SCO & SCO Chorus, Edinburgh review: 'full of warmth and wonder'
The SCO Chorus was on exceptional form for this performance of Berlioz’s L’enfance du Christ, writes David Kettle
SCO & the SCO Chorus, Usher Hall, Edinburgh ★★★★
Too early for a Christmas concert? The real question, surely, is whether Berlioz’s unclassifiable opera/oratorio L’enfance du Christ really has much to do with the festive season at all. Certainly in the hands of SCO Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, it was a wonderfully tender, intimate but still dramatic meditation on family love amid the spiritual turmoil of Christ’s early years, one that shone a strong light on the characters of Mary, Joseph and Herod and their inner lives.
Callum Thorpe’s Herod, for example, simmered with outrage and fear at the prophecy of a child who would overthrow his rule, with a voice you could bathe in but no lack of vocal nuance either. Paula Murrihy made a thoughtful Mary, full of saintly purity but with substance behind her motherly concerns too, while Roderick Williams was a memorable Joseph. Completing the quartet of soloists, tenor Andrew Staples was a beautifully clear and lucid narrator who really came into his own at the work’s luminous conclusion.
Emelyanychev made Berlioz’s striking orchestrations sound just as novel and fresh as they surely did in the composer’s own time, while ensuring a graceful flow, a velvety orchestral balance and a sure sense of dramatic pacing. And the SCO Chorus was on truly exceptional form, its tenors and basses singing as one voice as soothsayers predicting Herod’s downfall, and a select gathering of sopranos and altos making a wonderfully distant, sometimes magically indistinct off-stage chorus of angels.
It was an evening of quiet reflection and tenderness that grew increasingly intimate as the work progressed – a series of tableaux painted in watercolours, perhaps, rather than twinkling with gaudy multicoloured lights. But by L’enfance du Christ’s prayerful, a cappella epilogue – offered exquisitely by the SCO Chorus – it was a performance that filled the Usher Hall with an appropriately seasonal sense of wonder and warmth.
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