Festival Music
Rachel Podger & Brecon Baroque
St Cecilia’s Hall
Svend McEwan-Brown
three stars
EDINBURGH'S refurbished St Cecilia’s Hall is a delightful, intimate addition to the city’s venues and the EIF has been putting it through its paces this year with its series of early evening small scale concerts. Every venue has its limitations, though, and this was the occasion for St Cecilia’s Hall to reveal that an ensemble as large as string quintet/sextet plus a capacity audience leaves its acoustic bare and unforgiving. Tinder dry, it gave no quarter to Rachel Podger and Brecon Baroque in their pairing of Mozart’s G minor Quintet and (by special request of the EIF) an early 19th century arrangement for string sextet of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante (originally for violin, viola and chamber orchestra). Without any appreciable bloom on the sound, the players could not find a satisfying blend of ensemble and this in turn laid bare any and every awkward turn or flaw. Sadly, there was a noticeable number of these.
On the upside, the sextet arrangement of the Sinfonia Concertante turned out to be quite a find just as soon as you forgot the original and stopped worrying about it not sounding anything like Mozart’s own chamber music. This was no simple case of playing the original music on scaled-down: the anonymous arranger imaginatively redistributed the music amongst all six players to achieve a proper sextet texture. The result was a lively piece of proper chamber music with plenty of dialogue and vitality, and it was tackled with spirit by Brecon Baroque. With its fuller texture it even fared better in that punishing acoustic – perhaps if the concert had taken place in the Queen’s Hall it might truly have flowered.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here