SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Ives, Adams, Marshall: Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Christopher Maltman (baritone), Baldur Brönnimann (conductor), Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, 16.10.2010 (SRT)

Charles Ives: Three Places in New England

John Adams: The Wound-Dresser

Son of Chamber Symphony (Scottish premiere)

Ingram Marshall: Orphic Memories (European premiere)

This weekend Glasgow Concert Halls are staging Minimal, a celebration of musical minimalism since the 1960s. This, as an aside, gave me cause to reflect on the different musical cultures of Scotland’s two biggest cities: it’s difficult to imagine a large scale contemporary music festival like this getting off the ground in Edinburgh. Anyway, this concert was the SCO’s major contribution, and a serious one at that, containing one Scottish and one European premiere. The European premiere was Ingram Marshall’s Orphic Memories, a reflection, he writes, on Orpheus’ journey into the Underworld recalled by Orpheus after the event. The work contains five sections – Descent, Stygian Gates, Lost, Ascent, Hymn – and is structured like a musical parabola of descent and re-emergence, the lowest point coming with “Lost” and a crashing brass-led discord. I found it compelling and strangely beautiful, trance-like even, not least in the gentle but still unsettling opening on the strings. There was also a pleasing sense of joy upon reaching the surface again.

John Adams’ Son of Chamber Symphony contained a lot of his hallmarks, including a trademark Adams ostinato at the beginning which soon evolved into something much more jazzy both in rhythm and in the way each section was called forward to have a moment in the spotlight. This carried on in the hypnotic, often beautiful slow movement, before Adams’ characteristic syncopated rhythms returned to dominate the finale. His Wound-Dresser, however, was by far the most moving section of the whole evening, setting poems of Walt Whitman which describe his own experience as a hospital volunteer during the American Civil War. It’s not a song cycle so much as an extended tone-poem with voice, showing humanity and compassion in the midst of the horror of the casualty ward. The baritone soloist stands out, and even jars against the backdrop as the only voice of sympathy in the desolation: the cinematic opening, for example, where the singer enters after swaying, distant strings contrast with an edgy solo violin, surely a pre-figuration of the soloist himself. At times Adams’ writing was not just atmospheric but richly descriptive, such as the romantic sweep of strings which accompanies the poet’s sympathy for a boy soldier, or the angry trumpet that stands against a gangrenous limb. Christopher Maltman, always an artist worth hearing, here sounded darker and more like a bass than I have heard him before, quite right for the sombre subject material. He captured authority without losing empathy, helped by first class diction.

Somewhat ironically the most “challenging” work was the earliest: Ives’ Three Places in New England dates from 1914 and attempts a history-in-sound of three places he knew. Battle songs emerge abruptly from a backdrop of spectral, edgy strings in the depiction of Boston Common, and the same feeling sits over the third piece, somewhat surprisingly when you consider that it was inspired by a much calmer pastoral scene. The central movement, a reminder of a garrison in the revolutionary wars, is much more brash and chaotic. Throughout this and every piece conductor Baldur Brönnimann kept the music moving so that there was always a feeling of structure, even in pieces which can sometime make a virtue out of formlessness.

Simon Thompson