Review Details
UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN MUSIC PRIZE WEEKEND BBC SCOTTISH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Alan Cooper
20 November 2009
Music Hall
A host of musical events smashed together in a fabulous hadron collider musical explosion at the Music Hall on Friday. It was the second concert in the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s 2009/10 Aberdeen Season. It was the opening event in the 2009 University of Aberdeen Music Prize and it marked the final weekend of the Sound Festival. James MacMillan who is to be the judge of the Music Prize was in the audience to hear the first Scottish performance of The Sacrifice: Three Interludes, from his opera also entitled The Sacrifice. The five young finalists in the competition were there too. In fact it seemed to me that everyone who is anyone in the North-East music scene and beyond was in the Music Hall on Friday.
I felt that Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.22 in E flat Major, K.482 was somewhat dwarfed between two absolutely titanic performances, James MacMillan’s The Sacrifice and Dvorak’s Symphony No.8. All the same, there were some wonderful things about the Concerto. Soloist Piers Lane gave us many long passages of beautifully liquid playing and there was a delightful delicacy of touch from him in the andante tinged with sadness before it was lit up by bright playing from the woodwind section led off by the flute. There was happy good natured banter between him and the orchestra in the finale. Occasionally though, I felt he seemed quite detached from the music and there was certainly no Mozartian transparency from the fairly large orchestra.
How can I describe the amazing aerobics of the conductor in the Dvorak Symphony? I don’t know how much he was paid for this concert but with this Symphony alone, he must have earned every penny of it. Petr Altrichter did not so much conduct as mime and dance his way through the music and for those who think such histrionics are unnecessary (think for comparison of the conducting styles of Richard Strauss or Sir Adrian Boult) there is no doubt that he drew the most amazingly colourful and detailed performance from the orchestra compared with which all others seem dull and monochrome. My only problem was with the horns at the end which compared with the rest of the performance seemed strangely subdued. I have probably been spoiled by a performance given many years ago by an American orchestra at the Aberdeen Festival of Youth Orchestras. Their conductor not only made the horn section raise their bells he made them stand up as well. All right, as Alistair MacDonald said after the concert when I mentioned this to him, I am probably just a simple soul at heart and if the rest of Friday’s uniquely wonderful performance is anything to go on I will have to accept that Petr Altrichter’s way of doing this is the correct way.
Having got all these matters out of the way let me pass on to the real star of this weekends show James MacMillan. I was absolutely blown away by his Three Interludes. Titanic, panoramic, vast, are just some of the words which came to mind listening to these three marvellous pieces. Not since Richard Strauss has there been a composer who is able to handle such a huge orchestra with such easy and limitless imagination. His percussion and brass writing in particular are epic. Above all, and this is important for music that is part of an opera there is a sense of tense impending drama that makes you impatient for the curtain to go up so that you can find out what is about to happen next. I am sure that these three pieces, like Britten’s Sea Interludes will become part of the regular orchestral repertoire. They certainly deserve to. I have not always felt at home with all of MacMillan’s music but after hearing these three orchestral pieces and a couple of weeks ago at the Sound Festival his beautiful settings of the William Souter songs sung by Irene Drummond I have to declare myself a fan.