RSNO: Nicola Benedetti plays Simpson
Usher Hall - 22/03/24
Nicola Benedetti, violin | David Afkham, conductor
This was an interesting concert in the RSNO Season before another three week hiatus. It has been a very bitty season this year, for various reasons – touring, recording commitments and educational work – and one feels one is no sooner in a concert-going groove when it is interrupted for a few weeks. The main mitigating factor has been the superb standard of playing throughout the season, as the orchestra is playing as well as I have ever heard it in over 50 years of concert going.
Tonight, the Usher Hall was packed for another appearance of Scotland’s beloved Nicola Benedetti, whose Damehood must be imminent! She is indeed a superstar, a performer who can tempt people out on a grim Friday evening and fill the concert hall, with many new converts to classical music as evidenced by the whooping and hollering after the first half of the programme.
The programme consisted of two substantial pieces of music, neither of them easy listening, although Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony has become something of a modern classic.
Firstly, we heard the Scottish premiere of Mark Simpson’s Violin Concerto, written for Ms Benedetti in 2023, as a co-commission between four orchestras, including the RSNO. This is a flamboyant piece, astonishingly virtuosic for solo violin, which was played superbly with great love and commitment by Nicola Benedetti, and the RSNO conducted by David Afkham, the German-born Musical Director of the Orquestra y Coro Nacionales de España. The performance was cheered to the rafters, and the composer, who appeared at the end, was rapturously greeted. Mr Simpson enjoys a dual career as composer and clarinettist, and holds a record as both a former winner of the BBC Young Musician of the Year and a winner of the Guardian/BBC Composer of the Year.
Why then did I find the concerto disappointing? It certainly wasn’t a lack of notes, or passion, or virtuosity. It was wonderfully played with the utmost conviction by Ms Benedetti, whose dedication to the performance, even in the later stages of pregnancy, was marvellous to behold. The first movement is relatively calm, a world, as the composer states in his notes, of stillness and reflection, although his interpretation of the word stillness seemed at variance with mine. We are soon propelled into a fast energetic dance, releasing the pent up energy he experienced during the Pandemic. Thousands of notes flashed between soloist and orchestra, and then relaxed into what the composer calls an impassioned love song in the third movement, which itself transformed itself into a cadenza for violin. The last movement starts with a devilish tarantella, which leads to the finale and a wild, raucous, energy-filled climax. I quote the composer’s notes here, although I mostly failed to recognise what I was being asked to hear.
I searched in vain for any melodic beauty, or for release from the overwhelming build up of nervous energy in the score. Mr Simpson uses the whole of a large orchestra to find musical effects, with multiple percussion, and heavy brass, and the solo violin part is relentless in its pursuit of high speed bravura, but, for me, there was a lack of purpose at the heart of the concerto. For all the composer’s visions of stillness and reflection, I was left searching for some point in all the music, some respite from the relentless torrent of notes.
It must be stated that the audience went wild at the end, and it seemed as though I was in a small minority of grumblers. I will make an effort to listen to the concerto again, and perhaps I will find what eluded me tonight?
After the interval, we were treated to a magisterial performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony, first performed in Leningrad in 1937. There has been a lot written about this symphony, coming as it did just before the Second World War, and after Stalin had criticised Shostakovich indirectly but publicly after the debacle of his opera, ‘Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.’ Although the composer claimed that the symphony was “a Soviet Artist’s response to just criticism”, there has been much discussion of how much material Shostakovich hid deep within the score, reflecting the opposite reaction to the criticism. For now, I am prepared to let the musicologists and historians argue amongst themselves, and say that I have always loved this symphony, and consider it one of the composer’s finest works, and indeed one of the supreme works of the 20th century.
It certainly brought the best out of the RSNO and revealed David Afkham as a very fine conductor. Directing without a baton, a practice I always find odd to start with and then relax into after a few minutes, he gave us a thrilling, and also deeply moving, performance of this great symphony.
I prefer the use of a baton as a performer myself, as it gives much needed clarity to the beat, but I was reminded, by the fact that this was a concert dedicated to the memory of Sir Alexander and Lady Veronica Gibson, that the mere presence of a baton does not guarantee precision of beat. I sang many times in the 1980s with Sir Alexander Gibson, and to describe his beat as clear would contravene the Trades Description Act. However, Sir Alec possessed something far more important than a clear beat – innate musicianship and an ability to go straight to the heart of a composer, a genius for interpretation available only to a tiny handful of people. Once you grasped what he was doing, he was easy to work with, and conducted many of my most exciting nights in the theatre with Scottish Opera.
Mr Afkhan showed us what he can do, with a bold and exciting performance of the 5th Symphony, highlighting both the hardship of the struggle to cope with life in 1930s in the Soviet Union, and the beauty of life in general. The Fifth is in many ways a conventional four movement symphony, using a big orchestra with extra percussion, including xylophone and glockenspiel, and celeste, but there are also many innovatory touches. At some points, the violins split into three sections rather than two, there are times when only lower strings play, from viola down to double bass, and the slow movement excludes brass completely. The celeste has an important role to play, and the snare drum is busy.
Special moments were common, with lovely playing from Olivia Gandee (guest principal horn), Adrian Wilson (principal oboe) and some magnificent solo violin playing from the leader, Maya Iwabuchi, and the whole symphony was brought to a resounding conclusion, as the prevailing minor mood was turned into a glorious major, and which ensured great acclaim from the packed audience. Many may have come to hear and see their idol, Nicola Benedetti, but they were also rewarded with an absolutely fabulous account of a great symphony.
Cover photo: RSNO
