United Kingdom Maderna, Beethoven: Scottish Chamber Orchestra / Lorenza Borrani (director/violin). Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, 29.2.2024. (SRT)
Maderna – Selection from ‘Odhecaton’ Suite
Beethoven – Quartetto seriosos (arr. Mahler); Symphony No.7
This Scottish Chamber Orchestra concert began with two composers giving their take on another. Perhaps surprisingly, the more extreme one was the more successful.
Bruno Maderna was an arch modernist of the Boulez and Birtwhistle variety, yet his take on the Renaissance music captured in the Odhecaton was a total delight. Maderna managed to put his collection of fifteenth-century tunes through a modernist filter that made them simultaneously dainty and dusky, light and melancholy all at once, as though the Venetian Renaissance was going for a gambol with 1950s Darmstadt. It was a delightful illustration of what can happen when the modern rediscovers the ancient, and the musicians of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra played it with a lovely feel for its transparency and refinement.
They were directed from the leader’s chair by Lorenza Borrani, making her debut with the orchestra, and bringing focus and clarity to music that could have sounded muddled in other hands. She couldn’t get me excited about Mahler’s take on Beethoven’s Quartetto serioso, however. Gustav’s arrangement of Ludwig’s quartet thickened the textures and amplified the volume, but there were few other benefits. Only in the second movement’s fugue did the richer textures bring an extra air of poignancy. Otherwise the textures, so edgy in the quartet, sounded clouded and fuzzy so that the sparks never flew.
They did in Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, however; triumphantly so. The full orchestral chords which punctuated the opening were so heavily accented that they felt like sforzandi against the flowing wind lines, and the whole of the first movement felt lithe, airbound and buoyant. Wagner’s famous line about the apotheosis of the dance must have motivated their preparation because the main theme skirled like a Highland jig, and I ended up tapping my foot through most of it, almost in spite of myself. There was a tired sense of melancholy to the Allegretto, in contrast, while the cosmic explosions of the Scherzo were heightened by cheeky pauses and occasional extreme pianissimos. The finale was just a little bit foursquare by contrast, so tightly controlled that it felt a little rigid, in spite of its whipcrack precision. Still, this was a reading that was exciting and energising, never for a moment routine. Importantly, most of the musicians were smiling throughout, which tells its own story.
Simon Thompson