Charlie is the darling as Busted give silver service
Music
little wonder that the BBC SSO’s concert on Thursday evening had sold out weeks in advance.
A BBC commission, The Air, Turning was penned by the young British composer Edmund Finnis, who is currently composer-inassociation with the London Contemporary Orchestra and whose violin concerto was shortlisted for an RPS music award last year.
Inspired by Scottish poet Robin Robertson’s Finding The Keys, this piece was an ethereally beautiful exploration of the transient nature of the wind and its interactions with the natural world.
Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto begins with an arresting crescendo, Ilan Volkov’s galvanising conducting bringing out a full-bodied, rich sound from the orchestra. Steven Osborne, having stepped in at short notice for an indisposed Yevgeny Sudbin, gave a profound and meticulous interpretation of this great work. An unashamedly dramatic cadenza in the first movement was followed by lush, lyrical warmth in the second, which was brimming with potential energy as Osborne stretched out on Rachmaninov’s melodies. The final Allegro Scherzando movement was fiery and vigorous as the music skirted between the major and minor key.
Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade suite opened with a dark and brooding undercurrent, with leader Laura Samuels’ solo flourishes taking on an illuminated, honeyed quality. Named after the legendary Arabian folklore heroine, RimskyKorsakov’s evocative motifs are passed round a number of solo instruments, showcasing much of the individual talents from each section of the orchestra, from Julian Roberts’ warm bassoon playing and Rosemary Lock’s spritely piccolo to a taut, bright percussion section. Volkov was in incredible form, commanding the orchestra through a vivid, exciting reading of this colourful work. Rob Adams IT ALMOST goes without saying that jazz musicians are composers.
Their music, at its best, is in a constant state of recreation and ideas happened upon while exploring one piece might well reappear in some form as another composition entirely.
Even so, Polish guitarist Szymon Mika and his group take an approach to performance that’s composer-like in the extreme. Without giving any impression of repeating a previous gig, Mika, bassist Max Mucha and the wonderful New York-based drummer Ziv Ravitz played two sets here that were carefully structured and beautifully balanced.
Mika’s improvisations are thoughtful explorations that contain little hint of displaying chops, although he clearly has the jazz guitar vocabulary at his disposal. He’s all about creating fluent variations and diversions that have a logical, always melodic thread. Storytelling is the useful shorthand and he uses his technique – a combination of fingerstyle and plat-picking – in a sort of conversation with himself that he projects easily to the listener.
With an attentive audience the trio rewarded concentration with subtle interplay, painstaking detail and a huge range of colours. Mika can play with crunch as well as gentleness and Ravitz, who can motor very intensely at low volume, injected an indie rock-like urgency on occasion to great effect.
As is composers’ wont, Mika also occasionally integrates existing melodies into his own style. His reading of Sleep Safe And Warm, Krzysztof Komeda’s lullaby from Rosemary’s Baby became a soul ballad that sang directly through his warm tone and expressive extemporising, and his own opening number reappeared in a different guise at the end to give a satisfying feeling of resolution to a thoroughly involving group performance. Hazel Rowland AN EVENING of film music certainly feels appropriate for the run-up to the Oscars.
But despite the popularity of John Williams’s film scores, pulling off such a concert is no easy task. This was especially true for the RSNO on Friday evening, under the baton of film music veteran Richard Kaufman. By squeezing in music from 12 different films into a single programme, the orchestra had to navigate between vast changes in mood, with varying degrees of success.
Summon The Heroes (which, as the fanfare Williams wrote for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, is actually not film music) made for a brash and triumphant opening, with the timpani and brass satisfyingly filling the Usher Hall’s expansive space. Yet the orchestra had difficulty in shaking off this feeling in Hymn To The Fallen from Saving Private Ryan, which followed. A slower pace and greater wistfulness in the lower woodwinds was required.
The orchestra played with greater enthusiasm as the evening progressed, however. The strings responded with utter sweetness to the gentle flute solo by Helen Brew in The People’s House from Lincoln, producing nostalgia without becoming sickly. The RSNO enjoyed taking the drama to the max in the theme from Jaws, and during their heroic rendition of the Raiders Of The Lost Arc’s main theme, they maintained a relentless drive. Kaufman took the Flying Theme from E.T. at a swift speed, allowing the violins to gloriously sour, while their edgy approach successfully captured the suspense in The Duel from The Adventures Of Tintin. The brass remained on top form for the music from Star Wars. Taken at a brisk speed, it made for a thrilling close. TO THE list of recent acclaimed deputising at concerts in Glasgow – conductor Elim Chan and pianist Louis Schwizgebel with the RSNO and pianist Steven Osborne with the BBC SSO – we must add soprano Rowan Pierce, who stepped in to replace the indisposed Elizabeth Watts for the SCO’s Coronation Mass this weekend.
From her CV of early opera roles, it is clear she arrived on the recommendation of conductor Richard Egarr. Mozart’s compact Mass In C is an ensemble work, where the business of balance between orchestra, chorus, and the quartet of soloists was handled with relaxed aplomb by the conductor, but the soprano does have a star solo role in the closing Agnus Dei, and the beautiful pure tone Pierce had demonstrated up until then – and especially in the Credo – made that an anticipated climax to the evening.
An hour and a half previously, Egarr had barely reached the podium before he set the SCO off on a muscular account of Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture that favoured a bit of welly over period austerity. From then on it was Mozart all the way, the conductor sometimes round the othersideofthemusicstandashe engaged with the players, many of whom also probably have as little need of the score to play the 36th “Linz” Symphony.
The Magic Flute overture was notable for the contrast between the crisp, brisk string playing and the legato phrasing demanded ofthewinds,andparticularly Alison Mitchell’s flute. Pierce’s contribution not excepted, this was the conductor’s night. Neil Cooper A WOMAN dressed in black plays the flute as she walks mournfully on to a dust-covered stage flanked by rows of ash cans. At its centre, a man is elevated up from a life-size hole in the ground and rises from the grave he arguably made for himself. This isn’t the most obvious opening for Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize winning 1949 treatise on how money can literally suck the life out of those barely scraping by. Rather than merely replicate the play’s inherent naturalism, Joe Douglas’ production rummages deep within the psyche of the play’s tormented protagonist Willy Loman to revitalises its tragedy in an even more devastating fashion.
When not in a scene, the nine-strong cast pick out low-end notes on one of two pianos that sit either side of the stage. In the play’s key flashback scenes, dialogue is spoken into microphones as if echoes from the ghosts of a past that haunts Willy, as his successful brother Ben and the woman in the hotel room where his self-destruction began are conjured up.
As Biff and Happy, Ewan Donald and Laurie Scott capture all the confusion and under-achievement of a post-war generation coming of age.
As Willy, Billy Mack gives a heartbreaking turn as a crumpled bag of neuroses living on his nerves but too tired to admit his defeat in a searing portrait of ordinary madness in a madder world.