This is my second Appalachian Spring in a week, but this week’s Scottish Chamber Orchestra performance was very different to last week’s with the RSNO. For one thing, the SCO played the complete ballet rather than the more frequently performed suite, adding depth and power to a score that I struggle to love. There’s more light and shade in the complete ballet, slower music to contrast the sparky dances, and even moments of darkness and threat that speak of the sinister world beyond. True, the Simple Gifts tune does even more heavy lifting in the complete version, but even with that, this performance contained dramatic flow and musical shape to spare.
That was due to the performers. As played by a chamber orchestra, Copland's dances were naturally lighter on their feet and there was a major plus in having Ryan Bancroft as conductor. He was a real asset to the sound, a bundle of energy who bounced his way onto the podium. He understood perfectly when to press ahead with the ballet and when to hold back. That successful sense of dramatic contrast was mostly thanks to him, but the silky open strings of the orchestra gave the music that sense of the great beyond that is so key to is place in the American musical consciousness.
The team were every bit as good in Ives’ altogether more experimental Three Places in New England. Ives’ musical USP is his use of juxtaposition, and he’s at his most unique when he smashes his musical building blocks together. Bancroft understood that well, but he didn’t over-egg that ingredient in the way he shaped this musical structure. The opening movement, for example, was shaped slowly and very steadily, eerie sounds quietly coalescing with macabre memories and even flecks of horror. This was Ives’ juxtaposition of musical building blocks as a gentle smearing rather than a staccato collision. That came in Putnam’s Camp, however, which was a constantly shifting musical kaleidoscope where you’re constantly noticing new patterns, and The Housatonic at Stockbridge contrasted the gentle beauty of the hymn tunes against a restless, shifting string line. The effect throughout the piece was always very beautiful, but also rather unsettling. I suspect Ives would have approved.
Errollyn Wallen’s new piece was a revelation, too. She’s a composer whose work has often left me feeling slightly nonplussed, but Dances for Orchestra is a treat, a suite of contrasting dances, mostly alternating fast and slow, but always with a foot-tapping rhythm and a catch melody. There’s a rapid perpetuum mobile feeling to most of the music, and beautifully realised flashes of virtuoso instrumental colour drive the music forwards. Only towards the end, in an extended tribute to the Sarabande, does the energy drain away and the music become more like an intellectual exercise, but she pulled this back in a celebratory final flourish. This is music to which you could actually imagine yourself dancing, and when it's played and shaped as well as this it felt like an assortment of goodies.
