Queen’s Hall, 29/10/2026
Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Ryan Bancroft (conductor) and Clara-Jumi Kang (violin)
The Queens Hall was very full for this unusual concert of European and American composers, with its two halves represented by two well-known melodic pieces by the US composer Samuel Barber, both accompanied by two contrasting and more challenging pieces by lesser known European composers.
I haven’t reviewed the SCO for some time, with the excellent pairing of Kate Calder and Donal Hurley usually covering SCO concerts in either Edinburgh or Glasgow, but since both were unavailable today I stepped into the breach. Normally reviewing at the Queens Halls the reviewer is placed in the stalls but tonight whether by design or lucky accident I was placed high up on the central gallery. From there I got a very good view of the enlarged SCO line-up for our first work Schulhoff’s ‘Suite for Chamber Orchestra’, which requires a really big percussion section, which I had a great view of from on high.
I suspect that like me most of our readers have never heard of Schulhoff; indeed our conductor Ryan Bancroft asked the audience whether they knew him and very few hands went up. As a good critic I had researched the programme in advance and indeed had listened to it and seen it courtesy of YouTube and Apple Music! Erwin Schulhoff is a very interesting composer, and David Kettle’s as usual very good programme notes gave a brief account of his short and turbulent life. He was born at the end of the 19th century into a German speaking Jewish family and studied music in Prague’s Conservatoire from the age of 10, encouraged by no less than Dvorak! He was a child prodigy and became a revolutionary in music and indeed politics, becoming the only composer I know of who has set the Communist Manifesto to music! There is a clip of it on YouTube sung by a Glasgow choir and it sounds not bad! However as a Jew and a Communist he did not fare well during World War 2, and died in prison in 1942 aged 48.
His Suite for Chamber Orchestra, composed in 1921 is partly inspired by his love of dance and jazz, but he was also influenced by Dadaism, the revolutionary anti-intellectual movement of the 1920s. Indeed his suite for chamber music is preceded by a Dadaist poem which our conductor Ryan Bancroft dramatically read before beginning the music, clearly a conductor with a dramatic vocal flair! The music itself though modern is not non-melodic, but inspired by jazz and dance; it is surprisingly tuneful, with some great percussion and brass sections, lively enough to hold everyone’s attention. Schulhoff is certainly a composer worth hearing and exploring more. Ryan Bancroft conducted it masterfully and it got a warm reception from the audience.
The second work in the first half of the concert was Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto. He began to compose this in 1939 in Europe, offering a connection to our other works tonight. But Barber was able to depart quickly for the USA, where he completed it and where it was premiered in Philadelphia in 1941. Although not as memorable as Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’ it is a lovely melodic work and was beautifully played by Clara-Jumi Kang who is the daughter of South Korean opera singers but was born and brought up in Germany. She began playing the violin at age three and entered music school in Mannheim aged 4! She was very much a child prodigy and is now an international star, and she certainly demonstrated that tonight, receiving a great reception from the Queens Hall audience.
After the interval we began with the SCO reduced to a small string orchestra for Barber’s most famous work, the ‘Adagio for Strings’, a work everyone has heard often at funerals, - it is often described as “the worlds saddest music”. It began life as the slow movement of Barber’s String Quartet, with Toscanini no less proposing that it would make a great orchestral work and premiering it in a radio broadcast with the NBC Symphony Orchestra in 1938. It captured the nation and is now the most popular funeral music, with the programme notes singling out the funerals of FD Roosevelt, Albert Einstein and Grace Kelly, and describing how Jackie Kennedy arranged for it to be played to an empty hall following the assassination of JFK. The SCO’s small string orchestra played it beautifully.
The final work was from another European and, like Schulhoff, another socialist, but this time one with a strong American connection. Kurt Weill was most famously seen as the musical creator behind Brecht’s great theatre works, such as ‘The Threepenny Opera’, ‘Happy End’ and ‘The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny’, which even before the Nazis came to power in 1933 was stormed by Nazis denouncing it as “degenerate art”. Weill wisely concluded that a Jewish socialist composer would be unsafe in Nazi Germany and fled to Paris early in 1933 and thence to the USA. Incidentally if you want a brilliant musical account of the rise of Nazism in the 1920’s and 1930’s watch ‘Babylon Berlin’ - great musical theatre whose final part will be streamed in Britain next year. When Weill was in Paris in 1933, en route to the USA, he got a commission to write the symphony we heard tonight. It was premiered in Amsterdam in 1934 by the Concertgebouw Orchestra, conducted by Bruno Walter. The audience reputedly loved it, but the critics didn’t, and Weill never composed another symphony. Instead he went to the USA and became a very successful Broadway composer with works like ‘Street Scene’ which I remember Opera North performing in Leeds. The audience at the Queens Hall certainly enjoyed it and I thought it a perfectly decent composition, although lacking some of the drama and spirit of his musical theatre works, particularly those undertaken with Bertolt Brecht.
So it was an unusual Queens Hall concert with uncommon works but well worth hearing. It certainly extended my musical knowledge and I suspect most of the audience had theirs extended too and isn’t that what good concert programming should do? Fond as I am of the Queens Hall, I can’t wait for our new concert hall when we can not only hear everything but see it in comfort. The good news is that the Scottish Chamber Orchestra will be based there, the worrying news is that like the RSNO the SCO’s central funding has been frozen for 17 years creating financial difficulties. I think we should all remind John Swinney, who rightly said at his recent conference, “Scotland is a nation not a region!”, that a nation without properly funded music and art is a poorer nation!
