SCO / Kuusisto / Dreamers’ Circus
By Keith Bruce for VoxCarnyx
It is customarily Pekka Kuusisto who springs the surprises on his annual visits to direct the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, but in Edinburgh on Tuesday – where his popularity with the audience assured not a seat was unsold – the crowd turned the tables.
Kuusisto’s programme also involved Dreamers’ Circus, a three-piece Nordic traditional music group who have been appearing at Glasgow’s Celtic Connections festival for over a decade but, surprisingly, were making their Edinburgh debut.
Pianist Nikolaj Busk introduced their second half opener as “a tune from Switzerland from 1532”. It turned out to be from the Geneva hymn book and known to Scots from its number in their old hymnary as The Auld Hundreth, All People That On Earth Do Dwell. The Queen’s Hall duly treated it as a Lutheran chorale and joined in, to the initial surprise, but gratification of the band.
Beethoven would have recognised the response as exactly what Bach would have expected from a church congregation, and that was fitting because the whole evening was built around Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.
The much-quoted summary of that work by Richard Wagner as “the apotheosis of the dance” is not especially useful to understanding it, and even putting that remark in the context of its entire sentence, as the programme did, doesn’t help a great deal. What Kuusisto did was to parse the symphony, preceding and interspersing its movements with music from the trio, much of it of their own composition, although traditional in style, and a fair amount of it orchestrated.
Those arrangements for the SCO to play were a million miles from Beethoven, and not only in details that meant the horn and brass players discarding their period instruments for modern ones. In style they were a little like the film scores of Bryce Dessner or Jonny Greenwood, and the most interesting of them, played before the interval and after the second movement of the Beethoven, transcended its song basis to become a fascinating contemporary passacaglia with a filigree piano figure.
When performing on their own, Dreamers’ Circus were always fascinating, Busk playing accordion as much as the Steinway, Rune Tonsgaard Sorenson the violin soloist of the night, and cittern-player Ale Carr, who played with Kuusisto and the SCO in a similar excursion on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons two years ago, doubling on fiddle himself. Small wonder the conductor felt able to concentrate on directing the orchestra, only picking up his own fiddle to join in the symphony’s boisterous stop-start rhythmic fourth movement.
And hugely exciting that last movement was, while the stop-start nature of this performance of Beethoven 7 never really impaired appreciation of the detail of Kuusisto’s individual reading of the score, full of colour with interesting pauses and tempo adjustments.
Even the separation of the end of the Scherzo from the Allegro con brio finale, which looked potentially problematic, worked, and the prefacing of the opening movement made a very different listen of its slow start before the symphony bursts into vigorous life. In this performance the slow march of the second movement was never likely to seem at all funereal.
As well as the featured soloists, plaudits should go to two of the guests in the orchestra ranks, Frenchman Yann Thenet at first oboe and American Nivanthi Karunaratne, whose playing of the demanding low line on natural horn made the third movement.