Singer serves dishes that keep the customer satisfied
Naomi Shelton & the Gospel Queens
Carnegie Hall, Dunfermline
Rob Adams
IT has been said before that there is often a thin line between Saturday night and Sunday morning in the soul and gospel music world. What’s good for praising the Lord on a Sunday can be good for celebrating life the night before and that message was delivered with conviction by Naomi Shelton and her troupe of singers and musicians on Saturday evening.
The septuagenarian singer is currently performing in a wheelchair but she put all the energy she might have put into moving around into her singing, sometimes adding an emphatic rasping holler reminiscent of the late Bobby Blue Bland. Backed by a funky four-piece band directed by former James Brown bassist Fred Thomas, who immediately established the groove with a feelgood Pass the Peas in homage to Brown, Shelton is the epitome of the soul kitchen matriarch.
Every song, every solo, every call and response with one or all three of her Gospel Queens is accompanied by her concerns that the dish is to her clientele’s liking. If her diction these days sounds a little tired and less clear than it might once have been, there is no questioning her sincerity.
A tribute to Etta James, her version of At Last had grit enough for the two of them and the slow burning What Have You Done, My Brother and He Knows My Heart called on deep reserves of fervour and compassion. Despite her physical constraints, Shelton was still having a party and the small pockets of dancing in the auditorium seemed to brighten the twinkle in her eye.
BBC SSO City Hall, Glasgow Michael Tumelty
PROGRAMMING Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto requires a tricky balancing act: how do you set it up and precede it? And with what do you follow it? The concerto, effectively in four movements, not the usual three, is in many ways one of the Russian composer’s works where you can still sense him glancing over his shoulder, perhaps waiting for that knock at the door.
It is also so unremittingly intense, which could be felt all the way through Boris Brovtsyn’s drainingly-concentrated performance with the BBC SSO and conductor Vassily Sinaisky replacing an ill Alexander Vedernikov on Thursday night, that I don’t recall feeling such a hushed, expectant atmosphere. It felt that, in the crowded house, all of us were pinned to our seats.
And somehow, the amazing Brovtsyn, even when he let fly spectacularly in the finale with an astounding display of unstoppably virtuosic playing, never let go of our throats. And that level of wizardry, in performance and in the profundity of a composition that dwells in the depths yet, almost spiritually, rises way above the confines of its circumstances, is one of the miracles of music. You can contain the man; you cannot contain the limits of his expression, his spirit, or his creative imagination.
The path to the unrelenting tension of Shostakovich’s concerto was laid by Glinka’s Valse-fantasie, one of those pieces that defined Russian-ness in musical language. But after the Shostakovich, a straight-to-the-guts catharsis was required, and was provided by Sinaisky and the SSO in a gloriously-sonorous and rivetingly detailed account of Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition: a quintessentially Russian feast.
RSNO Glasgow Royal Concert Hall Keith Bruce
ALTHOUGH I have no prissy objection to orchestras playing single movements from symphonies as part of a concert programme, I am not convinced that the Death in Venice Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth sat particularly well immediately after the interval in this programme of romantic – if not exactly cheery – music for the feast of St Valentine. By the same token, I don’t know where else it might have gone and it was worth hearing for the RSNO’s ravishing string playing, and, more soberly, its lessons on how the string sections can combine.
Beyond that, conductor JeanClaude Picard’s programme was structurally very sound, with the bugle call of Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italien that opened the concert finding an echo in the Octavian’s hunting horn that heralds the waltzes of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier Suite that closed it, and the orchestra’s brass in fine, measured form in both. The latter was also memorable for the solo contributions of leader Maya Iwabuchi and principal oboe Adrian Wilson, who had a busy evening throughout.
At the heart of this celebration of St Valentine, which attracted a capacity house, was Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto, a quintessential romantic work, with melodies known to many from the Brief Encounter soundtrack or Eric Carmen’s 1975 hit All By Myself. Soloist Boris Giltburg could not have drawn listeners in more perfectly than he did with his playing of the opening bars, and Picard’s visible attention to balance, and physical command of the orchestra’s dynamics made for a pretty much perfect partnership. That precision control from the podium was evident throughout the programme in what was a very good night for the orchestra’s young associate conductor.
30:60:80 at Platform The Bridge, Glasgow Mary Brennan
IN the same year as Amy Conway’s 30th birthday, her mum turned 60 and her grandmother reached 80: interconnecting points on a trajectory of social change across several generations that nudged Conway into asking questions. At the age of 30, she hadn’t gone down the “married with children” path that her mother and grandmother were already on at the same age. What had that been like for them? Their recollections, alongside her own thoughts, were combined in a tiny voice-recorder she brings on-stage. In the course of an hour or so, she listens – through ear buds – to what it holds and then, with slight shifts in accent and body language, repeats their words to us, pauses and all.
This is sadly where we begin to part company with Conway, and the material she has collated with love and enthusiasm. It’s always a moot point with autobiographical shows as to how interested we are in other people’s lives: if the everyday ordinary doesn’t suddenly reveal some compellingly dark secrets or extraordinary twists, then all that’s left is someone else’s nostalgia and where’s the drama in that?
Conway tries to enliven her monologue with a visual framework, creating a different setting for each woman. When she sits in a garden chair, she’s channelling her grandmother. The kitchen worktop is where her mother perches, beside the teapot. Conway herself tends to be sofa-bound, still single and renting in sharp contrast to the lives she relays as she moves to and fro from chair to chair.
However, this activity soon becomes an over-busy distraction while her verbatim delivery makes their volunteered reality feel artificial, an impersonation albeit a fond one.
Boris Giltburg In Chamber RSNO Centre, Glasgow Keith Bruce
WHILE the bulk of the RSNO players were next door in the big hall providing the accompaniment for a Valentine’s afternoon of show tune, the string principals – leader Maya Iwabuchi, violinist Xander van Vliet, violist Tom Dunn and cellist Alexei Kiseliov – were in the auditorium of he orchestra’s new home in the company of Saturday night’s Rach 2 soloist, Boris Giltburg.
This is the sort of thing the new hall was built for as much as to provide up-to-date rehearsal facilities; a place to exploit the presence of musicians in Glasgow to the fullest extent.
The Quintet played was that of Cesar Frank, in F Minor, a mighty half-hour-plus work that shares the honours equally among the players, Biltburg in the opening movement supplying cascades of scales and arpeggios behind the strings that might almost be drawn from an book of finger exercises.
The slow central movement has captivating, if idiosyncratic organ-like swells of chords from the string quartet that are just one element of the challenging dynamics of the whole piece. Nadia Boulanger, quoted in Conrad Wilson’s programme note, observed its remarkable range of score markings from extremely quiet (ppp) to extremely loud (fff), and so it was an almost perfect choice to test of the acoustic of this space, and at times Giltburg seemed the most prepared to push the envelope.
The performance of Dvorak’s String Quartet No 12, his American, dating from the same time as the New World Symphony, suggested Kiseliov has recognised just how quietly it is possible to play in the hall and still be a significant presence.
Another fascinating step on the RSNO’s new journey into this space.