RSNO & Andreas Landin, Edinburgh review: 'bewilderingly eclectic'
If this was a disparate curate’s egg of a concert, the tasty bits were delicious, writes David Kettle
RSNO, Thomas Søndergård & Andreas Landin, RSNO Changed Voices, Usher Hall, Edinburgh ★★★★
Quite what the four disparate pieces in the RSNO’s bewilderingly eclectic concert had to do with each other is anyone’s guess. Do repertoire connections even matter? Well, yes, so that pieces can offer contexts for each other (none of that here), and so that we can understand why we’re hearing them in the first place.
That was the big question behind Mendelssohn’s almost never heard Son and Stranger Overture, which was pleasantly diverting (and given a fine, crisp account by the RSNO and music director Thomas Søndergård), but hardly revelatory, and raised the question of why it was padding out the programme. Conversely, Vaughan Williams’s Songs of Travel made a logical solo vocal follow-up to the concert’s choral opener (we’ll come to that), but Swedish baritone Andreas Landin struggled to make a convincing case. He clearly has a burnished tone and is capable of strong projection, but too often his voice simply didn’t cut through Søndergård’s velvet-touch accompaniments.
There was, however, a far clearer reason behind the concert’s opener. The RSNO’s Changed Voices chorus – for boys who want to continue singing while their voices are developing during teenagehood – is 20 years old, and the orchestra had commissioned composer Cheryl Frances-Hoad and writer Kate Wakeling to mark the occasion with a new work.
You Have to be Realistic About a Perfect Day drew on the boys’ own words in a beautifully eloquent, really very moving snapshot of hopes, despairs and joys, all conveyed in Hoad’s zippy but poignant, Adams-meets-Bernstein music, and sung with quiet authority by the Changed Voices chorus itself. It was a piece to bring a smile of recognition, and a lump to the throat too.
Søndergård closed with a Beethoven Seventh Symphony that was just as zippy, and trod a brilliantly convincing line between joy and desperation in its ceaseless, relentless rhythms. If it was a curate’s egg of a concert, the tasty bits were delicious.
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