Music

Mr McFall’s Chamber

Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

Keith Bruce

four stars

IN another of those delightful coincidences of programming, just a fortnight before Krzysztof Penderecki arrives to direct the RSNO in a performance of his Second Violin Concerto with Anne-Sophie Mutter, Robert McFall’s exploratory group arrived at the Polish composer’s work in the latest installment of its At Home in a Foreign Land recital series.

This concert included at a memorable performance of his piano sextet from 2000 in a programme for which the core quartet of McFall, Brian Schiele, Su-a Lee, and Rick Standley were joined by pianist Simon Smith, Scottish Chamber Orchestra leader Ben Marquise Gilmore and section principals Alec Frank-Gemmill on horn and Maximiliano Martin on clarinet. Early miniatures for clarinet and piano from the same composer illustrated how entrancing his work was at a very young age, but the concert also embraced a much wider palette of Polish music.

Just as original a voice is that of Grazyna Bacewicz, whose Piano Quintet No.2 dates from 1965 and has the keyboard and string quartet constantly swapping melodic and percussive roles. In the end it is the strings that take the lead, however, in a highly entertaining work with memorable pizzicato writing following some singular use of glissandi across the group. Can we hope to hear something of her four symphonies during next year’s fiftieth anniversary of her death?

The Penderecki sextet brought things to a conclusion, each of the musicians revelling in moments of solo feature and Frank-Gemmill required to play both off-stage and with the ensemble. Its material includes specific allusion to Polish tango and on either side of the interval we heard half a dozen of those from the 1930s, in arrangements for the full octet. Here was music from composers with fascinating histories, including the surprisingly Scots-sounding stage-named Fanny Gordon and Artur Gold, who left the comparative safety of London for the Warsaw ghetto and death at Treblinka. Effectively big band music scaled down, with Martin being the reeds and Frank-Gemmill the trombones and trumpets, it was a feast brilliant tunes, some surprisingly familiar, and Gilmore ladling on the vibrato in what was another kind of “period performance”.