THE Beach Boys? The Beach Boy, purists might be inclined to say. Of this eight-man reincarnation of one of pop's greatest ever bands, only singer Mike Love is a bona-fide founding member.
MUSICTHE BEACH BOYS
PLAYHOUSE, EDINBURGH
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In mitigation, keyboard player Bruce Johnston has been an on-off member since the Sixties, while both Carl and Dennis Wilson are too deceased ever to return, sadly.
On the ot
her hand, Al Jardine and Love's cousin, Brian Wilson – who have their own band under Wilson's name – are unlikely ever to come back. Love has probably sent one too many lawsuits their way for that to happen now.
So what we are left with is the BB template that Love always apparently wanted: the early, surf 'n' cars hitmaker, rather than the later, Wilson-propelled monument to obsessive studio trickery and sonic invention.
Any student of the band will tell you that the former era was frothy and commercially successful, while the latter was the stuff of legend.
Over more than 50 songs (not a misprint: more than 50) Love ploughed the band's entire career, but it's the early tracks he seemed most at home with. I Get Around, Surfin' USA, Help Me Rhonda and Fun Fun Fun were dispatched with jollity, albeit a creaky, ageing sort.
A few key tracks from Pet Sounds were drummed out in conservative style alongside some bland rock 'n' roll cover versions, and we were left confounded by Love's insistence on being most excited by his band's dullest days.
MUSICBBC SCOTTISH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
CITY HALLS, GLASGOW
***
THROWING together the delicacy of Britten's Serenade for tenor, horn and strings with the monumental thrust of Mahler's epic Fifth Symphony was an inspired move by the BBC SSO. The two composers are mutually compatible, given the latter's influence on the former.
But these are works that require utter conviction and pinpoint delivery. There were elements in both performances, under American conductor Robert Spano, that fell short of achieving that.
Perhaps the greatest problem with Britten's Serenade is the spectre of Peter Pears, the composer's lifelong partner who, with his idiosyncratic tenor voice, made this work so much his own. Thursday's tenor, Andrew Kennedy, could not have been more different, his lean, piercing tone more clinical, imbuing Britten's gorgeous lyrical streams with rigid precision.
That whole approach fed into David Pyatt's clean horn delivery – an impeccable performance – but also infected the string playing with self-consciousness. Spano simply didn't capture the luxuriant quality of the music.
That same discomfort induced tremors in the Mahler, more a result of awkward transitions of tempi than the overall mood of the performance, which captured both extremes of its emotional world. Spano engineered climactic peaks that sent shivers down the spine, benefiting hugely from exceptional solo playing by the horn and trumpet. But these crusty heights often emerged more bombastically than organically.
It seemed the music needed just a couple more gos to realise its full potential. Hopefully, that happened in last night's repeat performance in Aberdeen.
The full article contains 507 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
