Dance, Anna Clyne’s cello concerto, first performed in 2019 but here receiving its Scottish premiere, is a total winner; pulsing with life, radiant with melody and adding up to the most exciting new work I’ve heard in a very long time.
Clyne’s inspiration for the five-movement piece was the work of Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, and five of his lines about the importance and universality of dance. However, it isn’t a work of thumping energy and repeating rhythms: instead it’s a meditation on the very nature of dance and its ability to connect as a mystical part of the universe. So while there’s rhythm and movement aplenty, it’s of a piece with a warm blanket of harmony and some spellbindingly beautiful melodies, all expressed within masterful writing for both the soloist and the orchestra.
The pervasive beauty is there right from the gorgeously tender opening, caressed into life by a supportive choir of strings and a heartfelt, songful cello line whose slow moving tread expresses both pain and consolation. Clyne didn’t write the piece specifically for Senja Rummukainen, but she played it with such total identification and empathy that you’d be forgiven for thinking that she had. Rummukainen seemed to disappear inside both her instrument and her music, so that even in moments like the fourth movement Passacaglia she was a servant of the sound rather than its driving force. That cooperative sense of collaboration, combined with the overwhelming lyricism of the writing, fitted with the way Clyne used the orchestra, scoring for groups of instruments in a way that never detracted from the cello and which pinpointed some gorgeous touches of detail, such as her sparing use of double basses or the pervasive tingling of bowed percussion. Put all this together and you got an experience as spiritual as it was musical or, to put it another way, a triumph.
What a shame there weren’t more people there to hear it. The RSNO’s audiences are loyal, but the higher than usual number of empty seats seemed to suggest that new music still scares some people off. A pity, because the rest of the programme showcased orchestral dance music every bit as effectively. Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales had a winning sense of luxury to its swaggering start, and slower dances full of allure, with wind solos that felt like the songs of a lover. Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances had all the charm of the Ravel but with a hefty dose of added weight, yet with terrific transparency to the orchestral texture in every movement. I’ve never heard the piece sound more like a concerto for orchestra, with gorgeous wind solos in the first movement and the piano ambling gently alongside the unison string melody in a way that was so much more than an accompaniment. Yet the shadowy waltz of the second movement had a completely different colour, and the finale’s heel-kicking energy had a tinge of malevolence to it. This miraculous balancing act must principally have been down to conductor Emilia Hoving, who shaped every piece in the programme with total clarity but with a razor sharp ear for unity. This was her debut with the RSNO, but it was a spectacular one. I really hope they have her back soon.
