“In Katharine Bryan we heard some of the finest flute playing around today”

Editorial Rating: 4 Stars

The RSNO chose interesting, offbeat fare for their Sir Alexander Gibson Memorial Concert on Friday night, by way of complete contrast to what will be an immensely popular Rachmaninov/Tchaikovsky melange this coming week. Good for them, and I am sure that the great man, who brought so much to the RSNO in his extraordinary twenty-five year tenure and yet died at the relatively young age of 68, would have thoroughly approved.

The first piece was not without controversy: Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending transposed for flute by the RSNO’s Principal Flautist, and soloist on the night, Katharine Bryan. This well known work – indeed, it is number one in Classic FM’s Hall of Fame (make of that what you will) – while for some overexposed, is to me almost sacred. I first heard it as a schoolboy played in a concert in Dorchester Abbey in Oxfordshire by one of my peers, Richard Deakin, who went on to teach music at the Royal Academy and found the Orchestra of St John’s Smith Square. An early summer evening by the Thames with the fading sun streaming through the Abbey’s stained glass windows … and the piece moved onto my spiritual and emotional hard drives for ever.

To transpose it to flute had me and a number of others worried. Yet for me, full of reservation, it was a triumph. The warmth and roundness of the flautist’s timbre brought a new dimension to the work outwith the capacity of the violin. Bryan’s playing was exquisite: her control of her breathing in long passages extraordinary, her phrasing superb, her control and precision utterly convincing. So much so that I shall buy the recording. Now there’s a compliment in this age of streaming and downloads.

Composer Martin Suckling came on next to introduce his world premiere performance of our next piece,  The White Road. Interesting as this prologue was, it later became clear  – as our flautist returned  in a shimmering white dress rather than her earlier red version –  that this was a fill in. No matter, it gave the next quite difficult fifteen minutes some context.

Notwithstanding the composer’s aspirations the work essentially was a back and forth between sharp musical bites from the flute echoed by percussion, with minimal brass, wind and string support and unconvincing body bops by the soloist to accentuate the to and fro with little added value from the microtones. Melody went missing until the end of the work and I found it unremarkable. Fairly typical of the modern genre, I suppose, but it really only came into itself at its close.

Our nerves were soothed by Bryan’s blissful rendering of Massenet’s Thais as an encore, accompanied only by harp. Luscious.

Following the interval we were treated to Daphnis and Chloe Suites No’s 1 and 2. This piece is a conductor’s nightmare in terms of its fluidity and apparent lack of time signature, so it would be timely to point out that the baton was being held on the night by Arild Remmereit standing in for the indisposed Peter Oundijan. A fine job he made of it (and for the rest of the evening, too). You never felt the orchestra were out of control and their disciplined playing impressed. The work opened with a flute solo and lo and behold, there was Katharine Bryan again, now in black dress, back in her familiar principal flute’s chair. The Danse Guerriere at the conclusion of the first suite showed real verve and the Lever de Jour opening Suite No 2 was well realised and convincing. Remmereit got everything he could out of the band in the Danse Generale which ended our evening with a – or rather, several – bangs.

So in conclusion,  this was a concert that entertained with the familiar, challenged with new takes on familiar themes, and also with new material. Sir Alexander would have been proud of his orchestra’s playing and in Katharine Bryan we heard some of the finest flute playing around today.

Reviewer: Charles Stokes (Seen 3 January)

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“The RSNO is maintaining an extraordinarily high standard of repertoire and performance”

Editorial Rating:  4 Stars

The RSNO’s 2016/17 season continues apace with intelligent programming and excellent playing. On Friday we also had significant added value inasmuch as we heard not one but two piano concertos, in a splendid celebration of Russian music from the first half of the 20^th century.

The orchestra led off with The Enchanted Lake by Anatoli Liadov. Liadov was an enigma with a somewhat mystical approach to life as well as music, delighted to maintain that “Art is a figment, a fairy tale, a phantom. Give me a fairy tale, a dragon, a water sprite, a wood demon – give me something that is unreal, and I am happy.”  And sure enough, The Enchanted Lake follows no clear story and is an impressionistic portrait of a magical lake populated by all manner of water nymphs and wood sprites. It is a gentle piece that has evocations of Delius’s Walk to the Paradise Garden written some eight years earlier in 1901. The RSNO’s playing was suitably, lyrically, intoned as we settled comfortably in our seats.

We were rapidly shaken out of them by Nicolai Lugansky’s bravura rendition of Prokofiev’s Fifth Piano Concerto. “Nicolai has been coming to us for twenty years” one of the RSNO staffers enthusiastically told me, and it is commendable that this orchestra has such long-standing relationships with star players. Clearly this is reciprocated, because Lugansky learnt the work by heart in a week before the concert.

The work is of mixed quality and rather bitty. Five movements in twenty-five minutes, but only the last two are of any substance. There is far more “music” in the first concerto, a 15-minute work but less slender, which came after the interval. Nonetheless Lugansky took hold of it, easily disposing of its demanding notation, with the orchestra providing enthusiastic support. The fourth movement Larghetto was the most melodic, at least at the start until it built into a strong climax. The fifth, appropriately named Vivo, provided a lively conclusion.

After the interval the indomitable Lugansky appeared again for  Prokofiev’s First Piano Concerto, the more rounded one. This 15-minute tour de force is an object lesson in less means more, and much as I enjoy the other four concerti this one stirs me most. From its confident three chord brass opening in D flat major the piano and orchestra belted out the near frantic theme in unison until the orchestra took off on its own with the soloist following in a series of bravura passages, pausing only for a few minutes’ reflection in the second section of what is really a one-movement work. It was a joyride: taut, together, highly effective orchestral playing under the confident and relaxed baton of Eivind Gullberg Jensen, with soloist Lubansky clearly a master of his art. The theme sang out again when the pace returned in the third section and ended in a blaze of glory with the addition of glockenspiel.

The evening was brought to a close by Rachmaninov’s Third Symphony, premiered in 1936 by no less than Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and by a short head the most recently composed piece of the evening. Rachmaninov was a master of the romantic genre and this work is close to film music, and none the worse for it. However, unlike the utterly romantic Second Symphony with its long melodic lines, this pleasing work is full of thematic variations that never really go anywhere, so you are subjected to a series of treats rather than an enveloping whole. The RSNO were completely at home with it, from the opening cello solo (the first movement is all down to the cellos), through the wistful horn and harp opening of the second, concluding with the zestful Allegro with the orchestra giving everything it had got. This is a more reflective, even introspective work than the second symphony, which nonetheless, and notwithstanding the stature of the second symphony, contains some of the most expressive and romantic classical music ever written.

The RSNO is maintaining an extraordinarily high standard of repertoire and performance, worthy of its pedigree and 125^th Year Anniversary.

Reviewer: Charles Stokes (Seen 4 November)

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