Scottish Chamber Orchestra: Harmoniemusik
The Queen’s Hall - 21/11/21
The SCO’s Sunday afternoon concert contains only one work, British oboist Nigel Short’s arrangement for wind ensemble of music from Richard Strauss’s ‘Der Rosenkavalier’. This, its British premiere, is being played by SCO wind soloists working with students from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. The oboist, Alison Green, tells us in her introduction that this is the fifth in the Side by Side series of annual collaborations between the SCO and the Conservatoire. Of the fifteen musicians on stage there are seven from the SCO and eight students. It’s obviously been a worthwhile week of learning for all concerned, and the students are very much equal partners in this concert. The three student horn players, Anya Flanagan, Gabi Rodriguez and Matthew Sayers are especially to be commended for impeccable playing in the many exposed horn sections.
The 45-minute work condenses the three-hour long opera to three movements of 15 minutes each. In Rosenkavalier Strauss chose to write a Mozartian opera and its charming well-known melodies play a large part in this arrangement. But it’s not just a compilation of greatest hits. The winds, which feature heavily in the opera’s score, are used singly and in various combinations to mimic the voices – oboes and clarinets mainly for the women, horn and bassoon for the men. Their different textures also help to emphasis the 20th century elements in Strauss’s work, the unusual harmonies and the dissonances underlying the melodies, offsetting any tendency to mere prettiness. The winds also sound good in the waltzes, pastiches of the other Strauss’s 19th century dances which are deliberate anachronisms in the 18th century setting. Sometimes when they’re associated with the dreadful Baron Ochs, they are clumsy or over-exuberant. The winds capture this off-kilter element well, with burbling bassoons, and unexpected rasping horns.
Harmoniemusik works through each act of the opera, with Act 1 taking us from the raunchy opening – five horns! -through the Baron’s intervention to the Marschallin’s pensive conclusion. Act 2 is dominated by the presentation of the rose, with the piccolo (Matilda Coulton, student flautist) picking out the staccato accompaniment of falling notes to Octavian and Sophie’s duet – a particularly beautiful piece of arrangement. The act, which concludes with a comic waltz, might easily become a wind ensemble piece in its own right, as reflected in the spontaneous applause which greeted it!
Conductor, Alvin Ho, who has extensive experience in the States and Europe, has recently been appointed Leverhulme Conducting Fellow at the Conservatoire. He was an unobtrusive presence, but continually sympathetic to the demands of the work, and the different levels of experience in his players.
There are turbulent crowd scenes in the opera and Act 3 begins in a loud confused fashion, with scurrying lower winds. This is superseded by one of the raucous waltzes, with dissonance seeming to take over as it accelerates. Student Aaron Hartnell-Booth has a fine solo on basset clarinet, and as the opera ends with regrets, the horn motif from Act 1 and the piccolo accompaniment to the presentation of the rose are both heard.
Fine bitter-sweet music for a late autumn afternoon, much enjoyed by the decent sized audience at the Queen’s Hall. We look forward to hearing more of these students in their professional careers, those already mentioned, plus Ross Williams, oboe, Ossian Dance, D clarinet and Rachel Simmons, contra-bassoon.
