Stream: RSNO - Chan and Benedetti
This concert of music by Duncan, Szymanowski and Bartok was conducted by the excellent young conductor, Elim Chan, and featured the wonderful Nicola Benedetti in the second violin concerto by Szymanowski.
Once again playing in the Royal Concert Hall in Glasgow, this was the last in the Digital series which has helped us get through the Covid nightmare over the winter and spring.
The concert started with ‚ Stac Dona‘, one of the tunes of St Kilda discovered in a Nursing Home in Edinburgh, played by one of the residents some years ago.. This old man was remembering tunes taught to him early in the last century by one of the last islanders, who had been evacuated in 1930. These tunes were so evocative that Decca Records commissioned several composers to orchestrate them and released a CD “The Lost Songs of St Kilda”, which contained the original melodies played on the Home’s piano and the orchestrations. It proved a surprising hit, and sold in large numbers. We heard one of the orchestrations as part of an earlier concert in the series of Barber and Brahms, but I found this one a bit more interesting. I still prefer the original solo recordings, but this one, ‚Stac Dona‘ (Bad Stack in Gaelic), had more to it. The young Scottish composer, Christopher Duncan, has produced a lush orchestration, which fits the tune well, and indeed, it’s quite a catchy tune. Scored for string orchestra and harp, it had the flavour of rather good film music, and Ms Chan, without a baton, moulded it very attractively.
The Second Violin Concerto of Karol Szymanowski was composed in 1932 and 33, and was premiered in Warsaw by Pawel Kochanski, a brilliant Polish violinist who sadly died the year after the premiere. The concerto had been requested by Kochanski, who also devised the cadenza that separates the two sections of this one movement work. By this time, Szymanowski had been ill with TB for a few years, and had moved to Zakopane in the Tatras Mountains of Poland for his health. There he found a large number of Polish folk melodies, and these influenced his later music, including the second violin concerto.
It was a great pleasure to watch Nicola Benedetti play this concerto with the RSNO. There is something heart-warming about this young woman, still in her early 30s, who has taken the world by storm with her fabulous playing and charismatic personality. The winner in 2004 of the BBC Young Musician of the Year Award at the age of 16, Ms Benedetti has gone on to become perhaps Scotland’s most famous musician, not just for her playing but also for her work with young and disadvantaged people. She comes from an Italian Scottish family in the west of Scotland, and was recognised at a young age as a prodigy. It is quite a family, as her older sister plays with the pop group, Clean Bandit!
It was very clear that she had established a rapport both with the orchestra and Elim Chan, as, right from the beginning, one could feel the love flowing around the concert hall. The concerto is in one movement, with two sections separated by a fiendishly difficult sounding cadenza, and is in an idiom which, for this listener, was immensely appealing. There are many changes of mood and tempi, and one can certainly hear the influence of that Polish folk music I mentioned earlier. A piano in the orchestra lends an unusual texture to the sound, and the violin part seems to merge with the various instruments in a very pleasing way. There is an enormous climax in the middle of the first section, which gives way to a more lyrical part, leading into the violin cadenza. The second section seems more rhythmic, and the use of percussion more marked. Through all this, Ms Benedetti plays with a youthful abandon, exchanging glances with the conductor and some of the instrumental players, and the whole work reaches a cathartic end which elicits a warm response from the orchestra. Ms Chan conducts throughout with a restrained but tight grip on proceedings, and I must admit to a great sense of satisfaction when the concerto reached its climax. One of the great joys of listening to and watching this digital season has been to discover works new to me, which, at an age when such things are rare, has been enormously gratifying. Finding that the RSNO is on top form has also been a revelation, since my career has been spent mostly away from Scotland, and I have not personally been able to hear them play. As I have pointed out in many articles and reviews, this professional exile has not been my choice, but I hope we can see more Scots and Scottish- based musicians performing with our national cultural institutions in the future, both to the benefit of the audience and also to the musicians. It is perverse that most of us have had to work abroad, and I hope the success of Ms Benedetti will persuade these institutions of the advantage of using home grown talent.
The final work in the programme was Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, written in the USA in 1943, only two years before the composer’s death. He and his wife had emigrated to America in 1940, as he had realised that life in Europe was no longer safe for him, and his anti fascist views could be dangerous. He never felt really at home in the States, and he was better known there as a pianist, ethno-musicologist and teacher than as a composer. This seems absurd now that his reputation is so great, but it does appear that the Americans didn’t know what a genius they had on their doorstep. Sadly, his health deteriorated after he emigrated, but, at least, a commission from Serge Koussevitzky, the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1924 -1949, provided him with work and a purpose. His Concerto for Orchestra was premiered in Boston in December 1944, to some acclaim, but in September of the following year, he died aged 64 of leukaemia in New York, largely unknown and unnoticed.
Elim Chan conducted the Concerto with splendid control and a strong sense of direction. This tiny figure, born in Hong Kong, is the permanent guest conductor of the RSNO, and seems to be popular with both the orchestra and the audiences (in normal times). She is, despite her elfin appearance, very obviously a powerhouse as a conductor, and I was very impressed both by her technique and also her warm personality, which shone through in her conducting.
The Concerto for Orchestra was designed to highlight all the instruments in the orchestra, and this was a very good way of ending this digital season, which has shown us, in close up, many of the players in the RSNO. From the magnificent woodwind section, through the brass and strings to the percussion section, it showed how well this orchestra can play, and I’m sure we all hope to see them back in the concert hall next season.
Bartok’s Concerto was one of the first recordings I bought in the new CD format, back in the early 80s, and I have always enjoyed its variety, and its feel of modernity with ancient roots. Bartok’s use of Hungarian folk melodies was particularly expressive, and I also love the slow introductions to the first and third movements, which are so similar to the creepy beginning of his opera “Bluebeard’s Castle”, about which I have written in a recent Blog on EMR. The final movement is a real tour de force for the orchestra, as it is a perpetuum mobile, competing with a host of folk melodies. It was a bravura performance, and my delight was compounded by the fact that Scottish accents were present in some of the introductions from the players. There is no nationalism in music, but I was beginning to worry that there seemed to be no Scots in the RSNO, judging by the interviews. I was pleased to find that my worries were unnecessary!
This was a splendid concert, conducted by the orchestra’s permanent guest conductor, who I hope to see many times in the future. Her rapport with the orchestra was clear and evident, and it will be interesting to watch her development, as she is still comparatively young.
Available to stream on the RSNO website.
