RSNO & James Ehnes, Edinburgh review: 'fearsomely focused'
Other parts of this concert might have struggled to convince, but violinist James Ehnes made a brilliantly strong case for James Newton Howard’s Violin Concerto No. 2, writes David Kettle
Also sprach Zarathustra: Classics at the Movies went the concert’s uncomfortable, hedging-its-bets marketing line: was this meant for film music lovers, or serious Richard Strauss buffs? Neither were served particularly well by an evening that clearly set out to please both camps, but ended up offering somewhat meagre portions of what they no doubt hoped for.
Not that the repertoire felt ill-planned: indeed, there was a pleasing symmetry to the concert’s two halves, both of which kicked off with a short string orchestra piece before the main event. Conductor Alexander Shelley offered vivid and confident if somewhat brisk accounts of the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and Barber’s Adagio, though his determination to get through the pieces somewhat sapped their emotional power: Mahler’s long-built-up climaxes, in particular, sounded perfunctory rather than authentic, personal and heartfelt.
Similarly, Shelley’s rather cool manner and his elegant, sweeping gestures in Strauss’s gargantuan tone poem stressed the music’s ever-shifting, ever-potent colours and rhythms, but it felt like an exquisite demonstration of the composer’s compositional prowess rather than an urgent, compelling musical utterance that demanded to be heard and understood.
That was Death in Venice, Platoon and 2001: A Space Odyssey covered, but the concert’s shining highlight had rather different movie connections.
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The Violin Concerto No. 2 by Oscar nominee and Emmy- and Grammy-winning film composer James Newton Howard was a properly memorable, gripping, sometimes humorous, sometimes grandiose piece that clearly drew on its composer’s enormous movie-music prowess, but reconfigured it in thoroughly persuasive music for the concert hall.
And it was helped in no small part by the gritty, fearsomely focused performance by James Ehnes (for whom it was written), who made a brilliantly strong case for the piece with his easy-going virtuosity and his unmannered musical insights. Other parts of the concert might have struggled to convince, but Ehnes and Newton Howard lifted the evening to another level with unforgettably powerful, lyrical music.
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