SCO, Andrew Manze & Maximiliano Martín, Edinburgh review: 'glorious'
This all-John Adams evening offered abundant wit and mischief but also deep sincerity and vulnerability, writes David Kettle
SCO, Andrew Manze & Maximiliano Martín, Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh ★★★★★
Boldness and bravery can clearly pay off. Not only has the Scottish Chamber Orchestra successfully generated a new, younger audience with its more contemporary-themed “New Directions” concert strand, but it’s also getting a lot of enthusiasm from its new mix of listeners, regulars and newbies alike.
There were plenty of them, generating quite a buzz for the Orchestra’s all-John Adams evening under conductor Andrew Manze’s crisp, detailed and thoroughly engaging direction. And it was hard not to feel enthusiastic, frankly, about the concert – certainly the freewheeling juggernaut of rhythm that closed the evening, Adams’s over-the-top, sometimes deliciously tongue-in-cheek Fearful Symmetries. But despite the piece’s flamboyant excess, Manze ensured a nimble, thoughtful account that made the most of its gloriously supple, subtle colours, notably a sonorous saxophone quartet headed by Lewis Banks.
Manze opened the concert with an Adams minimalist classic, but his Shaker Loops was gently luminous and really quite moving in its surging rhythms and shifting harmonies – indeed, Manze’s way with Adams’s perpetual accelerations was spectacularly effective, and very powerful too.
The concert’s highlight, however, came from SCO principal clarinettist Maximiliano Martín, who stepped out from the orchestra as soloist in Adams’s deeply idiosyncratic clarinet concerto Gnarly Buttons. Despite its sometimes wilful oddness – cow moos and hoedown banjo twangs, anyone? – Martín brought deep conviction, freshness and an unwavering sense of connection and communication to the piece. He delivered a convincing soliloquy in the opening movement’s long, winding lines, and brought out the second movement’s arch humour most effectively by playing it straight.
The relentlessly accumulating intensity of Martín’s closing movement, the slow song “Put Your Loving Arms Around Me”, and its brutal climax were nothing short of emotionally shattering, and greeted by a stunned silence from listeners. It was an evening of abundant wit and mischief, certainly, but also of deep sincerity and vulnerability.
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