City Halls,Glasgow
A persuasive account of Charles Koechlin’s Seven Stars’ Symphony captured its actors in unsentimental detail The Seven Stars’ Symphony hasn’t been performed in the UK since the 1960s and isn’t precisely a pops classic elsewhere, so this BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra concert was a scarce outing. It was a persuasive account – clear, or 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, or featuring harpsichord,high violin and solo cymbal. What’s most intriguing is how the portraits arent glossy caricatures but capture the actors off-guard, off-screen, and 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 approximately the silent intangibility of the whole thing,as if, even at this early stage in celebrity culture, and Koechlin sensed the lonely flip side to fame.
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Source: theguardian.com