Review: Scottish Chamber Orchestra/Swensen, City Halls, five stars

City Halls, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

five stars

AN unforeseen benefit of the pandemic is a broader approach to repertoire in the seasons of some orchestras, reaping the benefit of some “blue sky” thinking during the strictures of lockdown.

“Musique Amerique” was the title the SCO gave to this colourful and inventive programme of four works from the first half of the 20th century, illustrating the flow of ideas across the Atlantic between Paris and New York, both by musicians on ships and on early recordings.

Just as American composers Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein were indebted to the legacy of the Old World, so French ones – Darius Milhaud and Francis Poulenc – were influenced by the new sounds in popular music and especially jazz.

Milhaud’s La creation du monde was the earliest piece, dating from only five years after the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s first record, and the product of his own original research in Harlem dance halls.

Joseph Swensen (Image: free)

Its six movements sound every bit the ballet score that they were composed as, and also including a startlingly modern descending figure that might be from the work of Randy Newman as well as a climactic New Orleans work-out for the whole ensemble of 18 players. Conductor Joseph Swensen, who shaped the evening into one flowing conversation, was very hands-off here, swinging his hips on the podium like a big band leader.

The whole concert was a treat for lovers of single-reed winds, with the alto saxophone of Lewis Banks leading the instrumentation at the start of the Milhaud, and a superb clarinet obligato from guest first clarinet Christina Mateo Saez, who also had a prominent role in the Poulenc Sinfonietta that ended the evening.

She was in the orchestra to fill the chair of SCO principal clarinet Maximiliano Martin, who was the featured soloist of the night with two virtuoso works he plays to perfection: the Copland Concerto commissioned by Benny Goodman after the Second World War and Bernstein’s slightly earlier Sonata, his first published work.

Following his own ballet scores, the Copland also often sounds like dance music, with a funky line for the low strings in the second movement, but is primarily a showcase for the lead instrument and its remarkable range, both of pitch and emotion. Bernstein’s Sonata is just as challenging, but looks more towards the contemporary European music of the time. This string orchestration of it was made in 1994 by Sid Ramin, who had worked with Bernstein on West Side Story, and who died in 2019 at the age of 100.

The concluding Poulenc was the only music to utilise the full forces of the orchestra and is a lovely theatrical work, its Molto Vivace second movement more sprightly dance music and the Finale a gloriously filmic soundtrack of a vibrant city.