Friday, September 27, 2024

Concert Hall, Helsinki Music Centre, Mannerheimintie 13 A, 00100 Helsinki, Finland

The concert started with music by Ernest Pingoud (1887-1942), born in St Petersburg to a French father and a German-Finnish mother and who died in Helsinki. Danse macabre is colourful and rhythmic and reminds at times of early Stravinsky (such as Scherzo fantastique), at others of the ‘Dies irae’ (which Pingoud quotes) meeting Dukas’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice, to all of which a wordless chorus adds a spooky layer.

The new organ concerto by Federico Perotti (born 1993) is motivic, punchy and clangorous, with the orchestra the equal of the organ; but, for me, the rather spare musical ideas proved unengaging. No doubt this premiere performance was excellent, Jan Lehtola engaged with an electronic instrument, and the composer was present.

Olari Elts took a brisk view of Mendelssohn’s ‘Scottish’ Symphony: flowing and restless in the (not so slow) introduction, the Allegro windswept and strongly lyrical, a direct approach emphasised by omitting the exposition repeat. The Scherzo was fleet, inviting and receiving virtuoso playing, and the Adagio was of slow-march tread and dramatic intent, with a bracing Finale, played incisively, before sinking into Highland mists and emerging from them to (as Elts sees it) a three-part coda, jaunty, majestic, and fast-forward.

Finally, Peter Maxwell Davies’s An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise – entertaining, scenic, suggestive of folk-dancing, drunkenness, a party in full swing, with a fine solo from the concertmaster, until a new day dawns, signalled by Robert Jordan, in full regalia, entering down a flight of stairs, bagpipes at full throttle.

Ernest Pingoud: Dance Macabre
Federico Perotti: Essence, Organ Concerto, world premiere (Kaija Saariaho Organ Composition Competition commission)
Felix Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 3 in E Minor “Scottish”

Peter Maxwell Davies: An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise (Robert Jordan, bagpipes)