Once again the Usher Hall was very near full for a concert with the traditional format of an overture, concerto and symphony. The first two were composed by Mendelssohn but at different stages of his career. Tomas Hanus was conducting. He is a highly regarded musician from the Czech Republic.
More than once Mendelssohn was in Britain. In 1829 he took a boat trip round Fingal’s Cave on the island of Staffa when he set to paper the first few bars of the overture he later finished in Italy the following year. The Edinburgh connection is that Staffa became the property in 1821 of an Edinburgh lawyer living in Heriot Row, my great-great-great-uncle. Almost immediately the music is of water which is calm at first, but the swells reach seasickness levels, and the trumpets and timpani tells us there’s trouble about. It takes the clarinet to bring us to calmer waters, slowly and gracefully.
Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto was written fifteen years later and soon was considered the natural successor to Beethoven’s. We were fortunate to have Vadim Gluzman perform on the 1690 ‘ex-Leopold Aer’ Stradivari violin. Born in 1973 in the Ukraine he moved to Israel in 1990 to continue his studies and has since played all over the world with many great orchestras. The Concerto is very much the soloist’s - the orchestra sitting behind plays a secondary part. It was not surprising that Vadim Gluzman was given the applause he deserved and played a short encore.
Under the baton of the Czech conductor the Royal Scottish National Orchestra played the sixth of Dvořák’s nine symphonies. His biographer considered that ‘In this Symphony dwells the gaiety, humour and passion of the Czech people’.
Seasoned RSNO watchers enjoy the ever chaging faces of the players and this was the concert that welcomed Xander Van Vliet as its Principal Second Violin. Noted too is the different entrance style of the Joint Leaders. One comes in just before the conductor, the Orchestra having already tuned up. The other takes the role of being in place at the same time as everybody else with the role of attending to the tune up.
And the programme notes these past three concerts have given us the expected length of each piece of music to be played, fortunately I believe, only in small print.
Event: Friday 11 November 2011 7.30 pm.