RSNO: Søndergård Conducts Rachmaninov Two
Usher Hall - 18/02/22
This was one of those concerts when you think it might be interesting, you don’t know the music, but you just have a good feeling. Well, gosh, it was excellent!
We started with a short piece by the young Dutch composer, Carlijn Metselaar, entitled ‘Into the Living Mountain’, inspired by the book of the same name by Nan Shepherd. The book describes the author’s experiences climbing in the Cairngorm Mountains in the 1940s and is in the form of a reaction to the mountains rather than a description of them. Ms Metselaar has stated that her music here is similarly a reaction to the “wide views and interesting gnarly details” of a mountainscape. Perhaps coming from a country with no mountains, one’s feelings about these wild places are different from someone more familiar with them.
Whatever the genesis, I was quite taken with this work, which opened with timpani and brass, and explored various aspects of the orchestra. Ms Metselaar was the winner of the RSNO Composers’ Hub in 2019, and this work seems to have evolved from that, coincidentally requiring the large orchestra which we had in the Usher Hall tonight. She explored different orchestral textures in the piece, with notable cameos for flute, harp and bassoon, and often using the col legno string technique. Coming to a quiet and gentle conclusion, the composer seemed to evoke the thin air high up in the mountains. She is soon to return to Wales to complete her PhD in composition, and I think we shall be hearing more of this talented musician soon.
The second work on tonight’s programme was the Violin Concerto written by Igor Stravinsky in 1931 for the Polish violinist, Samuel Dushkin. It was composed during Stravinsky’s “neo-classical” period and is far removed from the standard classical Violin Concerto, as written by Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky. I must confess to not being a great fan of Stravinsky’s neo-classical work, and I have found this concerto somewhat lacking, but tonight we had the great good fortune to have the Moldovan-Austrian-Swiss violinist, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, as our soloist, and what a revelation she was. I had heard that she was very dramatic, and played barefoot, and indeed the reality was a whirlwind of a performer, alert to every nuance both of her part and the whole orchestra. The member of the orchestra who introduced the concert had suggested an affinity with the Hip Hop classic, “Jump around!”, by House of Pain, a comparison which had surprised me, but watching Ms Kopatchinskaja literally leaping around the podium, it didn’t seem so far-fetched. She is a wonder to behold, dressed in a sort of east European folk dress, and I was actually reminded of a Russian gypsy band I had seen on the Fringe years ago, which had used a gypsy violinist and a classically trained one in conjunction, to remarkable effect. Watching Thomas Søndergård, Music Director of the RSNO and tonight’s conductor, like a hawk, Ms Kopatchinskaja moved directly in time with the music, never standing still for a second. It was all quite mesmerising, and indeed I found myself enjoying the concerto much more than I expected. Her soft playing was very delicate, and she rose to all the twists and turns of the solo part with apparent ease, showing a complete mastery of her instrument. This concerto is a shared experience between soloist and orchestra, and the RSNO were well up to their usual standard of superb playing. Towards the end of the last movement, there is a section where the soloist and the leader have a little duet, and this continued into the encore, when Ms Kopatchinskaja and Sharon Roffman shared a delightful cadenza. The audience was thrilled by this superb performance, and we awaited the second half of the concert with bated breath, looking forward to the luscious attractions of the Second Symphony of Sergei Rachmaninov.
Mr Søndergård eschewed the baton for this lengthy work, and his expressive conducting felt almost like he was massaging the orchestra, in order to find more and more gorgeous sounds. Rachmaninov’s first symphony had been an absolute disaster, in 1897, with an apparently drunk conductor and an unprepared orchestra, and the composer was severely traumatised by the experience. It took him nearly ten years to return to symphonic writing, famously using a hypnotist and psychologist trained in Sigmund Freud’s theories to help him. Whatever he did, when he conducted his second symphony in St Petersburg in 1908, it was a triumph.
The slow opening gives way, after a lovely reiteration of the opening theme on cor anglais (bravo Henry Clay), to an allegro moderato, sweeping us to a powerful ending. The second movement, with its suggestion of the Dies Irae chant, and its fugato middle, flows naturally into the famous slow movement, with its deeply beautiful clarinet solo (brilliantly played by Timothy Orpen) and its wonderful string sound. The arrangement of the orchestra, with the violas on the right of the conductor, allowed us to hear that much maligned (only in jest) section in all its glory, especially at the end of the movement.
The exuberant and thrilling final movement was superbly played by the RSNO and admirably conducted by Mr Søndergård, who, I feel, is a very worthy holder of the post. It is just over forty years since the estimable Sir Alexander Gibson recorded this symphony with this orchestra, and I am sure the old boy, who I sang with at Scottish Opera around the same time, would have been beaming with pride after this fine performance.
