Rich rewards from powerful restraint
Less, as the cliché goes, is more. That was certainly the case among the somewhat disparate threads that wound together in the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s Franco-scottish “Auld Alliance” concert under principal conductor Maxim Emelyanychev. Or at least in its two headline pieces: both smouldered with restrained emotion, and were all the more powerful for that.
Sir James Macmillan’s brand new Composed in August – getting its worldpremiere performance – was a sumptuous, deeply lyrical setting of Burns’ Now Westlin Winds for chorus and orchestra. The piece seemed to flow organically from one pregnant idea to another, from Messiaen-like birdsong to a duet between on-stage oboe and off-stage cor anglais playing the poem’s two lovers. Best of all, Macmillan dared to let his new work speak softly but eloquently, finding a luminous (even numinous) quality in a simple, two-chord progression, for example, or profundity in a gentle hummed conclusion. It was delivered with utter conviction by the SCO and Chorus.
Matching Macmillan’s new work for emotional richness, however, was mezzo Karen Cargill’s spellbinding account of Berlioz’s La mort de Cléopâtre, a rather overlooked oddity, but a gripping and richly imagined creation nonetheless in Cargill and Emelyanychev’s hands. She was every inch the wronged Egyptian Queen, channelling frustrated fury and shattered honour, but with a deeply human sense of a woman wronged in love too, and Emelyanychev was alive to her every vocal nuance.
More outspoken than those two images of restraint, however, were Emelyanychev’s bounding, dashing Berlioz Rob Roy Overture that opened the concert with bristling energy, and a wonderfully cinematic Maxwell Davies Orkney Wedding with Sunrise that closed the evening in shimmering radiance. A concert of riches.