RSNO, 04/05/2024

Ellington : Black and Tan Fantasy

Grieg (arr. Ellington) : "In the Hall of the Mountain King" (Peer Gynt)

Bernstein (arr. Florian Ross) : West Side Story Suite

Gershwin (arr. Tommy Smith) : Rhapsody in Blue (Makoto Ozone, piano)

Herrmann : Suite from Vertigo

Bernstein : Symphonic Dances from West Side Story

Scottish National Jazz Orchestra

Tommy Smith, leader

Royal Scottish National Orchestra

Bertie Baigent

It has clearly been a weekend for collaborative concerts.  Last night, it was the SCO with the SCO Academy, tonight, the RSNO with the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra (SNJO, for short).  The SNJO was founded by Tommy Smith in 1995, and is a big band formation of around 15 players, the usual sort of mix of saxes, trumpets, trombones and rhythm section.  They featured in the first half of the programme, starting with a half-hour set which began with a couple of Duke Ellington numbers, one of his earliest hits, Black and Tan Fantasy, of 1927, and an extract from the much later adaptation of Grieg's Peer Gynt Suites.  The thing I most remembered about Black and Tan Fantasy is the fairly relentless rhythm, which was somewhat attenuated in the hands of the SNJO, and there was a bit too much rasp in the trumpet breaks for my taste.  The Grieg, on the other hand, was more interesting.  I didn't know it, though it's fairly contemporary with Ellington's arrangement of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, and shares a similar level of sophistication and style, well conveyed by tonight's group.

The selection of tunes from West Side Story was more of a medley than a suite, and there was a bit too much overlap with Bernstein's own selection, which we heard in the second part of the programme.  It began well enough with a dreamy improvisation on "Somewhere" from pianist Peter Johnstone, but the big-band take on the other tunes left me a bit cold.  I'm not a big jazz listener, and one of the problems that I've had with many performances is that I don't recognise a lot of what are generally known as jazz standards.  West Side Story, on the other hand, I know back to front, so when I know that I should be able to follow the song through the arrangement and/or improvisations, I get a little irritated when, in a medley, something flickers by so rapidly I haven't really had the time to identify it, never mind how it has been arranged.  

Something a little similar happened with the Gershwin which, given the amount of reworking involved, really out to be called something like "Fantasy on Rhapsody in Blue" by Tommy Smith.  The RSNO arrived on stage for this piece, along with soloist Makoto Ozone, and the very first thing that tipped us off to the fact that this was most emphatically not going to be anything like a regular performance of Rhapsody was the absence of the celebrated opening clarinet slide.  Smith's reimagining is quite comprehensive.  Ozone himself plays the piece regularly with added improvisations, even if the orchestral score is as written, but Smith, I think, was enjoying taking the Rolls Royce that is a major symphony orchestra out for a spin, and there was a lot of heavy writing for the orchestra, particularly in the introduction, which was, frankly, both portentous and pompous.  Frankly, it struck me as a case of "all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order".  All the elaboration more than doubled the length of the piece; Ozone's own performances tend to clock in around the 25-minute mark, where a 'straight' reading usually averages around 18 minutes, but this was over 40 minutes, and really did not, in my opinion, gain from what was mostly a lot of padding.  

The three-movement structure was emphasised more clearly here, but for the first third, Ozone might as well have been part of the rhythm section, and really only started coming into his own with the central section.  His bridge back into the final section was the most interesting bit of solo playing I heard from him, and also in this last section was the best piece of arrangement, when Smith swung big band and orchestra alike into a lively samba variation which, for the first time, I felt, suited both Gershwin and Smith equally well.  What was also impressive was young English conductor Bertie Baigent's ability to keep the orchestra, which was arranged behind the big band and could not, therefore, be seen by the jazz musicians, rigorously in time with the band.

For the second half of the concert, the SNJO left the stage, and the piano was pushed back to the side (though it would still be needed), while the RSNO resumed its normal positions on stage to play Bernstein's own 'suite' from his West Side Story, and before that, three cues from Bernard Herrmann's masterly score for Hitchcock's Vertigo.  The RSNO has garnered quite the reputation for performing film scores, and it's not hard to see, or rather hear, why, because they take the music as seriously as any symphony, and put care into the sound and the presentation.  Vertigo is arguably the finest example of the Herrmann/Hitchcock collaborations, profoundly unsettling visually and aurally, and for all the tensions that frequently existed between those two prickly characters, here, for once, they were completely on the same page from start to finish.  In filming the love scene, the point at which Judy becomes Madeleine again, and which is mostly verbally mute, Hitchcock apparently instructed the sound team to keep the sounds as low as possible because, he said, he believed "Mr. Herrmann will have something to say,"  which he most certainly did.  Three movements constitute this suite, the Prelude, with its dizzying, spiralling arpeggios, perfectly matched to the almost psychedelic titles, the Nightmare, with its grotesque, obsessive habanera rhythm, and the fragile and hopeless love scene, all beautifully rendered.  

Finally, Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, which he put together in 1960 following the Broadway success of his musical.  If there's anything that actually dates this score, it's the finger-clicking of the Overture, and in "Cool", the first of which, at least, provoked a ripple of laughter from tonight's audience, which was not entirely appropriate.  The Symphonic Dances trace the inexorably tragic arc of the story, with few leavening moments; only the tentative tenderness of the Cha-Cha, and the yearning of "Somewhere" offer respite, and "Somewhere" has always felt like a pipe-dream to me, with that ominous tritone pedal at the end undermining any true sense of hope.  Like Herrmann, Bernstein could be a master of non-resolution when he chose.   There were moments tonight when I could have wished for a little more incisiveness, notably in "Cool", which, I admit, has always been my favourite number from the show; I mean, come on, a jazz fugue in the middle of a Broadway musical?  That is indeed what I call cool!  However, it demands cut-crystal precision, of a kind that is horribly difficult to achieve in live performance.  However, it was a small point in a generally very good performance, and Baigent seems a persuasive advocate for these mixed-genre musics.

[Next: 8th June]