Sensational strings

The Scottish Ensemble’s Edinburgh Festival concert at the Queen’s Hall, to be repeated in Inverness, Dundee, and the Maltings at Aldeburgh, was  a sensational success.

To hear Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro, Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia, and Tippett’s vibrant Double Concerto in a single programme was not only a revelation, but to hear them so adoringly and eloquently played made the event all the more rewarding.  Popular though they deservedly are, these three milestones of British music for strings are seldom heard as an entity, made all the more  of a treat on this occasion by the inclusion of two masterly scores from the southern hemisphere as perfectly chosen and thoroughly appropriate interludes.

The presence of a group of young players identified as Commonwealth Strings, admirably partnering the Scottish ones,  added to the excellence, making the concert seem all the more unified. This was beautifully attuned playing, with the SE’s infinitely responsive Jonathan Morton as principal violin, swaying to every fluctuation of the music.

 Peter Sculthorpe's String Sonata No 3, filled with the fierce sounds and atmospheres of the Austrian Outback, and the premiere of the New Zealand composer Gareth Farr’s Relict Furies, held their place to perfection amid their British counterparts.

For Sculthorpe, who died a few weeks ago, the sonata  was the most  seering of tributes. But Farr’s elegiac cantata, which began like an exquisite extension of the Vaughan Williams fantasy which had preceded it, before moving into a more Mahlerish world of melancholy intensity, was no less fine.
27 August 2014