The BBC SSO
Eden Court, Inverness
The Edinburgh Music Review is based in Edinburgh, but ranges widely across Scotland and occasionally abroad. Tonight, I'm in Inverness for what is a regular visit from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra to Eden Court, the excellent art centre in Inverness. Martyn Brabbins our conductor was interviewed beforehand and warned us that with the corona virus this might be his last live concert for some time. However, there was a decent audience in the very nice concert hall known as the Empire Theatre at the centre of Eden Court. Martyn also spoke about the all-Russian programme tonight, which he was very close to since he spent some time studying and conducting in Russia in the 1980s alongside the great Russian maestro Valery Gergiev. He said Russian orchestras tend to sound the same, as they were all trained in the same conservatories, whereas British orchestras tend to be much more international in their recruiting.
The Russian programme began with some very familiar melodies. This was because it was Glazunov's adaption of some famous piano works for the orchestra by Chopin, one of them ending up being used in the ballet, firstly for a work called Chopiana, and then later some being used for Les Sylphides. The orchestra played them delightfully under Brabbins direction, although his conducting seemed quite colourful compared to his talk about teaching conducting before the concert, when he said it was important for young conductors not to be too colourful in their gestures! The concert continued with an old operatic friend from earlier days at Covent Garden, Sergei Leverkus, who at the age of 73 has a long and distinguished operatic career behind him. Indeed, our opera singer reviewer Brian Bannatyne-Scott recalls singing with him and Placido Domingo in Tosca in Paris many years ago. The question we were all asking was did he still have the voice? Martin Brabbins promised us we were in for a treat and certainly there was no problem about the power of the voice, although at times it lacked subtlety in conveying the nuance of Mussorgsky's settings of the text by Arseny Arkadyvich Golenschiv-Kutzov's and its orchestration by Shostakovich. He got a warm reception from the Eden Court audience, but surprisingly for a Russian performer no encore. We had incidentally a similar problem in reading the text of the songs due to dim lighting that we have reported recently at the Usher Hall. The Edinburgh Music Review plans to mount a major campaign for Scottish Concert halls to either provide surtitles or at least keep the lights on so audience members can read the text of songs!
After the interval we hear a very Russian work, Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony, written in 1888 and first performed in St Petersburg. It became an instant hit with audiences although not apparently with the press! The following year he took it to Hamburg and Brahms was in the hotel room next to him, having stayed to hear the new Symphony. He liked it, apart from the finale, maybe too Russian for him. Again, Martyn Brabbins was very colourful in his conducting. Interestingly, while writing this review, I'm watching and listening to his old fellow student Valery Gergiev conducting this work with the Mariinsky Orchestra. His style is very different, his fingers flutter and he gives little nods to sections of the orchestra. Of course, much of the work of the conductor is done in rehearsal and certainly the BBC Scottish seemed well rehearsed. They played it splendidly, with lots of brass, although maybe not as much vibrato as the Russians would! They got a great reception from the audience and we all trooped off into the night wondering, rather like Martyn Brabbins, when we would next see live music! Whatever the immediate future holds, after tonight's excellent concert I shall be back!
