São Paulo Symphony Orchestra/Fischer review – a rich and colourful library of music

Some distance had built up between the concert the Edinburgh international festival detailed when the 2024 programme was unveiled and what the audience heard at Usher Hall, but the essential foundations remained: Brazil’s São Paulo Symphony, under the baton of its music director, Thierry Fischer, visiting Europe for the orchestra’s 70th anniversary with a rich and colourful library of music.

As advertised, we heard the epic tone-poem of Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony after the interval, every inch of the platform filled with the huge cast of players the composer desired, some horns, doubling on Wagner tubas, off stage when required, and the huge percussion section framed by a very new-looking wind machine on one side and thunder-sheets on the other, with the two timpanists in the middle.

This was a full-fat Alpine, but Fischer ensured all the detail was there too, the São Paulo front desks supplying some very fine solo voices. Special credit goes to the orchestral pianist Cecília Moita, who put in a crucial shift on the Usher Hall organ on very short acquaintance.

The 1963 Violin Concerto of Alberto Ginastera was also still in place at the heart of the first half, but with the London Symphony Orchestra leader Roman Simovic replacing the indisposed Hilary Hahn as soloist. Its opening movement is a hugely demanding cadenza that presents material developed later, full of double-stopping and across the entire range of the instrument.

Just as taxing, and executed with equal assurance, were the dynamics of the work, often requiring the quietest possible playing from individuals as well as discrete ensembles within the orchestra. Poised performances, in music a world away from the Strauss of two decades earlier.

The programme opened with five movements from Camargo Guarnieri’s Suíte Vila Rica, the São Paulo composer depicting the orchestra’s home with an audio cityscape derived from a film soundtrack. The fourth section’s smoochy melody surely underscored the scene where the two main characters finally get it together.

In a big evening of music, Simovic and Fischer followed the concerto with Franz Waxman’s Carmen Fantasie, a violin party-piece developed for the concert hall from the composer’s Oscar-winning soundtrack to the Joan Crawford vehicle Humoresque. As a built-in encore to the demanding listening of the Ginastera, the pacey ride through Bizet’s familiar tunes was an inspired choice.