RSNO & Jess Gillam, Edinburgh review: 'wailing banshee cries and whirlling rhythms'


Royal Scottish National Orchestra/Jonathon Heyward, Jess Gillam (soprano saxophone), Usher Hall, Edinburgh ★★★★
‘A concert of extremes’ was RSNO principal flautist Katherine Bryan’s pretty accurate description in her engaging introduction. And the RSNO’s performance did indeed feel like two wildly contrasting musical and emotional worlds separated by an interval.
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Hide AdFirst came wailing banshee cries and whirling rhythms in Anna Clyne’s larger-than-life soprano saxophone concerto Glasslands, written three years ago for Jess Gillam, who provided a dazzling, deeply compelling account that stuffed every one of Clyne’s vivid musical ideas full with meaning and purpose. There were howls aplenty – in a distinctive figure that united the work’s outer movements – but also some genuinely moving intertwining melodies, slowly accumulating over time, in a touchingly restrained middle movement. Clyne’s writing might have strayed perilously close to blurry Celtic atmospherics on occasion, but there was a hard edge to the piece too, which Gillam conveyed with bristling energy. Her encore – Ellington’s In a Sentimental Mood – showed off her remarkably liquid jazz playing, and segued nicely into the far more inward-looking second half.
Though written in the apparently optimistic final years of the Second World War, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 8 is a piece full of foreboding and dark resignation at a likely return to even greater Soviet oppression. Conductor Jonathon Heyward delivered a blisteringly powerful account that drew sometimes overwhelming power from the composer’s inexorable build-ups and his slow procession of ideas. There was a constant flow of movement and change, even if Shostakovich’s music seemed to be taking its time to get anywhere. Heyward’s heavy-footed, sonorous first scherzo and the raw, brutal rhythms of his second captured the work’s unsettling insights brilliantly, while flautist Bryan returned to close the Symphony with a few meagre gestures – perhaps an expression of hope, she’d suggested, though I’m not so sure. It was a deeply involving performance: Heyward was crisp, clear and eloquent in his gestures, and the RSNO musicians played with a profound sense of commitment. Not much hope, perhaps, but plenty of catharsis.
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