RSNO, Emilia Hoving & Senja Rummukainen, Edinburgh review: 'not much to tap your foot to'

RSNO, Emilia Hoving & Senja Rummukainen, Usher Hall, Edinburgh ★★★★

It might be taking things too literally, but for a concert themed around dance, there wasn’t much to tap your foot to in the RSNO’s evening with young Finnish conductor Emilia Hoving.

That was partly down to the repertoire, of course: two of the evening’s three pieces took quite an oblique view on movement. Inspired by verse by Sufi mystic Rumi, the cello concerto DANCE by Anna Clyne, for instance, felt more like an expression of defiance and resilience in the face of trauma.

Despite some gritty, energetic sections – delivered vividly and passionately by soloist Senja Rummukainen – the piece revolved more closely around slow, deeply contemplative music, sculpted tenderly by Hoving’s elegant movements, and with intense, soaring lines from Rummukainen.

RSNO strings | Sally Jubb

The slow, hushed opening movement set the piece’s introspective tone, and showed off the RSNO’s luminous strings to beguiling effect, but the closing movement’s somewhat banal tune got so many repetitions that it sapped the atmosphere of reflection that had been so carefully established earlier – and also meant you’d probably never get it out of your head.

If conductor Hoving’s direction was elegant in the Clyne concerto, she positively danced her way through the opening Ravel Valses nobles et sentimentales, very much alive to the music’s multifarious perspectives on the waltz.

But it was a performance that seemed to take things to extremes: more exuberant music was disconcertingly muscular and hearty, while quieter moments seemed on the verge of faltering entirely.

The result was an account that seemed to sidestep the very simplicity that Ravel spun out with his harmonic sophistication. But it was an approach that made for a particularly vivid Rachmaninov Symphonic Dances, the concert’s colourful closer, with biting rhythms and seething textures that showed off the RSNO’s playing to gloriously rich and detailed effect.

This concert might not have got your hips swaying, but there was plenty for the mind and heart all the same.