Festival Music
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
Usher Hall, Edinburgh
Keith Bruce
four stars
FOR THE final year for which he is director of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, chorus-master Christopher Bell is having a very successful send-off indeed, with the National Youth Choir of Scotland, which he founded, setting the standard for choral singing as well as youth performance in this Year of Young People from the start, and the adult choir showing it is more than capable of performing the sort of repertoire previously heard from the young voices, or by professional singers. Even Bell cannot have engineered this sequence of events.
The second half performance of Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe here was a big ask of an amateur chorus, which they delivered beautifully. It also requires a large orchestra, but doesn’t really shout about that, with a score that embraces shifts of tone and style. There were a couple of ragged instrumental entries from the CBSO under conductor Ludovic Morlot, and the partnership seemed happiest when luxuriating in the big concert orchestra, or even dance-band moments, in the music.
The other work that had survived the originally-announced programme, before the orchestra’s music director Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla’s pregnancy forced her to cancel her appearance in Edinburgh, was the Scottish premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s recently-rediscovered Funeral Song from 1909. This early work foreshadows the triumph of his ballet scores to come and is undoubtedly of interest, but I’d guess it will not be something we will hear with any great regularity.
In that it could hardly be more of a contrast with the Elgar Cello Concerto, which brought Royal Wedding cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason into the concert. Not only is the work familiar, and oh-so-British, it also has one of the most exposed openings for the soloist, and most listeners will have heard a more confident and powerful one than Friday evening’s. It is not disrespectful of his talent to ask if Kanneh-Mason is yet a the level of appearing as a guest soloist on the biggest stage at the Edinburgh International Festival – and whether it is fair to the development of that talent that he should have had that exposure.
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