Adès : Dances from Powder Her Face
Vaughan Williams : Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
Orff : Carmina Burana
Valentina Farcas (soprano)
Daniel Taylor (counter-tenor)
Audun Iversen (baritone)
RSNO Chorus
RSNO Junior Chorus
Royal Scottish National Orchestra
Peter Oundjian
The one thing that might have prevented me from booking a ticket for this concert was that it coincided with the Metropolitan Opera broadcast of Adès's The Tempest. However, I wasn't to be deprived of his music, with this little suite drawn from his first opera, Powder Her Face. Having had the chance to see the film of that piece again quite recently, its skewed forties dance-band idiom wasn't a complete surprise, and the orchestra pulled most of it off very well, although the central section grew a little aimless for a minute or so. The black humour of it came through very nicely though, entertaining but unsettling, and I thought it a good choice to precede Carmina Burana.
Before plunging into that bawdy fresco, though, we were taken into an utterly different world with the sublime Tallis Fantasia. If I were to be asked to name the finest classical composition ever penned by a British composer, I think this would be it. Concise yet endlessly inventive, it demands to be heard in concert, because it is almost impossible for a recording to capture the spacialisation of the three string 'choirs' - or if the recording does, it takes a first-class pair of headphones to render it at home, nothing less will do. In the hall, the interplay of the three groups becomes wonderfully clear, especially played with the clarity and care lavished on the music tonight. The work's jewel-toned harmonies filled the air with the rich resonance of an organ, and commanded the audience's silence until the very last vibration had faded into a magical silence.
And so to the reason the concert hall was pretty well packed out tonight, Carmina Burana. After the superb Vaughan Williams, I had high hopes for the rest of the evening, but although I enjoyed the piece well enough, somehow it didn't completely click for me. There were two basic problems. The first was the enunciation of the chorus. They were fine in the slower or softer sections, but as soon as the pace picked up, and especially the more insistently rhythmic it got, the less distinct they became. Some of this might be because as Scots (and I assume that at least 80% of them are), we have a soft-ish approach to English, and the West Coast in particular has a tendency to drop the ends of words. The Orff, on the other hand, demands a precision in its sounds that can border on the grossly exaggerated. You need to hear the T's and D's, the sibilants need to be placed very precisely. It's a difficult text (particularly the Low German) that requires getting your teeth into, and without that, true accuracy can be problematic. The Junior Chorus, however, sounded excellent.
The other thing was I thought most of it a little po-faced. Carmina Burana is the musical equivalent of a Breughel painting; it buzzes with vitality and a lust for life (never mind a lust for anything else!) that needs to be communicated to the audience, and I wasn't getting that sense of excitement from either the chorus or the orchestra. The soloists, fortunately, were very good. If Valentina Farcas didn't fully seize the opportunity to indulge in pure beauty of tone in the exquisite "In trutina", she was impressively serene and clear-voiced in the stratospheric heights of "Dulcissime". Daniel Taylor made the most of the grotesque "Olim lacus colueram", without vocal distortion, but plenty of mournful expression, and acting as much like a swan roasting on a spit as a man standing on a concert platform can contrive. Finally Audun Iversen displayed a fine range of tone, and a warm, seductive timbre, and all three were fully deserving of the warm appreciation from the audience.
[Next: 15th November]
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