‘Fruitcake’ and Pink Martini serve up perfect cocktail
Music
new disc Je dis oui! It was, however, that titular chorus from the new album’s opening track, Joli Garcon, that really got the party started – one of three from the soundtrack of a new Isabelle Huppert film, Souvenir, which most of this audience will surely be breathless to catch, once they have recovered from the conga around the stalls to Ary Barroso’s Brazil. was one of his more memorable (almost tuneful) performances. On a huge trampoline over the standing masses, Bieber nailed a couple of tumbles, during which there was absolutely zero pretence in keeping up the charade that he was actually singing. The funniest moment, perhaps, was when he sang into his water bottle instead of the hand-held mic (the backing track and pre-recorded, digitised vocals did not seem to mind).
Children – performed with young dancers from Coatbridge – provided two things: an Ibiza breakdown chorus and a comedy moment when Bieber couldn’t tune into young Regan’s North Lanarkshire accent. “We all have a purpose; we all have a calling,” Bieber cried, rather patronisingly, introducing title track Purpose before What Do You Mean? and Baby broke the sound barrier with the decibel level of teenage screaming. Although not a hugely musical experience, for his masses of young fans it certainly was a sensory one. Parental chaperones: look out your earplugs. Michael Tumelty WHAT a belter of a concert, and a supremely sophisticated one, on Thursday afternoon from the BBC SSO, with towering SSO debuts from both conductor and soloist and superlative playing from the orchestra.
The conductor was Nicholas Carter, principal conductor of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, and a Donald Runnicles protege who has worked with the great man at the Deutsche Opera and at Runnicles’ Wyoming festival. But Carter, neat, supple and flexible in his direction, is very much his own man, as he demonstrated in Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, where the light, fluid and pristine clarity of the SSO’s superarticulate playing reflected the certainty of direction from the young man at the front.
Carter, for all his cracking timing, is no metronome on legs. There is a fabulously flexible quality in his pulse, which was reflected warmly and dramatically in the orchestral accompaniment to the gorgeous performance of Barber’s Violin Concerto, gloriously played with a seductive glow and some fierce intensity by Ukranian Valeriy Sokolov. The concerto is among the most overtly beautiful of Barber’s works, but the performance from soloist, conductor, and a gleaming SSO had an unforgettable sheen. An encore was demanded, and Sokolov produced more than the goods in Fritz Kreisler’s electric Recitative and Scherzo.
To cap it all, this magic young conductor and the orchestra produced a wonderfully broad, noble, and calmly majestic account of Vaughan Williams’ Fifth Symphony, characterised as much by its inner momentum as by its inimitable stillness of atmosphere. I’m no fan of the music, but this performance was deeply impressive and profoundly moving. Michael Tumelty WEDNESDAY’S RSNO lunchtime concert, part of its Symphony, Soup and a Sandwich series, presented in the auditorium of the RSNO Centre, was an absolute winner with the audience that thronged the place, filling it to capacity, which is 400 souls. That is interesting in itself, but what added to the inimitable buzz that accompanies a full house was the strand of informality filtering through the occasion.
It was presented by Lisa Rourke, a viola player in that section of the orchestra. She was playing, but simply got up with a microphone to chat to the crowd in an informal manner, and, equally conversationally, to conductor Ben Gernon, who was replacing the indisposed Jamie Phillips. And Gernon was also effective at the chat, whether about the programme or the prospect of Beethoven as a dinner guest.
Gernon was very good, too, in his description of Kurt Schwertsik’s Shrunken Symphony, a wee opener that was a microcosmic starter packing four movements and a thesaurus of classical styles and structures into its highly entertaining five minutes: a partypopper as well as a clever musical construction.
The intimacy and benign quality of the occasion generated a perfect ethos for the warm and beautifully-played account of Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll that followed, before Beethoven, also in a good mood, though with his usual unstoppable energy, joined the lunchtime event with his Eighth Symphony as the main course. In truth, and the acoustic of the new auditorium reveals only the truth, much of the symphony, in timings of entries and ensemble balance, could have been tighter; but who am I to ruin a good lunchtime?