A LONG concert is not necessarily one that accidentally overruns its estimated timing. This ambitious and cleverly devised contribution to Glasgow's West End Festival was deliberately long, a three-part programme with two intervals and a sense of structure that made a potentially fragmented evening of mostly little-known music seem in the end rewardingly integrated.
As its title implied, it was essentially a homage to American music, not at all stuffy in its choice of composers, and disclosing an unexpected bond between Copland's exquisite Emily Dickinson settings and the more popular Broadway sound world of Gershwin and Kern. Sandra Porter, more at ease in the Copland, sang in fetchingly wispy tones, not always quite clearly enough, but with Graeme McNaught as an accomplished accompanist.
Into this context, seven of Leonard Bernstein's little piano portraits entitled Anniversaries were neatly slotted, their moody post-Poulenc idiom sympathetically caught by Gusztav Fenyo. Samuel Barber's four-handed Souvenirs teamed Fenyo with McNaught in a dance suite cheerful and charming, but the emotional weight of the concert lay elsewhere, in Barber's early String Quartet, with the famous Adagio for Strings as centrepiece, and in John Corigliano's Violin Sonata, a productive injection of Stravinsky-like neo-classicism into ideas richly and melodiously romantic.
If Mr McFadyen's Chamber, the recently-formed ensemble who played the Barber, failed to bind its opposing elements into a convincing whole, the gifted young German violinist Susanne Stanzeleit had more luck with Corigliano's disgracefully neglected sonata. Partnered by Fenyo, she conveyed its fireworks and fervour with an arresting intensity of utterance.
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