MUSIC: SCO WIND AND BRASS (Community Hall, Boat of Garten, 22 July 2010)
SCO Wind and Brass (Photo -
Paul Hampton)
MUSIC: SCO WIND AND BRASS (Community Hall, Boat of Garten, 22 July 2010)
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27 July 2010
JAMES MUNRO enjoys an evening of music for wind and brass, but wonders why the flutes got short shrift. ON THE basis that half an old friend is better than no friend at all, every summer the Scottish Chamber Orchestra bifurcates itself to create two peaks of music-making in the more intimate venues that cannot accommodate the full band. The strings do their own thing, as do the wind and brass players.
The latter ensemble set of on their mini-tour at Boat of Garten where they performed to a sell-out audience in the excellent atmosphere of the village’s Community Hall, before moving on to Strontian and Tobermory. If beautiful settings were the only criterion on which to judge a concert, then the members of this band would have had top marks before they had blown a note.
Carl Maria von Weber was one of those German composers of the Romantic era who died tragically young, at only thirty-nine, when he still had so much to give. He is probably best known for his operatic output, especially the overtures, but that does not do him justice as his influence was acknowledged by Liszt, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Wagner.
Both halves of the SCO Wind and Brass concert opened with a Weber overture, albeit arranged by others. Euryanthe was, and still is, a dramatically flawed opera which is why only its overture is ever heard today. It is at times romantic, at times heroic, even chivalrous, but overall it is a cheery piece and is well suited to the wind arrangement by Franz Weller, despite the absence of flutes.
There was ample compensation for that omission in the second item on the programme when flautists Alison Mitchell and Liz Dooner were joined by bassoonist Peter Whelan for Haydn’s London Trio No 1 inC major. It is a piece in which all three short movements seem to bounce along and at times tries to be bigger than it actually is, but the fact remains that, no matter how well the trio was performed, it was composed when Haydn was capitalising on his London successes and churning out quantities of wallpaper music.
The third piece before the interval was by Mendelssohn, his Notturno in C major for wind instruments, composed when he was only fifteen, and therefore contemporary with his excellent series of String Symphonies, as though he wanted to prove that he could compose just as well for winds as for strings.
Scored for double oboes, clarinets, horns and bassoons, with extra flute, trumpet and contra-bassoon, it started gently, as befits a nocturne, but that was the only sleep the audience got as the music changed gear to a vivacious allegro which lasted right through to the end.
The second half of the concert got under way with another Weber overture, Der Freischutz, which is his only opera to survive in the international repertoire. This arrangement for wind and brass by Wenzl Sedlák also left out the flutes. Is this trend following Weber or is it a conspiracy against that divine instrument? All the atmospheric tunes were there, but somehow there was something missing as, try as they might, the clarinets could not substitute for the tensions in the music provided by the strings in the full orchestral version.
There is a whole extra catalogue of works by Beethoven marked “WoO”, or without opus number, that are unjustly neglected. One such is his Rondino in E flat major for wind octet. It is a charming piece that makes full use of a mute in the bells of the horns – an unusual event but a fascinating sound.
Then it was time to leap forward from the 19th to the 20th century and a programmatic suite of seven dances from Jean Françaix called Les Malheurs de Sophie. A work so typical of the treasury of great music coming out of France in the 1930s, so much of it written, as was this suite, for the French cinema, although it was also used for a ballet. And were it not for the encore of one of Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances, these seven little gems would have made a most satisfactory climax to an enjoyable, if somewhat short, evening.
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