Festival Music
BBC SSO
Usher Hall
Keith Bruce
four stars
A PROGRAMME for the cognoscenti perhaps, but this concert of "Festival Firsts" – works that had been premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1953, 1960 and 1996, conducted by the composer of the most recent one, James MacMillan – deserved a fuller house, for the single reason of the quality of the performance. At a time when great orchestras from around the world are in town, here was a reminder of how fortunate we are with the quality of the home team.
The MacMillan work, the trumpet concerto Epiclesis, is one of the most exciting in his canon. Beginning with a low note on the violas and cellos as the soloist, Ole Edvard Antonsen, takes the stage, and ending with him taking a three-note phrase off into the wings, its theatre includes plenty to keep four percussionists interestingly busy. Organ-like sonorities emerge from the brilliant orchestration with bowed vibes and double bass harmonics in the mix and as well as the obvious echoes for the brass bands of the composer's Ayrshire youth, there is a jazz sensibility (Gill Evans specifically) in some of the writing in the demanding solo part. Antonsen was a model of measured control and the SSO played their hearts out.
Resonances of jazz scoring are even more apparent in Walton's Second Symphony, which also called to mind, unsurprisingly, the golden age of British cinema in some of its orchestration. The SSO was missing a couple of key players, but the long-established partnership in the clarinets was in full attendance and sounding superb and the hall-filling horns and brass at the finale made the work an ideal partner for the MacMillan.
Tippett's Fantasia concertante on a theme of Corelli, which had opened the evening, showcased the quality of the orchestra's strings, and the playing of leader Laura Samuel in particular.
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