Lammermuir Festival: RSNO
St Mary’s Church, Haddington - 10/09/22
The RSNO’s Lammermuir debut, a 2-work programme of Sibelius and Brahms, was delivered on the night of 10th September in St Mary’s Church, Haddington, a magnificent building with a very live acoustic. It would be difficult to devise a program better suited to demonstrating the pros and cons of such an acoustic.
Sibelius’ Symphony No. 4 in A minor is the bleakest of the seven. Insofar as there is any underlying narrative, it takes place in an austere stony landscape indifferent, if not inimical, to the struggles of life. There is a sense of striving for meaning, but as soon as a glimmer of melodic or harmonic hope seems to appear, it is snuffed out by tritones and fifths, or peters out into harmonic ambiguity without the affirmation of a symphonic climax. It is, set against the Late Romantic tradition embraced to a greater or lesser extent in the composer’s first three symphonies, an anti-symphony. Under the baton of Rory Macdonald, from the de profundis harmonically ambiguous growl of the double basses in the opening bars to the final descent back into fatalistic despair in the low strings of the closing bars, it received its fullest and most cogent advocacy. It was clear that he had a vision of the work as a complete (if somewhat nihilistic) structure and guided orchestra and audience to the fullest sharing in that vision. I was struck by the clarity of detail in the stark Sibelian sound texture, especially with some skilful solos from the wind principals and the delicious glockenspiel comments and viola folkdance (so reminiscent of the composer’s string quartet Voces Intimae) in the finale, more so than ever in live performance before, and I became aware of the role of the live acoustic in the church in delivering that clarity. So many factors contributed to this being a memorable performance of this enigmatic work, but the happy coincidence of live acoustic and conductor’s insight stand out for me as the most salient.
A starker musical contrast than that between the Sibelius and the Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto, which followed after the interval, would be hard to imagine. If the Sibelius eschews romanticism, the Brahms embraces it and luxuriates in it. Brahms selects the warm home key of B-flat major and takes us on a sunlit journey full of rich melodic inventiveness, ingenious symphonic development (including a scrumptious scherzo – whoever heard of a scherzo in a piano concerto?), lush harmonies and the triumph of optimism. The American soloist, Jeremy Denk, brought technical brilliance and an engaging warm musicianship to this sunniest of works, while our wonderful RSNO played their hearts out. But… the same acoustic that delivered such clarity in the Sibelius was less kind to Brahms’ lush textures. Rapid runs on the piano, in particular, were robbed of some of their clarity by the reverberations. I should stress that this did not spoil my enjoyment of the music – the quality of the playing was superb and the work is a firm lasting favourite. But I was left wishing that, for the Brahms, the soft velvet drapes in the music were also present in the architecture.
Still, all in all, a great Lammermuir debut for the RSNO and a memorable concert.