EIF music review: Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra | Steven Osborne | Ars Nova | Sydney Symphony Orchestra | Bliss | Montezuma

Published on Tuesday 7 September 2010 14:06

Sarah Urwin Jones delights in a rousing finale after a festival filled with revelations and hope for the future

WITH the Fringe crowds departed, the last week of the Edinburgh International Festival often feels like it has got a little more room to breathe. In a week dominated by New World repertoire and performers, no one could complain at the contemporary opener from Mariss Jansons and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra from Amsterdam. They brought meaty breadth to Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments and full-bodied tension to Bartok's cracking Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, the strings split into two opposing camps in a profusion of expressive colour. Berio's attacking Four Ddicaces, a series of miniatures grouped after his death, impressed before an explosive performance of Stravinsky's Firebird suite. Showpieces all, when such precision and expression are involved.

The following morning brought another masterful performance, this time from homegrown pianist Steven Osborne, bringing a fresh slant to the New World theme with an eclectic programme of American jazz-influenced pieces in the Queen's Hall. He played Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag with matter-of-fact flair, before the syncopated lilt of Gershwin's Three Preludes, Ives' miasmic Three-Page Sonata, Crumb's pulsing Processional, and Kapustin's loungey 24 Preludes in Jazz Style.

Amidst this flurry of notes and thought processes it was Oscar Peterson's utterly fiendish Indiana that left jaws on the floor. After the interval, Osborne whizzed back across the Pond with insightful brilliance for Ravel's Valses Nobles Et Sentimentales and Rachmaninov's Variations on a Theme of Corelli. Did I mention he does improvisation too?

Rather less successfully, Paul Hillier's Copenhagen vocal outfit, Ars Nova, took on work from the New World. Ars Nova's sound is warm, clear and energetic, but the seven works from America and the Antipodes jostled for aesthetic breathing space , from David Lang's repetitive For Love Is Strong to Jack Body's irritating Oceanic invented language for his Lullabies..

Later that evening the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and their principal conductor, the erstwhile pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy, preceded their concert sandwiching classic 20th-century works with Elgar in a heartfelt tribute to Sir Charles Mackerras, the sorely missed conductor who died in July. Ashkenazy resumed with hugely enjoyable expositions of Elgar's In The South (Alassio) and ended with his Enigma Variations. But it was Ross Edwards' seminal Maninyas and Peter Sculthorpe's powerful, bleak picture of environmental and cultural degradation, Memento Mori, that made the programme.

The final performance of my festival was the much-anticipated Bliss, the new, accessible opera by Brett Dean, commissioned in 2001 by the then music director of Opera Australia, Simone Young, written to a libretto by Amanda Holden (not that one), in a bold production by Neil Armfield.

Based on Peter Carey's debut novel, Bliss is a satire on the rat race and one man's rather equivocal escape from it. Harry Joy is a 1980s ad man celebrating 20 successful years in the business when he has a heart attack amid partying sycophants. Convinced he has died and woken in Hell – although everyone else prefers to think he's mad – Joy pairs up with earth goddess/'amateur tart' Honey, firing his best clients because the chemicals they sell cause cancer. Dean's score is vivid, visceral, descriptive and often darkly funny, its interleaved arias increasing the momentum, rapidly, brashly played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under a no-holds-barred Elgar Howarth. There are nice, tongue-in-cheek moments amid the nastiness, but the end, changed from Carey's original, is rather clumsily handled, and there are other unresolved issues, specifically the abandonment of the next generation – Joy's poor, lost daughter, fellating her brother for drugs in a truly shocking aria – and the way Harry moves from one controlling 'Eve' to the next. Echoing the presiding sentiment of centuries, there's not a sliver of salvation in this vision for the ladies.

It marks the end of a festival that has seen howlers – forgive me for reminding you of Montezuma – but also real revelations and rediscoveries. There was some brilliant, idiosyncratic Charles Ives; Australian composers Ross and Dean; the culture-clash sound world of baroque Latin America in Greyfriars; some big orchestras crucially bringing their own sound and some well-loved, familiar orchestras showcasing more adventurous repertoire. With news of the further dismantling of Scottish Opera coming mid-festival, we might be a very long way from the phenomenal Ring Cycle that opened this festival's decade, and still teetering rather too close to predictable shock-opera as the prevailing on-stage aesthetic, but the existence of exploratory new productions marks a sign of hope for the next.