NCH, Dublin:Mendelssohn: Hebrides Overture. Bruch: Scottish Fantasy. Arnold: 'Tam o'Shanter' Overture. MacCunn: Land of the Mountain and the Flood. Peter Maxwell Davies: An Orkney Wedding with Sunrise
Musical Postcards is the name that has been given to this year’s series of summer concerts by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. The postcards theme has been interpreted in a sometimes loose way. The programmes for some locations – the combinations of Italy and South America, and of France and Spain, as well as a standalone American programme – have honoured their descriptions. Hungary’s Zoltán Kodály, however, strayed into Bohemia. Mozart, Mendelssohn, Bellini and Mitch Leigh rubbed shoulders with Sibelius in Finland. Mozart, Rossini, Handel and Meyerbeer infiltrated Norway. And only a single Scotsman, Greenock-born Hamish MacCunn, made it into last Friday’s Scotland postcard, although, to be fair, the works by Hamburg-born Mendelssohn, Cologne-born Bruch, Northampton-born Malcolm Arnold and Salford-born Peter Maxwell Davies did all have a Scottish connection.
Sadly, however, Friday's musical sequence didn't work well musically. The second half of the evening was particularly weak. The one true Scottish work, Land of the Mountain and the Flood, written by the 19-year-old MacCunn in 1887, was sandwiched between two pieces that offer a Scottish equivalent of pigs in the kitchen or leprechaun's hats in Ireland.
Arnold and Maxwell Davies both indulge in bagpipe sounds (cleverly emulated in the Tam o'Shanter Overture, and with the instrument's stirring sound physically present in An Orkney Wedding with Sunrise), as well as extended orchestral depictions of drunkenness. The cleverly contrived, 20th-century garishness of these two graphic depcitions quite overpowered the piece by MacCunn, which George Bernard Shaw once characterised as "a charming Scotch overture that carries you over the hills and far away".
The performances were neither shapely nor pointed. And, although the same could be said of the music-making in the first half, there the music itself was stronger. Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overturesurvived even the generalised overview that the conductor, John Finucane, provided. But the small sound of the sweet-toned violin soloist, Anna Cashell, was often overcome by the poorly controlled washes of sound from the orchestra in Bruch's Scottish Fantasy.
