Scottish Chamber Orchestra: ‘Musique Amerique’

Queen’s Hall - 12/01/22

After Thursday’s concert, I went online, keen to hear again the SCO’s first piece of the evening, Darius Milhaud’s “La Creation du Monde.”  Written a hundred years ago, it celebrates the composer’s thrill of discovering in American Jazz, a new way of writing and listening to music.  After a few ventures into recent YouTube versions, I re-learned a few valuable lessons.  Firstly that a live performance is almost always better than a recorded one, and secondly that some conductors and orchestras were uncomfortable with this music – the up and down beat and the dour, determined expressions said it all, without hearing a note.… 

But mostly, Joseph Swenson and the SCO turned in such a convincing and exciting performance that it blew all the competition away and grabbed the audience from beginning to end. Milhaud first heard jazz in London, and went to New York where he spent much of his time in Harlem immersing himself in this new music.  By the time he came back to Paris, jazz had preceded him and Josephine Baker was already a star. “La Creation du Monde” is a fifteen minute ballet score in six movements which run without a break.  It’s written for an orchestra of 18 players, though I think the SCO squeezed in a few more winds. Across the centre of the stage were four strings, two violins, a cello and a double-bass – also, in jazz mode, doubling as a percussion instrument.  Along the back rows were an array of winds, including an alto saxophone (Lewis Banks), who with the two trumpets and a trombone (Brian McGinley, Peter Franks and Duncan Wilson) provided the authentic sound. On the left of the stage was Simon Smith on piano, and on the front right, nearly hiding Louise Lewis Goodwin and her timpani, was Tom Hunter on an astonishing drumkit. Joseph Swenson, who, as he explained later, grew up in Harlem, conducted with the casual swaying nonchalance of a dance-band leader.  The work starts slowly and quietly, but with a wonderful deep resonance from the winds, especially the brass and saxophone. The second movement ‘La chaos avant la creation’ (the chaos before the creation) is louder, faster and with some exciting outbursts from various parts of the orchestra, directed by Swenson stabbing his left arm towards the players involved. The story is based on African creation myths rather than the Bible, but the movements suggest the familiar pattern of the creation of plants, animals and then man and woman.  There’s differentiation between louder more savage, and quieter more lyrical sections, but what impresses is the organic whole which Swenson presents, moving with a sense of purpose, which perfectly catches Milhaud’s joy at exploring a whole new set of sounds. It goes without saying the performers enjoyed the experience as much as the audience – the 10 year-old in front of me grinned up at his father, scarcely believing how much fun this was. 

As Swenson said afterwards, “I bet you never thought you’d start with something like that tonight.”  The three other works on the programme are from the 1940s and show how jazz influences on classical music developed and were assimilated into the mainstream.  Benny Goodman, ‘the King of Swing’, was also an accomplished classical clarinettist, and in 1946 asked Aaron Copland to write a concerto for him. The two-movement work for clarinet, string orchestra, harp and piano has a classically influenced first movement marked “Slowly and expressively” and a jazz-inspired second movement, marked “Rather fast”. There’s an elegiac quality to the first movement which begins with harp and quiet strings under the clarinet, sounding austere after the rich textures of the Milhaud.  It develops into a lusher more expansive sound, like some of Copland’s ballet music from earlier in the 1940s.  There’s a cadenza between the movements which starts in this lyrical vein and then moves to the punchier dynamic of the jazz clarinet. There’s a stop-start momentum to the early section of the second movement with an off-beat rhythm which refuses to settle.  Later the piano plays an important role in the faster sections where more coherent melodies and rhythms take hold.  The story goes that Goodman found the last part of the concerto too difficult, but all is accomplished with ease by the SCO’s own Maximiliano Martin, balancing cool and virtuosity in a piece he knows well and has recorded with the orchestra. 

After the interval we have an interesting 10 minute Goodman coda, when the same string forces and piano accompany Martin in an arrangement for orchestra of Leonard Bernstein’s 1942 Sonata for Clarinet. It’s also in two movements with classical and jazz influences.  In the first movement I found the sections for piano and clarinet more interesting, with the string accompaniment superfluous.  This was Bernstein’s first published piece, and the second movement with its Latin American inspired dance rhythms gives an foretaste of Bernstein the composer of hit musicals – more than a hint here of ‘I like to be in America’. 

The final work takes us back to Paris where in 1947 Poulenc was commissioned by the BBC to write a work for the first birthday of the Third Programme. Poulenc, who, like Milhaud, was one of the group of French composers known as “Le Six”, wanted the Sinfonietta to be a work to be taken seriously, a cooler approach to the jazz influences. The four movement work is written for full orchestra – minus the saxophone - and piano, with the percussionist, Tom Hunter playing the xylophone.  Despite his serious intentions Poulenc was surprised that so much humour had got out, which, at 48, he felt might be thought inappropriate for a man of his advanced years, and the result is a cheerful piece which shows influences of a range of composers from Mozart to Stravinsky.  The second movement molto vivace has the innocent charm of a toytown march. 

The SCO have waited nearly three years to put on this concert, twice cancelled by lockdowns, but the packed house clearly felt it was worth waiting for.  We’re back at the Queen’s Hall  on 19th January for An Evening with Francois Leleux – for details click here.