RSNO, 30/04/2022

Capperauld : Fèin-Aithne

Alfvén : Bergakungen Suite

Strauss : An Alpine Symphony

Royal Scottish National Orchestra

Musicians from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland

Thomas Søndergård

Tonight was not merely an RSNO concert, it was a joint venture between the RSNO and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.  Not the first, and surely not the last, but the first in over two years, for the obvious reasons, and brought about because performing Strauss's Eine Alpensinfonie requires such significant forces that the orchestra drafted an additional 54 musicians, on- and off-stage, to amplify the ranks.  

There were a few present in the first half too, though a mere handful compared to what was to come, and the concert opened with a piece by an alumnus of the RCS, young Scottish composer Jay Capperauld, Fèin-Aithne which, according to his notes, is Gaelic for "Self Identity".  

"...takes its inspiration directly from Scottish Culture by attempting to personalise the various elements that form modern and traditional Scotland and its place in the wider context of the world.... while also attempting to challenge the accepted constructs, notions and preconceived stereotypes associated with the defined 'identity' of Scottish Culture...."

So runs part of the composer's presentation notes.  However, if that really was his intention, I have to say I thought that it's a bit of a bust.  If you're supposed to get an image of Scotland and the Scots from this piece of music, the first and foremost thing you're likely to carry away from it is that they're loud, brawlsome, and fixated on the Military Tattoo, which, really, just pings on so many stereotypes it's hardly even funny.  

Hugo Alfvèn was a Swedish composer pretty much contemporaneous with Richard Strauss, who he greatly admired, notably for his mastery of the orchestra.  He did, however, succeed in not being a slavish imitator, but took inspiration from the opulence of Strauss's textures, and translated them into his own more clearly Nordic idiom.  "The Mountain King" was intended as a ballet, based on a Swedish fairy-tale of a shepherdess kidnapped by said Mountain King (who, I presume, is the same creature as Peer Gynt's one).  The girl's lover mounts a rescue mission, aided by a troll, but the troll has an ulterior motive, and when he realises that the shepherdess will not return his interest, he abandons the lovers on the mountainside to die in the snows.  The ballet project had a difficult birth, and Alfvèn judged, correctly, that it would not become a mainstay of the repertory, so he drew a four-movement suite from the music for concert performance.  The first movement is an atmospheric, ominous number, the third a shimmering, impressionist gem, and the last a fleet-footed, delicately playful dance with a gently melancholy centre.  The whole was delivered with fresh charm by the orchestra, and some truly admirable precision-playing from the violins in the last movement.

After the interval, with the stage packed to overflowing (and it had been extended well into the stalls), we travelled from Norway's mountains, to the Bavarian Alps, and Strauss's last great tone poem.  The idea germinated in 1899, but after some sketches were completed, he abandoned it until 1911, when the death of Mahler, who was a friend, prompted him to revisit the idea, and the whole was finished by 1915.  I'm always a bit stunned to think that he was working on this monumental piece at much the same time as he was undertaking the revisions to the intimate, small-scale masterpieces that were the Ariadne project - the completed Ariadne auf Naxos, and the Bürger aus Edelman- and Couperin Tanz-Suites.  All told, Ariadne and its companion works are probably rather better compositions musically, but there's much to enjoy in the Alpine Symphony, and one gets to hear it far less often.

This is an orchestral extravaganza, with double winds and brass including eight on-stage horns with four doubling on the wonderfully warm-sounding Wagner tubas, two harps, celesta, organ, twelve off-stage horns, no less, two timpanists and four percussionists, and as many string players as can be fitted into the remaining space.  It's a very graphic piece, one might even say cinematic, with a few longueurs, notably in the early stages when some of the tone-painting - cows in the pasture? - borders on the twee.  On the other hand, the off-stage hunting horns are thrilling, and after the ramblers get above the levels of human habitat, onto the glacier and upwards, Strauss starts looking outwards and upwards again, with a true breadth of vision that Søndergård and the orchestra conveyed admirably.  This was big, bold playing, confident and assured, a tour-de-force in every sense.

[Next: 6th May]