BBCSSO, 14/01/2016

Dukas : The Sorceror's Apprentice
Unsure Chin : Clarinet Concerto (Kari Kriikku, clarinet)
Koechlin : The Seven Stars' Symphony

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Ilan Volkov

Dukas's glittering orchestral scherzo never fails to please as an opener, and Volkov picked a good tempo for it, the broom's theme lolloping along at a suitably inexorable pace.  Once again I found - and it's a recurrent problem with British orchestras in particular - that the trumpets didn't have quite the right degree of acidity to really pierce through the climax of the piece, and the panicked tumble as the apprentice resorts to an axe to put a stop to the obstinate broom wasn't quite wild enough, but it's still a wonderful example of the evocative power of first-rate orchestration.

Unsuk Chin is a contemporary Korean composer, and the Clarinet Concerto, her sixth essay in the concerto genre, was created late 2014, by tonight's soloist and dedicatee of the work, the Finnish clarinettist Kari Kriikku.  She states in her programme note for the concerto that she "was no longer interested in the traditional idea of a competition between soloist and orchestra", but if it's not exactly a competition, the soloist is still solidly to the forefront, and the piece strikes me as very taxing.  Not only does it exploit a remarkable range of types of sound production in the instrument, the soloist is rarely silent for the 25-minute duration of the piece.  As the concert was broadcast live, I've been able to listen to it again at home, with the slightly different aural perspective given by the microphones as opposed to my seat in the concert hall, and to some extent the clarinet stands out more in the recorded version.  In the hall, there were passages where he really was playing alongside the wind section - and the orchestra's principal clarinet in particular - creating a kind of shadow-play, when you were no longer certain how many instruments you were hearing.  That's less apparent in playback, and the piece seems more straightforward than it did on initial hearing.  I'm not, however, completely won over by it, though I enjoyed the mysterious central movement.

Charles Koechlin was a prolific composer whose music is largely unknown, and whose reputation rests more on that of several illustrious students (including Poulenc and Cole Porter) and his friendship with Debussy which led to his orchestration of some of Debussy's incomplete works towards the end of the older composer's life.  However, there's much to be discovered in Koechlin's own music, which has its own distinctive flavour, closer to Roussel or Magnard than to Debussy and Ravel.  He was a man of eclectic, and sometimes eccentric, tastes, including a passion for Hollywood cinema which apparently resulted in a string of imaginary film music spawned by the movies of Lilian Harvey.

More concretely, it also produced the Seven Stars' Symphony, which is perhaps more a suite of short symphonic sketches rather than an actual symphony, seven "portraits" of early movie stars; Fairbanks (Senior), Harvey, Garbo, Clara Bow, Dietrich, Emil Jannings and Chaplin.  Despite the context, this is not silent movie music, but deploys an orchestral palette more akin to that brought to Hollywood by the Austro-German refugees from the rise of the Third Reich, Korngold, Waxman and the like.  They're not really portraits of the actors, but reflections on their work, or on particular roles or films, for the most part, although apparently the Harvey and Bow movements were simply inspired by photographs of the two actresses.

The work is full of surprises, however; the orientalist languor of the first movement seems an odd way to depict one of cinemas earliest and best adventure heroes. The ondes Martenot make an appearance in the "Garbo" movement - Koechlin was later to recycle this music as an evocation of Norway, but perhaps here it was meant to suggest Garbo's famously melancholic nature, while the "Jannings" movement is more of a threnody for Professor Roth, the character he played in "The Blue Angel".  Like Dukas, Koechlin was a gifted orchestrator, and the range and variety of colour and effect deployed in this substantial score is impressive, and was well brought out by Volkov and the orchestra.  Oddly beguiling, perhaps, more than really absorbing, but certainly worth an airing.

[Next : 16th January]