RSNO, 21/11/2015

Liszt : Les Préludes
Poulenc : Organ Concerto (Thierry Escaich, organ)
Saint-Saëns : Symphony No. 3 "Organ"

Royal Scottish National Orchestra
Jun Märkl

As the Concert Hall has acquired a brand new digital organ over the summer, clearly the RSNO decided it should be put to good use as promptly as possible, and came up with this programme in order to do precisely that.  It was a good choice, too, on the whole, the pieces working well together, with a soloist who is a particularly distinguished practitioner of his instrument.  Yet somehow the evening never quite gelled as it should have, and while the thunderous conclusion of the Organ Symphony was given a reasonably appreciative reception, it was a far cry from raising the rafters the way it usually does, given the right performance.

To be honest, I was not expecting too much from the Liszt.  All the symphonic poems present the same problem in concert, how to tread that fine line between boredom and bombast when interpreting this music.  Much of orchestral Liszt tips over easily onto either end of the scale, in ways his piano music does not, and most conductors, in my experience, find it very difficult to simply get it right.  Even with Les Preludes, arguably the most famous of the set, Märkl failed to impart any forward impetus to the music, it came across as a series of episodes, the connections loose, and the climaxes simply dumped before us, rather than being arrived at by a process of exposition and development.  This was a stale reading, routine and bland, instead of exciting.

There were one or two things about the Poulenc that irritated me too, some tempi a little rushed, so that the strings lost the precision of their articulation, and some phrases from the organ that seemed a trifle slurred.  That may have been a conscious decision on Thierry Escaich's part, but it didn't work for me.  Other times, though, the organ dreamed between more vibrant moments, the reveries enigmatic and wistful.  The concerto is one of the more Stravinsky-influenced items in Poulenc's catalogue, especially in the crisp, spiky string writing which generally came across very well, though to my mind a few more players would not have come amiss.

After the interval, Escaich discreetly returned to the platform along with the rest of the orchestra to fill the organ post for Saint-Saëns's popular and rousing Third Symphony. This too was a fairly good performance on the whole, but again there were some choices of tempo with which I was not in accord, a little too fast in places - the start of the Scherzo, which again saw slight articulation problems in both strings and winds, and an exaggerated rallentando in the Finale, for example - and there was, in general, a lack of tension, that edge of excitement which drives the piece forward to that triumphant conclusion which should have an audience virtually on its feet, but here merely elicited approval, rather than rapture.  Another instance of "could do better".

[Next : 3rd December]