Perth Festival: Pictures at an Exhibition
Perth Concert Hall 01/06/24
KNDS Fairey Band, Mark Heron conductor
Founded in 1937 by a group of employees at the Fairey Aviation Works in Stockport, the Fairey Band, recently renamed the KNDS Fairey Band following company mergers and rebranding, still maintains links with the factory (including rehearsing there twice weekly). Composed of both professional and amateur musicians, the band sustains a reputation for performing excellence and competition success. Under the baton of Scottish conductor and Professor of Conducting at the RNCM, Mark Heron, they performed at Perth Concert Hall on the night of 1st June, in a concert titled ‘Pictures at an Exhibition in Sound and Animation’. The “sound” referred to the familiar 1922 Ravel orchestration of Mussorgsky’s 1874 solo piano masterpiece, depicting paintings by Viktor Hartmann as seen by a visitor to a St Petersburg exhibition, in an arrangement for brass ensemble with percussion by Elgar Howarth. The “animation” referred to a film, commissioned by the renowned conductor Michael Tilson Thomas for the grand opening of New World Symphony Hall in Miami in 2011. Created by the USC School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles, the animation, inspired by both the original paintings and the music, is projected across three screens using technology whereby the projectionist can adjust the animation in real-time to sync with the band. Saturday night’s Perth Festival performance was the European premiere of the animation and is indeed thought to be its first live showing in performance outside the United States, a significant coup for the Festival. Attendance was disappointingly sparse for such a unique event. The house lights were fully dimmed but, as there were no printed programmes, this presented no major inconvenience to anyone, other than reviewers hoping that notes jotted in the gloaming would be legible – mine aren’t.
The concert opened with Berlioz’ Roman Carnival Overture, in a super arrangement by Frank Wright. The band lost no time in setting out their stall as purveyors of excellence. The ensemble sound was rich, precise and stylish, while an early soulful tenor horn solo showed we could expect individual musicianship of the highest standard, with phrasing that captured the ear of the listener. The faster tutti were crisp and thrilling, while the dynamics were elegantly controlled by Mark Heron, building some fine crescendi. Lovely timbral effects in the arrangement, especially muted cornets and trombones, were skilfully deployed. There was nothing in the performance to make this reviewer thirst for the orchestral version, boding well for the goodies to come.
Principal cornet, Dundee-born Iain Culross, was the soloist in Armenian composer Alexander Arutiunian’s 1950 Trumpet Concerto in A-flat major, arranged by Roger Harvey. In a first hearing for me, it is a virtuosic showpiece in 7 contrasting sections played without a break, lasting about a quarter of an hour. The musical language reminded me of that of Arutiunian’s compatriot Khachaturian, with hints of Armenian folksong and dance, very tuneful but with occasional surprises of syncopation and key. The lyrical sections were soulful and expressively melancholy, the fast sections were snappy thrilling galops. A stunning cadenza and coda finished on an unexpected cadence. A great piece and it received the utmost advocacy from Iain.
Then it was time for the headline work, the Mussorgsky with the animated visuals. The Promenade representing the viewer walking between paintings in the gallery was accompanied by images of moving figures, sometimes photographic, sometimes silhouette, sometimes cartoon graphics, at first in modern dress, then in Victorian costume. The moving images for the 10 pictures were all imaginative and added an extra dimension to the music, which itself was performed evocatively, the fusion experience much greater than the sum of its parts. A scary grotesque goblin depicted the Gnome, while the Old Castle was an imposing and rather sinister building, viewed outside and inside in moonlight and approached hesitatingly by a figure in its overgrown gardens. The Tuileries were depicted by a naïve cartoon of children playing and teasing in a garden. Bydlo was a monochrome animation, workers toiling in the fields under a brooding sky while a heavy cart, drawn by brutish oxen and carrying an enormous tuba, laboriously toiled up an incline with the onion domes of a walled Russian city in the distance. The reader may gather that it made a deep impression on me, music and animated graphic art in creative unison. The ‘Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks’ raised the most chuckles in the hall, hilarious cartoon chicks dancing, scantily clad in eggshell tutus. ‘Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle’, two Jews, one opulent, imperious and disapproving; the other impoverished, servile and miserable, were depicted as characters from the Hebrew alphabet, rising out of a text and engaging in a very uneven disputation. Iain’s muted cornet was a convincing unhappy Schmuyle. ‘The Market Place at Limoges’ was actual speeded up footage of the bustle of a wholesale food market of a large American city, maybe New York. ‘Catacombs’ was a macabre graveyard with statues, monuments and headstones in silhouette and in monochrome illumination, then suddenly a pile of human skulls. No less spooky was Baba Yaga’s hut, stalking through the forest on chicken’s legs, with a grotesque cartoon of the hag herself. Finally, the ‘Great Gate of Kiev’ was suffused with glorious golden light, interior and exterior pictures of ornately decorated fine architecture and line drawings of the same, as the music seemed to celebrate the triumph of the human spirit. An unforgettable audiovisual experience.
Finally, to let us down gently from these lofty heights, Ray Farr’s arrangement of Bach’s Toccata in D minor (It’s Bach, Jim, but not as we know it). An imposing, austere, straight beginning quickly slips into a jazzy ‘derangement’, quirky and virtuosic, to send us home with a spring in our step.
A super closing concert to the main Festival (apart from those heading to the Twa Tams in a week for a day’s session of up-and-coming singer/songwriters and band talent), this review concludes what has been another great Festival. Plaudits to the organisers and the venues. Here’s to next year!