Naumov, SCO, Egarr, Queen's Hall, Edinburgh review - orchestral magic rescues some punishing music

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra has had to put up with its fair share of artist cancellations over the last month, and the ensuing games of musical chairs led to the somewhat implausible scenario of this concert, where Richard Egarr, a conductor more closely associated with Bach and Handel, conducted the UK premiere of a work by Peter Eötvös, that darling of the avant-garde.

In fairness to Egarr, he did nothing more than what he does with the Baroque music for which he is so renowned: he played it with the clarity, shape and the expression it needed to come alive. Shape, in fact, was critical to Eötvös’ double bass concerto, Aurora, in more ways than one. Scored for soloist and string orchestra, with the occasional icy piping of an accordion for spice, Eötvös uses two double basses in addition to the soloist, forming a triangle of double basses around which the sound comes in and out of focus in what he was no doubt hoping would be three dimensions.

It's a pity, then, that the music’s mood was so fixed and unwelcoming. Aurora was inspired by Eötvös’ experience of flying through the aurora borealis over Alaska, and parts of its fragmentary structure and flickering textures could well have mirrored that. But the music’s tone was mostly angsty and tense, hardly a celebration of natural awe and wonder.

Nikita Naumov, the soloist, was until recently the SCO’s principal double bass. Both the orchestra and the audience welcomed him like a returning hero, and his athletic feats on the double bass were remarkable, drawing a range of colours out of his instrument that one might scarcely have guessed was possible. It’s a shame, therefore, that Eötvös hadn’t given him a wider palette of colours to paint with. The overwrought tone of the music became wearing, and neither the second movement’s soloistic writing for the orchestra nor the increasingly searching tone to the finale provided sufficient stylistic variety to keep the piece interesting.

Aaron Jay Kernis’ Musica Celestis used similar sized force to that of Eötvös, but with sparing delicacy and a more pleasing sense of growth. Inspired by the medieval belief in the ceaseless music of the angels around the throne of God, Kernis’ piece had a slow moving beauty which the SCO strings played with both affection and transparency, developing from an opening that resembled the Lohengrin Prelude under hypnosis, into the gathering kinetic energy of its central climax, and then a final section that sounded like a cousin to the Tallis Fantasia.

Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony ended the concert with the most famous of all musical evocations of nature, and it played to Egarr’s strengths (the conductor pictured above) with natural brass and timps, and minimal vibrato to add leanness to the strings. It all felt a bit unrelenting in the first two movements, however, Egarr wielding the basses like a weapon of war, and often conducting with a karate chop gesture that suggested they hadn’t quite nailed the details of the shape in rehearsal. Unfortunately, some scrappy ensemble work seemed to confirm this.

Egarr relaxed enormously once he shut his score at the start of the third movement, however, and the music’s character seemed to feel the wind in its sails after that happened, the winds having a whale of a time at the peasant gathering, and the storm growing impressively rather than throwing everything at the opening blast. The finale set the seal on it very effectively; still a touch hard-driven, but with a gorgeous consummation on the tutti moments that came close to Beethoven’s joy of fulfilment.

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