RSNO & Paul Philbert, Edinburgh review: 'a missed opportunity'

Anyone who’s experienced principal timpanist Paul Philbert’s charismatic, often exuberant playing as part of a Royal Scottish National Orchestra concert must have wondered how he’d be as a concerto soloist.

So it was a shame, then, that the concerto the orchestra had commissioned from composer Matthew Rooke, Tamboo-Bamboo, didn’t showcase Philbert’s considerable talents a bit more overtly, even flamboyantly. It was a great piece, immediately appealing and thick with references to the Caribbean – it takes its name from a bamboo instrument invented in response to a British colonial ban on drums – and it drew heavily on classic Seventies film soundtracks to deeply entertaining effect.

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There was no doubt it put Philbert through his paces, with some nimble, athletic but also subtle playing across six timpani that showed off the drums’ ability for melody and subtle sonic effects as much as their sheer percussive power. The RSNO lapped it up in a vivid, deftly entertaining account, and conductor David Niemann tackled it with verve and no shortage of rhythmic insight. But Philbert seemed too often in the background, underpinning Rooke’s towering orchestral textures, rather than in the spotlight and swaggering in his own virtuosity. A bit of a missed opportunity, surely.

Tamboo-Bamboo formed the centrepoint of a brilliantly conceived trilogy of starkly contrasted pieces. The concert opened with Panufnik’s 1963 Sinfonia sacra, which sent a quartet of trumpets fanfaring across the Usher Hall and mixed pious restraint and secular grit in a performance high on contrast and drama from Niemann. His closing Beethoven Eroica Symphony (from a slimmed-down RSNO, plus the evening’s third set of timpani) was brisk, bracing and brightly coloured – not to say a little breathless at times, though there was no mistaking Niemann’s quest to uncover all the drama and theatre in Beethoven’s muscular creation.

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