RSNO, 09/04/2016

Debussy : Marche écossaise
MacMillan : The Death of Oscar
Ravel : Piano Concerto for the Left Hand (Steven Osborne, piano)
Strauss : Tod und Verklärung
Ravel : La Valse

Royal Scottish National Orchestra
Stéphane Denève

It was a very nice idea to preface Debussy's charming Marche écossaise with a bagpipe rendition of the original Scottish tune it was based upon, and it revealed Debussy to have been surprisingly faithful to the original, yet undeniably himself.  The piece drifts away from anything identifiably march-like in the middle, into a deliciously pastoral reverie, but remembers its original function just before the end, to conclude with a smile and a wink.  It was a light-hearted opening to a concert that otherwise spent much time on the passage from dark to light and back again.

Sir James MacMillan's The Death of Oscar was apparently written in response to a project by the sculptor Alexander Stoddart for a monumental work (Denève described it as Scotland's answer to Mt. Rushmore!) based on the Celtic legend of the Fenian warrior Oscar.  From an ill-defined haze, a call to arms sounds, and MacMillan paints the battle between Oscar and the High King Cairbre, which then gives way to a plangent lament on the cor anglais.  MacMillan's work is always worth hearing, although I could probably do with going through the beginning a couple of times in order to grasp the material properly.  However, if Stoddart's project ever materialises, and it's half as evocative as this, it will be a sight to see.

The first thing that struck me about Steven Osborne tonight was that his piano stool was placed distinctly right of centre to the keyboard.  The second thing was that even during the performance, he was constantly shifting from left to right of the stool itself.  Logically, I can understand.  There's an optimum position for the hand and arm when you're playing, that allows for maximum control.  With only the left hand in play in the Ravel D major Concerto, and a piano part that truly spans the entire breadth of the keyboard, leaving yourself in the traditional position pulls the arm out of that optimum placing when you need to get to the top of the range.  Nevertheless, Osborne is the only pianist I've ever seen take such measures, and it made for restless viewing.

After an opening salvo which was distinctly untidy, I also felt that Osborne was a bit off-colour, maybe a little tired.  I don't ever expect to hear that first outburst from the soloist played "clean", not live - it's really too difficult, and even the very best will fluff more than a few notes, but this was much more than a few, and although the second theme was beautifully played, with luminous tenderness, Osborne never quite recovered the darkling energy for the rest of his part, leaving the focus too much on the orchestra.  This was hardly without interest, and Denève made excellent play of the constant juxtapositions of duple and triple time, but it's not really quite the way the concerto is meant to be heard.

The choice of Strauss's Death and Transfiguration in the programme seemed a little odd, at first glance, but I think it was there for two reasons.  Firstly, Denève's last concert as Music Director of the RSNO was a similar combination of MacMillan, Strauss and Ravel (though not the same pieces).  Secondly, the orchestra is about to begin commemorations of its 125th season, and as a fledgling orchestra, in 1902, they played this same work under the baton of Strauss himself, in it's UK premiere.  I wish I could say I was as happy with Denève's Tod... as I had been with his Till Eulenspiegel back in 2012.  This is still young man's music - Strauss was 25 when he wrote it - and should have a certain élan to it, however portentous the themes.  We got the portentousness, but not the vitality, and the brass tended to be a bit overpowering.  There was no real uplift to the Transfiguration theme, no sense of soaring aspiration, it was solid and, ultimately, uninspired.

Thankfully, the case was quite the opposite for Ravel's La Valse, to close the concert.  If Denève chose quite a broad, almost stately base tempo for his waltz, he made it work for him, allowing him to let the various sections of the orchestra have their moment in the spotlight of Ravel's glittering orchestration, and to wind the piece up to the precipice, then pull it back again, before pushing it right off at the cataclysmic climax.  Here was indeed the dance at the edge of the volcano, the sense of a last, glorious vision of a world about to be lost in a dreadful morass of mud and blood, all the more telling in this period of commemoration of the centenary of the Great War.

[Next : 10th April]