Stéphane Denève was bubbling with enthusiasm as he introduced the first concert of 10:11 season. Bubbling particularly because during the coming season the Royal Scottish National Orchestra is to play ten pieces that have been written in the last ten years.
There was a choice of a least a hundred and some he had only heard about after inviting suggestions from friends around the world. He and Simon Woods, the Orchestra’s Chief Executive, on stage for the post-concert talk assured us that the choice was entirely Denève’s with absolutely no rules as to gender, geography, age or anything else. It was an emotional decision Denève told us.
And the first on the list was by James MacMillan. From his opera The Sacrifice the composer chose three of the seven Interludes which, with a bit of shaking around, have become the concert suite we heard. Each is about five minutes with the shortest break between them. They were engaging and well worth hearing again. As we were so rightly told in the pre-concert talk, a new piece played at the start of a concert is easily forgotten by the time other familiar works have been played. It was a great help to have heard a recording upstairs at the talk before going in for the live performance.
Although Nicholas Angelich was born in America, it was at the Paris Conservatoire from the age of thirteen that he studied music. One of his contemporaries there was Stéphane Denève. And he speaks perfect French we were told by the conductor in his remarks at the start of the concert. We watched with total fascination the playing of the Ravel Piano Concerto for the Left Hand - with just the left hand. Indeed with his right arm down by his side there was almost a feeling of pity because it seemed as if there was something wrong with it. The Concerto was written for an Austrian pianist, Paul Wittgenstein, who has lost his right arm during the First World War. At first Wittgenstein was not impressed but after a while came round to realising Ravel had written a great work. And so it was for us in the Usher Hall.
After the interval the Orchestra treated us to Dvořák’s From the New World Symphony. It would certainly have been in a list of ten best one hundred years ago. Dvořák spent three years in New York at the National Conservatory of Music and, with the help of his students and visits to his some of his family settled in Iowa, gathered melodies from Native Americans to produce in 1893 a symphony that is both Czech and American.
Event: Friday 24 September 2010 7.30 pm