SCO, Ryan Bancroft & Clara-Jumi Kang, Edinburgh review: 'boisterous'

Ryan Bancroft | B. Ealovega

SCO, Ryan Bancroft & Clara-Jumi Kang, Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh ★★★★

There was a dark thread running right the way through the richly coloured tapestry that US-born conductor Ryan Bancroft had woven for this big-boned, sometimes boisterous programme with the SCO – a thread of persecution and exile, even death.

Mortality seems to get stared at directly in Samuel Barber’s iconic Adagio for Strings, of course, but in Bancroft’s reading the piece’s chant-like phrases slid by smoothly and swiftly, which made its fraught climax all the more shattering. It was modest rather than monumental, moving rather than mawkish.

No, the darkness came more from the concert’s first and last pieces, by composers who suffered under the Third Reich. Erwin Schulhoff died in a Nazi prison camp in 1942, but his mischievous Suite for Chamber Orchestra from two decades earlier showed a mind full of seething, idiosyncratic creativity in its angular, chiselled jazz, all conveyed with enormous wit and insight by Bancroft, and lapped up by the SCO players (including a six-strong percussion section on impeccable form).

Kurt Weill was forced to flee Germany in 1933, and wrote his Second Symphony – which closed the concert – in Paris. It’s a dense, many-layered work in which ideas, instruments and themes often seem to compete for attention, but Bancroft teased them apart expertly and made sure each had their moment to shine – several, in fact, sounded just like a number from a Weill musical dressed up smart for the concert hall.

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By way of complete contrast, Clara-Jumi Kang delivered a passionate but deeply tender account of Barber’s Violin Concerto, with a tone so adaptable it often sounded like she was playing more than one instrument, and an evident sense of deep affection for the piece. She unleashed an impressive arsenal of vibrato, articulation, phrasing and more on the concerto’s arching melodies, but it all sounded spontaneous and sincere, never calculated.

It was a concert of contrasts and surprises, but Bancroft’s sense of drama and colour, and his eagerness to share, ensured its varied parts clipped together immaculately.

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