Canny connections and contrasts
Scottish Chamber Orchestra/thomas Adès, Emma Posman (soprano)
Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh
Giving a world premiere by arguably Britain’s hottest composer is already quite something (even if it’s – admittedly – an orchestration of an existing piece). But to have composer/conductor Thomas Adès on the podium to conduct it was quite a coup for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra – and it felt like a collaboration that both Adès and the orchestra lapped up.
His new/old The Origin of the Harp – originally written for ten musicians in 1994 – was music of strangeness and wonder in its fresh incarnation, with ideas in a state of perpetual flow and transformation, bringing in weird and wonderful colours from a duo of hyperactive
percussionists, struck piano insides, thumb pianos and more. The results, though, were thoroughly beguiling, and brought brilliantly alive by Adès.
It formed the midpoint in what was quite a cerebral collection of pieces, threaded together by canny connections and contrasts. Adès seemed to revel in the sonic strangeness of Haydn’s Symphony No. 64, whose enigmatically sparse slow movement seemed to prefigure the halting, faltering Mozart fragments that coalesce ( just about) in John Woolrich’s collage-like The Theatre Represents a Garden: Night, played with such tenderness and delicacy that it sometimes felt on the verge of dissolving completely.
Far more gutsy was Judith Weir’s Heroic Strokes of the Bow, driven through with rugged urgency in Adès’s compelling account – and the ideal counterpart for his closing sections from Beethoven’s ballet The Creatures of Prometheus. With her liquid, silvery soprano, Emma Posman had earlier made an ideal interpreter in Mozart’s aria ‘Vorrei spiegarvi, oh Dio’. There was a lot to take in, across several contrasting musical styles. But Adès’s enthusiasm and authority – also evident in a couple of warm introductions – brought it all together superbly.