Festival Music
BBC SSO
Usher Hall, Edinburgh
Keith Bruce
five stars
WE SHALL see him on the podium again. but he will be further away. For Donald Runnicles's final concert as chief conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra at the Usher Hall, the platform apron had been extended at the expense of two rows of stalls seats, to accommodate the vast forces required by Arnold Schoenberg for his cantata Gurrelieder. From the opening bars it is immediately clear why he wrote for as many as nine flutes and piccolos, the shimmering sound the players produced only achievable through sheer numbers. The horns, percussion and double bass sections all boasted double figures, and the latter are joined by pairs of contrabassoons and bass clarinets as well as the rarer contrabass trombone and bass trumpet for the fullness at the other end of the spectrum.
Yet this is music that often wears its requirements lightly, and – although four of those horns double on Wagner tubas – often sounded much less grandly Wagnerian than it is trumpeted, with the debt to Richard Strauss more pronounced and Schoenberg's own remarkable journey from Romanticism to serialism clearly detectable. With so much going on, its a mighty ensemble to control, Runnicles working from a score the size of a kitchen table, and a real challenge for a vocalist to make an impression over – one that Scots mezzo Karen Cargill rose to majestically. For her narrative as the Wood-Dove, she commanded the stage with captivating musical authority.
Cameos from Anthony Dean Griffey and Iain Paterson were also impressive, and Anja Kampe's Tove and Thomas Quastoff's own story-telling Speaker characterfully bracketed a performance where tenor Simon O'Neill has the toughest task, railing against the Almighty, as bereaved king Waldemar. Making a huge impact, not just in numbers but in dynamic tonal quality, the Edinburgh Festival Chorus brought another Usher Hall programme, to which they had contributed with such versatility, to a spectacular close. But it was the man with the baton who took the last solo bow before a cheering audience.
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