Wagner's rousing Overture to his opera The Mastersingers of Nuremberg opened the Royal Scottish National Orchestra's 2014/15 season. Peter Oundjian in his third year as Music Director told us that in the first two of the new season's concerts he was keen to feature some of the Orchestra's extraordinarily talented players.
Meanwhile at the pre-concert talk in the foyer of the upper gallery Katherine Bryan, the Orchestra's Principal Flautist since she was 21, had told us that her colleagues were not so much looking forward to her massive solo performance as to what evening gown she would be wearing. The clue she had told them was the colour of her finger nails. And so it proved.
American composer Christopher Rouse's Flute Concerto was written in 1993 for Katherine Bryan's flute teacher at New York's Juilliard School. She and the Orchestra recorded the work in 2013 but we heard its first live performance in Scotland. And, she told us, it's technically really difficult in places. For most of the work's thirty minutes she was hard at it, and holding her own against her colleagues. At one exciting point she and her three flute colleagues were each playing different parts, and that does not happen often. The Concerto is in five movements with the first and fifth based on Scottish and Irish melodies for which the flute is so ideally suited. The second and fourth are slow but it's the third which is an elegy - in memory of the brutal murder of the two year old James Bulger by two ten-year-old boys at the time the work was being composed. I really expected a longer and louder applause at the end.
The Orchestra was on form for Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade with its leader, Maya Iwabuchi, playing the violin solo and Aleksei Kiseliov the cello solo.
A very solid start to an exciting season ahead for the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.
Concert: Friday 3rd October 2014 at 7.30pm