On another level
This audacious combination of Nordic folk tunes and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony proved to be a revelation, writes David Kettle
SCO, Pekka Kuusisto & Dreamers’ Circus, Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh ★★★★★
When the whooping and cheering starts before even a note has been played, you know it’s hardly going to be a conventional classical concert (whatever that is). With musical agent provocateur Pekka Kuusisto at the reins, that’s virtually guaranteed, but his collision of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra with Nordic folk and more from partners in crime Dreamers’ Circus was on another level – of audacity, risk and also revelation.
Not that there was anything didactic here, no worthy lesson about an undiscovered folk thread running through Beethoven’s music (or vice versa). Instead, Kuusisto’s brisk, demonstrative Symphony and the trad and newly composed tunes from the Danish/Swedish trio existed entirely in their own terms (well, mostly), offering striking, memorable contexts for each other, and sounding bracingly fresh, new and surprising as a result.
The concert’s first half was more closely integrated, and stronger, with Dreamers’ Circus’s opening pair of tunes almost running into the Symphony’s explosive opening chord, cunningly arranged so that both were in the same key. There was a hum-along hymn tune, and even a supple, tasteful arrangement of a Beethoven violin sonata movement for the Dreamers’ Circus trio, the only time his music got messed with.
READ MORE: Pekka Kuusisto and Dreamers' Circus on their plan to 'pollute' Beethoven
Kuusisto was clearly out to question lazy tradition and received wisdom on the Symphony, but his account was probing and perceptive, never simply wayward, and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra musicians were wonderfully alive to his detailed direction and urgent tempi. For their part, Dreamers’ Circus provided bewitchingly clean, crisp performances: fiddler Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen had a winningly silky, crystalline sound, and Ale Carr swapped his mandolin-like cittern for a fiddle, too, in a couple of muscular numbers.
If anyone was worried about a lack of serious-minded intellectual intent, that was more that made up for by sheer musical verve and vitality, and by the evident joy of performers making music together – whatever the style. There were plenty more whoops and cheers for the two encores – deservedly so.