United Kingdom Edinburgh International Festival 2025 [3]: Bacewicz, R Strauss, Kilar, Bizet/Shchedrin: NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra / Alexander Sitkovetsy (leader/director). Usher Hall, Edinburgh, 10.8.2025. (SRT)
Grażyna Bacewicz – Concerto for String Orchestra
R. Strauss – Metamorphosen
Wojciech Kilar – Orawa
Bizet (arr. Shchedrin) – Carmen Suite for strings and percussion
The Edinburgh International Festival embarked this weekend on a miniature Focus on Poland strand, the centrepiece of which was the visit of the NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra. They are the resident orchestra of the National Forum for Music in Wroclaw, a string orchestra led by a Brit, Alexander Sitkovetsky.
Appropriate, then, that they should bring some Polish music, and fortunate that they should play it so well. In fact, everything on the programme benefited from the sheer richness of their sound, but Grażyna Bacewicz’s Concerto for String Orchestra paired that with a vigorous sense of to-and-fro being bounced around the orchestra, with contrasts of dynamics and textures ricocheting off one another as furious pizzicatos answered bowing of surging immediacy. Disarmingly intimate solos varied the aural picture, as did the chilly intimacy of the central Andante and the bounding dynamic energy of the finale. There wasn’t so much tonal variety in Wojciech Kilar’s Orawa, more a sense of dynamic expansion. A celebration of Poland’s southern Tatras Mountain region, it grows from the repetition of a tiny musical fragment like a sort of Polish minimalism. It is a pretty thin piece, but tonally appealing and the audience loved it.
You wouldn’t get such a buoyant response from Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen; more a sense of disconsolate disintegration. It sounded remarkably vivid in this performance, however, opening with the loneliest set of cellos you could imagine and a steadily enveloping sense of doom; a sense that temporarily dissipated in the urgency of the major key central section, moments which seemed to hold out a sense of hope before being cut off at the knees by the return of the desperate opening material. Sitkovetsky directed unobtrusively from the leader’s position, and what impressed most was the remarkable variety of the textures on offer: by turns icy, flowing with warmth, dripping with regret or flowing with life; often forbidding, but always richly inviting.
Rodion Shchedrin’s Carmen Suite ended the concert outrageously and uproariously. Written for a 1967 ballet, this is a universe away from the opera as you may know it. Shchedrin arranged Bizet’s music for string orchestra and percussion and clearly had a whale of a time while doing it, even if listeners who know the opera will frequently be caught short listening to it. Part of the fun is identifying the solutions Shchedrin chose for the aural puzzles he set himself, like what he used to replace the oboe in the Aragonaise, or the flute in the intermezzo. Often his decisions are plain bizarre, like opening (and closing) the suite with the love theme of the Habañera being sounded out quietly on bells, as though doing an impression of Cavalleria rusticana. I loved every minute, though, as did the five percussionists, who were clearly having a ball. I don’t blame them: I was, too.
Simon Thompson
The Edinburgh International Festival runs at venues across the city until Sunday 24th August. Click here for further details.