EIF music reviews: Royal Scottish National Orchestra | Cat Power Sings Dylan ’66 | Seong-Jin Cho + more


Cat Power Sings Dylan ’66
Cat Power Sings Dylan ’66
Cat Power Sings Dylan ’66 | Edinburgh International Festival
Our latest round-up of EIF music reviews includes three striking contemporary concertos, some exemplary baritone magic, an expressive solo recital, and a great American singer/songwriter paying tribute to one of her heroes

Royal Scottish National Orchestra ★★★★

Usher Hall, Edinburgh

These three very different contemporary concertos were given magnificent readings by the RSNO under the powerhouse of a conductor Elim Chan.

Alison Balsom set the bar high, setting in motion Wynton Marsalis’s stylistically eclectic Concerto for Trumpet with the call of a trumpeting elephant.

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A classical and jazz trumpeting legend himself, Marsalis pushed virtuosity levels to the limit on a number of fronts. But Balsom, with her smooth technique, played with an elegant brilliance. She moved effortlessly between jazz and blues riffs and Latin American rhythms, using an assortment of mutes on the way.

The six-movement work concluded with the exotic sounds of the jungle where the elephant also had the last call.

By comparison, Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto Op 42 with its straight-jacketed 12-tone technique was more stripped down. But soloist Pierre-Laurent Aimard quickly drew us into this stark atonal world, melting away the dissonances and packing a dramatic punch to finish.

The most unusual work on the programme was Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra, shinning the spotlight on nearly every section of this first-class band.

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He is an orchestrator par-excellence and packs this piece, inspired by Polish folksong, with an array of dazzling effects and spectacular massive waves of sound.

Susan Nickalls

Cat Power Sings Dylan ’66 ★★★★

Playhouse 

Almost 60 years on from Bob Dylan’s notorious 1966 UK tour when his transition from acoustic folk performance to electric rock’n’roll was met with outright hostility, acclaimed US singer/songwriter Cat Power (aka Chan Marshall) revisited the setlist of his Royal Albert Hall date as an act of celebration rather than rebellion.

Controversy has long since given way to convention; instead, this tribute was a snapshot of a fertile period featuring key Dylan cuts. 

In the first half of the show, Marshall was accompanied on acoustic guitar and harmonica with just a sensation of Hammond organ as she dug deep with a husky soulful rendition of She Belongs To Me, a torch song take on Fourth Time Around, an epic Desolation Row, the troublesome gender politics of Just Like A Woman, a Dylanesque melody mangling on It’s All Over Now Baby Blue and a cheeky lyrical change on Mr Tambourine Man to refer to her broken toe. 

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Then it was stilettos off for the full band frisson and electric epiphany of Baby, Let Me Follow You Down, Leopard-Skin Pill-box Hat (“the fun song”), the jazzy prowl of Ballad of a Thin Man and the rootsy jubilation of Like A Rolling Stone.  

Fiona Shepherd

Thomas Quasthoff Trio ★★★★

The Hub

For a triple Grammy-winning singer to switch from lieder and opera to jazz, as Thomas Quasthoff did a decade or so ago, is no ordinary career move, but Quasthoff is no ordinary singer, his immensely rich and malleable bass-baritone voice transcending disability as well as perceived genre boundaries.

Here, in the empathetic and adept company of guitarist Wolfgang Mayer and trombonist Shawn Grocott, he delivered an engagingly diverse repertoire that ranged from the gritty R&B of Route 66 to a rendition of Girl from Ipanema that sashayed along an octave or two lower than we’re used to hearing it, with Grocott blowing an expansive trombone break.  

He gave heartwrenching expression to the spiritual Sometimes I feel Like a Motherless Child, in what also seemed an impossibly low register, while John Lennon’s Imagine was performed relatively straightforwardly but from the heart, and Autumn Leaves received a leisurely swing treatment.

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A highlight was an extraordinary, Bobby McFerrin-inspired vocalising excursion, Quasthoff whooping and plummeting through octaves, beatboxing and scatting syncopated vocables that just might have been Venusian.

For an enthusiastically greeted encore there was Moon River, delivered with characteristic warmth before plunging to a basso profondo final note by way of farewell.

Jim Gilchrist

Seong-Jin Cho ★★★★

Queen’s Hall

In performing something as long and mighty as Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage, Deuxième Année: Italie, pacing is all.

In his solo recital at the Queen’s Hall yesterday morning, Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho’s judgement was unerring as these seven pieces inspired by Italian literature and visual art came to their momentous conclusion with the dramatic and tumultuous textures of the Dante Sonata.

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Requiring sustained reserves of both physical and mental energy, this second of three ‘years of pilgrimage’, represents iconic works of art, such as Raphael’s Sposalizio and Michelangelo’s Il Penseroso, the latter both sombre and very loud as Cho crouched right down over the piano’s lowest notes.

The three Petrarch sonnets represented were more reflective, but never losing the tension or momentum to see the whole suite through. With what seemed like impossibly perfect precision, the first half of all Ravel heard Cho in a contrasting and extensive range of colour, coupled with a sense of flow that allowed the music to breath with ease and warmth.

Both the Sonatine and Valses nobles et sentimentales lent themselves well to Cho’s expressive playing, glistening and dreamy, animated or nonchalantly questioning to suit their mood.

Carol Main

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