Other Links
Editorial Board
- UK Editors
- Roger Jones and John Quinn
Editors for The Americas - Bruce Hodges and Jonathan Spencer Jones
European Editors - Bettina Mara and Jens F Laurson
Consulting Editor - Bill Kenny
Assistant Webmaster -Stan Metzger
Founder - Len Mullenger
Google Site Search
SEEN AND HEARD UK CONCERT REVIEW
Battistelli: Fair is foul, foul is fair
Berio: Folk Songs
Harper: Pastoral (Ed./Arr. Cresswell), SCO commission, world premiere
Britten: Suite on English Folk Tunes (A time
there was)
New Romantics has been one of the key themes of this year's SCO
season. The four concerts have focused primarily on 20th
and 21st century composers and have featured three
premieres, but raging dissonances have been thin on the ground.
Instead the melodic impulse of each work has enabled their creators
to be labelled Romantic composers for our age. The same was true
tonight: Britten's wonderful folk song suite sat next to Berio's
charming Folk Songs and a world premiere from Edward
Harper.
Berio's Folk Songs are wonderfully appealing and show this
composer at his best. The main melodies are someone else's but the
arrangements are utterly distinctive and contain prominent parts for
solo instrumentalists. The opening song features a fantastic double
viola part while a haunting nocturnal harp line turns up in a few
songs. The reduced forces of the orchestra allowed the writing to
come through well, but there was a clear sense of fun when all
sections came together for the final Azerbaijani love song. Harper's
Pastoral, on the other hand, was meant to the first
movement of his Third Symphony but the composer died in
2009 before he could finish it so what we heard tonight was a
realisation of the score from his friend and fellow composer Lyell
Cresswell. It's poignant and beautiful at the same time, using a
setting of Burns' Ye Banks and Braes as its
centrepiece, surrounding it with lovely string writing and a mix of
traditional as well as original tunes. Both these works featured the
fulsome mezzo of Susan Bickley, standing in for an indisposed Karen
Cargill. Her rich, lustrous voice was poignant and affecting in the
Burns setting but wonderfully versatile for the Berio songs: the
American settings which opened the cycle were straight and clear,
while the Mediterranean songs were more reckless. She sounded
positively coarse for the Sicilian A la femminisca, which
was entirely appropriate, but in every song, even the unashamedly
merry ones, it was the sultry intensity of her voice that made her
interpretation special.
Britten's Folk Song suite, a world away from that of Vaughan
Williams, sounded great in the hands of these musicians. A band like
the SCO is perfect for Britten: their reduced forces mean that the
composer's fantastically inventive instrumentation gleams like
polished silver and every detail was clearly audible in radiant
detail tonight. The gorgeous harp effects in The Bitter Withy
and the stupendous cor anglais in Lord Melbourne are only
two examples, but when this final movement rose to an astonishing
climax the entire orchestra showed themselves capable of coming
together brilliantly.
Battistelli's Fair is Foul left me a little cold, though.
An Edinburgh International Festival commission from 2009, it takes
its inspiration from the blasted heath in the opening scene of
Macbeth and the 20-minute long piece is a spectral evocation of
a dark world. Right from the opening, featuring icy strings, muted
trumpets and electronic wind sounds, the composer is very skilful in
evoking a landscape of physical and emotional devastation. The tone
painting is masterly in the way surging strings portray the wildness
of the wind (or is it Macbeth's emotional terror?) and it's a
powerfully atmospheric piece. It's rather dependent on repetition,
however, particularly in runs of scales and glissandi, and it struck
me as moody rather than melodic so that, ultimately, there wasn't an
awful lot to it. Conductor Garry Walker seemed least comfortable
here, using anodyne gestures to mark time and entries but little
else. He relaxed as the evening wore on, though, and he was at his
most comfortable for the bumptious encore which the orchestra tore
through.
As the final concert in this New Romantics season this one
confirmed the importance of contemporary music in the SCO's
repertoire and reassured me that this is an orchestra that continues
to push boundaries and look for new things. Their new season will be
announced at the end of the month. Watch this space for details.
Simon Thompson