East Neuk Festival: Closing Concert
Holy Trinity Church, St Andrews - 02/07/23
Scottish Chamber Orchestra: Isabelle van Keulen, violin/director | Tom Wilkinson, organ
Holy Trinity Church, St Andrews, was the magnificent Romanesque venue for the closing concert of the East Neuk Festival, featuring the strings of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (with a single tubular bell), directed by leader and violin soloist Isabelle van Keulen, and organ soloist Tom Wilkinson, playing on the church’s fine instrument by Harrison and Harrison of Durham.
The programme opened with Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s ‘Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten’, a wonderful piece which only 6 weeks previously had been performed by the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra at the Perth Festival and reviewed by me, so a comparison is inevitable and I regret that it is not a positive one. The cathartic power of the piece, in my opinion, lies in its icy stoic stillness and simplicity, with parts of a descending A-minor scale being played out of sync, punctuated by a tolling bell, gradually increasing in intensity until a final resolution, when the strings stop playing and the reverberation of the last stroke of the bell dies out. To my taste, the tempo in St Andrews was far too fast and the top volume was attained far too early, robbing the piece of its evocative power and its ability to take the listener through reconciliation of the conflicting emotions of grief and acceptance. I would question the wisdom of performing this piece without a conductor. A great pity because the ensemble tone of the SCO strings was, as ever, glorious.
One of my very favourite Bach pieces, the monumental ‘Fantasia and Fugue in G minor’, then showcased the magnificent organ under the fingers, and feet, of Tom Wilkinson, university organist and lecturer at St Andrews. Few pieces so thoroughly illustrate the power of the organ, and the minor key in particular, to inspire spirit-shocking wonder and awe, with the Fantasia’s startling and unrelenting harmonic progressions (and the famous illusion of an apparent continuously descending scale that never actually exits one octave) and the Fugue’s sense of demonic mischief. Superb.
Benjamin Britten’s ‘Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge’, simultaneously an act of homage to his teacher and a manifesto declaring his own creative independence, is also a great favourite and it received the full SCO treatment, top-quality orchestral playing informed by chamber music sensibilities; great ensemble sound but also full attention to expressive detail, profundity and whimsy. Musing about when I’d heard this masterpiece performed so characterfully, I suddenly remembered: it was a few years ago in the Queen’s Hall and, yes of course, it was the SCO then too.
The concert after the interval was given over to the music of Philip Glass. In the early 80s, when I was still at university, I borrowed, on a whim, an LP from the university’s record library: ‘Glassworks’, a suite of pieces by Glass performed by the Philip Glass Ensemble. I was smitten and recorded it to cassette so that it was one of the many albums I could listen to on my Walkman-fuelled bicycle commute. Over the intervening years and the advent of CDs and other media, other Glass works have taken my fancy, including his excellent opera ‘Akhenaten’. I mention this to show I bear no anti-Glass or anti-minimalist prejudice.
‘Mad Rush for Organ’, though? I had never heard it before, but was expecting, from the name on the tin, a sort of fast moto perpetuo with lots of clever syncopation and polyrhythms and, well, stuff happening. Wrong. I found it unbelievably repetitive and mind-numbingly tedious. Stravinsky was once moved to remark: “Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end”. ‘Mad Rush’, I fear, continues for far too long and finishes without ever starting. It’s a ‘no’ from me.
However, ‘American Seasons’ is a very different kettle of fish and, by contrast, a thrilling discovery for me. A 4-movement violin concerto in all but name, its name nevertheless a reference to Vivaldi’s masterpieces, it consists of a Prologue and 3 ‘Songs’, each prefaced by an expressive solo recalling Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas. The movements are not named for the seasons and, to be honest, the music is far too richly engaging as pure music to need a programmatic narrative. With Isabelle van Keulen in the challenging solo role and the SCO strings (and did I detect a harpsichord?) very much in the zone with this rhythmically inventive and thrilling music, it was performed with commitment and a sense of joy in music-making and sharing. And that’s what it’s all about.
It has been a great East Neuk Festival and the Closing Concert, whilst not uniformly excellent, finished with a winner. Can’t wait for next year.