Music

RSNO

Centennial Hall, Tuscon, Arizona

Keith Bruce

four stars

IT IS possibly not the greatest insult to Tuscon, Arizona to say that it does not boast the largest and most sophisticated of classical music audiences. The state’s orchestral capital is Phoenix, but Tuscon does boast an impressive large performance space in the Centennial Hall, which often hosts touring musical theatre productions, but also has a well-used onstage shell to convert the vast stage into a concert hall.

The RSNO sold a goodly number of the venue’s 2500 seats for the first date of its US tour with a programme that has a cross-over hit at its heart in Danny Elfman’s Violin Concerto “Eleven Eleven”.

The Holywood composer wrote the concerto with its soloist Sandy Cameron in mind, and she has been, so far, the piece’s sole performer. Elfman met her when they were both working on a show for Cirque du Soleil and the elfin Cameron still looks very much the part, with her mane of curls and body-hugging embroidered top and leggings. If she had flown off like Tinkerbell into the wings during one of the work’s cadenzas no-one would be much surprised.

More to the point, as Elfman recognised, she is an extraordinarily gifted fiddle player whose performance background is always apparent in her gymnastic playing, but never at the expense of the music.

If perhaps just a tad overlong, the concerto is a very fine piece of work, full of 20th century influences - Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Berg and John Adams, to name but four - but still with a clear narrative of its own. Cameron’s violin is amplified, as much for effect as volume, with this performance having the benefit of the composer at the mixing desk, but that too was never a distraction, rather an enhancement of her performance from an audience perspective.

There is a compelling dialogue between soloist and the orchestra’s strings throughout the piece, some robust big band brass in the second movement and sprightly bassoon at the start of the fourth.

That platform for the strengths of the whole orchestra made the concerto of a piece with the rest of the programme, the Seventh Symphony of Sibelius and Fifth of Prokofiev on either side of it. When the latter ended, Scotland’s national orchestra was rewarded with a Tuscon standing ovation.