Empire Theatre, Eden Court, Inverness, 20 May 2011

Both conductor and soloist were making their Inverness debuts, both hailed from The Netherlands and both have built their reputations in the opera house rather than the concert hall. That background showed in the style of conductor Lawrence Renes as he worked with his arms rather than being overly flamboyant with his whole body. Similarly the baritone soloist Henk Neven could not resist adding little dramatic touches to his singing.

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

Nonetheless, Renes wasted no time establishing a good rapport with the members of the orchestra. He opened his performance with the Symphony No 1 in D major by Sergey Prokofiev, frequently known as the “Classical”, perhaps because it looks back to the classical period even though it was composed in 1917 when many of his contemporaries were throwing themselves into the atonality of modern music. Renes caught the snappy, athletic feel of the opening allegro perfectly, making sure to emphasise the parts for the flute to lighten the summery feel with a bit of birdsong. Two dance-like movements followed, one using melodies look forward to Romeo and Juliet, and like in the finale, marked Molto vivace, Renes produced a carefree atmosphere that seemed to take us on an open-air pic-nic.

Henk Neven divided his five songs into two parts, starting with the tune generally known as ‘Handel’s Largo’, although it is in fact marked larghetto. Ombra mai fu is sung by Xerxes as he rests on a summer’s day in the shade of a plane tree. From that aria’s lugubriousness, Neven upped the pace and the comedy with Papageno’s aria from Mozart’s The Magic Flute, maintaining a mock duet with the piccolo of Rosemary Lock. Then, from the frustration of bird catching, the tone had to turn to the arrogance of the Count in another great Mozart aria from The Marriage of Figaro as he rails against being thwarted from exercising his droit de seigneur on the occasion of Figaro and Susannah’s wedding.

After a short break, Henk Neven returned to demonstrate yet two more aspects of his repertoire. In the first “Look!” from Benjamin Britten’s most well-known opera, Billy Budd, Billy looks thoughtfully out of a porthole at the moon on a calm sea as he waits to be taken on deck and hanged. It would have been so easy for Neven to have sung this aria somewhat mawkishly, but instead he conveyed a sense of sad resignation accompanied by a moving obbligato from the principal cellist, Martin Storey and frequent sea gull calls from the flutes. For his final offering, this velvet-voiced baritone sang the role of William Tell in the aria from Rossini’s opera when he tells his son to stand still and think of his mother as Tell is forced to shoot an arrow into the apple on his head. The purity, the sensitivity and the variety of Henk Neven’s performance fully explains why he has been selected as a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist.

After the interval, summer continued as Beethoven reflected on his walks in the countryside. His Symphony No 6 in F major, known as “The Pastoral” is one of everyone’s favourites and there are so many memories that people hold of when they first heard it – the most popular being a scene in the Disney film “Fantasia”. Lawrence Renes gave a suitably atmospheric performance of all five sections, especially the “Scene by the brook” and “Thunderstorm” which called for such virtuosic dexterity from the cello section. Famously, the final part is called “Thankful feelings after the storm” as the birds start singing again, and judging from the number of puddles in the Eden Court gardens, a summer storm is exactly what the audience must have been sheltering from.

© James Munro, 2011

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