True, Steven Osborne is giving all four Tippett piano sonatas at Queen’s Hall, and Elisabeth Leonskaja six of Schubert’s there, but these are minor agglomerations by Edinburgh standards. What is particularly impressive is that the Weber celebration — concert performances of three operas and a Northern Sinfonia programme of orchestral and chamber music, all at Usher Hall — is not marking an anniversary, but is offered as a cultural encounter purely for its own sake. The Tippett tribute looks forward to his centenary next year, but Leonskaja’s Schubert recitals need no excuse (in the first, she brought out the massy spaciousness of the D960 B flat sonata with rare force); nor did the song recital by the French-Canadian soprano Measha Brueggergosman, its highlight a shatteringly vivid rendition of Duparc’s L’Invitation au voyage.
As for the opening concert, an Usher Hall presentation by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Festival Chorus of Honegger’s dramatic oratorio Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, it stood splendidly apart, with its jazzy and sanctimonious French-Catholic intensity, from anything on the music programme, even if the work’s librettist, Paul Claudel, made a link to the theatre programme, which featured his 11-hour epic Le Soulier de satin.
So unrelated were the first few concerts that I began to find links in odd places. Both the Honegger and Weber’s Horn Concertino — marvellously performed under Thomas Zehetmair’s baton with the soloist David Pyatt — sport an unlikely technical innovation. In Weber’s case, it is the chords that the horn-player has to produce by singing as he blows; in Honegger’s, the objects that the two orchestral pianists place on their strings to make a clattery sound like a harpsichord. Here was the “prepared piano” John Cage is usually credited with inventing, in 1938, the very year of the oratorio’s premiere.
Besides that novelty, this eclectic work also makes use of the electronic ondes martenot, a syrupy whine beloved of Messiaen, a trio of saxophones and a troupe of actors — the same ones from the Centre Dramatique National who put on the Claudel play, and who conveyed the story of the saint in melodramatic exchanges across the stage. Jeanne Balibar, wrists bound with a sash, was a convincing if shouty Jeanne, Philippe Girard a monotonous accusing priest. Among the singers was Lisa Milne as Jeanne’s heavenly voice of Marguerite, but she had little to do. The conductor, Kwamé Ryan, had plenty. In his hands, the 90- minute score was surprisingly pacy.
Zehetmair’s Weber concert was sparkling throughout, and fascinating for the way it implied that the composer needed to write opera- tically in order to get content into his music. Such items as the Clarinet Quintet (Ronald van Spaendonck with the Zehetmair Quartet) and F minor Konzertstück for piano (the faultless Dejan Lazic) and orchestra are perfectly vacuous if wholly attractive instrumental displays. The first of the Royal Bank of Scotland’ s excellent late-night series (all seats £5), an Usher Hall performance of two Morton Feldman works, was a reminder that music can be almost devoid of material, yet still profound.