The Seven Stars’ Symphony hasn’t been performed in the UK since the 1960s and isn’t exactly a pops classic elsewhere, so this BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra concert was a rare outing. It was a persuasive account – clear, attentive, soft-grained, unsentimental – but Seven Stars’ is still a weird piece. It comprises a series of fond and fairly abstract musical portraits composed in 1933 by Charles Koechlin – a Parisian who was friends with Satie and Debussy – in which each movement is dedicated to a star of silent film or the early talkies.
There are some ear-catching harmonies and instrumental combinations, featuring harpsichord, high violin and solo cymbal. What’s most intriguing is how the portraits aren’t glossy caricatures but capture the actors off-guard, off-screen, in private repose. Emil Jannings is craggy and stern; Greta Garbo is summoned by an eerie tune on ondes martenot and earthy flutes. There is something wistful about the quiet intangibility of the whole thing, as if, even at this early stage in celebrity culture, Koechlin sensed the lonely flip side to fame.
Conductor Ilan Volkov treated Seven Stars’ with characteristic efficiency, verve and a determination to give the music a fair hearing. He has a marvellous knack of making the saccharine seem straight-up, the complex seem simple and the hackneyed seem fresh. He opened the programme with The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by Dukas and found new menace in it – a hushed, deadpan brutality in its jumpy tune. Unsuk Chin’s Clarinet Concerto is a riot of squealing, scurrying sounds, but the extraordinary Finnish clarinettist Kari Kriikku, for whom the piece was sensitively written, delivered it with ease. Nobody else can make the instrument flutter, groan and bend like Kriikku does. Musical portraiture at its most vivid.
