Jan Vogler

“Great if you like twelve-tone. Not so great if you don’t”

Editorial Rating:  4 Stars

Combined concerti for violin and cello are relatively rare, and on Friday at the Usher Hall we got two, separated in composition by 128 years. Such was the nature of the new work, however, that it was more like a comparison of the Viennese Salon of the 1890s and the 1930s’ Second Viennese School.

As is his custom, conductor and Director of Music Peter Oundjian gave us an introductory talk alongside cello soloist and this year’s Artist in Residence Jan Vogler. Not unreasonably, the majority of the talk was about the UK premiered work Duo Concerto by Wolfgang Rihm. Rihm was born in 1952 in Karlsruhe and is a professor of composition at the University of Music there. The work was commissioned by the Friends of Dresden Music Foundation to celebrate ten years since the reopening of the Frauenkirche and received its world premiere in Purchase, NY and in Europe in Dresden in 2015. It was written for performance by Vogler and tonight’s violin soloist, Mira Wang. Vogel’s association with the work, and his being the orchestra’s Artist In Residence, explains its choice on tonight’s programme in addition to its legitimacy as a composition.

The work lasts for 25 minutes in one movement. The soloists are in play almost the entire time, and the work has a heavy texture and is written in the twelve-tone technique. “Great if you like twelve-tone”, said Vogler. “Not so great if you don’t”. The work in fact had momentum, good orchestration, and a particularly demanding part for violin soloist Mira Wang. It was, perhaps, down to the limitations of twelve tone that it sounded remarkably similar to Schoenberg albeit composed seventy years later.

Our hardworking soloists carried straight on into the Brahms Double Concerto in A minor. Brahms is the master of melody, and we were into a glorious cello theme just four bars in. Whereas Wang did most of the heavy lifting in the Rihm, this work was Vogel’s and in fact a case could be made for writing out the violin part altogether, taking nothing away from Wang’s fine playing and   interplaying with Vogel beautifully when the score allowed it. The orchestra played with excellent phrasing and balance and were clearly very comfortable in their skin, supporting the soloists with all effortlessly harmonised under Oundjian’s baton.

After the interval we returned for Beethoven’s Symphony No 6 in F major, the ‘Pastoral’. What can a music writer add to the reams that have already been written about this glorious work? Well, you could feel the hall relax as we snuggled into this closing number, the orchestra were on top form, fully rehearsed and sure of foot, and familiarity did not disappoint. One notable difference in interpretation were the strings playing of the first subject in the final movement (Shepherd’s Song), Oundjian holding them back just a little so we could hear more of the supporting wind. He bought them back to the fore before the finale.

And did you know the Shepherd’s Song was used as music in the TV commercial for Lentheric’s Tweed fragrance in the 1960s? Now, you will find that degree of historical research only in Edinburgh49.

Reviewd by Charles Stokes (Seen 3 November)

Go to the RSNO, Scotland’s National Orchestra

Visit Edinburgh49 at the Usher Hall archive.

Sir Roger Norrington
Photo: Alberto Venzago

“Sometimes good things come in small packages”

Editorial Rating: 4 Stars

There was much more to Friday’s excellent RSNO/Roger Norrington gig than met the eye. Of course it was a thrill to be in the hands of the maestro of historically informed musical performance, last seen here at the Edinburgh Festival for his assured and thrilling Monteverdi performances, as well as for the reassurance of an evening’s accessible, if not easy listening, classical music. Yet we got so much more, namely an insight into the deceptively futuristic ahead-of-its-time works of Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy.

The first question one was forced to ask oneself was, “When is a symphony not a symphony?” The initial work, Schumann’s Overture, Scherzo and Finale was originally titled Symphonette and played out in three movements in around 19 minutes. Both Prokofiev and Shostakovich wrote symphonies of lesser duration, the former at the beginning and the latter towards the end of their symphonic canon, so why the name change? In admittedly three movements rather than four, it was greater than the sum of its parts and was a satisfying, rounded piece developing all the way through towards a Finale: Allegro molto vivace that was recognisably mature Schumann as compared to its more Mozartian beginnings.

After the deftest of scene changes (only three first violin desks to move out of the way in this cut down band) to bring on the concert grand Steinway, Roman Rabinovich delighted us in a relaxed, assured and thrilling interpretation of Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No 1 in G minor.   In an underrated work clearly ahead of its time – that reminded me of Brahms and Tchaikovsky a generation later  – we were treated to excellent solo and ensemble playing of a dramatic operatic opening followed by a strong melodic line and taut together playing under Norrington’s understated, enabling direction.

The evening concluded with Schumann’s Symphony No 1 in B flat minor (Spring). I cannot find any reference to Tchaikovsky being influenced by Schumann in his ground breaking fourth symphony but the opening two bars of the Spring symphony were near identical. The orchestra were sufficiently beefed up for this work to make one forget it was contemporaneous with the opening number. We went from two French horns to five, nought to three trombones and were full on for more than half an hour. The playing and direction were disciplined and effective with well-managed crescendos and an elaborate brass coda in the first movement. The band continued to provide a rich tone in the second, but in the elaborate and extended finale, following on a beautiful flute intervention, the brass gave into themselves showing tone a little coarsened by virtue of their evident enthusiasm. Never mind, this was joyous music making.

As I left the auditorium I noticed that I was leaving at the remarkably early hour of ten past nine. We had, in fact, just one and a quarter hours of music making when on a good night one can expect nearer two hours. Yet it was a well-put together programme and hard to see how it could have been justifiably fleshed out. Some times good things come in small packages.

Reviewer: Charles Stokes (Seen 20 October)

Go to  the RSNO, Scotland’s National Orchestra

Visit Edinburgh49 at the  Usher Hall .

“I was happy to leave the concert hall with a spring in my step and wish them bon voyage on their long flight to Orlando”

Editorial Rating:  3 Stars

The RSNO are rounding off their glorious 125^th Season with a tour of the USA, Florida to be exact. Why Florida? Because classical music’s largest constituency is older people, and Florida is a state where they are legion, both full time residents and the “Snowbirds” who go for the winter. And Florida has more world-class concert halls than any other state in the USA. Five, no less. They played their final concerts in Glasgow on Thursday, and Edinburgh on Friday. There was a real whiff of excitement in the air. The last time they toured the States was 1992, before the fabulous Nicola Benedetti was born.

So Friday night’s audience, loyal to their orchestra and adoring of their favourite soloist, were in no mood to be troubled by the niceties of musical criticism, they were there to have a good time, and they did. Alas, it is the job of the music writer to point out the subtler issues.

The first half of the concert was, on paper, a romantic’s dream, Debussy’s Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune, followed by the ultra romantic Bruch violin concerto. This writer anticipated both eagerly. Both disappointed.

Principal flute Katharine Bryan led off the Debussy confidently and competently in what is an extremely exposed solo in a difficult register. The orchestra answered in a well played ten minute exposition of the theme, but only on a fairly superficial level. This work has mystery, shades of eroticism and soul, and we didn’t get this. Indeed, in the entire first half of the concert Peter Oundjian’s baton was there for the score, but too restrained in the exposition.

By all accounts Nicola Benedetti had given a bravura performance of the Brahms’s Violin Concerto in Glasgow the previous evening. Tonight we were all well up for the Bruch, arguably the most romantic violin concerto ever written, if not as great a work as the other three German concerti: by Beethoven, Brahms, & Mendelssohn. While one doesn’t want the soloist – or orchestra – to wear their hearts on their sleeves, there was much more that could have been brought out of the work by the soloist in terms of phrasing, power and sheer bravura of performance. Competently executed and, yes, restrained, we were left feeling puzzled and short changed. The presence of sheet music tucked away on a stand suggested a performer perhaps a little weary before the USA trip, allied with, unusually, no encore. Yet, of course, in the eyes of the RSNO claque she can do no wrong, and was applauded enthusiastically. The orchestra played well.

Live music is a fickle mistress and often provides the unexpected, both disappointing and pleasing. What on earth could the RSNO bring to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and what new is there to write about it?

Well, the RSNO brought a fresh, lively approach to the work from the beginning of the well known opening theme. It was as if they had received a half time pep talk. They made a lively pace throughout, notably the cellos in the andante con moto, along with the cleverest, anticipatory build up to the final Allegro. Clearly a game of two halves, I was happy to leave the concert hall with a spring in my step and wish them bon voyage on their long flight to Orlando

Reviewer: Charles Stokes (Seen 10 March)

Go the the RSNO

Visit Edinburgh49 at the Usher Hall

“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)

Go to the RSNO, Scotland’s National Orchestra

Visit Edinburgh49 at the Usher Hall archive.

nd

“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)

Go to the Royal Scottish National Orchestra

Visit Edinburgh49‘s Usher Hall archive.