Review of SCO performance at EIF 2010

The Scotsman, Monday 30 August 2010
**** Susan Nickalls

Robin Ticciati, the SCO’s new Principal Conductor is fast gaining a reputation for his innovative programming and absorbing performances of new works, as this concert demonstrated. Kevin Volans’ Symphony Daar Kom die Alibama, one of the few premieres this festival, provided some thoughtful musical substance in this otherwise lightweight programme. The music beautifully evoked the sounds associated with sea voyages; whistle and horns, the rhythmic purr of engines and squawking gulls. While the piece was largely episodic in nature it gained coherence through the gorgeous filigree layers that Volans used to create his scintillating textures.

By contrast, Poulenc’s flamboyant Concerto for Two Pianos was ideally suited to the dazzling talents of Katia and Marielle Labeque. It’s dance-like rhythms echoed those in the preceding Les Elemens, a ballet by eighteenth century composer Jean-Fery Rebel. It begins with striking dissonant chords, not dissimilar to passages in the Volans, but reverts to eighteenth century convention with quirky appearances of tambourines and bird whistles. Bizet’s youthful Symphony in C, superbly played by the orchestra, as a touch too exuberant after the reflective nature of Volans’ symphony, which ideally should have been played twice.