Lammermuir Festival: BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

A sweet and Sour night at Haddington.

St Mary’s, that great church which is more like a Cathedral than a parish church, provided a couple of surprises last night, even before the concert began. First there was a very nice al fresco concert outside the church by a local choir which provided a pleasant overture to the concert. Second, when we got into the church, we found that the BBC Scottish were occupying a large section at the front of the church, exactly the opposite of Monday’s concert with the Hebrides Ensemble. This was also a big BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra with up to 50 musicians, rather more than the smaller chamber ensembles we have become used to during Covid restrictions. It was very ably conducted by Peter Whelan, a fine Irish conductor who plays piano and bassoon as well as conducting and is a specialist in Baroque music. He was certainly very much at home in the ‘sweet sections’ of the concert, namely the opening and closing symphonies of the programme by Haydn and Mozart. He began with Haydn’s Symphony No 35 regarded as an early work for someone who wrote 106 symphonies and who is generally regarded as the “father of the symphony” or ‘Papa Haydn’. It is a delightful work which showed off the skills of the BBC musicians and Peter Whelan’s control of the orchestra. Similarly Mozart’s symphony no 40 is a very familiar and melodic work composed very near the end of Mozart’s too short life and conducted at its premiere by his supposed enemy Salieri in April 1791. It was a wonderful end to the concert but in between as my American neighbour said, “there was something completely different”! 

This was Britten’s Nocturne, composed in 1958 and premiered at the Leeds Festival with Peter Pears for whom it was clearly written. It is the fourth and final song cycle by Britten and arguably the most modern and “difficult”. It is about the themes of sleep and darkness and uses a wide variety of poets as its lyric sources, including Shelley, Tennyson, Coleridge, Middleton, Wordsworth, Owen, Keats and Shakespeare. Now these are great poets and great verses, which raises the first problem: in Joshua Ellicott’s singing it was very difficult to hear the words. He seemed more intent on delivering line, length and volume of the songs than the clarity of the text. Now this is a common problem in concert recitals, even sung in English. Usually it is solved by surtitles or printed texts in the programmes. Neither were available tonight, so the beauty of the poems and the mystery of the songs went largely unobserved, something confirmed by my American neighbour. Was this the tenor Joshua Ellicott’s fault? Well partly, - I remarked in an earlier review that he tended to sing too loud in ‘’Das Lied von der Erde’. St Mary’s is a big church to fill and the temptation to sing out is great and perhaps is done at the expense of the text. This is confirmed by the several versions I’ve listened to on Apple Music whist writing this review: Peter Pears, Ian Bostridge, Mark Padmore all bring out the text clearly but then they were recording in a studio, not in St Mary’s. So this performance became the “sour” element in a sweet melodic evening. We should be challenged by listening to less familiar and more difficult music in a concert, but it would be helped if we could understand what the songs were about. As more diplomatic critics tend to write “it was a challenging work”! However the concert itself was a delight. As my American friend said, “it’s the first live orchestral concert I’ve heard for 18 months and it was very good”.