The Scottish Chamber Orchestra are living dangerously in their series of “Adventurer” concerts: not many orchestras try to premiere three commissioned works in the space of six weeks. The first commission, from Judith Weir, didn’t arrive in time: that happens. But in mid-November youth choirs and narrator duly delivered Brian Irvine’s The Boy Who Kicked Pigs. Two weeks later, here we were with a symphony by the distinguished and ingenious Edward Harper, just retired from 40 years’ teaching at Edinburgh University.
Splendid enterprise; though judging by Friday’s turnout the orchestra are currently more adventurous than their audiences. Even the carrot of Schubert failed to stem fear of the unknown. In the event, the SCO’s Unfinished symphony itself felt unfinished. Garry Walker, conducting, took a perfunctory view of its tragedies; the music lay marooned and bleached under the auditorium’s cream walls, like white bones in the Sahara.
The graveyard vanished, however, once Harper’s second symphony struck up. His symphony label could be disputed: right now it’s more of a cantata or song cycle (cancer surgery left no time for the first movement Harper planned). But there’s no disputing the subject matter — the pity of war, the death of children, the hope of reconciliation— or the work’s intermittent power. In Harper’s orchestrations of Schubert songs, heard earlier, David Wilson-Johnson’s bass-baritone had sounded crushed; but it immediately bloomed in William Barnes’s dialect poem The Turnen Stile, delivered between a saddening waltz and bows rocking across strings.
Harper’s second movement, swinging between violence and hope, also delivered. On the page Ron Butlin’s commissioned text looked nastily plain; eloquence arrived with the SCO Chorus’s shouts, the obsessive strings, the dramatic pauses, and bloodied brass stabs. Harper’s gift for direct expression, uncluttered by fashion or obscurantist technique, was heard at its best here.
Unfortunately his inspiration then wobbled. For a scherzo movement, the setting of Walt Whitman’s Miracles proved uncommonly grey; and even with mellifluous voices the finale’s mix of the Agnus Dei with Isaiah’s vision of peace never quite took flight.
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Maybe Harper can revise and complete: we need this symphony’s beauty and truth.