Northern Landscapes Reviews

Dundee Courier
Garry Fraser
7 December 2011

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s decision to promote music for their December concert by composers near to or in the Arctic Circle was extremely visionary, taking into account the weather we have experienced in the past few days. However, the music was anything but chilly and made up of three works that were warm and welcoming, the perfect antidotes to inclement weather.

Although commissioned by the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra, Haflioi Hallgrimsson’s violin concerto was given its world premiere on Wednesday night in the Younger Hall, St Andrews, performed by Jennifer Pike and the SCO. In his pre-concert talk, the Icelandic composer seemed understated, low-key and self-effacing but the work itself was a complete contradiction. It was melodic, dynamic, vibrant and immediately captivating and if he was concerned about its opening performance, he shouldn’t have been. Pike, the SCO and conductor Enrique Mazzola gave it a debut to dream of, delivering it with the ease of an old favourite.

A one-movement work, climaxes came and went, a wonderful patchwork of colour with Pike, for whom the work was written, delivering a performance that went through the whole spectrum of emotions from engaging softness to full-blooded ferocity. In short, a superb work that belied its contemporary freshness and one that makes a welcome addition to the ranks of violin concerti.

The concert had opened with one of Sibelius’ un-sung successes, the King Kristian II Suite. I found this quite un-Sibelius-like with more than a passing resemblance to Rachmaninov, but it still made for an excellent 20 minutes or so with the SCO putting in some sterling work. As with all music based on historical epics, the moods ranged widely with the orchestra slipping from the soft Elegie, via a pastoral Serenade, to the stormy finale that was a Ballade in name only and not something of lyrical romance.

Both these works deserve star ratings, but the laurels of the evening go to Edvard Grieg and his one-and-only symphony. Goodness knows why he penned only one – he has the melodic, harmonic and construction qualities of any other Romantic symphonist. It is a terrific piece and if it needed championing, the SCO are the very people to do so. Under Mazzola’s guidance, they gave a masterful performance and if on conclusion he felt every player deserved his personal thanks, it was a gesture more than justified.

The Scotsman
Kenneth Walton
12 December 2011
***

What Edinburgh missed as a result of Thursday's cancelled concert, Glasgow got on a less blustery Friday. The programme included a new Violin Concerto by the Icelandic composer (and former SCO principal cellist) Hafliði Hallgrímsson, with violinist Jennifer Pike as soloist.

Hallgrímsson's concerto is fundamentally calm, thoughtfully assembled and genuinely engaging. A pulsating two-note motif gives the opening bars a sense of bareness that is arresting in its elemental simplicity, yet energising in its rhymith potential. Pike's interpretation harnessed both these characteristics, in particular allowing the outpouring of successive gestural ideas to emerge with increasing force and assertion, only to recede with a final and fulfilling sense of appeasement.

Yet this is a concerto in which the protagonist would be nothing without the atmospheric cushioning of the orchestral score. Sometimes lush and verdant, at other times hot and aggressive, there was something restful and reassuring, almost comforting, about its role in this performance, which Spanish conductor Enrique Mazzola judiciously adhered to.

A similar efficiency informed the remainder of the programme, which included Sibelius's heroically fashioned King Kristian II Suite, and Grieg's rarely-heard Symphony in C minor – a work so Germanic it falls into the sub-Schumann category, only occasionally preempting the Nordic freshness of the composer's later works.

Yet neither performance was as completely clean or charismatic as the SCO would normally muster, as if something had knocked some of the wind out of its sails.

The Herald
Michael Tumelty
12 December 2011
***

I know no composer more self-critical or fastidious in his thought and composition than Hafliði Hallgrímsson, Iceland-born and, until recently, resident for decades in Scotland, where he was the first principal cellist with the SCO until he gave it up 28 years ago to devote himself to composing.

Since then his jewelled music, sculpted and crafted with precision, care, conscience and a degree of near-reluctance – facility is a condition alien to his music – has graced the Scottish music scene on all-too-few occasions. Any big work by Hallgrímsson is thus a major occasion.

And so it was on Friday night in Glasgow for the first performance in the city of his new Violin Concerto, which received a luminous, gleaming and massively-assured performance from violinist Jennifer Pike, pictured, not long ago a wunderkind, now a seasoned artist whose maturity was reflected at every level of her understanding of Hallgrímsson's concerto.

It's a fascinating, pluralistic work that has all the imagined pre-requisites of a concerto: there are surges and swells; drama and interaction between soloist and orchestra; virtuoso passages for the soloist; there is a palette of fantastic colours, textures and harmonies to be shared between the forces.

But, on a single hearing, the heart and soul of the beautiful sound world of the new concerto is its totally-seductive expressivity: the man of Iceland, an intellectual in many respects, has melted into this music. One issue: was it a touch too long? Whatever. It was the best thing in a night conducted by Enrique Mazzola that also featured routine performances of Sibelius's King Kristian II Suite and Grieg's curious Symphony.