FRIDAY was an odd day.
Within the space of three hours I baked in the sun, was whipped by a wind from the Arctic and lashed by freezing rain. In the middle of this climatic madness was an oasis of sanity as the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland staged a beautiful concert of French music for woodwinds: music of Mediterranean warmth and colour.
The most striking feature for me of the concert given by the students, present and graduate, was that, with the exception of Poulenc's Sextet For Piano And Wind Quintet, I didn't know a single work on the programme. And what a lovely set of revelations flowed from that, with a gorgeous Bassoon Sonata by Saint-Saens, expertly and effortlessly played by Graeme Brown with the exquisitely attentive Scott Mitchell as pianist: a gorgeous piece; I didn't know Saint-Saens had it in him.
Jacques Ibert's Three Short Pieces For Wind Quintet were gems (I didn't know they existed) in the hands of flautist Carina Gascoine, clarinettist Calum Robertson, oboist Siobhan Parker, bassoonist Ryan Sullivan and the super-restrained horn player Rachel Muir; and nor did I know of Jean Francaix's Five Exotic Dances for alto sax: sultry, Latin-tinged pieces, sexily played by Ross Montgomery.
Then they wheeled out the big guns, including the extraordinary clarinettist Fraser Langton and French hornist Martin Murphy for a dazzling account of Poulenc's Sextet; though even playing of this quality failed to shift my ambivalence about the composer's structuring: a fast movement will always contain a slow section; a languorous slow movement will always contain a fast section. Still, a very good concert.
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