RSNO: Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony

Usher Hall – 17/03/23 

Elim Chan, conductor | Steven Osborne, piano 

This concert marked the final appearance, as Principal Guest Conductor of the RSNO, by Elim Chan, one of the world’s most exciting young conductors, and also the first appearance of the orchestra’s new principal cello, Pei-Jee Ng. It also featured Edinburgh’s Steven Osborne as piano soloist in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 12 and ended with one of the most fantastic symphonies in the repertoire, Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. Several hours later, I’m still buzzing with excitement! 

It has been my privilege to attend the whole season so far of the RSNO’s Edinburgh performances, a season in which the bar has been raised to astronomical heights by our Scottish national orchestra. At a time when the Philistines are battering at our gates, as Arts budgets are threatened on all sides by ignorant governments, and funding bodies seem to prefer banality to excellence, we are indeed fortunate to be able to attend, each week, musical performances of world class in the great cities of Scotland. I have been encouraged over the season, too, to see more and more younger faces in the audience, a sure sign that great culture is for everyone, and not some imaginary elite of which the detractors speak. 

Another sign of good health was the opening piece in tonight’s concert, a work by a living female composer, Anna Clyne, ‘This Midnight Hour’. Written for L’orchestre national d ’Île-de-France in 2015, it is a 12 minute orchestral work, inspired by two poems, one by Juan Ramón Jiménez, the other by Charles Baudelaire. The Spanish poem is short and concise: 

Music –  

a naked woman 

running mad through the pure night 

while the Baudelaire, ‘Harmonie du Soir’, evokes strong perfumes of flowers at night, overlaid with a ‘melancholy waltz’. 

These two images dominate the piece, which begins with a breathless chase through the night, represented by the lower strings and rhythmic percussion, followed by a strange waltz with violas tuned a quarter tone apart to create the impression of a Parisian accordion. Towards the end, two solo trumpets, widely spaced at the back, play a sad tune, only to be interrupted by a savage drum stroke. 

I thoroughly enjoyed this quirky piece. I’m young enough still to be able to take pleasure from the idea of a naked woman running through the night in a perfumed forest, or to relax in the sensual pleasure of a sultry accordion. Anna Clyne has forged a fine reputation as a contemporary composer not afraid to use harmony and tonality in her work. Born in London, she studied music at Edinburgh University, and now lives in New York. Elim Chan’s wonderfully expressive conducting was perfect for this music, and the trumpet solos were excellently played by Christopher Hart and Simon Bird. 

The orchestra was reduced to chamber size for the next piece, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 12 in A Major, played superbly by Edinburgh’s Steven Osborne. We are lucky in Scotland at the moment to have two world class instrumental soloists in Nicola Benedetti and Mr Osborne, who studied initially at St Mary’s Music School in the capital with Richard Beauchamp, and the audience gave a warm welcome to him tonight.  

The concerto was one of Mozart’s signature pieces, a work which alerted his new fellow citizens in Vienna to the appearance of both a great player and a fine composer. Practical as well as brilliant, the 27 year old Mozart realised that he could make a decent living playing his own music and was not ashamed to publicise his genius. 

It was a great pleasure to hear Steven Osborne coaxing beautiful sounds out of the Usher Hall Steinway. Of course, in Mozart’s time the piano was still in its infancy, having only been invented and perfected by the Florentine, Bartolomeo Cristofori in 1711, and the grand sonority and sparkling brilliance of the modern concert grand was unknown to the young composer, but it is clear that he was a superb player himself, and he established himself as the pre-eminent pianist of his day. Mr Osborne is a remarkably unassuming player, but he exudes class and musicianship at the keyboard, and it is rather nice to watch a highly skilled player simply allowing the music to dictate his movements and gestures, in contrast to some of the more flamboyant practitioners of the art. The slow movement, an Andante, was a beautiful exploration of Mozart’s genius, as the young composer paid gentle homage to his mentor, J C Bach, who had taught him composition at the age of 8, when Mozart had been brought to London by his father.  Johann Christian, the eighteenth child of J S Bach, had moved to London in 1762, and had established himself as the ‘English Bach’! 

Steven Osborne and Elm Chan combined splendidly in the rondo form finale of the concerto, and the audience gave both warm applause at the end. Mr Osborne delighted us with an intriguing encore, his interpretation of a track from the 1968 album, ‘Bill Evans at the Montreux Jazz Festival’, revealing a sound world utterly different from that of Mozart. 

After the interval, we were plunged into that great Romantic masterpiece, Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, which was first heard in St Petersburg in 1888. Despite a standing ovation at its first performance, Tchaikovsky was uncertain of the success of the symphony, as it received a mixed reception from the critics, fuelling his own feelings of self-doubt and failure. Dismissed by some as cosmopolitan cleverness, lacking in Russian soul, it seems inconceivable now that anyone could be other than blown away by its lyric splendour, its vivid orchestration and its fabulously thrilling conclusion, and yet the idea persists that the finale is ironic and bombastic rather than an expression of heroic triumph over adversity. 

Elim Chan’s interpretation, with the RSNO, gave the lie to that notion, in a performance of such heroic intensity that we were literally overwhelmed with emotion at the end. I have rarely heard an Edinburgh audience so enthused by a symphonic performance as this, and she was given an ovation which obviously deeply moved this slight figure on the podium. Ms Chan may be small in stature but she is a giant of a conductor, and I fervently hope that she can be coaxed to return frequently to the RSNO in the future. 

From the dark funereal intensity of the opening bars, the famous Fate motto emerges on the clarinet from the gloom of the lower strings, and gradually we are led into the heart of the music. Timothy Orpen, who was given the opportunity to be a soloist last week in Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto, again demonstrated the beauty of his playing, and the woodwind section in general showed how good they can be throughout this symphony. 

In the second andante movement, the solo horn tune was played with absolute brilliance, full of a deep yearning, by the guest principal, Diana Sheach. It must be daunting to come into an established orchestra as a guest, and find yourself playing one of the most exposed and famous instrumental solos in the repertoire, but Ms Sheach nailed it, and received deservedly warm applause at the end, especially as she is one of our home-grown stars, coming from Glasgow. 

The third movement reminded me of Tchaikovsky’s other famous waltz from the last act of his opera, ‘Eugene Onegin’, and got me thinking about how this strange, much travelled, self-doubting genius has left us with outstanding compositions in almost all of the great classical music genres, of symphonies, concertos, operas and ballets. Present in Bayreuth in 1876 at the first performances of Wagner’s ‘Ring Cycle’, conductor at the gala opening of the Carnegie Hall in New York in 1891, composer of the most famously triumphant overture of all time, the 1812 Overture, celebrating Russia’s victory over Napoleon, it is small wonder that Tchaikovsky is still so loved by audiences the world over, and this performance by Elim Chan and the RSNO kept alive, in the most thrilling way, his reputation. Hats off too to Paul Philbert for his dynamic timpani work in the symphony. 

I’m still buzzing!