Scottish Chamber Orchestra: Shostakovich 14
The Queen’s Hall - 04/11/21
A Concert of Two Halves
Well there wasn’t an interval at the Queens Hall tonight but there was a mighty division between the opening Mozart Symphony and the very different Shostakovich which followed. Firstly I must report that this was my first orchestral concert of the autumn season and my first concert in the Queens Hall since before lockdown. My first impressions were that the Queens Hall has been busy since lockdown, opening up the ground floor cafe and the narrow hall way from the front door, and above all creating a suite of gender free toilets on the first floor (which are much better than the old toilets). In the concert hall they have taken away the stage and pushed the audience back to allow the orchestra a more socially distance layout. The audience was socially distanced and fully masked. It seemed a decent sized audience, although what social distancing does to the Queens Hall economics I’m not sure.
The first thing that struck me with the Mozart Symphony, known as the Posthorn Symphony, was how loud the opening movement was. This is partly because it is a very brash opening, with loud wind and percussion contributions, but also I realised because I was sitting around 20 feet from the orchestra and in the very good acoustic of the Queens Hall, instead of the expanses of the big tents at the Edinburgh Festival, or indeed the volume controlled sound of my B&O Hifi at home. The SCO were conducted tonight by Mark Wrigglesworth who I know well from his opera conducting at Covent Garden and the ENO and he seemed very much at home with the SCO no doubt partly because the orchestra had performed the programme the night before in St Andrews. The SCO were well staffed with over 30 musicians but sadly without my favourite cellist Su~a Lee who was no doubt in the Highlands with her new husband! The Mozart began as a posthorn serenade to celebrate the end of the academic year for students at Salzburg University. It has a big noisy and lively opening movement with a very quiet middle movement and then a spirited final movement. I don’t think this is Mozart’s best symphonic work. Indeed I found the middle movement slightly tedious, but it certainly was a contrast with what came next.
Shostakovich’s Symphony 14 is not really a symphony at all, but a song cycle about death written towards the end of his life. He uses great poems by Lorca, Appollinaire and Rilke to explore his obsession with death. They are powerful in words and music as Shostakovich by this time doesn’t seem worried about pleasing the Communist Party bureaucrats in charge of music policy. Indeed one of his most severe critics had a stroke on its first night and died a month later, certainly a strong critical response to his new music!
Singing the Shostakovich was a challenge readily accepted tonight by our singers. Peter Rose was a fabulous bass who not only conveyed the gravitas of the text and the music, but whose Russian diction was perfect. Elizabeth Atherton is a superb soprano who trained at the Conservatoire in Glasgow and has since gone on to sing widely in opera and recital. She nailed the power and the pathos of the text and the music tonight and again her Russian was very good. The music is often not melodic but powerful and challenging. The SCO wisely gave out the libretto to the audience so we could follow it both in Russian and translation, and it was powerful and gripping. The singers were backed by a superb set of SCO soloists on strings and percussion, all under the very firm control of Mark Wrigglesworth. It was a memorable performance and the audience gave it a warm reception. This is what live music is all about and it made this one-and a half hour concert without interval slip past very quickly.
