Music
SCO/Emelyanychev
City Halls, Glasgow
Keith Bruce
five stars
Although it says “Music” at the head of this review, this packed, compact evening was almost as much a five star night of theatre, with soloist Karen Cargill and conductor Maxim Emelyanychev at their dramatic best.
For the mezzo-soprano that was in the role of Cleopatra, in Hector Berlioz’s 1829 tilt at France’s prestigious Prix de Rome, La mort de Cléopatre, setting the text of Pierre-Ange Vieilllard. Cargill’s performance got to the heart of both the character and the reason Berlioz didn’t carry home the trophy.
Rather than deliver a formal cantata for soloist and orchestra as instructed, the composer created a mono-drama, a one-person opera in which all distinction between recitative and aria is dissolved, and a masterpiece of musical story-telling in which the Egyptian queen confronts her own failures.
Not only did Cargill captivate in her portrayal, she also engaged fully with the orchestra, adding her own rich-toned instrument to the ensemble as effectively as she expressed the lyric. It was a mesmerising performance.
Read more: Review: 'Fiery Benedetti' and the RSNO at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
So, too, was Emelyanychev’s direction of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise, which ensured that not a bar of musical wit or a panto-like punchline was missed in the composer’s gloriously pictorial score – a narrative precisely described in its title. In all its solo musical moments, mock-inebriated ensemble and changes of gear, this one by the SCO and piper Robert Jordan was as fine a performance as I’ve heard of the party-piece.
The outsider’s eye the Russian conductor brought to that work was also what made a success of the Rob Roy overture, also by Berlioz, that opened the concert – the Frenchman producing a set of variations on Scots Wha Hae that spoke of the fame of Burns and Scott in 19th century Europe.
As the bard wrote, “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us to see oursels as ithers see us!”. Appropriately, it was a setting of his Now Westlin Winds, under its actual title, Composed in August, that provided the programme’s world premiere. Sir James MacMillan has taken this early Burns song, which combines his gift for a love lyric with his skill as a nature poet, and made a lovely choral work for the SCO Chorus with different music for each stanza, much of it folk-inspired but also post-minimalist in its overlapping rhythms.
In some ways unlike anything else in MacMillan’s now vast catalogue, this secular work features his characteristic flourishes of orchestration from the burbling strings and horn melody at the start to the lapping chords at the finish, combined with word-setting that is quite exemplary. Choirs will surely be clamouring to perform it.
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