Festival Music

Rudolf Buchbinder

Playfair Library Hall

Michael Tumelty

Four Stars

IT seems to me, though this ain’t rocket science, more instinct and experience, that Rudolf Buchbinder might be settling into his Beethoven Piano Sonatas cycle in the Playfair Library Hall. Certainly, at his fourth concert on Wednesday, which was extremely well-received, the Viennese pianist was on his game and more at ease than in the earlier recitals. And that was immediately evident in his opening performance of the relatively early Opus 7 Sonata in E Flat.

This sonata, written when Beethoven was just 27, and not a piece so well-known other than in cycle-performances such as Edinburgh’s, or generally to addicts or completists, was really important to Beethoven. For all he could be a grumpy, irritable old/young you-know- what, he was massively-pleased with, and peacock-proud of, this big piece. And Buchbinder did Beethoven, the Sonata and himself proud in a performance where a wind seemed to have blown through the pianist’s approach, freshening up his touch, leaving textures crisper, cleaner and more lucid, his structuring of the music more directional and purposeful, and his pianism less splashy. Just a feeling; but you never know. There was certainly something more confident and coherent in the performance. And the slow movement of the third opus 10 Sonata had a sombre, deadly-serious and intense concentration, whose turn towards a rich, major-key sonority was cathartic. But the coup de grace, with a heady release, followed in the Les Adieux Sonata, a thrilling performance with a few blurs, but racing and rolling over the entire keyboard, with all the little decorative figures flying off the surface of the music like sparks.

Festival Music

The Rake’s Progress

Usher Hall

Keith Bruce

Five stars

In interviews around the launch of his first Festival, Fergus Linehan acknowledged caveats about his programme’s apparent paucity of staged opera, making the financial excuse, but just half way through week one the situation looks rather healthier in reality than on paper, with much still to be heard and seen during EIF 2015.

There was a lot of home-grown talent on stage in this performance of Stravinsky’s mid 20th century masterwork, which was much more than a mere “concert” version. Behind Sir Andrew Davis and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, playing with perfect precision on music that is not seen as their core repertoire, with the crucial wind soloists particularly outstanding, was a “scratch” choir of 36 singers from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, drilled by Timothy Dean into a crisp and dynamic force, and later adding other crucial voices to the narrative.

The witty libretto, by WH Auden and Chester Kallman, needs little in the way of staging when it is as clearly expressed by a chorus and a cast as fine as this. Andrew Staples was an eloquently clear-voiced Tom Rakewell, American soprano Emily Bursan as pure-toned and expressive as Anne Trulove, and Gidon Saks the perfect definition of the Mephistophelean in vocal tone as Nick Shadow. Susan Bickley’s Baba the Turk and Catherine Wyn-Jones (brothel keeper Mother Goose) supplied glorious character studies and Alan Oke put in a scene-stealing turn as Sellem the auctioneer in a scene that was the high point of the evening, even if Bickley spent it under a table cloth, with the RSC singers supplying the bidding.

Not a moment of narrative was lost in performance that could scarcely have been more lucid, but used the bare minimum of costuming and props. Ivan Fischer’s Figaro at the Festival Theatre tomorrow has a tough act to follow.