Lammermuir Festival

SCO/Poska

St Mary’s Church, Haddington

Keith Bruce

four stars

THE SUN may be shining on the lovely venues it visits, but the last leg of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s busy summer touring schedule (ending in The Beacon in Greenock on Saturday) features music that is mostly of sombre tones.

Shostakovich composed his Chamber Symphony – actually a rescoring for string orchestra of his Eighth Quartet – at one of the many low times in his life, to the extent that his friends worried about his bulk purchase of sleeping pills.

A century and a half earlier, Beethoven’s Symphony No 2 was composed in Heiligenstadt, where he wrote – but did not send – a letter to his brothers now known as the Heiligenstadt Testament, in which he confessed to contemplating suicide because of his personal unhappiness and encroaching deafness.

Before both of those, the concert began with Beethoven’s stirring, portentous, Coriolan Overture, written just a few years later to accompany a play (not Shakespeare’s) about the Roman general – who takes his own life. It’s a symphony orchestra favourite as a programme-opener, and sounded rather different, but no less ominous, from these smaller forces under Estonian conductor Kristiina Poska.

She has a very clear beat form her baton left hand, and lucid indication of accents and dynamics from her right, in a style that is as readable from the back as it must be to the musicians. The decay of the work’s big chords in the church acoustic only added to the work’s impact.

The Chamber Symphony is a masterpiece of painting in sound with a restricted palette – and a lesson in exactly what can by achieved by mixing playing with and without bridge mutes on stringed instruments. It is also sometimes true to its origins as a string quartet work, with fine solo playing from leader Michael Gurevich and first cello Christian Elliot.

The contemporary work Poska brought with her to the evening, Flamma by her countryman Erkki-Sven Tuur, may have been less bleak, but – although asking for a smaller ensemble of strings – it was no less intense. The 15-minute depiction of fire, commissioned by the Australian Chamber Orchestra and premiered in 2011, also features solo action for the front desks, particularly the violins. These are flames that are dancing, rather than destructive, and the work ends on a more philosophical note than in ashes, or dust.

It is, nonetheless, a dark programme that looks to Beethoven for some lightness at its end, and Poska found that in a reading of the Second Symphony that unfolded in very satisfying increments. The Scherzo syncopations were clearly setting a path for so much of the composer’s subsequent orchestral writing, but most immediately the triumphant Allegro molto finale of the symphony itself.