Roof-raising concert is anything but redundant
The opening concert of the Edinburgh Festival was once the grand opening of the entire proceedings. These days, with the Fringe already in full swing, the morning series at Queen’s Hall under way, and opera and theatre schedules already busy, it can easily seem a bit redundant.
To make an impression, the opening concert has to be really spectacular, and one might ask whether a Haydn symphony and the most earnestly pious of Mendelssohn’s symphonies is really up to the job. As it turned out, the concert was actually wonderful. It was given by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and led by a young Spanish conductor called Pablo Heras Casado, who on this occasion fully lived up to his glowing reputation.
The Haydn symphony was No 94, known as the Surprise because Haydn blows a loud raspberry in the generally tiptoeing slow movement. Heras Casado made sure we really did jump when the sudden loud crash came, but the real surprise came in the first movement. Here Heras Casado highlighted the way the symphony’s prevailing cheerfulness was momentarily pushed aside by anxiety and turbulence, as if Haydn were remembering the dark “storm and stress” symphonies of his youth. The most delicately shaped moment came in the charming Trio of the minuet, when Heras Casado made the numerous little hesitations so natural that one barely noticed his guiding hand on the tiller.
Heras Casado’s unobtrusive way of sustaining the momentum was a boon in Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang (Song of Praise), which can all too easily descend into stodgy sentimentality. After a shout of praise from the excellent Edinburgh Festival Chorus and two sweetly pious duets (the one from sopranos Emma Bell and Dorothea Röschmann was especially touching), the tone changed. The chorus sang of a time of tribulation, when they wandered in darkness. “Watchman, will the night soon pass?” sang the tenor Werner Güra, and his insistently repeated question was moving because he never overplayed the pathos. The same couldn’t be said for Röschmann. She got so emotionally involved in the drama that her tuning went awry in her ecstatic affirmation “the night has passed”. Still, the consoling beauty of the hymn Now Thank We All Our God melted us all, and the final triumphant shout of praise raised the roof.