Festival Music
Dvorak’s Requiem
Usher Hall, Edinburgh
Keith Bruce, four stars
RULES are made to be broken, and it would be wrong to head this review Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, as is Herald house style. The German musicians made a huge contribution to the success of the evening - if we hear better clarinet playing on this stage this year, we shall be very fortunate indeed - but the concert was all about the one work it featured, and which has had other orchestra and conductor combinations pencilled in to work with the Edinburgh Festival Chorus on the road to securing this one.
In the end, the man on the podium was crucial to its success, Czech Jakub Hrusa happy to let his own orchestra take care of business while he paid closer attention to the choir than is often the case with such brief relationships. If we don’t often hear the Dvorak Requiem it is because it is a tricky sing, and has none of the familiar handholds of other settings of the mass. Commissioned to be premiered in Birmingham at the end of the 19th century, the composer was still tweaking it to help the singers on the eve of the first performance.
In 2018, the Edinburgh Festival Chorus’s concert will be one of those for which Christopher Bell’s tenure as chorus master is remembered, and one in which the women of the choir, both sopranos and contraltos, can take huge pride. The concentration of sound they produced at low volume really had to be heard to be appreciated.
The SATB ensemble of the chorus is often played off the quartet of soloists in the work’s intricate construction, and their individual strengths (opera stars all) sometimes didn’t quite gel in that department. Here it was the men, tenor Pavel Cernoch and bass Jan Martinik, who stood out in their solos, and if Hrusa had found time in his busy evening to give them a little of his forensic attention, the performance of a stunning work could well have reached the pinnacle of excellence.
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