East Neuk Festival
Scottish Chamber Orchestra/Swensen
The Bowhouse, by St Monans
Keith Bruce
four stars
NOT UNLIKE Dvorak’s “American” Quintet, which was played earlier in the East Neuk Festival, it is debatable how “Scottish” Felix Mendelssohn’s Symphony No 3 really is, but we now hear it as such regardless. And the band’s Conductor Emeritus Joseph Swensen was sufficiently enthused about the prospect of conducting the work to close this year’s event that he flew back from the United States to do so. It is meat and drink to this orchestra, even an edition that lacked many familiar faces, featuring the Hebrides Ensemble’s Will Conway leading the cellos, and - oboes excepted - an entirely freelance wind section, with Jean Johnson in the crucial role of principal clarinet. There were the occasional hesitations in tempi in some of the slower, quieter music, but it was a perfect way to end a festival that had begun with very local talent five days earlier.
Developing talent was also the impetus behind the work that preceded it, Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante, which showcased two products of the East Neuk Retreat for emerging musicians, violinist Benjamin Baker and viola player Diyang Mei. They produced lovely duo cadenzas at the end of the first and second movements and the Andante was a beautiful conversation between the soloists and orchestra in its entirety. There are obvious economic reasons why works requiring more than one soloist are less frequently heard, and they have complexities of balance as well. Those took a little while to be resolved at the start of this performance, the clarity of the acoustic in The Bowhouse being as demanding as ever. That initial glitch apart, the warm tone of the violist, whom I can’t recall having heard before, was well worth seeking opportunities to hear again.
The closing concert began with a composer who wrote little music likely to find a home in this festival, but Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll was a perfectly pastoral way to begin. And a thoughtful audience granted it a respectful pause before the rapturous applause at its end.
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