Festival Music
Colburn Orchestra
Usher Hall, Edinburgh
Keith Bruce, three stars
SCOTTISH musicians tend to shuffle somewhat randomly on to the platform, while many visiting orchestras at the Festival like to make a more formal entrance. The young players from LA’s Colburn Conservatory of Music, by contrast, were onstage warming up before most of their audience was in the building, far less seated. More familiar to local audiences was the fact that their guest conductor, Stephane Deneve, music director of the RSNO until 2012, then chose to introduce the programme before they played it, pointing out that composer names like Esa-Pekka Salonen and Sergey Rachmaninov did not stop it being an all-American one, as the works had all been written there.
The violin concerto in the middle, by Samuel Barber, while most obviously American, also boasted the most appealing local connection in the Scottish country dance rhythms of its opening theme, and the chanter-like oboe solo in the slow movement. Soloist Simone Porter, a graduate of the Colburn school, was a little overwhelmed at the start of a performance that was professional and poised, if a little lacking in sparkle. Deneve quickly corrected the balance, but it may well be the case that the work had enjoyed rather less rehearsal time that the Symphonic Dances that followed the interval.
On the Rachmaninov the ensemble sound of the strings was of high quality, particularly in the second and third movements, and the balance with the solo voices, notably the alto saxophone at the start, was spot on. There was something very American – a Marine Band precision perhaps – in the orchestral sound, that perhaps lacked a little passion, but there was some evidence of that elsewhere in the evening. Salonen’s Nyx is a big piece and made for a very bold opener, perhaps not always rhythmically on the nose, but full of colour, with the principal clarinet on fine form. And the encore nod to the Bernstein centenary was clearly repertoire with which the young musicians felt completely at home.
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