EIF: The RSNO and Elim Chan
Edinburgh Academy Junior School
Sublime strings in the evening sun.
It was a sunny Monday evening with a blue sky that greeted us at the big tent at Edinburgh Academy Junior School, and a very full audience. The RSNO has of course a big Edinburgh following, and a big subscriber base. Indeed it has just released its autumn programme where it hopes to pull in full houses at the Usher Hall. Talking to audience members and listening to conversations it’s clear to me that this year the big majority of International Festival concert goers are Edinburgh residents with few international visitors around.
The RSNO were very much a string orchestra tonight, more like a large chamber orchestra than a full symphony orchestra, and while this fitted their programme it meant that they had less of an aural impact than did the BBC Scottish the night before with bigger numbers and wind, brass and percussion to impress us. Of course the RSNO has a very good string section and they were clearly out to impress with some delicate playing but also some full-blooded sounds, particularly in the Beethoven. They were under the leadership of Elim Chan, who has become a firm favourite with Scottish audiences since her appointment as principal guest conductor in 2018. She is a small but dynamic figure on the podium but clearly in charge of the orchestra and in the cello concerto, very much in tune with the soloist.
The music began with a short work by US composer Caroline Shaw called ‘Entr’acte’. She said she was inspired by Haydn’s string quartets although I couldn’t hear much evidence in the work. It was not unpleasant and had some melody, not at all atonal modern music. This was followed by Saint-Saens’ great cello concerto, wonderfully played by the Argentinian cellist Sol Gabetta who is one the leading soloists in the world. Wearing a striking long green dress in contrast to the black of the orchestra she resembled a young Jacqueline Du Pre on the podium, and in her vivid playing of the cello reminded us of that great cellist. Saint-Saens wrote this work in 1872 yet it sounds remarkably modern and at times resembles the Elgar concerto which was written much later. It certainly is a great vehicle for the cellist to show off and Sol Gabetta did this vividly with great vigour but she also responded well to the orchestra - indeed she moved her body in response to the orchestral passages, but in her solo parts she showed us why she is one the world’s leading cellists. Finally the concert concluded with Beethoven’s First Symphony, first performed in Vienna in 1800, a new century giving rise to the new radical music of Beethoven. The First Symphony is not Beethoven’s most radical work; indeed you can hear the influences of Haydn and Mozart in the work, but also the challenging new approaches which made Beethoven the revolutionary in music he became. The RSNO responded splendidly to Elim Chan’s vigorous leadership from the podium, although interesting she conducted from a score, unlike Marin Alsop the previous night who conducted Beethoven’s Fifth from memory. However there was no doubt who was in charge and the players responded well and despite the lack of brass and wind produced a great climax to the symphony. They got a great response from the big audience and for the second night in a row we went into the Inverleith evening buoyed up by the great music of Beethoven.
