Scottish Chamber Orchestra: America, the Beautiful

Queen’s Hall - 17/03/22

Hugo Ticciati has stepped into the breach to replace the indisposed Pekka Kuusisto in three concerts this month.  After explorations of contemporary music in the first two concerts, this programme features iconic, sometimes ground-breaking, American works from the 20th century.  Three of Kuusisto’s original choices remain, but the first work was chosen by Ticciati.  Brian Schiele, the viola player, tells us that the Philip Glass Symphony No 3 was new to the players, who learned it for this concert.  The other three works were written within eight years of each other in the 1930s and 1940s while the Glass dates from 1995. 

As Hugh Kerr noted in a recent review, the full orchestra list tonight at 43 players is as big as the forces of some symphony orchestras.  As is the SCO’s practice, various chamber groupings perform the first three works with the full orchestra coming together only for the Aaron Copland at the end. 

Precisely 19 strings take the floor, as stipulated in the score, with Ticciati as leader, for the Philip Glass Symphony.  For this piece, the upper strings are standing, which always adds to the communication both between the players and with the audience.  The piece is in four movements, Glass suggesting when he wrote it that it seemed to require this conventional division.  With its links to minimalism and repetitive rhythms, it reminded me of John Adams’ ‘Shaker Loops’ played in the autumn season, and it receives a similarly intent and vigorous treatment from the players.  Glass’s brief for this commission from the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra was to treat the musicians as individuals as well as part of a group, and the regular use of solo musical lines adds to the complex surface of the piece.  The short first movement has a quiet steady pulse with a melody passed between instruments and gradually taking over complete sections of the orchestra.  The second movement is faster and louder with trickier rhythms and contains some harmonies reminiscent of Indian stringed music – Glass studied sitar with Ravi Shankar.  The third movement is the longest and most complicated.  Starting off in the lower strings a melodic line is played over a rocking rhythm and very gradually is picked up by individual instruments until the whole orchestra is playing loudly.  We can see this melody sweep over the whole orchestra from the lower instruments on the right through the cellos and viola, ending with the back row of violins on the left. Meanwhile Ticciati has started a soaring solo melody which weaves around and above the other music.  It is a mesmerising piece to listen to.  And often witty too.  The last movement is an energetic dance which could almost take its place in West Side Story.   

Stravinsky’s ‘Dumbarton Oaks’ is written for a smaller group of musicians, strings with flute, clarinet, bassoon and horns.  Although he wrote the piece in Paris - for the owner of the estate of that name outside Washington DC in 1938 -  Stravinsky was shortly to move to the States, one of a group of émigré composers from Europe who made their home there just before and during World War II. This is a light-hearted piece in three sections which mixes the conventions of classical music, for example a minuet and a stately baroque dance, with playful bird-song, and some harsher dissonance in the wind instruments.  The music is thrown off with such nonchalance by these SCO musicians, so adept in smaller ensembles, that the precision and complexity of the work almost passes us by.   

Both the Glass and the Stravinsky are well received by the audience, although individual reaction was more mixed.   Someone nearby remarked philosophically at the interval, “We’ve had the hard music.  Now we can relax for the easy bit.” 

Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’ did appear over-facile to some fellow left-wing composers when it was premiered in 1938.  Copland however admired its “absolute sincerity” and more recently Alex Ross, in his 2007 appraisal of 20th century music, ‘The Rest Is Noise’, speaks of its “timeless quality”.  It’s become the music for the funerals of Presidents and is played on the radio “whenever the American Dream seems threatened.”  Tonight Ticciati appropriates it as the orchestra’s tribute to the people of Ukraine.  He asks for no applause at the end while the musicians and audience have a short period of reflection. 

Ticciati returns to the stage with baton rather than violin to conduct Aaron Copland’s ‘Appalachian Spring’.  This music has come to represent an optimistic view of America, based certainly on a partial understanding of the frontier past but seeming to aspire towards an achievable future.  Appalachian Spring was written as music for a ballet by Martha Graham, which develops the symbolic story of a pioneering family.  Copland’s easy way with melody and for orchestration which evoked the sense of wide-open spaces had been honed in earlier compositions such as ‘Billy the Kid’.  The ballet was scored for a small instrumental group, but tonight we have the suite for orchestra. Over forty players perform in this final work, with piano, harp, multiple percussive instruments and timpani, as well as a full array of brass and woodwind.  There are nine markings of different tempos, or moods, sometimes in English, sometimes Italian – e.g. “very slowly”, “quite fast”, but also “moderato” and “allegro”.  At times there’s a sudden change in mood, at others the sections run into each other. The opening with high winds is beautiful, and the country dance half way through is rhythmic and vigorous with strings mimicking the fiddles of a barn dance band.  The Shaker hymn ‘Simple Gifts’ and its four variations make the most of the power of the full orchestra, although Copland himself emphasised the importance of the quiet coda which follows. It’s marked “like a prayer” and Ross quotes Copland’s recorded instructions to an orchestra, “It should sound rounder and more satisfying.  Not distant.  Quietly present … Like an Amen.” 

David Kettle in his admirable programme notes suggests that this concert is an exploration of what constitutes American music.  The individual pieces suggest that there are many answers to the question.  For a detailed discussion see the online programme, available for this and previous concerts at www.sco.org.uk  

For another Scottish take on the Glass Symphony, try last year’s film of the third and fourth movements made by the Scottish Ensemble and senior members of the Scottish Youth Orchestra (below).