The Agony and the Ecstasy
Usher Hall, 5/6/2026
Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Patrick Hahn (conductor)
The return of Principal Guest Conductor, Patrick Hahn, resulted in a cleverly constructed concert, taking us on a fascinating journey across musical styles. We have become accustomed to his carefully curated evenings, and this was no exception. A concert of Crumb, Britten, Elgar, Wagner and Scriabin might have been daunting, but a satisfyingly large audience turned up, to be rewarded by a programme of music truly offering us a glimpse of the Agony and the Ecstasy of life!
Before it began, CEO Alistair Mackie made a moving speech, dedicating this concert to the memory of Irene Heggie, doyenne of the Usher Hall’s staff, who sadly died recently. She was a well-known face at all Usher Hall events, for 24 years, and was a great supporter of the RSNO. It was a particularly poignant touch to hear Elgar’s Cello Concerto, apparently one of Irene’s favourite pieces. She will be much missed.
The concert began, enigmatically, with a snippet from George Crumb’s ‘Black Angels’, a work premiered in 1970, at the height of the Vietnam War. We heard God-Music, a short section matching the eerie sound of crystal glasses with a solo cello, played right at the back of the organ gallery by tonight’s soloist, Kian Soltani. The lights were dimmed to create an atmosphere of other-worldliness, dramatically interrupted by the brutal start of Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem, as the lights came up on the orchestra declaiming, with timpani and brass, the Lacrymosa of the Catholic requiem mass.
This is early Britten, written in 1939/40 on a commission by the Japanese government to provide music for the 2,600th anniversary of the founding of the Japanese Empire. Since Japan was at that point invading mainland China, and on course to enter the World War, by attacking Pearl Harbor in 1942, the intensely pacifist Britten was determined not to create anything remotely jingoistic, and not surprisingly, the piece was rejected by the Japanese Government. Fortunately, their loss was the world’s gain, as the premiere in New York in 1941 announced clearly to the listening public the emergence of a significant new composer, soon to reinforce that opinion with ‘Peter Grimes’ in 1945.
The Sinfonia da Requiem is a remarkable work, with clear references to the music of Shostakovich, and it was superbly played by the RSNO and Patrick Hahn. In three consecutive movements, it shadows the form of the Requiem, from lamentation through the apocalypse of the Dies Irae to the resignation of Requiem Aeternam, and a glimpse of comfort in the D Major ending.
We have become so used to the fiery recording of the Elgar Cello Concerto by Jacqueline du Pré and Sir John Barbirolli from 1965, that almost every other performance seems to necessitate a comparison. Well, this reading by the Austrian/Iranian cellist, Kian Soltani, was quite different, but I loved it, as, judging by the applause at the end, so did most of the audience. It was interesting to hear Elgar’s cello concerto so soon after Nicola Benedetti played his violin concerto in the last concert before the RSNO toured to China. The contrast is amazing - a good if overlong showpiece for the violin and one of the great concerti for the cello!
We were indeed fortunate to have one of the world’s finest cellists of the present day, Kian Soltani, to play tonight, and he announced his complete control over both his instrument and the work in the dramatic opening to the concerto. Thereafter, both Mr Soltani and Patrick Hahn together unveiled the secrets of this most marvellous of masterpieces and transported us listeners to extreme depths of emotion. The concerto was first performed in London in 1919, and in it, Elgar poured out both his anguish at the terrible losses of the First World War and also his own personal feelings as his wife of 30 years was beginning to suffer from the illness that led to her death the following year. The immediate aftermath of the end of the War, with social upheaval all over Europe and the dramatic savagery of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, was an immensely desperate time, made even worse by the onset of the Spanish Flu epidemic, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide.
It is not surprising therefore that a sensitive and emotional soul like Elgar would feel the need to write a work as visceral as the Cello Concerto, but there is some surprise at the sheer quality of the writing. By this time, Elgar’s musical style was being seen as old fashioned and stuck in the past, and his reaction to this may explain the dramatic and dynamic solo writing for the cello. There is also much to admire in the concerto of an elegiac nature, again giving us the impression of a man looking back, perhaps in despair, to an era now consigned to History.
It’s interesting that the concerto was dismissed early on as a failure, not just because the premiere was a fiasco, as the conductor, Eric Coates, didn’t even bother to rehearse it and it was universally panned, but also because contemporary critics and most audiences weren’t ready for it. It slowly began to collect admirers, and that recording by Jacqueline du Pré in 1965, was perfectly timed to awaken people to the greatness of the work.
Mr Soltani was an ardent exponent of the concerto, producing sounds of utter beauty as well as dramatic whirlwinds of notes when required from his superb Stradivarius cello. I particularly enjoyed his poised and lyrical playing in the deeply moving slow movement, making his instrument sing with burnished tone.
His performance was greeted by overwhelming applause, and he honoured us with a simple but moving Iranian folksong as an encore.
After the interval, Mr Hahn cleverly juxtaposed Richard Wagner’s sensual Prelude to ‘Tristan und Isolde’ with Alexander Scriabin’s astonishing ‘Poème de L’Extase’. Coming the week after I heard Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’ in Inverness and not long after Scottish Opera’s concert performance of ‘Tristan’ in the Usher Hall, it was a pleasure to hear this prelude in isolation, and simply to wonder at the audacity of Wagner in 1865 to write this music, revealing sounds and harmonies that simply had not been heard before. Mr Hahn, who has a good background in conducting operas in Germany, was spell-binding in his grip on the prelude, not scared in the least to allow silences to punctuate the chromatic ecstasy of the music, and the RSNO played with a wonderful concentration of tone.
The prelude merged seamlessly into the beginning of Scriabin’s extraordinary tone poem, ‘Le Poème de L’Exstase’, first heard in 1908 in New York, a work pushing the bounds of tonality to the edge, and occasionally dropping over. I’ve always loved this piece of unabashed chromatic sensualism, and the orchestra and their Principal Guest Conductor gave it all they had. In another clever bit of programming, Mr Hahn chose to play the very piece that Eric Coates had rehearsed to the limit in 1919, at the expense of Elgar’s Cello Concerto at its premiere.
Scriabin wrote the piece over a period from 1905-1908, latterly in Italy where he was, as it were, lying low with the pianist, Tatiana Schlözer, for whom he had recently left his wife. He was obsessed with the Theosophy Movement, a belief in music’s ability to bring Man into ecstatic union with the Cosmos, and the text he approved for printing in the original programme in New York would nowadays be instantly featured in Private Eye’s Pseuds Corner!
Despite the moral and philosophical verbiage, the Poem is actually wonderfully satisfying, using an enormous orchestra, including 8 French horns, 5 trumpets, 3 trombones and a tuba, and a percussion section of drums, gongs, glockenspiel, bells, cymbals and a triangle (of course) and throwing in a celeste and a full pipe organ at the final climax. So, not a minimalist!
Lush harmonies, strong rhythms, striking contrasts, all these contribute to a piece which fills its 22 minutes with an orgasmic mix of decadence and release. I love it!
There were strong solo moments for trumpet (welcome back Christopher Hart), all the woodwind principals, leader Maya Iwabuchi at the head of a solo quartet, and all the percussionists, not forgetting Imogen Morgan on the great Usher Hall organ. The final resolution at the final climax left us all exhausted but drenched in ecstasy! A terrific concert!