Music

Scottish Ensemble/Bertrand Chamayou

Music Hall, Aberdeen

Keith Bruce

four stars

BY the midpoint of the renovated Music Hall’s long Reverie weekend of French music, Aberdeen was in full Irish party mode and wearing silly hats for St Pat’s. That contradiction was fine, however, as this “celebration of musical impressionism” was consistently critical of its own parameters, the use of the “impressionist” label itself cheerfully acknowledged as being damned as “idiotic” by Claude Debussy, the composer to whom it is most frequently applied.

His music had begun the event when the BBC SSO repeated the Viva Espana programme with pianist Javier Perianes that Glasgow had heard on Thursday, and it also opened the concert by the Scottish Ensemble on Saturday evening with leader Jonathan Morton’s arrangement of the sole string quartet. With its riffing violas and pizzicato passages, it certainly sounded very French, and mirrored the performance of Rudolf Barshai’s arrangement of the Ravel quartet, with its famous pizzicato movement, which closed the concert – and which the Ensemble recorded for Linn over fifteen years ago when Morton’s wife Clio Gould was leading the group.

Bassist James Manson contributed arrangements of Faure and Ravel that featured cellist Alison Lawrance and Morton himself in leading roles, as well as a version of the piano piece we know as the Golliwog’s Cake-Walk that sounded like a Western prairie theme played by the 12-strong string group. The real curiosity of the programme was the inclusion of five of the Epigraphes Antiques as arranged by French conductor Jean-Francois Paillard made for his own chamber orchestra, which particularly showcased the viola of Jane Atkins in the opening movements.

Pianist Bertrand Chamayou contributed an equally thoughtful programme on Sunday afternoon, which made a convincing argument for Robert Schumann as a proto-impressionist with the wonderful sequence of flowing ideas that is Carnaval following the more prosaic but melodic Blumenstuck. Chamayou’s recital continued to demand as close attention after the interval with Ravel’s Miroirs, dedicated to his fellow artistic mavericks, Les Apaches. The Hispanic fourth movement is close kin to the Bolero, and the reflective mood of the Valley of the Bells that ends the piece was followed by a Saint-Saens sequence that began with his evocation of the bells of Las Palmas.

It was Debussy who had the last word though, when Chamayou encored with – what else? – Clair de lune.