Music

BBC SSO/Dausgaard

Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Keith Bruce

five stars

THE MUSIC played may have covered a very specific era of French composition, but there were echoes of nearly half a century of Scottish music-making to be heard from the stage of the Usher Hall on Sunday afternoon.

The soloist for Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand was the composer’s fellow Basque, Bilboa-born veteran Joaquin Achucarro, 86 on the first day of this month and last heard in the company of this orchestra at the Usher Hall on March 8, 1971. The conductor for that live broadcast on BBC Radio 3 was James Loughran, on the eve of his departure from Scotland to succeed Sir John Barbirolli at the Halle in Manchester. He would return three years later, for the debut concert of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and by chance the SCO provided both the leader of the basses, Nikita Naumov, and the cor anglais of Rosie Staniforth, whose solo playing was essential throughout the afternoon, from the opening bars of Nuages, the first of Debussy’s Nocturnes.

With 17 young women from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland providing the wordless vocals for the closing Sirenes, this was the first evidence of the emphasis conductor Thomas Dausgaard would put on dynamic control throughout a range of Debussy’s orchestral music. The ballroom abandon of the central Fetes section was the most freewheeling release by way of contrast.

After the interval, principal flute Charlotte Ashton opened the Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune in breath-catching sotto voce fashion, and that control was also evident in the restraint of the second violins later, in a reading that was all about swell and space. As with the Nocturnes, Dausgaard made clear distinction between the three sections of La Mer where the performance seemed designed to emphasise the separate voices of harps, solo trumpet, piccolo and percussion as ingredients of the ensemble sound.

Ravel’s concerto lays out its lower register materials at the start, with contra-bassoon, bass clarinet and Naumov’s string basses, before the piano steals all the attention with the jazzy chords of the faster material. As the work unfolded, the conductor was obviously attentive to his experienced soloist in matters of tempo, particularly in the build-up to the dramatic finale.

ends