergård puts Brahms centre stage

If Søndergård’s motives for programming the Brahms are as much about personal choice as about being good for the health of the Orchestra, Mackie is focused on the bigger picture and its strategic justification. ‘I see Brahms as a once-in-a-decade reset for the Orchestra, particularly as a yardstick in recalibrating the rich ensemble sound. The same can be said of Bruckner and Schumann, which also put an orchestra under the microscope in that particular way.’ 

Mackie is also keen to emphasise the excitement and variety of a wider 2022:23 Season where the pre-pandemic scale of performance can be resumed. ‘It’s not just about the Brahms symphonies,’ he says. ‘We open with Thomas conducting Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and the world premiere of David Fennessy’s The Riot Act, which didn’t happen last year due to Covid.’ 

He’s also capitalising on the potential celebrity options a piece like Beethoven’s Triple Concerto presents. ‘We have an all-star team of soloists for that,’ Mackie reveals, rhyming off the dream team of violinist Nicola Benedetti, cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason and pianist Benjamin Grosvenor, two of whom will perform, in the same May programme, a separate piece with the RSNO Youth Chorus. 

Indeed, thinking out of the box is something Mackie believes is essential in ensuring the RSNO maintains its freshness, vitality and edge. And he’s prepared to go beyond traditional orchestral programming patterns and proprietorial grounds to do so. 

It involves capitalising on the investment made last year in adapting the main rehearsal auditorium as a state-of-the-art recording facility for movie soundtracks, and reaching out to smaller, specialist music ensembles in Scotland with offers of creative collaboration, all with a view to increasing the experience, creativeness and versatility of his own players.

When the amazing, multi-talented Jörg Widmann returns in October for the first of two Season appearances, he will perform his own clarinet concerto Echo-Fragmente, postponed from last Season, and written somewhat challengingly for two orchestras: one modern; the other period-instrument Baroque.

‘The intention last year was to make it work by simply dividing the RSNO, but when reprogramming it I thought, why don’t we do this with the real thing? So we’ve brought in the Dunedin Consort to partner us,’ Mackie reveals. ‘That’s given rise to plans for a more extensive three-year partnership we’re now developing with Dunedin.’ 

Other new collaborations are emerging linked to the parallel season of chamber music concerts planned for the new Season, including groups such as the Hebrides Ensemble. Mackie and Søndergård are determined ‘to find a new way’ that will ultimately pay dividends for the RSNO as an artistic powerhouse and for its players.

‘In the long term, we have a vision of a really dynamic group of players, who can do film scores one day, a classical recording the next, while still maintaining top-class live performances at both symphonic and chamber level,’ says Mackie. ‘Then think of the benefits when we take all that quality into schools as part of our educational programme.’

To a great extent the RSNO’s expanding horizons were fuelled, not hampered, by the pandemic. It was well ahead of the game in initiating the online delivery of streamed performances to potentially global audiences. ‘Through Alistair’s insistence, the world now knows so much more about us,’ says Søndergård. ‘We’ve become very proactive at getting things out there, and it’s got to stay that way.’

Again, he turns back to player empowerment, mutual trust, as the fundamental driver of such ambitions, which has played its part in producing so many powerful and moving RSNO performances in recent times. 

‘Often in rehearsals now, I just stop conducting. I don’t need to explain everything anymore. When we played Rachmaninov a few weeks ago I just went into the room and let them play a whole movement without me. That’s when real magic happens.’

(This article is also available in the RSNO 2022-23 Season Brochure. Full concert details for Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Perth and Dundee available at www.rsno.org.uk )

RSNO / Chan

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

It’s very hard to dismiss Russia from our minds at this troubling time, and particularly for music lovers to separate its rich cultural legacy from the hideous bully-boy tactics of its current warmongering leader. Especially when the RSNO’s digital programme booklet this weekend bannered prominently that evening’s Shostakovich opposite the prospect of Rachmaninov two weeks hence.

The fact is, Russians wrote some of the greatest music that exists, some of it composed under the threat of state censure. The existential dilemma was diplomatically dealt with by RSNO principal guest conductor Elim Chan in her carefully-worded introductory remarks on Saturday. Yes, everyone is praying for the people of Ukraine, she said, but we should also remember that oppression is a way of life for the ordinary Russian people. And Shostakovich, himself, operated under punishable Stalinist tyranny.

The harrowing misery that haunts his Cello Concerto No 2 is actually more to do with the later Brezhnev era, written for the great Mstislav Rostropovich in 1966 while the 60-year-old composer was staying in the Crimea. It even uses an Odessa street song as the basis of the central Allegretto. 

Its placement in this programme, however, was more a vehicle for the RSNO debut of popular British cellist, Sheku Kanneh-Mason. That appeared to be the reason for the biggest Glasgow audience attendance for the orchestra since Covid struck, confirmed by those who took to their feet and cheered once it was over.

It was a cool and calculated Kanneh-Mason performance that emerged broodingly, proceeding with grim perseverance via the vivid mockery of the Allegretto to the climactic surges of the final moment and its ruminative solo cello sign-off. Kanneh-Mason and Chan worked seamlessly together, the latter giving Shostakovich’s gnawing, bitter percussion writing the hideous prominence it deserves.

In fact, it was the orchestral performance that provided the essential electricity, Kanneh-Mason’s visible reserve contradicting to some extent the full intensity and true expressive potential of the solo line. There was minimal gutsiness in his playing, some troublesome intonation in the double-stopping, but its level-headed composure won the day for his fans. A pensive improvised encore satisfied the call for more.

The feistiest playing of the evening had come beforehand, a gripping performance of Grazyna Bacewitcz’s short Divertimento, written by the Polish-born composer in the same year as the Shostakovich concerto, also under Soviet influence. From the very first note, Chan’s alert persuasiveness made its mark, the dry, dissonant energy of the music exploding into action, the RSNO strings maintaining its infectious rhythmic spirit throughout.

As Chan also promised in her opening spiel, the second half of the concert would dispel warring shadows. And so it did, with the RSNO Junior Chorus constituting a truly angelic (split treble voices) presence in Fauré’s sublime Requiem, positioned above the intimate instrumental forces. Chan elicited muted delicacy and precision, unhurried but never laboured, evoking quintessential innocence and hope. 

From the chorus came the uplifting freshness of children’s voices, from soloists Marcus Farnsworth and Katy Anna Hill a matching purity, cushioned by the plaintive wash of Fauré’s restful orchestration. The seraphic In Paradisium transported us, finally, to a better place.

Ken Walton

BBC SSO / Dvorak / MacMillan

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City Halls, Glasgow

Sometimes the periphery of a programme outshines its intended core. There’s an element of that in this Radio 3 broadcast by the BBC SSO under Martyn Brabbins. For at its heart is a performance of Dvorak’s gloriously lyrical and substantial Cello Concerto featuring the highly popular Sheku Kanneh-Mason as soloist, the impact of which is lessened by moments of inconsistent tuning, particularly those high solo reaches towards the end of the opening movement.

That’s a pity, because otherwise there is much in Kanneh-Mason’s performance that shows sure signs of a maturing musical voice. Take the slow movement, where the young cellist colours Dvorak’s plangent lyricism with breathy sighs and yielding subtleties, dispelling the untypical shoddiness of the orchestral opening and finding a warmth and intensity that lingers into the finale. 

It’s an unusual version of the concerto, George Morton’s slimmed-down 2018 arrangement distilling Dvorak’s opulent scoring to chamber orchestra size, much of it to great effect. There’s less tension in the mightiest tuttis, the cello sings through without need to force, all of which contributes to a more easeful appreciation of the music. Brabbins grasps that opportunity, minor skirmishes aside, but the key concern remains those frantic periodic intonation lapses by Kanneh-Mason. 

Wrapped around this mighty concerto is a sublime opener from the pen of American composer Augusta Read Thomas, currently professor of composition at the University of Chicago, and an early seminal work from James MacMillan, Tryst, written for the1989 St Magnus Festival and premiered there by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

Thomas’ Plea for Peace – a short ruminating work commissioned four years ago to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Chicago Pile-1, the world’s first controlled nuclear reactor – is both questioning and reassuring. In this alternative version, which replaces the original vocalised soprano solo with a sinuous interchanging of solo flute, oboe and trumpet against a sumptuous backdrop of stings, an austere Coplandesque simplicity prevails, magically so in this haunting, atmospheric performance.

It’s easy to forget the starting point for MacMillan, given the 30 or so years that have passed since such launchpad works as Tryst or The Confession of Isobel Gowdie, and the sheer prolificacy of his output ever since. Here, in Tryst, is a vivid reminder of the rawer 30-year-old, tangible conflicting influences exploding in abundance, yet the distinctiveness that was to become MacMillan’s maturer style piercing through the underlying turmoil.

So yes, there is jagged-edged Messiaen, factory-like Stravinsky (or are those incessant repetitive rhythms more Kenneth Leighton, MacMillan’s university teacher?), and becalming Brittenesque acquiescence; but there is also a driving, defining intent that knits such discordant elements into a powerfully argued entity.

The point is well-made in this gripping performance, which Brabbins steers with brutal excitability, hushed tranquility and consequential theatricality. A cathartic complement to the earlier Thomas.
Ken Walton

Available for 30 days on BBC iPlayer and BBC Sounds