Music
Scottish Chamber Orchestra/Kuusisto
Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh
Keith Bruce
five stars
IT is an oft-used compliment to orchestral conductors to say that they made a score sound as intimate as chamber music. Finnish violinist and director of this superb programme Pekka Kuusisto could, one suspects, create a chamber vibe with the massed pipes and drums on Edinburgh Castle esplanade. As the SCO’s newly-announced Featured Artist for the coming season, there will be a further three concerts to come from this partnership and you’d be very wise to book early on the evidence of this one.
With leader Benjamin Marquise Gilmore, first cello Philip Higham and principal clarinet Maximiliano Martin also soloists, the first half featured the four movements of Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin prefaced by Bartok and interleaved with a movement from Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello, the solo clarinet section of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, and God-Music from George Crumb’s Black Angels. This was a unique and riveting exploration of the music of the last century, with Martin’s dynamic performance exquisite against the rich sound of the ensemble, and violinist Gordon Bragg and guest principal viola Fiona Winning completing the quartet of wine-glass-bowing strings on the Crumb. Kuusisto had introduced the sequence by saying he was agnostic about applause during it, but the truth was that everyone was too rapt to clap until the end.
Biber’s Battalia, the 17th century start of pictorial music, opened the second half, a nonet of strings joined by Jan Waterfield on harpsichord, and a chorus of drunken soldiers offstage, and Kuusisto covered the setting up for a larger ensemble to play Hayden’s Farewell Symphony with some folk fiddle. Here was full-fat Haydn at its most robust, performed like precursor of Beethoven it is. As the band departed by numbers from the stage, horn Harry Johnstone removing his shoes to do so silently, and bassist Nikita Naumov with a flashy solo, the meta-joke was that this was really more of a fond “hello”. Kuusisto encored with another folk tune (“from Sweden, of all places”) and a cheery “See you next time.”
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