Cumnock Tryst
Steven Osborne
Trinity Church, Cumnock
Keith Bruce
five stars
Although it would have been stretching a point to bill it as such, the opening recital of the 10th birthday programme of Sir James MacMillan’s hometown festival, the Cumnock Tryst, was fundamentally a premiere.
An expertly-constructed recital of keyboard music from Bach to the present, with MacMillan one of four composers still living, it was surely the concert many of us have been waiting for from Steven Osborne.
A master of towering challenges of the piano repertoire, including Messiaen and Tippett, this was Osborne in more relaxed salon mode, with no loss of rigorous technique and virtuosity, demonstrating the widest possible range of immaculate good taste and a reliable ear for a stonking good tune.
Opening with Schumann’s Kinderszenen, as a sort of stand-alone prelude to the two groups of five composers that followed, the pianist prefaced those with a brief spoken introduction – about the adult view of childhood – that focused the ears on his perfectly poised pianism.
No other player could have come up with the sequence that followed. Bach’s Jesu, joy of man’s desiring segued perfectly into MacMillan’s brief Lumen Christi before we travelled through a Prokofiev Prelude to his countryman Anatoly Liadov’s Musical Snuff Box. Its clockwork mechanism wound down to set up Fritz Kreisler’s Liebesleid, completely repurposed for piano in his own image by Sergei Rachmaninov.
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Turning the record over, as it were, side two stayed in the West. It began with distinctive Scottish folk tune arrangements by Osborne’s music school contemporary James Clapperton and Judith Weir’s Chorale for Steve (remembering the US composer Steven Stucky) before a trio of jazz transcriptions made by Osborne himself of recordings by Keith Jarrett, Bill Evans and Oscar Peterson.
As those who have heard him play these as encores to orchestral concerts already know, these are an irresistible other side to Osborne’s musical personality and it was fantastic to hear them given a fuller platform.
The jazz pianists’ original music, albeit based on George Gershwin’s I Love You, Porgy (Evans) and James F Hanley’s Indiana (Peterson) marked them out as composers of the first rank too, and this audience was on its feet to acclaim Osborne’s passionate advocacy.
The Cumnock Tryst runs to Sunday
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