Review: Festival Fireworks, Scottish Chamber Orchestra

Published on Friday 3 September 2010 19:22

Festival Fireworks, Scottish Chamber Orchestra **** Princes Street Gardens

Come the fireworks concert, one can form a moderately comprehensive view of the Festival that is ending. For starters, we have not had a surfeit of baroque music this time round. That the Usher Hall has brought a succession of great orchestras has been reflected by higher levels of attendance and that is good.

The notion of basing this year's programme on cinema music raises some questions. A succession of 20th-century composers were aware that when a film had done its rounds, it would be consigned to the archives with their music, too.

Korngold intended that what he wrote for the cinema should be able to stand alone in the concert hall. His suite from King's Row began with a criss-crossing of white trails in the sky, followed gradually by bursts of colour.

On the Waterfront won no fewer than five Academy Awards, one of them for Lenny Bernstein's score. Again, the opening was treated quite gently with Roman candles on the ramparts, followed by higher, more eye-catching bursts.

Alfred Hitchcock engaged Bernard Herrmann to provide music for his Marnie. In the second of two sections, entitled The Hunt, there was some dazzling co-ordination of music and pyrotechnics, the most successful dual presentation of the evening.

Franz Waxman's Taras Bulba score was nominated for an Oscar. Its second movement introduced the traditional waterfall effect and the third brought this year's noisiest, most stunning spectacle.

The SCO, directed by Clark Rundell, produced a convincing Hollywood sound, however it seems reasonable to suggest that more familiar musical fare might fit the bill more acceptably.