RSNO & Patrick Hahn, Edinburgh review: 'vivid and dramatic'

RSNO & Patrick Hahn, Usher Hall, Edinburgh ★★★★

Death might seem an unlikely concert theme to draw a capacity crowd to Edinburgh’s Usher Hall. When one of the evening’s works is Mozart’s lavish, legendary Requiem, however, that popularity is perhaps more understandable. The Requiem’s notorious associations with shadowy strangers and Mozart’s own mysterious demise – courtesy of the Milos Forman’s movie Amadeus – are largely hokum, but the piece’s uncanny power and granitic seriousness remain, and it received a brisk, vivid and deftly dramatic reading from RSNO Principal Guest Conductor Patrick Hahn.

Patrick Hahn PIC: Kow Iida

The slimmed-down orchestra was on incisive form, even if Hahn’s four vocal soloists seemed oddly matched, from stentorian baritone Laurent Naouri to the exquisite soaring purity of soprano Mhairi Lawson, who made several silvery contributions. The RSNO Chorus – pushed firmly into the spotlight in Mozart’s demanding writing – sounded occasionally underpowered, but delivered a crisp, energetic, resonant account, particularly in an urgent “Confutatis”. They spun sumptuously velvety threads, too, through the concert’s opener, Beethoven’s rarely heard Elegischer Gesang, in Hahn’s nicely restrained but richly conceived account.

Hahn took the unusual but very effective decision to segue directly from Beethoven’s silky choral miniature into the far harder-edged, grittier world of Berg’s Violin Concerto, which, famously written in memory of family friend Manon Gropius who died aged just 18, continued the concert’s fateful theme. And it received a commanding but deeply human performance from violinist Carolin Widmann, who unravelled the piece’s structural intricacies expertly, but played with such open-hearted, unadorned sincerity that she clearly won over listeners who were maybe less familiar with Berg’s sometimes violently dissonant sound world.

As in the Mozart, Hahn’s tempos were on the speedy side, but that only re-emphasised the performance’s absence of wallowing indulgence, and he drew inner lines and details from Berg’s often dense scoring to telling and moving effect.

Widmann, Hahn and the RSNO have just been recording the Concerto, the conductor divulged – that’ll be something to watch out for.