The Scottish Chamber Orchestra musicians have been rewarded for a sensational season with very good sales for the closing week of concerts, and that was especially good to see and hear in Perth, where a superb programme could be enjoyed in what is the finest acoustic in which to appreciate their playing.
Proving once again that nothing is beyond the SCO’s range, Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev’s programme bracketed two Ninth Symphonies around the singular character of Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No 1.
The piano soloist for that was Steven Osborne, a musician of similarly eclectic capabilities, but ideally matched to this mercurial work. He was teamed with the solo trumpet of Aaron Azunda Akugbo, reflecting the origins of the work as an abandoned Trumpet Concerto.
Scored for a string ensemble, and benefitting from the augmented sections required for the symphonies, it is a strange but beguiling work, incorporating quotations from Beethoven and Haydn, and hugely virtuosic for the pianist. That was the composer himself at the work’s premiere, and it is not hard to hear his day-job as a movie-theatre accompanist in much of the writing.
It was preceded by the same composer’s Symphony No 9, one of his briefest, and less frequently heard than many of his longer works. That’s a pity, because it is a very colourful piece and the Allegro first movement makes a lively concert-opener, even if its frivolity was not what Stalin expected as a celebration of victory in 1945. Emelyanychev set a pacey tempo that didn’t deny the hints of music-hall about the score and maintained a lightness of touch in the performance.
After a robust solo from guest leader Sini Simonen, the scoring moved on to feature first clarinet Maximiliano Martin and principal trumpet Peter Franks before bassoonist Cerys Amrose-Evans had the lion’s share of the limelight from the Largo into the closing Allegretto. All were on top form, and, with some terrific pizzicato passages from the low strings, the orchestration was always intriguing and beautifully clear.
That set the template for a superb account of Dvorak’s Symphony No 9 “From the New World” after the interval. If the Perth audience had been enthusiastic for music that was probably unfamiliar to many, they were about to be blown away by the interpretation of a well-loved work.
As they had been placed for the Shostakovich symphony, four basses were centre-stage, high at the back of the platform, the four horns on their right and trombones and tuba to the left. The strings were augmented to 18 violins and six each of violas and cellos. This was a big SCO, but still far short of symphony orchestra size and the winds were as usual, with oboist Katherine Bryar doubling on cor anglais for the Largo and first flute Andre Cebrian also playing piccolo.
If Shostakovich 9 is a compact symphony, albeit in five movements, here was a deliciously compact reading of Dvorak 9, the dynamic accuracy of the strings under that slow-movement cor anglais tune utterly mesmersing. Emelyanychev brought such finesse from the string players that it couldn’t help but draw as much attention as the composer’s best-known melody.
The rhythms of the Scherzo, be they Native American or Czech, were as precision-tooled and, indeed, every gleaming detail of Dvorak’s masterpiece shone as if being played for the first time in what was an unforgettable reading of an old war-horse of the repertoire.
These season-ending performances, in Perth, Edinburgh’s Usher Hall and Glasgow City Halls have been dedicated to the memory of viola section stalwart of over 30 years, Brian Schiele. In the programme, 10 of his colleagues, past and present, share memories of his character, musicality and generosity. It is another example of the SCO doing things properly, but it was the music-making of the orchestra that really did him proud.
ENCORES from the catalogues of jazz piano masters, often in his own transcriptions, have long been a feature of the practice of Linlithgow’s international classical piano star, Steven Osborne. In this recital that side of his musical personality was given free rein in a duo with the alto and soprano saxophones of Martin Kershaw.
The recital began, however, in more familiar solo piano mode, with a first half “based around the waltz” presented in informative and witty style for Osborne’s home crowd. That meant a very thorough explanation of the narrative of Schumann’s theatrical Papillons and a fascinating sequence that began with a plangent Gymnopedie No 3 by Eric Satie melding into Lily Boulanger’s D’un Jardin Clair.
The pianist’s mother, who lives in Linlithgow, cast a long shadow over the evening, her absence explained, if I understood correctly, because her philatelic expertise was required elsewhere. It was a jewellery box she owned that explained the young Osborne’s early enthusiasm for Anatoly Liadov’s A Musical Snuffbox, but more crucially her antipathy to jazz that partly prompted her son’s mission to explain it to a classical audience.
In his solo set it was Bill Evans’ Waltz for Debby and Osborne’s transcription of a live performance of Gershwin’s I Loves You Porgy that introduced the music, before the rollercoaster-ride that is Frederic Rzewski’s Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues, a composition filled with socialist protest song anger that embraces industrial noise as readily as any recognisable style of music.
After the interval, Osborne was joined by jazz saxophonist and stalwart of the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra Martin Kershaw for a duo set that, apart from Kershaw’s ballad reading of Someday My Prince Will Come, primarily featured arrangements by Osborne.
The pianist was at pains to stress how Kershaw had brought the required jazz sensibility to their rehearsals, but it was notable that Osborne was mostly playing from memory (as he had performed the first half) while it was the improvising saxophonist who had a music stand.
There was familiar ground in the music of Duke Ellington and Jerome Kern – the pair swapping 8-bar phrases in All The Things You Are – but esoteric choices as well, including a version of Will Stratton’s Tokens, the opening track on the American singer-songwriter’s acclaimed 2021 album The Changing Wilderness, and Scots saxophonist Rob Hall’s Across the Sound, from his 2005 set with pianist Chick Lyall, The Beaten Path.
If that tune is punningly titled, it was nothing to the rhythmic mayhem Osborne and Kershaw went on to create in a singular version of Gershwin’s perennial I Got Rhythm.
The bold choice of encore, on the day Ireland had thwarted the Scots at rugby, was another Osborne arrangement, of the altogether gentler Londonderry Air.
Keith Bruce
Steven Osborne and Martin Kershaw play in Dundee’s Marryat this evening and then tour to Peebles (Thursday) and Nairn (Saturday).
ROBERT Schumann’s Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood) are open to interpretation, and it was emblematic of the fascinating programme Steven Osborne debuted to open the 10th birthday edition of The Cumnock Tryst that the pianist chose to offer a brief guide to the 13 short pieces verbally before he played a note.
Whether they are simply a wistful adult view of childhood or contain a deeper psychological picture of the composer, it was an invitation to sit up and tune in to the recital this most thoughtful of players had structured.
Crucially, the set contains at least two melodies well known beyond their original context, and that set the tone: some top tunes, masterly keyboard technique and a sequence of choices that engaged the brain as well as the heart.
The earliest piece followed, Bach’s Jesu, joy of man’s desiring. It too has a rich back-story, becoming especially popular in the mid-20th century performances of Myra Hess. Here it was immediately followed by Lumen Christi, composed in 1997 by our festival host, Sir James MacMillan. His use of a liturgical Easter chant in the brief piece sounds a little like a musical box, and after we had heard a sparkling Prokofiev Prelude we returned to that idea with the Musical Snuff Box composed by Anatoly Liadov, a composer every bit as troubled as Schumann.
That lovely miniature ends like a musical box in need of winding, and Osborne followed it with a third Russian, Rachmaninov and his unmistakable flamboyant signature arrangement of Fritz Kreisler’s Liebesleid.
There ended that distinct section, before a time-shift to the sequence that followed, perhaps more eclectic superficially, but no less carefully thought-through, and clearly all close to the performer’s heart.
Beginning with keyboard studies on Scottish Folk Tunes by Osborne’s contemporary at St Mary’s Music School, James Clapperton, it visited the catalogue of Judith Weir with her 2017 piece, Chorale for Steve (remembering American composer Steve Stucky), before seamlessly moving into jazz mode.
Playing three of his own transcriptions of recordings of improvising, with a fourth as an encore, Osborne was in territory he has made his own, but here given welcome sustained exposure. Keith Jarrett, unsurprisingly, featured large, his My Song – one of his loveliest melodies – opening the sequence, and, in the encore from his Vienna Concert album, closing it.
In between Osborne “became” two more very different and distinctive jazz pianists: Bill Evans playing Gershwin’s I Loves You Porgy and Oscar Peterson doing his Art-Tatum-on-speed thing with the very early James Hanley jazz standard, Indiana.
45 years ago, when he was 53, British jazz pianist composer and band leader Stan Tracey recorded a fine album of solo piano music which he wryly entitled “Hello Old Adversary!” At the same age, Steven Osborne’s relationship with the Steinway grand is more like that between Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer – and what fabulous fun they are able to have together!
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.
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.
With the programme brochure boldly trumpeting the word “Mahler”, the intention was clear – the intended focal point and mighty peroration of this BBC SSO season opener was to be Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. That it emerged as the least exciting event in a long evening didn’t so much lead to overall disappointment – though as such it defied expectations – as throw the spotlight onto a side of SSO conductor Ryan Wigglesworth that is absolutely his forte.
This was the Scottish premiere of his own Piano Concerto, written originally for the 2019 BBC Proms, and played in this instance by the unshakeable Scots pianist Steven Osborne. It was the one moment in Thursday’s concert where the stars fully aligned. Osborne, it goes without saying, commanded the stage with a performance that magically fused the music’s glistening fragility with its expansive climactic peaks. The SSO, responding to Wigglesworth’s natural mastery of the score, offered its own multicoloured insight. In total, the experience was breathtaking.
The most touching aspect of this performance was its detailed sensitivity. The writing is beautifully concise, precise and tantalisingly understated. It was like that from the offset – elemental motifs pithily suggested by the orchestra, taken up by the pianist and jointly toyed with in an opening Arioso notable for its alluringly poetic journey.
Even in the Scherzo, where Wigglesworth explores a more austere, lightly modernist sound world, the assimilation of microcosm and macrocosm was deftly fulfilling. The Notturno, playing ghostly polytonal mischief with a Polish folk melody (think Lutoslawski), and running straight into the final Gigue, maintained its volatile intoxication, ultimately dissembling into a valedictory piano solo.
What came before was also something of a discovery, the Heroic Overture by Johanna Müller-Hermann. She lived and worked in Vienna at its fin-de-siècle height, clearly conscious of the prevailing winds of stylistic change. In this stormy overture, one eye is on the turbulent excesses of Richard Strauss, the other looking tentatively at the new revolutionary order of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. Wigglesworth recognised that in a solid but sensuous performance, ripely and robustly delivered.
If all that ought to have been the perfect set-up for Mahler Four, the outcome was less impressive. Wigglesworth presided over an unsettled opening, his tempi changes unconvincing, in some cases awkward. What he did achieve from the SSO in the second movement was clarity of texture, but stodgier moments – in relation to orchestral tone – killed the magic.
Even in the slow movement, often exquisite with shafts of timeless beauty peeking through, there was still a sense the conductor was painting by numbers, and by the time we reached the finale and its sublime Das Himmlische Leben for solo soprano, any hope of achieving the truly sublime had dissipated. Soloist Sally Matthews did not seem entirely comfortable in this instance, her delivery unfocused, periodically insubstantial.
It made a long concert seem longer, which begged the question, why play an encore? The applause had all but died down, and many were already leaving the hall when Wigglesworth announced “more Mahler”. It was an error of judgement.
After 12 days of world class music making, a star-studded procession of international stars, everything from opera to symphonic, choral and chamber music, an impressive 82% box office of which 30% were new attendees, regular visitors from as far afield as Washington DC, and an Indian summer to boot, the Lammermuir Festival came to a thundering close with a potently optimistic programme by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra of Tippett and Beethoven.
Again, there wasn’t a seat to be had in the sizeable nave of St Mary’s Church. The palpable buzz was reflective of a communal warmth, friendship and exceptional quality of music-making that has embraced this 14th, and unarguably the best, Lammermuir Festival ever: an event Scotland, East Lothian, and the powers that govern this country ought to be immensely proud of.
Yet, as we reported last week in VoxCarnyx, this is a Festival that Creative Scotland unbelievably withdrew its funding from at the eleventh hour. As you’d expect from Lammermuir’s co-directors James Waters and Hugh Macdonald – two of the most skilled, experienced and globally respected classical music impresarios in the UK – the news was greeted with disbelief and puzzlement, but also a dogged determination to overcome the odds.
In a brief speech before the final concert, Waters acknowledged the goodwill and support that had been forthcoming, stating “a determination to run a campaign to maintain the festival, to find a way of securing the funding of a festival we have grown together.” He even announced proposed dates for 2024.
With that, Festival Patron Steven Osborne took his place at the piano to perform Tippett’s Piano Concerto, a work whose combination of subliminal magic and robust Beethovenian rhetoric perhaps reflected our prevailing thoughts – music’s ability to apply utopian diversions to the grounded reality of everyday life. A metaphor, perhaps, for the incalculable value of such threatened events.
Osborne was magnificent, his tried and tested mastery of Tippett’s elusive language – there’s no better testimony to this than his Hyperion recordings – colouring this performance with a vital luminescence and mind-blowing virtuosity. His interaction with the SSO was as instinctive as it was authoritative, those moments where the piano is encased within a toy box world of ethereal celeste and fluttering woodwind exquisitely enhanced by the spacious acoustics. The preternatural world of Tippett’s opera The Midsummer Marriage, written around the same time, is never far away.
Neither, though, is the inspiration the composer himself declared came from Beethoven. It was there, without doubt, in the tumultuous surges that inhabit and shape the outer movements, but also in the intertwining lyrical threads – every one of them surreally definable as Tippett – that inform the structural flow, especially in the central slow movement.
SSO principal conductor Ryan Wigglesworth supported Osborne’s mindset well, eliciting lustrous empathy from his players. If the slow movement fell short in achieving a genuine tranquillo – Wiggleworth’s direction favoured a more restive lamentation – the rest was a triumph of transcendent rapture.
The concert ended with Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, and a performance that didn’t hang about, giving it the necessary vigour and clarity to succeed in such a diffusive environment. There were superlative moments from the orchestra – the brooding basses in the Funeral March, the sky-bound horns in the Scherzo, golden woodwind solos, and the strings meaty and resplendent throughout.
As a whole, Wigglesworth engineered a purposeful and ultimately exhilarating reading. Not every tempo felt rigidly stable – he has a tendency to add spasmodic flicks to his beat that audibly impact on rhythmic discipline – but it was a version of a visionary, revolutionary symphony that celebrated its most profound and affirmative qualities. And, needless to say, Lammermuir’s.
Some end-of-term concerts are grander than others, and this one, in terms of its participants and musical content, was certainly top of the class. Featuring an orchestra that teamed the current cohort of students with alumni whose schooldays ended as long ago as the early 1980s, under the baton of cellist, teacher and leader of the Hebrides Ensemble Will Conway, and a choir that involved the entire school singing a new work by Sir James MacMillan, the star soloists included a trio for Beethoven’s Triple Concerto of violinist Colin Scobie, cellist Philip Higham and pianist Steven Osborne, all former pupils.
Yet there was a sense that the event needed to be grander than it turned out. It felt constrained by the dimensions of the venue, both physically and aurally, and the occasion – the Golden Jubilee of the establishment of St Mary’s as a proper academic establishment for the training of young musicians – seemed worthy of a bigger bash. The long saga of the school’s ambition to move from its present cramped accommodation in Edinburgh’s West End to a redeveloped Old Royal High School on Calton Hill, has perhaps taken its toll. Although that development is now on track, it is probably unlikely that even the youngest of the present pupils will still be around to see the move.
Nonetheless, St Mary’s cannot be accused of losing sight of the music in the course of embracing its bold building scheme. That campaign has been soundtracked by The Seven Hills Project, which commissioned seven composers to write a diversity of pieces, the common thread being new verses, themed on Edinburgh’s seven hills, written by Alexander McCall Smith. The 50th birthday commission was the new MacMillan piece, setting George Mackay Brown’s calendar poem The Flute in the Garden.
It is a challenging sing for a youth chorus, in which the orchestra is very much an equal partner, and the flute of the title a crucial voice. The loveliest moments occur, appropriately, in the summer months, with instantly recognisable evocations of the sounds of nature. It is not a long work, but surely one that other ensembles, vocal and instrumental, will be keen to get their teeth into.
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise was a well-chosen work to follow the new piece, although also a tall order for young players, who rose splendidly to its challenges and enthusiastically added the required vocal punctuation. The concluding bagpipes appeared from the back of the hall in the hands of Brighde Chaimbeul, more usually a virtuoso on the bellows-powered smallpipes, and rarely seen playing standing up, never mind making a pacing entrance.
The concert ended with another world premiere in Judith Weir’s 50 Happy Bars, a measured fanfare/coda that revealed itself as an orchestration of the world’s best known birthday melody.
The first half of the programme had begun with the only piece that really suited the scale of the Queen’s Hall – Aaron Copland’s Quiet City. Conway’s small string ensemble was flanked by the two guest soloists – trumpeter Aaron Akugbo and the cor anglais of Katherine Bryer. As a piece it may have outgrown its theatrical origins, but it was the precision of this performance by all involved that made it such a good place to start.
The Triple Concerto, on the other hand, did seem a squeezed into the space, an impression amplified by an orchestral sound that was initially more (late) ‘Beethoveney’ than the work really wants. What was fascinating, so soon after hearing Benedetti, Kanneh-Mason and Grosvenor play it with the RSNO, was the very different approach of Scobie, Higham and Osborne. They were no less communicative as a trio, but there was no question that Higham had the leading role.
With its programming including a concert staging from Scottish Opera as well as music performed by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the Royal Northern Sinfonia and the BBC SSO, Lammermuir Festival has outgrown any impression of it as a showcase for small-scale chamber music in pretty East Lothian churches, although it is that as well.
All of its dozen venues bar one, Garvald Village Hall, still fit that description, but Dunbar Parish Church has joined St Mary’s in Haddington as capable of accommodating larger ensembles and performances – most recently April’s community opera Catriona and the Dragon. Just as Lliam Paterson’s work demonstrated the range of Lammermuir, the September Festival runs from a first Scottish performance of Richard Strauss’s late opera Daphne to an enticingly diverse sequence of solo and duo recitals.
They include this year’s Artist in Residence, harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani, playing Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier as well as more recent music pairing his instrument with live electronics. Both JS and CPE Bach feature in his recital with violinist Antje Weithaas and then in a concert with the SCO.
The box office violin and piano partnership of Alina Ibragimova and Festival Patron Steven Osborne play Debussy, Prokofiev and Part, and Osborne returns a week later to close the Festival with the SSO and Ryan Wigglesworth, playing Michael Tippett’s Piano Concerto alongside Beethoven’s Third Symphony. A duo of tenor Nicholas Mulroy and Ryan Corbett on accordion promises a programme ranging from Monteverdi to Joni Mitchell.
Return visitors from last year include French string quartet Quatuor Agate and the NYCOS Chamber Choir and other chamber music ensembles include a debut from international group Spunicunifait, playing Mozart (whose made-up word gives them their name), and three concerts by Kaleidoscope, whose Tom Poster and Elena Urioste will also be revisiting their Juke Box lockdown selections, live.
The Maxwell Quartet begin a three-year association with Lammermuir, working with baritone Roderick Williams and pianist Christopher Glynn in the second of their two performances, and Dunedin Consort continues its association with soprano Nardus Williams in a concert of music by women composers of earlier years.
With Fretwork and Gesualdo Six celebrating the 400th anniversary of William Byrd in St Mary’s, Rory McCleery’s Marian Consort and historian Lizzie Swarbrick combine forces to celebrate the venerable venue and its musical heritage on the festival’s first Saturday, marking the 50th anniversary of the restoration of the building.
Lammermuir Festival runs 7-18 September. General booking opens on Friday.
YOU have to have been a follower of Scotland’s national orchestra for a great many years to recall the RSNO’s last run of concerts at the City Halls, the current return there necessitated by Glasgow City Council’s rather unexpected finding of funds for the refurbishment of the Royal Concert Hall.
Had the RSNO management known that was coming, the season’s programme may have been shaped differently. However, it transpired that the last concert conducted by Hong Kong’s diminutive and much-loved Elim Chan as the orchestra’s Principal Guest Conductor was transplanted to the Merchant City, while the same programme – a big colourful opener by Anna Clyne, a Mozart concerto with pianist Steven Osborne, and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony – would surely have sold out the larger hall.
A quart in a pint pot it may have been, but Chan’s last hurrah was an evening crammed with delights. Clyne’s This Midnight Hour has nothing to do with either Thelonious Monk or Wilson Pickett but rather the imagery of Jiménez and Baudelaire in their musical poetry, and the specific character of the strings in a contemporary French orchestra. The RSNO strings, especially the violas, had some tricky stuff to play, but the conductor clearly relished the huge palette of colours that Clyne, characteristically, calls for. The composer is an orchestrator par excellence, and the details in the percussion parts and specific deployment of the trumpets make for a terrific fun piece.
Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 12 is the middle one of three he wrote for the Viennese market when the newly-wed composer settled there in the 1780s. There is a tribute to the recently-deceased Johann Christian Bach, the “London” Bach, whom Mozart had met as a child, in the central slow movement and that was the focus of Osborne’s reading of the work, which was quite firm and precise in its outer sections, and intensely emotional, and a long way from languid, in the middle.
There was a much smaller RSNO on stage, but the pianist’s spare approach to the music might have been reflected in further reduction in the string numbers, particularly in a hall of this size and for a work its composer undoubtedly saw as chamber music.
Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 5, on the other hand, was intended to be a work of scale, even if Tchaikovsky was plagued by self-doubt at the time. Although it ends with a huge resounding rebuttal of its “Fate” motif – first heard in first clarinet Timothy Orpen’s lower register statement at the start – most modern listeners have found that bold finish unconvincing, a judgement perhaps coloured by the “Pathetique” Sixth Symphony that followed. Chan seemed to take the work more at face value, and the orchestra players – not excepting the guest principals in key positions – gave her big, generous performances in return.
There was a small presentation to the conductor by leader Maya Iwabuchi at the start of the concert, and Chan had dressed very stylishly for the occasion. As popular with audiences as she clearly was with the musicians, she will be much missed as her career focuses increasingly on the US as well as continental Europe.
It may say something or nothing about wider changes in society, but it is a paradox that music written by Brahms for the intimacy of the domestic salon now needs the well-funded platform of an international festival to be heard.
For most of us, the EIF’s morning Queen’s Hall concert series is as close as we can be to the atmosphere the composer and Clara Schumann would create for the first performances of his two sets of Liebeslieder-Walzer.
At the piano here were two of Scotland’s finest players, Malcolm Martineau and Steven Osborne, their presence the main attraction for a pretty full house. The four singers were from south of the border and, in the case of soprano Madison Nonoa, New Zealand.
For reasons that were unclear, we heard the later “Neue” Liebeslieder-Walzer first, apart from the closing Goethe setting, saved for an encore. That meant the soprano had the prominent solo voice for the first half of the concert – and a very fine one it is too. Her other engagements this season include Handel’s Acis and Galatea and Maria in West Side Story and that gives a good indication of the tone and precision she brought to Brahms. She also combined beautifully in duet with alto Jess Dandy, whose rich instrument is known and loved by Scots audiences and who was in excellent voice here.
Tenor Magnus Walker was to the fore in the earlier songs (performed second), but we had already heard him to advantage in the fickle Ich kose suss mit der und der. Bass William Thomas had an early solo moment with Ich swarzen Augen, but was more often in a supporting role. It was as an ensemble, for which they had presumably had little rehearsal, that the young singers really impressed, their balance consistent even with some brisk tempi set by their accompanists.
On either side of the interval Osborne and Martineau added two classics for four hands, some of the best known piano music in the canon. Ravel’s fairytale settings, Ma Mere l’Oye, went on to orchestrated life, but are exquisitely colourful and technically precise in their original form. The pianists in the hall are perhaps more likely to keep a lasting memory of Schubert’s Fantasie in F Minor, surely the most famous work for four hands and given an utterly spell-binding reading. The way the work unfolded, with its recurring anguished melody and climactic fugue, was absolutely masterly.
Conductor, pianist and organist Wayne Marshall (pic Charles Best)
The home team of musicians were out in force at the Usher Hall later, with a large edition of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra that included a sprinkling of players from the RSNO as well as well-known freelances in prominent roles.
Continuing a relationship with EIF after last year’s A Grand Night for Singing, Wayne Marshall was on the podium and, initially, at the keyboard for a programme of American music that began with Rhapsody in Blue and ended with the “Symphonic Picture” arrangement of Porgy and Bess by Robert Russell Bennett. I don’t much like the latter, and Marshall’s approach to Rhapsody was idiosyncratic – good and pacey but with long, meandering cadenzas by himself.
A well-filled auditorium loved it though, and especially enjoyed his encore variations on I Got Rhythm on the Usher Hall organ. In between were early works by Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland: Fancy Free and El Salon Mexico set both composers on their paths to popular success in the USA and are important to hear, but I missed the crisp beat and dynamic control a conductor like John Wilson would have brought to the task.
When co-leader Sharon Roffman has directed a conductor-less RSNO in recent seasons, revelatory things have happened, with Beethoven her usual co-conspirator. That was once again the case in Glasgow on Saturday night, and the hall itself was one of the beneficiaries.
The acoustic of Lally’s Palais, as it was christened when the city’s then Provost drove its completion to crown Glasgow’s year as European City of Culture, has always been contentious. Rarely have I heard it sound so well for what was a chamber music approach by symphony orchestra musicians – and that was despite some intrusive hearing-aid noise from an audience member in the seats upstairs.
When Steven Osborne sat down at the piano to play Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 4 it was apparent from his sotto voce beginning that he and Roffman were on the same page. That intimacy of approach took a little while to develop and it was Osborne’s beguiling playing that drove it – in the Andante second movement, the soloist as relaxed as if he was in the front room of his own home.
By the time we came to the exquisite structure of the Finale – absolutely quintessential Beethoven – the sonic clarity of this shared approach was extraordinary, and quite revelatory for the venue.
That sound-world, produced by players who were all – cellos excepted – on their feet, was replicated after the interval in Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony. Not everyone would concur with Roffman’s introductory assessment of it as “funny”, but the Fourth is certainly “fun”, which is not a word you would think to use to describe either the symphony that preceded it or the one that followed.
In its slow movement there was the occasional moment of ragged timing, but the ensemble quickly pulled itself back into shape, and there was some particularly lovely playing from the winds in the scherzo, with fine solo work from guest principal clarinet Lewis Graham.
The fun came to a head in the Finale, taken at impressive speed and with some very demanding phrases dispatched with elegant poise.
That quality had been evident at the start of the evening as well, in David Fennessy’s Hirta Rounds. Written for 16 string players in four groups, and much more complex than it first appears, it is as haunting as it is technically demanding. Heard out of context, pinpointing its composition within the last half-century would be tricky (it was premiered in 2015) and that only adds to the work’s charm. For most of its 12 minutes, it is difficult to guess at its shape, and yet it arrives at an irresistible conclusion.
On many levels, it was an extraordinarily bold way to begin the RSNO’s new series of concerts, but that was true of the entire programme – one that demonstrated the high calibre of the musicianship in the current membership of Scotland’s national orchestra.
When a couple of ace pianists get together and sound indistinguishably as one, the outcome is pure magic. Not that we needed Saturday’s keynote recital at James MacMillan’s Cumnock Tryst Festival by Steven Osborne and Paul Lewis to discover that. Their recent Hyperion recording, French Duets, is already a testament to their unique symbiosis as duettists. Hearing the same music in the flesh, however, took us to another level.
Osborne and Lewis are serious-minded musicians, Lewis especially, whose brooding stage persona generally conveys an intellectual intensity void of whimsy or idle chit-chat. It fell to Osborne – more comfortable perhaps with audience repartee – to sweeten the load through introductory thoughts and anecdotes, and the odd jokey interchange with the unexpectedly mischievous Lewis.
All of which set a suitably relaxed context for music that variously sang sweetly, touched on the sensuous and exotic, bristled with biting irony, even evoked the subtlest perfumes. Both took it in turns to handle the upper part, not that it made much difference to the outcome. When it comes to music, Osborne and Lewis share the same intuitive sensitivity of touch, melodic shaping and rhythmic nuance.
Applying it to Fauré’s tuneful Dolly Suite they turned this favourite of fumbling amateurs into a masterclass in lyrical ingenuity. Simple on the surface, there are treasures within, melodies that defy expectation, inner thoughts that deserve to be heard just enough to make their presence felt. What a joy to hear these so effortlessly revealed and yet so meaningfully contained within the broadest frameworks.
Poulenc’s belligerent Sonata for Piano Duet signalled a sudden change in delivery, the emphasis now on terse detachment and pounding dissonance, yet mindful of the bittersweet charm that pervades its calmer moments, and balanced neatly by a later performance of Stravinsky’s Trois Pièces faciles, just as edgy and acerbic, but with leaner, sharper textures.
It would hardly have been a representative French programme without Debussy and Ravel, and it was here that Osborne and Lewis really took our breaths away. The sense of mystery and potency of colour conveyed in Debussy’s Six Epigraphes antiques was spellbinding, the contrasting piquancy of the Petite Suite illuminating and jewel-like. Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite seemed the perfect finale, its fairy-tale imagery captured magnificently in a performance that summed up in one the previous triumphs of a great evening.
This year’s Festival music programme, given it’s a semi-outdoor experience, is as much a challenge to the listener as to the performer. So yes, in Wednesday’s lunchtime recital, pianist Steven Osborne no doubt had to acclimatise his own thoughts and actions to a performance space – the gazebo-style tent in Old College Quad – infiltrated by the everyday sounds of midday traffic and screeching birds. But equally, as an audience, we had to assimilate such conflicting stimuli and take what we could from the resulting melange.
I found it strangely invigorating, the urban soundscape adding a risky unpredictability to the usual hemmed-in security of the concert arena. That’s not to say Osborne’s bold programming was ever intended to be an easy, comforting listen. That is never his style. And how could it be, with Schubert and late Beethoven sandwiching the unconventional experimentalism of American composer George Crumb and the frenetic ecstasy of Tippett’s Second Piano Sonata?
Nor did he present these as a serving up of disparate courses. There was overriding structural continuity that allowed one work to play off the other: sometimes made easy for us, as in the uninterrupted shift from Schubert’s plain-speaking Impromptu in F minor, D935 No 1, to the elusive resonance (conveniently opening on a whispered note F) of Crumb’s 1984 Processional, rather like an instant transportation from the real world to the Twilight Zone; at other times through subliminal connections, as in the rhetorical turmoil common to both the Tippett and opening movement of Beethoven’s ultimately tamed Sonata No 32 in C minor.
Osborne’s delivery was one of tempered intensity, which allowed Schubert’s tunefulness to breathe easy within the confines of a taut interpretational overview, and graced Crumb’s growing agitations with a polarity that made haunting sense of its reflective sound world. It was almost impossible to hear the final hushed notes over the gentle circling breeze, but the gestures alone bore an imagined significance.
Tippett’s music has been both friend and foe to Osborne, but these days he is master of its challenges. There is something slightly unhinged about the Piano Sonata No 2, a surface randomness in the feverish juxtaposition of its jousting ideas, which Osborne tamed without losing its essential clarity. Nor did he attempt to make anything more of the curiously exasperated ending than it is what it is – something of an enigma.
Few can beat Osborne when it comes to Beethoven, which he proved yet again in the composer’s final sonata. At the heart of the opening movement, the powerhouse fugue thundered its confident message, answered sublimely in the final Arietta with its all-encompassing variations, during which a nearby butterfly ceased its fluttering and rested motionlessly on the floor as if enthralled. Art and nature as one. Ken Walton
It is not a strategy any sane person would recommend, of course, but the long period without performances at full strength has surely produced an audibly re-energised Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Or perhaps that is to do an injustice to oboist and conductor Douglas Boyd, whose direction of this concert shows that every section of the band is within reach of his eloquent arms.
Nonetheless, it is the wind section that shines brightest in the opening performance of Mendelssohn’s Overture: The Fair Melusine, and in particular the flute of Bronte Hudnott and the clarinet of Maximiliano Martin. With natural trumpets and horns, there is a robust period-band approach from Boyd and an appreciation that the narrative of the daft mermaid story is still a tragic one.
This reviewer is not much given to tears, but the performance by pianist Steven Osborne and the orchestra of the Adagio slow movement of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G brought a lump to the throat. That this achingly melody should have been the last thing Maurice Ravel wrote for these forces is poignant, but the emotional power of the unfolding line – a real challenge for the soloist to express as beautifully as Osborne does here – is all in the notes themselves.
The muscularity that was apparent in the Mendelssohn continues into the first movement’s percussive opening, from orchestra and then piano. This is the richest of early-20th century compositions, full of echoes of dance, jazz and ethnic music, the movement ending as boldly and expressively as it begins. The closing Presto movement goes at full pelt from the off, with Osborne’s lightning work at the keyboard matched by piccolo, E-flat clarinet and impressively zippy bassoon playing. Especially memorable in the online incarnation is the piano’s partnership with the cor anglais of Imogen Davies, given a lovely retro realisation in the vision-mix by film partner Stagecast and director Phil Glenny.
The programme ends with Mozart’s “Paris” Symphony, No 31, and the SCO knows playing Mozart’s symphonies in the way that Rick Stein is worth listening to on cooking fish. This was the composer’s first “full-strength” symphony, new-fangled clarinets and all, even if the instrument is strangely undeployed in the flowing dynamics of the Andantino. The outer Allegro movements were as Boyd’s Mendelssohn predicted, with the timpani-driven march at the start of the finale emblematic of commitment evident across the programme as a whole.
The story goes, told in a radio broadcast by Aaron Copland himself, that the spelling of his family name resulted from the edgy twang of the Glaswegian patois. A Clydeside border official mistakenly took Kaplan – the family name his migrating Lithuanian parents gave when alighting in Glasgow en route to a new life in New York – to be Copland, which it can so easily be when expressed in the Glaswegian tongue.
Copland’s musical accent, in such evocative works as Appalachian Spring and Quiet City, could hardly be more different. There’s no harshness in these contrasting evocations of wide open landscape and urban isolation, just a quietly intense optimism expressed through lucid, transparent colours and purified, fresh air harmonies.
These represented the softer side of this Radio 3 broadcast by the BBC SSO, conducted by Martyn Brabbins, against which the subversive Soviet wit of Shostakovich offered the perfect counterbalance. Two of the latter’s works – the ebullient Piano Concerto No 2, with Steven Osborne as soloist, and the pithy concert suite compiled from his music for Shakespeare’s Hamlet – were the acid content.
If it took a moment or two for the atmospheric layers of Appalachian Spring to bed in, what followed was the very stuff of sentimentalised American pastoralism. But Brabbins never allowed sentiment to over-dominate. The emerging wind solos remained suffused with charm but laced with intent. There was sparkle as well as glow in the vivid folksy references, innocent passion in Copland’s human characterisations, and honest magic in the signature appearance of the famous Shaker melody, Simple Gifts.
The shift to the Shostakovich concerto was all the more incendiary as a result. Short and snappy – it lasts just over 20 minutes – its outer movements are like delirious fairground rides to the sumptuous lyrical calm of the central Andante. Osborne played cautiously with his tempi, relying on disciplined, needle-sharp articulation and feverish insistence to create the thrills. His slow movement, so moodily Rachmaninov, was meltingly luxurious, the SSO equally aglow.
After the interval, in which presenter Jamie MacDougall added a track from Osborne’s superb new CD duetting with fellow pianist Paul Lewis, it was back to Copland and the sublime reflective tranquility of Quiet City, the dreamlike solos of Mark O’Keefe (trumpet) and James Horan (cor anglais) raptly interwoven within Brabbins’ seamless reading.
Shostakovich had the final word, and how bizarre was that for those of us used to the British view of Hamlet? Having written the original incidental music for a 1932 Moscow production by the avant-garde director-designer Nikolai Akimov, whose intent was to turn a tragedy into an absurdist satire, the eventual concert suite retains every ounce of that anarchy.
Ophelia is given the cabaret treatment, the Requiem – complete with Dies Irae theme – reeks of the macabre, as if Brecht’s Berlin of the 1920s has been transported to 1930s Russia. This performance got the translation, and accent, spot on. Ken Walton
Music at Paxton is confident that this year’s summer festival (16-25 July) will play to a live audience. Outlining the 10-day 2021 programme of chamber music centred in the famous Picture Gallery at Paxton House, artistic director Angus Smith said: “We anticipate that visiting Paxton for great music in the stunningly beautiful setting of the Scottish Borders will once again be a relaxing and joyous experience.”
Included in the international line-up of artists are pianists Steven Osborne (who opens the festival with an all-Debussy solo programme) and Imogen Cooper, tenor James Gilchrist, soprano Elizabeth Watts, the Gould Piano Trio, Maxwell Quartet, Concerto Caledonia and Paxton’s ongoing partnership with Live Music Now Scotland, which presents a series of concerts by young Scottish classical and folk musicians.
Gilchrist and pianist Anna Tilbrook perform Schubert’s Winterreise (17 July). Schubert also features in a solo recital by Imogen Cooper (22 July), who teams up the following day with the Maxwell Quartet to perform Dvorak’s Piano Quintet in A. Watts is accompanied by Sholto Kynoch in a programme ranging from Richard Strauss to some of Britten’s fetching folksong arrangements.
Baroque specialists, The Brook Street Band, follow the European trail of Patrick Home (the 18th century commissioner of Paxton House) with music by Frederick theGreat, Bach, Handel and Telemann (18 July). They also present “Mr Handel’s Pleasure Gardens”, the first of the Festival’s family concerts (17 July).
Also for the family, Tracey Renton presents Boogie Beat, an interactive combination of songs, dancing, classical fairy tales and stories for young children, with opportunities after to explore Paxton’s riverside grounds (20 & 22 July).
Among the classical and traditional concerts presented by Live Music Now Scotland before and during the festival are a folk-inspired programme by Sally Simpson (fiddle) and Catrional Hawksworth (17 July), and Northumbrian traditional music performed by Eddie Seaman and Luc McNally (24 July).
Other concerts with local historical resonance include lutenist Alex McCartney’s The Flodden Flag (the original flag, dating from 1513, can now be seen at Paxton House) on 25 July; and Concerto Caledonia’s tribute to the famous Union Chain Bridge that connects Scotland to England across the River Tweed, built just over 200 years ago in 1820.
New for 2021 are a series of online pre-festival talks and four ‘as live’ broadcast concerts available online. General manager Elizabeth Macdonald said: “Whilst the Music at Paxton team is working hard to ensure that we can reopen safely to live audiences in the Scottish Borders this summer, the addition of an online component to the programme is an excellent opportunity for us to connect with a wider audience, both nationally and globally.”
PERTH EASTER FESTIVAL: QUARTET FOR THE END OF TIME Perth Concert Hall
While it’s tempting to compare the enforced incarceration Olivier Messiaen would have experienced as a French prisoner of war in 1940-41, when he wrote the incredible Quartet for the End of Time, to the “imprisoned experience” we’ve all been facing in recent months combatting Covid, it’s also perhaps too convenient.
We’ve at least maintained our basic home comforts; Messiaen and his fellow prisoner-musicians, who premiered the work in 1941, did so on salvaged instruments in the bitter January cold of an overcrowded spartan Stalag VIIIA in what is now southern Poland. Yet the music arising from such adversity is gloriously ecstatic, fuelled by inspiration from the seven angels and trumpets of the Book of Revelation, full of infinite hope and lustrous conviction.
It was a fitting choice of repertoire, then, with which to start this week’s daily series of chamber concerts from Perth Concert Hall, featuring musicians based in Scotland and available to watch on Vimeo via the hall’s own website, or to listen to daily at 1pm on BBC Radio 3. In this single-work opener, pianist Steven Osborne is joined by members of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra: violinist Maria Włoszczowska, clarinetist Maximiliano Martin and cellist Philip Higham.
The visual experience is simple but effective, warmed by a blue-wash backdrop, highly appropriate for a composer who envisaged colour as intrinsic to the textures he invokes. The sound recording is rich and penetrating. Above all, the quality of performance is unerringly virtuosic and expressively profound.
From the calm awakening of Liturgie de cristal to the transcendent acceptance of Louange à l”Immortalité de Jésus, this is a paradoxical 8-movement journey of introspective outpouring. Even the infinite timelessness of Abîme des oiseaux (Martin’s soliloquising breathtakingly magical) and Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus (the unending elasticity of Higham’s cello melody cushioned by Osborne’s gently pulsating chords) bears a mystical effusiveness.
There is, nonetheless, unbridled drama where Messiaen prescribes it: the abrupt violent outpourings that embrace the otherwise mesmerising lyricism of Vocalise, pour l’Ange qui annonce la fin du Temps; the biting unisons, like plainsong on steroids, of Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes; or the sugary ecstasy that defines the work’s ripest climax in Fouillis d’arcs-en-ciel, pour l’Ange qui annonce la fin du Temps, where the richest textures unfold before being quelled ultimately by Włoszczowska’s sublime interpretation of the final Louange à l’Immortalité de Jésus.
Only momentarily – the final bars of the sixth movement – does a slight unhinging of the tight ensemble occur. Otherwise, there’s very little to complain about in a truly gripping performance of a thoroughly awesome piece.
STEVEN OSBORNE / 50th Birthday Concert Wigmore Hall, London
Current circumstances prevent friends gathering for a major birthday bash; but there’s a way round it if you happen to be a highly-respected solo pianist and your close friends also warrant a place among today’s classical music elite.
Thus Steven Osborne and friends were the starry concert party last Friday in an audience-less 50th birthday bash for the Scots pianist, forming part of the Wigmore Hall’s excellent live-streamed concert series, and featuring music chosen by Osborne himself. The outcome was a warm-hearted feast of Schubert and Ravel.
The friends – if you’ve followed Osborne in the many brilliant collaborations he has enjoyed over and above his international solo career – were personally chosen and predictably so: pianist Paul Lewis, the other half of a recently-released duo album with Osborne, the soprano Ailish Tynan, violinist Alina Ibragimova, Lewis’ cellist wife Bjørg Lewis, and Osborne’s own wife, clarinettist Jean Johnson. Their socially-distanced presence was a sequence of duo and trio combinations.
Osborne’s single solo contribution came in the magically impressionistic sonorities of La Vallée des Cloches from Ravel’s 1904-5 suite Miroirs, which he introduced as “an aperitif” to the same composer’s Piano Trio in A minor – a typically modest touch; a typically breathtaking performance.
As for the Piano Trio – the personally chosen favourite around which Osborne planned the rest of his programme – its homogenous warmth summed up the extraordinary musical symbiosis that had thus far distinguished an evening beginning with the intimate salon charm of Schubert’s The Death and the Maiden (Osborne, Johnson and Tynan relishing – as we all are at the moment – the ultimate anticipation of Spring), and the Fantasie in F Minor for piano duo.
In the latter, Osborne and a masked Paul Lewis went for the Covid-safe option of two separate pianos rather than the one-piano-four-hands Schubert intended, but the outcome was one of singular entrancement, an interaction of instant and instinctive ideas, and never once a suggestion that either pianist was going it alone.
But it was that final Ravel which summed up the true nature of this celebration. It was not about noisy prima donna voices showing off among themselves, but rather a cosy respect for the music that defines their lives. The Trio featured the lustrously tasteful violin playing of Ibragimova alongside the equally amenable Bjørg Lewis and Osborne, all with personal flavourings to offer, but always with the common goal of respecting Ravel’s unmatchable ear for instrumental colour.
The story goes that Ravel picked up the opening theme of the Piano Trio from watching ice cream vendors dancing a fandango on the Basque coast. That’s as riotous as this exquisitely tasteful birthday celebration got. No encore, no histrionics, just a quiet recognition by some fine musicians that they were able to share a good friend’s special moment together. Ken Walton
Scots pianist Steven Osborne turns 50 this week. KEN WALTON caught up with him en route to his Wigmore birthday bash
It should surprise no-one to learn that Steven Osborne has chosen to celebrate his 50th birthday this week with a celebratory concert at London’s Wigmore Hall that also features his very closest musical friends and collaborators.
It’s typical of the award-winning Scots pianist not to be grabbing the sole limelight. Osborne, while utterly consummate as a world-renowned soloist, is thoroughly disarming and unassuming as an individual.
Meet him on an Edinburgh street and, like any normal guy, he’ll chat about the weather. Watch him in the concert hall and his persona is an intoxicating fusion of intellectual intensity and unpretentious charm.
As we speak, he’s in the company of his wife, the clarinettist Jean Johnson, and they’re hurtling south on the M6 towards the London concert. “Having my best friends and people I really enjoy playing with there is very important to me,” he says. “Jean comes under both categories.”
In a programme of music by Ravel and Schubert, other participants include soprano Ailish Tynan, violinist Alina Ibragimova, cellist Bjørg Lewis and fellow pianist Paul Lewis. “Sadly, due to travel restrictions, [German cellist] Alban Gerhardt couldn’t come. But it’s a great line up,” Osborne promises.
Another great friend is the Wigmore Hall itself. It’s 40 years since Osborne first played there. Yes, he was only 10 at the time, and the occasion was a pressurised one – competing for a scholarship – but the exhilaration of that moment has remained firmly in his memory. “It was the first time I’d played a great piano in a great hall and was absolutely dumbfounded. At the sound of that very first note I thought ‘what, where have you been all my life?’ I’ve enjoyed every appearance there since. They always have wonderful pianos.”
Also at the age of 10, Osborne transferred from his local Linlithgow primary school to St Mary’s Music School in Edinburgh. “That was like coming home,” he recalls. “I had friends at Linlithgow, but not ones I could really talk to about music. At St Mary’s the atmosphere was wonderful, a feeling that everyone was on the same wavelength.” Richard Beauchamp was assigned as his piano teacher. “ He was very opened minded, generous with his time, so focussed and never superficial. He sent me in a good direction.”
Not that any prescribed direction was ever been foremost in Osborne’s thoughts. He was in no doubt from an early age that playing the piano was as natural as learning to speak. He started lessons at the age of 4. “My parents listened to classical music, but I was more fascinated by the piano we had in the house. As soon as I woke up I went to play it. The trouble was I slept really badly as a kid and was up at 4.30am. My dad would come and put me back to bed. Eventually he stuck a note on the piano saying not to play it before 7.30. It was like torture!”
So yes, the young Osborne was obsessed, but even at college – the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester – future aspirations were not for him. “It might sound dumb, but I really didn’t have any,” he confesses. “I was lucky to have a teacher [Renna Kellaway] whose focus was on the repertoire, then a manager who was always thinking ahead for me in planning terms. They were never part of my thoughts.” He describes his musical journey as “a series of repertoire moments”.
Proof of that lies in a career structured on monumental composer encounters, captured in a discography – now edging to over 30 albums on the Hyperion label – that has journeyed from Messiaen and Tippett (a comprehensive survey that proved as personally exhausting as it was exhaustive) to Beethoven, Stravinsky, Ravel, Debussy and Rachmaninov with snatches of Schubert, Prokofiev, Crumb and others to boot. Most are solo releases; others include the very friends he’s teamed up with for the 50th birthday concert.
But like any genuine musician, Osborne lives for the live moment, which is where the true persona, the modestly probing genius, shines through. Few capture the deep-rooted humanity in Beethoven’s last three sonatas the way he does; few can make the piano repertoire’s most finger-twisting challenges appear so effortless. “I’m generally attracted to music that is very difficult,” he says. “I’m not sure why. Tippett, Ravel and Rachmaninov are all extremely hard.”
Does anything technically tax Osborne? “Rachmaninov has its problems, mainly because I am left handed,” he admits. “My left hand is much stronger than my right, and in Rachmaninov the right hand is always doing so much. All that filigree stuff is not natural to me, so I have to work really hard at it.”
Such determination and the pursuit of perfection have had their rich rewards. Early in his career Osborne won first prize in the prestigious Clara Haskil International Piano Competition (1991), followed by a similar triumph in the 1997 Naumburg International Competition, and featured among the first ever BBC New Generation Artists. The Royal Philharmonic Society bestowed its Instrumentalist of the Year award on him in 2013. These days, he’s as frequent a presence in Scotland, where he was recently the RSNO’s artist in residence, as in the world’s top concert halls. When lockdown started last March he was about to perform Beethoven’s final sonatas at New York’s Lincoln Center.
“That was disappointing,” he says. Like every other performer during Covid, many engagements have disappeared, though he has busied himself learning repertoire for the two remaining CDs that will complete his Debussy series. But the pandemic has not been his main concern.
“Brexit on top of that has been infuriating, especially with [Boris] Johnson saying musicians would have free access to Europe. He was either lying or didn’t know what he was talking about.” Osborne has already experienced the lengthy process involved in applying for a visa. “I spent more than a week getting one for Spain, morning till night, trying to work it out. Nobody knew what you had to do.
“My fear is we won’t be able to do things at short notice, as is often required. I got a last-minute call to go to Belgium recently. I won’t be able to do that now, and all this while European musicians can come over visa-free to the UK? We gave up this right for what? No wonder Paul Lewis is moving to Norway.”
Paul Lewis and Steven Osborne: “a match made in heaven”
Lewis, of course, is part of the Wigmore birthday line-up. He and Osborne recently regrouped to issue their latest duo album on Hyperion, French Duets. It’s a match made in heaven, their performances of Debussy, Fauré (the affectionate Dolly Suite), Poulenc, Stravinsky and Ravel’s delicious Mother Goose Suite characterised by irresistible spontaneity, infectious wit and sparkling bonhomie.
They have known each other for over 20 years. “I first met Paul when we were BBC New Generation Artists,” Osborne explains. “We’re very like-minded.” They also share an indebtedness to the legendary Alfred Brendel. Lewis is well-known for having studied with him, but Osborne also acknowledges the influence Brendel had on his own development.
“I learnt more about characterisation from him than any one; how you make something sound like it’s completely natural. He does it quite a lot by distorting what’s written. It’s so specific; he pulls the rhythm around just to make a particular point. It doesn’t sound self conscious, it just sounds alive. He taught me a lot in that sense: that you can’t just set the metronome going and play in time; that to make music alive you need a lot of ebb and flow. I’ve never heard anyone who does that better.
“I only had one lesson from him,” Osborne recalls. “I think about it quite often, especially in terms of his physical approach to the keyboard. It’s funny, from a distance there’s this very penetrating, singing sound. What he’s doing sounds so crude from very close up, like he’s banging away, yet what he’s doing is going right to the very, very bottom of the keys. I really got a lot from that and it really changed how I played: how you really have to project what you’re saying. It’s easy to underestimate how you need to do that in a concert hall.”
Now at 50, Osborne is every bit his own man, driven by singularity of purpose and confidence in his own immense capabilities. But what are his ambitions for the future? “My immediate concern is just how long it will take people to get back into halls. I’m confident it will happen, but I reckon it may take a year or more. I don’t expect Covid to change the landscape much. Brexit is more likely to do that.
He’s typically circumspect about this musical future. “Honestly, I don’t have a plan,” he insists. “I’ll finish the Debussy project and I’m learning Messiaen’s Des Canyons aux étoiles, which is a pretty massive thing. Beyond that you’ll just have to ask my manager!”
Watch Steven Osborne’s 50th Birthday Concert, available from Friday 12 March 7.30pm for 30 days, onwww.wigmore-hall.org.uk
