Scottish Chamber Orchestra: Les Illuminations
Queens Hall - 16/03/23
Pekka Kuusisto, violin/director | Allan Clayton, tenor
An ‘illuminating evening’.
I couldn’t resist the pun, after all the SCO concert was headlined ‘Les Illuminations’, the early work that helped make a name for Benjamin Britten, the most famous and probably the best English composer of his day. What really made it illuminating for me was to hear the work sung by Allan Clayton, the English tenor who was recently brought into prominence by his superb performances as ‘Peter Grimes’, in my opinion Britten’s finest opera. I was fortunate enough to see him sing Peter Grimes at Covent Garden, just after I had seen the world’s leading tenor, Jonas Kaufmann, sing it in Vienna. As you may have seen in my review in the EMR, I had no hesitation in saying Allan Clayton was a better Peter Grimes than Kaufmann. Therefore I was interested to see how he would fare with this very different work of Britten’s, and the answer was he was superb.
As David Kettle’s excellent programme notes explained, ‘Les Illuminations’ was an early work by Britten, composed when he was only 25, completed in 1939 and first performed in 1940. Interestingly he conceived it originally for a soprano, but soon arranged it for his partner, tenor Peter Pears, and this recording is usually taken to be the gold standard for the work. Actually while I’m writing this review, I’m listening to Peter Pears’ recording and while there is much to admire in the austere purity of Pears’ voice, I have to say I preferred Allan Clayton’s performance last night. Firstly, the power of his dramatic tenor voice really made an impact and its range and colour too, including at times a soft gentle tone, made for a gripping account of this fine work. Certainly, the audience thought so as he was given several curtain calls. For me, this evening emphasised that Allan Clayton is not only, along with Freddie De Tommaso, one of Britain’s finest operatic tenors, but also has a great future as a Lieder singer.
If this was the highlight of the evening there were some other good things on the programme, after conductor violinist Pekka Kuusisto’s usual jokey introduction to the concert; this time he got us to mutter to each other for two minutes so we could experience “performing”; lots of “rhubarb” was heard! He then introduced Allan Clayton who sang two songs by Pekka’s friend, American composer Nico Muhly. These were composed for surrealist poems by Andre Breton and Jacques Bernard Brunius; they were pleasant enough and gave us an indication of Allan Clayton’s quality of voice. We then had Haydn’s splendid Symphony 104, known as the ‘London’ as it was the last piece he composed on his visit to London in 1795. It was a delight to hear a very big SCO do justice to this great symphony and Pekka conducted it very well from his violin. After the interval we got a short work by Nico Muhly dedicated to Pekka (they are clearly close friends) which was called ‘Shrink’ - not about his psychotherapist, but apparently about the relationship between the notes. Well it wasn’t unpleasant and Pekka played it well, but I’m not convinced it will become a regular on the concert programme.
