Scottish Chamber Orchestra: Seek the Light
Queen’s Hall - 10/03/22
This World Premiere of ‘Seek the Light’, a radical blend of folk and classical music that was commissioned by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (SCO), was introduced at Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall by Korean born cellist Su-a Lee. During her warm and exuberant opening speech, she announced that Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto was unable to take part in the direction of the performance as planned, but that his place would be taken by fellow violinist, Hugo Ticciati. She also rather informally asked for a straw poll of how many in the audience had come to see award winning Scottish folk singer-songwriter, Karine Polwart, and how many had SCO as their reason for attending. Overwhelmingly, and with no disrespect to the excellent SCO, Karine definitely had a fan-base present!
The evening started with Beethoven’s Symphony No 4 – Adagio played by an SCO whose violin section was on its feet. This may be a convention unfamiliar to those in the audience not accustomed to attending classical concert, and could be a projected sympathy, but it seems like it could be bit of a trial for that section of the orchestra. With no fanfare and dressed in a sparkly orange dress matched with a slate grey evening coat, an outfit she confesses has let her ‘embrace her inner diva’, Karine Polwart arrives on stage in her otherwise quiet and modest manner. After her purest voice renders the composition by herself and Pippa Murphy, ‘You Know Where You Are’, to which Hugo responds on the violin, she leaves the stage as unobtrusively as she left, as though just moving to change seats rather than having just thrilled an audience with her immaculate voice.
What follows is Swedish composer Andrea Tarrodi’s, ‘Birds of Paradise’. This opens with a clarinet solo followed by a quiet build-up of strings led by Hugo Ticciati, who is at once relaxed and animated in this evocation of animal sounds and nature. Again, Karine quietly graces the performance area, this time with another joint composition, ‘The Night Mare’, that looks at our relationship with light and dark. Polwart’ s voice is singular yet blends with the musicians like another instrument.
There is a sense of a journey or flight in the swooping sounds and gathering noise that makes for ‘Insula Deserta’ from Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür that closes the first half of the concert to sustained applause.
Karine opens the second half in her signature style of intimate chat, neatly describing the meld of genres as ‘different worlds shoogling around…’ before an elegant and moving rendition of ‘A Love Too Loud’, a humanised retelling of the Myth of Cassiopeia who was destined to perpetual humiliation by the gods for the vanity of boasting too much of her daughter Andromeda’s beauty. Karine’s discreet but expressive hand movements look like a kind of gentle conducting.
The final orchestral piece is ‘Distant Light’ from Latvian composer Péteris Vasks that opens with Hugo making his violin sing before rest of strings join in this intense and abstract composition that has an esoteric feel for those of us not used to the genre. The apparent chaos is soothed when Karine appears for the final time to sing a Gaelic inspired lullaby for the end of the day, ‘Sleep Now’, during which she is utterly in accord with her SCO accompanists and invites the audience, in a subdued salute to folk tradition, to join in as the song proceeds and the lights dim. A quiet humming of the words is the reticent response from the audience before another round of sustained applause.