Parabola

Queen’s Hall 13/3/25

 Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Pekka Kuusisto conductor / violin, Simon Crawford-Phillips conductor / piano

 The Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s ‘Parabola’, part of the New Dimensions series, pitched at exploring new sound worlds, has emerged from the ever-lively partnership between the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Finnish virtuoso Pekka Kuusisto, whose energy and verve has enabled audiences across the world to engage with contemporary music in fresh ways.  

 For this absorbing concert involving three living composers and two from the recent and more distant past, Kuusisto teamed up with pianist and conductor Simon Crawford-Phillips to present a colourful programme played on consecutive evenings at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh and the City Halls in Glasgow.

 The appetiser, so to speak, was Benjamin Britten’s infrequently performed and uncharacteristically spritely Young Apollo (1939), inspired by the closing lines of Keats’ poem ‘Hyperion’. Animated by driving, exuberant piano lines (delivered with emphatic precision by Crawford-Phillips), this A-major mini-concerto makes up for its lack of harmonic expansiveness with an explosion of textures and ideas and a short, bittersweet interlude just before the end. Here Kuusisto’s violin both leads and blends with the other insistent strings.

 Thomas Adès composed his four Märchentänze (‘Dances from Fairytale’) violin and piano pieces in 2020, reworking them a year later in the orchestral version we heard this evening. Each of the dances draws on English folk sources, but takes them in a variety of unusual places. Pekka Kuusisto took the lead, his own eclectic style ideally suited to a suite which moves from buoyant and expansive melody to chant-like melancholy, a melange of bird song, and a vigorous dance finale in compound time. Detailed and complex, Adès writing is full of vitality, shifting textures, unusual sonic interjections and interesting orchestration.

 This sonic treat was followed by another. American composer and pianist Timo Andres calls his Piano Concerto ‘The Blind Banister’, and it is something of a homage to Beethoven in its three-movement B-flat form, but without actually quoting him. Stylistically, it could perhaps be termed post-postminimalism, built around interlocking descending scales, continuous variations, and bold instrumentation – including the use of xylophone, percussion and vivid orchestral contrasts.

 There are moments of solitude and introspection in this concerto, but more often a propelling energy, and one segment where Brad Mehldau seems to meet Turangalîla-era Messaien. Absolutely glorious, and a piece which definitely deserves to work itself into the repertoire of more adventurous pianists. The composer was on hand to take a bow, rapturous applause and a solitary, out-of-synch boo from one audience member who seemed to find it a little too challenging.

 After the break we returned to Sally Beamish’s mesmeric Whitescape, which turns the orchestra towards a delicate and evolving forest of evocations, conjuring up waking dream-states connected to Mary Shelley’s experiences and flashbacks in the realisation of ‘Frankenstein’. The work is what the composer describes as a “sketch-pad of ideas” which concentrate on aspects of imaginative flow and landscape in the novel, some of which ended up as interludes within a subsequent opera. Somewhere in the midst is a simple melody on glockenspiel, venturing back to the innocence of youth – something also present in the Britten. Spellbinding.

 To end the programme, and ahead of a short, lingering Finnish fiddle encore from Pekka Kuusisto, we returned to the nineteenth century with Haydn’s witty and charming Symphony No. 88. Under the spell cast by the seemingly natural synergy between the SCO and their charismatic conductor, a work of (by turns) stately formality and life-affirming gaiety was given a fresh look – perhaps especially in the central trio section, with its curious bassoon, cello and bass drones. It’s clear that Pekka loves Scotland and the SCO, and the feelings are clearly mutual.          

Simon Barrow is a writer, journalist, think-tank director and commentator whose musical interests span new music, classical, jazz, electronica and art rock. His book ‘Transfiguring the Everyday: The Musical Vision of Michael Tippett’ will be published by Siglum in 2025.