EIF: Scottish Chamber Orchestra
Festival ends with a whimper instead of a bang!
Traditionally the Festival ends with a final orchestral concert, usually with a choral work backed up by the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, indeed before writing this review the end of festival concert for 2015 popped up on my Facebook Memories page. This was a significant year, Fergus Linehan’s first festival as director. After an underwhelming Final Concert the year before, Fergus staged a triumph in 2015. It was the SCO and the Festival Chorus with four fine soloists in Beethoven’s Mass; it was very good. Sadly, tonight’s final concert did not live up to that standard. Yes, I know there had been a change of conductor due to COVID restrictions, but the SCO recently had a 5-star triumph at the Proms with their principal conductor playing three Mozart symphonies. Tonight we got a substitute conductor, two short works, a Prokofiev symphony and no chorus. The whole concert had 45 minutes of music and had I paid £32 for a ticket I would have felt short changed!
At least it was a nice sunny evening. The Festival has been lucky with the weather overall, with only a couple of performances badly affected by the rain, although people have discovered how cold Edinburgh gets in the evening after a sunny day! The SCO were warming up on stage with a respectable number of players, between 30-40 musicians on the stage but sadly without their wonderful cellist Su-a Lee, who was probably having more fun accompanying Alan Cummings at the Old Quad! Originally the conductor engaged for the concert was to be Japanese conductor Kazushi Ono and there were two Japanese works on the programme. He couldn’t make it due to COVID rules so was replaced by French conductor Lionel Bringuier. I did ask myself why on this big night for the SCO their principal conductor and big star, Maxim Emelyanychev, did not lead them tonight? Lionel Bringuier is a very good French conductor with an international reputation, and he conducted all three works decently, but spent a little too long taking bows, no doubt aware of the 45 minutes length of the programme. But if the programme was short, they must have realised that when they dropped one of the Japanese pieces. Why didn’t they replace it, or at least give us an encore?
The works chosen for the final programme were also a puzzle. First, ‘Blossoming 2’ by Hosokawa, no doubt there because of the previous Japanese conductor. It was originally commissioned by the Festival in 2011 (I think it was one of Jonathan Mills themed festivals “Orientalism” if I recall!) and performed by the SCO under Robin Ticciati. It is meant to symbolise the opening up of the lotus flower, the symbol of Buddhism. It was pleasant enough although the lotus flower did sound a little warlike towards the end of its 10 minutes. The second work was Ravel’s’ Le Tombeau de Couperin’ a tribute to the friends of the French composer killed in the First World War. It is a pleasant but slight work lasting 20 minutes and I for one was not clear why it was chosen? Was there no more memorable work available? What about a Scottish composer instead of a Japanese, a French and a Russian? The final work was Prokofiev’s First Symphony. As David Kettle’s good programme notes explained, it was his first major work written in 1918 and before the growth of socialist realist music criticism began to trouble him. It sounds very influenced by Mozart and Haydn, has some lovely melody in it and is relatively well known. It was certainly more fun than the earlier two works but was it weighty enough to end the festival? It certainly wasn’t long enough; it finished at 6.45 pm and despite the conductor taking several bows we were leaving the big tent long before 7pm asking, was that it, why no encore? It was as one audience member commented, “a bit of a damp squib of an ending!” I shall reflect at more length in an article on the festival shortly, but sadly our last night in the big tent proved to be somewhat disappointing and very brief!
