Music
RSNO and Dunedin Consort/Chan
Usher Hall, Edinburgh
****
GIVEN present arts funding anxieties – highlighted by the collapse of the charity responsible for the running of Edinburgh’s Filmhouse and the Film Festival and the Belmont in Aberdeen – the start of a new three-year partnership between Scotland’s Government-funded national orchestra and the Creative Scotland-supported, internationally-renowned Dunedin Consort has more than musical resonances. In some ways, for instance, it parallels the way the much younger National Theatre of Scotland has operated since its inception.

In his well-chosen introductory words, however, RSNO Chief Executive Alistair Mackie chose to stick to the musical benefits of the relationship and what large symphony orchestras like his have learned from the work of historically informed “period” bands like the Dunedin, managing to explain the knotty issue of playing at different musical pitch in a breezy, accessible way.

His was an important contribution, because it explained what the hour and half performance that followed would illustrate. Principal Guest Conductor Elim Chan choose to conduct Beethoven’s Symphony No 5 in a way that precisely illustrated Mackie’s point about the sharing of historically informed practice in her tempi, superb control of the work’s dynamics, and pin-sharp focus on instrumental detail.

Before the interval we had heard two very different illustrations of what that fresh approach to one of classical music’s best-known works is all about. If it is not always easy to spot gut strings and baroque bows from the audience, the Dunedin Consort’s four-piece horn section made their early music authenticity very evident by holding their instruments vertical, the bells pointing upwards.

This is what, it is now believed, Joseph Haydn would have seen and expected when his Symphony No 39 had its premiere at the Hungarian court over 250 years ago. Chan had no role here, the 26 players directed by leader Matthew Truscott, his pace and phrasing of the Andante slow movement predicting the conductor’s Beethoven later.

In between, she and the RSNO’s “Musician in Focus” this season, clarinettist and composer Jorg Widmann, were co-directors of his extraordinary work Echo-Fragmente, which was designed to expose and exploit the different approaches of a period band and a modern orchestra. From the stage management and the tuning-up onwards, there were elements of theatre in his extraordinarily clever use of both groups of musicians, each sticking to its own definition of “correct” pitch.

It was ear-bending, but much more harmonious than anyone might expect, the Dunedin horns required to play completely differently, Widmann’s virtuoso soloing combining with the RSNO’s single reeds in a clarinet choir, and a bonkers nod to bluegrass from the fiddles of Truscott and orchestra leader Sharon Roffman with guitarist Sasha Savaloni beating time on an old banjo.