Music review: RSNO & Rachel Barton Pine, Usher Hall, Edinburgh

US violinist Rachel Barton Pine lit up this Usher Hall performance from the RSNO, taking virtuosity to another level, writes David Kettle

RSNO & Rachel Barton Pine, Usher Hall, Edinburgh ****

America and Finland might not be the most immediate musical bedfellows that spring to mind, but Estonian conductor Kristiina Poska made a strong case for the pairing in her brisk, no-nonsense concert of sometimes raw energy with the RSNO.

Not that there was much rawness about her opening Copland Appalachian Spring. Rather, there was a luminous purity to Poska’s evocative scene-setting in Copland’s slower sections, with vivid contributions from RSNO principal flautist Katherine Bryan and guest principal clarinettist Yann Ghiro. And with Poska’s clipped rhythms and bracing briskness, his faster dance music can seldom have sounded more Stravinskian.

Rachel Barton Pine PIC: Erin Defuria / RSNO

It was quite a weighty opener – to make up, no doubt, for the brevity of Florence Price’s Second Violin Concerto that followed. Roundly disregarded during her lifetime, Price’s music is enjoying a strong renaissance, and this 15-minute marvel more than deserves a regular place in the repertoire, with its gleeful collisions of circus music, jazz, old-fashioned Hollywood glitz, classical and more. And, of course, its fiendishly demanding solo part, dispatched with ringmaster-like glee by US violinist Rachel Barton Pine, clearly a passionate advocate for the piece, and able to deliver its songs and dances with joyfully vivid clarity.

If that weren’t enough, her encore of Nathan Milstein’s breathtakingly pyrotechnic solo-violin reimagining of one of Liszt’s Mephisto Waltzes took virtuosity to another level.

After the interval, Sibelius’s First Symphony seemed to come from a different, colder, more austere world. Poska drove it through with a similar energy to that of the earlier Copland – it meant a few moments of drama were overlooked but it made for an account of searing cumulative power nonetheless. From clarinettist Ghiro’s silky, sultry solo introduction to the Symphony’s gruff sign-off, Poska was clear-sighted on the work’s grand architecture, while alive to the teeming detail of its figurations and articulations. A revelatory, compelling evening.