Swap roles in lust-driven show
bored with their own initial idea and decided to ramp things up to preposterous proportions in order to make things more interesting. One minute it’s a girls’ night out style feel-good romp; the next it’s a turbocharged fantastical sit-com, barely based in reality and peppered with potty-mouthed one-liners, pink-stetsoned stand-offs and smatterings of high and low campery.
A cast led by a heroic Louise Mccarthy as Daniella give it their all, but amidst the appealing kitsch of Alan Penman’s show-tunes and a serious message about financial hardship in working-class communities, there is much here that is surplus to requirements. Barbara Rafferty’s Henry The Hoover wielding Joanna, for instance, appears to have wandered in from another show, and indeed merits one all of her own.
There’s a mighty fine play in here somewhere, but it needs a heap of work to chisel away the excess baggage it’s currently saddled with before it can fully connect. While there is much to enjoy on a surface level, at the moment it feels like a first draft work-in-progress for something bigger, brasher and brighter yet to come. Music
Scottish Chamber Orchestra
City Halls, Glasgow
Keith Bruce
****
IT was probably as much a fortuitous coincidence as careful planning, but Francois Leleux’s concerts with the SCO were the ideal occasion on which to launch the orchestra’s new season, which features a feast of French music as well as a number of performances where the soloist and conductor are the one person, and a year that again showcases individual talents within the ensemble.
Leleux is one of the regular guests with an increasing association with the orchestra, exemplified here in the little encore of music from Bizet’s Carmen with principal flautist Alison Mitchell that followed his performance of Lebrun’s Oboe Concerto No1. She had been the soloist in the first half performance of Leonard Bernstein’s Halil, a work dedicated to a young flautist killed in the Yom Kippur war of 1973. With her colleagues in the flutes in the choir stalls, and a veritable batterie of percussion, this iconoclastic piece creates a very individual soundworld that was not only an early contribution to marking the centenary of the composer’s birth, but also sat very well with the older music around it.
Mitchell was, of course, superb, but rather less flamboyant in performance that Leleux himself, whose theatrical soliloquy in the first movement of the concerto deserved such a description rather than a simple “cadenza”.
He is not an especially demonstrative conductor, but the works that opened and closed the concert, Faure’s Pelleas et Melisande Suite and Bizet’s Symphony in C, are both examples of those composers at their most colourfully melodic, and were ideally suited to the forces on stage. The former contains one of Faure’s best-known tunes, while the latter simply fizzes with youthful energy from the first bar to the last.
BBC SSO
City Halls, Glasgow Keith Bruce
****
THERE will not be many Saturdays when two Scottish audiences are hearing different pieces by Oxford-born composer Charlotte Bray, but at weekend as the Schubert Ensemble performed her piano quartet Zustande in Stirling on the group’s farewell tour, Geoffrey Paterson was conducting Bray’s Stone Dancer as the opening salvo in a programme for Radio 3’s Hear And Now strand of contemporary music.
Bray makes the most of her resources in the orchestral piece in what is a very colourful work that ranges widely in pitch, tempo and dynamics. Thanks to a hiccup in the recording process we were blessed to enjoy its 10 minutes twice, which is arguably the better way to appreciate a new work.
While it had its first performance last year under Oliver Knussen at Aldeburgh, Thomas Hyde’s Symphony was a world premiere and the most immediately arresting of the evening’s pieces, its drama punctuated by congas and bongos, glissando trombones and some highly original writing for the strings.
The two other works were from composers of an older generation.
John Hopkins’s Double Concerto for trumpet and alto saxophone had plenty of complex full-on work for soloists Marco Blauuw and Marcus Weiss. Although there is nothing especially jazzy about the writing, the way they inter-act inevitably recalled the front line of a jazz group, with the sax often in more of a supporting role.
Diana Burrell’s Resurrection, from 1992, made full use the orchestral brass and was, like the Bray, more programmatic, if a little more opaque in its intent. Alongside a memorable throbbing figure in the low strings and an evocation of pealing bells in the finale, the cor anglais of James Horan was the featured solo instrument here.