I HAVE a lot of time for Swiss conductor Baldur Bronnimann.
He's done some fine contemporary work with the SCO. And he's also the conductor who was in charge of an absolutely amazing performance of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony with a student orchestra at the former RSAMD some years ago, a performance which liberated the young players and did some sterling missionary work for Shostakovich's most underrated symphonic masterpiece.
But not even Bronnimann could liberate Hans Zender's leaden arrangements of five of Debussy's glorious Preludes from their casket at Friday night's SCO concert. Zender, in nailing them to the page, has actually created something which amounts to an antithesis of Debussy's free-flowing spirit: Voiles was wooden and devoid of mist and mystery; Les collines d'Anacapri was bereft of its glitter; and Des pas sur le neige ran by the stasis which is at the heart of the piece.
Bronnimann was on surer ground with the first performance of Lyell Cresswell's Triple Concerto for Piano Trio and chamber orchestra, a protean work which declared itself effectively an anti-concerto in that it eschewed the conventional format of soloistic heroics versus the mass of orchestral weight, and the solidity of orthodox concerto structure in favour of a mercurial mix that, in eight short and continuous abstract movements, pitted the principles of animation and action against those of stasis and reflection. With both the Swiss Piano Trio and the SCO in hyper-alert and responsive form through the concerto's eight short breathtaking movements, Cresswell's new concerto bounded off the page.
Bronnimann rounded off a fascinating evening with unusually directional accounts of Takemitsu's How Slow The Wind and Ravel's Mother Goose Suite.
HHH
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