RSNO: Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto
Usher Hall, Edinburgh; 30/05/25
RSNO, Thomas Søndergård (conductor), Randall Goosby (violin)
On the evening of 30th May, I caught the penultimate concert of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s 2024-25 season at the Usher Hall, under the baton of Music Director Thomas Søndergård. In the second of three performances across Scotland, Edinburgh welcomed the return of charismatic American virtuoso violinist Randall Goosby (whose performance of the Tchaikovsky Concerto had wowed in April 2023) to perform the Mendelssohn as the headline work of the programme. The concert opened with Debussy’s dreamy 1894 ‘Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune’. Lera Auerbach’s 2007 Symphony No.1 ‘Chimera’ was the single work after the interval. The satisfyingly large audience was welcomed and the programme introduced by principal trombone, Dávur Juul Magnussen.
Checking my records, I see that it has been 18 months since I last experienced the RSNO live with Thomas Søndergård conducting, when indeed they performed Auerbach’s tone poem ‘Icarus’, itself derived from the symphony, in a Glasgow programme which included Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic suite, ‘Scheherazade’. From the start of the Debussy, the familiar magic of the long-standing artistic partnership was immediately evident once more. Katherine Bryan’s flute solo set the languorous mood perfectly infecting harp, horn and winds. The strings shimmered seductively. Louche harmonic ambiguity wavered between chromaticism and fragments of whole-tone scales. Warm breezes seemed to waft seductively through the Usher Hall. Magical indeed.
Randall Goosby is now ‘Artist in Residence’ with the orchestra. His E-minor eschewed glowering gravitas and emphasised expressive lyricism, with flawless intonation and phrasing, and sweet and brilliant tone from his glorious 1708 ‘ex-Strauss’ Strad, fully supported by the warm acoustic of the Usher Hall. Mendelssohnian lightness of touch was echoed responsively by the orchestra, but not without a sense of the dramatic when it was called for, drawing the listener into the romantic narrative, especially in the lovely G-major second subject. The cadenza was virtuosic and thrilling without loss of expressiveness. The cantabile nocturne of the slow movement, a veritable “song without words” was delicious, with elegant phrasing and rich vibrato-assisted tone supported by responsive dialogue, especially with the strings. A mood of mutual consolation seemed to permeate the two anxious minor-key episodes, calm and contentment restored in the soaring sweet final cadence. After the teasing bridge passage, the playful light-hearted finale was delightful from start to finish, with some lovely bubbly flute and clarinet comments responding to Randall’s joyous agile staccato. The RSNO cellos rose to the occasion for their gorgeous countermelody that accompanies the last return of the rondo theme. The gleeful coda was no less deliciously thrilling. An excellent account of the Mendelssohn no less thrilling than the Tchaikovsky had been and very well received by the enthusiastic Edinburgh audience. He offered a choice of encore: a Bach Largo or jazzy blues strut. Knowing that the latter was likely to be the same piece we had already heard after the Tchaikovsky two years ago, the Bach got my vote, but the jazz won the show of hands. It was the same piece: Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s ‘Louisiana Blues Strut’. It was, of course, excellent.
In December 2023, when I first heard Soviet-born Austrian-American composer, poet and artist Lera Auerbach’s, tone poem ‘Icarus’ performed by the RSNO, the composer was present and introduced the music, encouraging the audience to experience and respond to the music free of any programmatic preconceptions. However, the programme notes were rich in biographical detail. The tone poem is essentially the last two movements of the 7-movement symphony. The latter was composed as an act of self-care, recovering from exhaustion brought on by overwork on a hugely successful commission from the Royal Danish Ballet for a 3-hour work commemorating the bicentenary of Hans Christian Andersen, based on his story ‘The Little Mermaid’, inaugurating the newly-opened Copenhagen Opera House. Only 4 weeks ago, I heard ‘Icarus’ again with the BBCSSO in Glasgow, when the programme notes were by the composer herself and made the same enjoinder, with no biographical references. The programme notes for the symphony were again by the composer, and perhaps more revelatory of her creative philosophy, and slightly less reticent on biographical detail. I quote:
“The name ‘Chimera’ contains multiple meanings, and I embrace them all: the mythological beast made of disparate parts, the impossible dream one cannot realise, the biological fusion of incompatible origins. These definitions are not contradictions. They are facets and refractions – light bending through memory’s prism.
I wrote ‘Chimera’ by reimagining the material of my ballet The Little Mermaid, based on one of the most tragic stories by Hans Christian Andersen – a dark self-portrait of sacrifice and transformation masked by the illusory form of a fairytale.”
The 7 movements are titled ‘Aegri somnia’(the dreams of the sick), ‘Post tenebras lux’ (light after darkness), ‘Gargoyles’, ‘Et in Arcadia ego’ [and (even) in Paradise, I (death, was present)], ‘Siste, viator’ (halt, traveller), ‘Humum mandere’ (to bite the dust – a reference to the fall of Icarus) and ‘Requiem for Icarus’. The music is epic in scale with no obvious adherence to symphonic form. There is tenderness and brutality, consolation and anxiety, security and terror, the idyllic and the macabre, unity and fragmentation, the surreal and the starkly real, the stormy and the still. It can be experienced as a narrative, but I preferred to experience it holistically as an evocative orchestral tone poem on an epic scale. The orchestration is full of captivating sonorities, not least the spooky timbre of the theremin. The closing pages of the work attain an idyllic Elysian serenity of great beauty. In live concert it was, in a word, phenomenal. Kudos to Søndergård and the RSNO for bringing this challenging masterpiece to performance. I’ll leave the last word to Lera Auerbach herself: “a dark self-portrait of sacrifice and transformation masked by the illusory form of a fairytale”.