THE brooding and somewhat unnerving opening of Britten's Prelude & Fugue set a precedent for a concert that was to feature many expansive melodies.
The Scottish Philharmonic Orchestra showed great capacity for carefully crafted interpretation th
roughout this hour-long programme.
Most successful, and also most familiar, was Vaughan Williams's Oboe Concerto in A Minor. Soloist Rosie Staniforth made clear her personal affection for the piece, not only in her short introduction, but in every phrase that she played. Whether in the midst of a soaring, rhapsodic melody or reeling off yet another implausibly throwaway semiquaver passage, Staniforth's performance combined elements of the blithe and the contemplative, the jocular and the pastoral, to convey a depth of emotion that was acutely human in its complexity.
A Suite for String Orchestra by Frank Bridge, though never quite able to match the intensity of the Vaughan Williams, still afforded the ensemble an opportunity to demonstrate its ability to invoke a power far greater than its constituent parts when presented with a luscious, romantic tune.
The lack of such material in a new work by Scottish composer Alan MacDiarmid could in part account for the lull in proceedings as the players struggled to give meaning to the thematically unconnected sections.
The full article contains 214 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
