Of the Edinburgh Festival’s nine directors since its founding in 1947, only one, the ninth, Jonathan Mills, has been a composer. Until yesterday he refrained from employing the festival as a vehicle for his own music, but the theme of his final festival - the response to war by those with creative gifts - proved an irresistible opportunity for a performance of his own Sandakan Threnody, a lament for the victims of the Japanese in the prison camp of that name in Borneo, some seventy years ago.
First heard at the Sydney Opera House in 2004, it reached the Usher Hall last night in a performance by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Edinburgh Festival Chorus under Ilan Volkov’s lucid conductorship. Coupled with what could be called its startling obverse, Janacek’s great, exultant Glagolitic Mass, it formed the first part of an evening which certainly required the explosiveness of Janacek to bring the final concert of the festival to a resounding close.
Described by Mills as an oratorio, the Sandakan Threnody was conspicuously more severe, with the singers (somewhat underused in oratorio terms) supplying a sort of wailing wall, while the orchestra provided more vivid sounds of its own, filled with sudden, striking flashes of instrumental detail in the atmospheric manner of other Australian composers whose music has come to Britain.
In a work whose other effects seemed more drab - the closing lullaby had none of the balm poured on the closing pages of Britten's War Requiem - this was welcome and interesting. But the score as a whole did not quite hang together. It was certainly a threnody, but was it an essential one?
The exuberant outburst of the Glagolitic Mass after the interval, complete with a splendidly declamatory quartet of soloists and Thomas Trotter bringing bright shafts of colour from the renovated Usher Hall organ (never has that gargantuan instrument sounded better) it was the glorious resolution the concert needed.
Orchestra and chorus flung themselves into the splintery, marvellously compressed music with impressive abandon. The BBC SSO sounded like what it is now becoming: a great orchestra. But what will happen to it if the referendum result is a yes? That was the ominous question which hung over the entire performance.
31 August2014
It is sad that the BBC SSO's future may again be in some doubt, but it has been in this situation before. In the early 1970s as one of its efforts to reduce costs, the mandarins at the BBC in London produced a document on the future of its music output which proposed, I seem to recall, the disbanding of 3 of the orchestras, the SSO being one. There was a huge public outcry as a result of which little if anything changed.
ReplyDeleteOne solution discussed at that time was a formal association with Scottish Opera whose continued growth meant the SNO was no longer able to provide most of its orchestral requirements. The BBC SSO was an obvious solution and the orchestra did find itself playing for a series of performances of La Traviata conducted by its then Principal Conductor James Loughran. Unfortunately for the orchestra management in Queen Margaret Drive, its somewhat archaic Musicians' Union regulations meant that considerable additional payments had to be made to musicians for work outside the studio. Scottish Opera simply could not afford to continue down that route and tripartite negotiations failed to find a satisfactory solution.
So a freelance ensemble was formed from a nucleus of Leonard Friedman's Scottish Baroque Ensemble, the Sottish Philharmonia. From their ranks would soon emerge the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.