RSNO/Denève

Gürzenich Orchestra/Stenz

A few questions for Jonathan Mills at the end of his first year as Edinburgh Festival director. First, could he bang some heads together at the increasingly grim Usher Hall? This is a venue where the stewards seem to regard the audience as roadblocks best herded back to their seats rather than treated to anything as inconvenient as a glass of wine (a commodity that had run out by 9pm on Friday). It’s no wonder that the Fringe audiences don’t hang around for the Festival endgame if this is the concert experience awaiting them.

Second, why not make more of a real event out of the final Saturday concert? In the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s Celebration of Poulenc evening, only the superb contribution of Christine Brewer, whose golden soprano made the all-too-brief sorties into the French composer’s dreary Stabat Mater, leavened the business-as-usual feeling of it all.

True, there were some excellent individual performances. The redoubtable Gillian Weir fizzed in the Organ Concerto, and Rosemary Joshua made a strong contribution to three extracts from Dialogues des Carmélites (she sang the novice heroine, Blanche). That didn’t excuse the uninspired playing of the RSNO, led by a hammy Stéphane Denève, or the sheer bizarreness of carving three tiny extracts out of a three-hour opera – the success of which entirely depends on its cumulative power.

There was much more fun to be had at Usher Hall the previous night, when the tourists of the Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne got a night off from Capriccio at the Festival Theatre – and seized the opportunity with both hands. This is the orchestra that gave Strauss’s rambunctious tone poem Till Eulenspiegelits premiere and it showed in the classy way in which they tackled the eponymous hero’s outrageous exploits – drawing out the comedy precisely because they took it all so absolutely seriously.

Better yet was to come. A dip into the postwar avant-garde threw up Zimmermann’s vivid Photoptosis, wryly travelling through Wagner, Bach and Beethoven quotations in a richly rewarding 12-minute haze. Then, after the interval, Schumann’s Rhenish Symphony, not just brimming with imaginative details but given a real dramatic arc under Markus Stenz’s authoritative and affectionate direction. The only blip on the radar was the arrival of Gabriele Fontana (another refugee from Capriccio), making heavy weather of three Strauss lieder by way of dessert.

Finally, 50 years to the day since Dennis Brain’s tragic death, the horn player David Pyatt honoured his memory in an impeccably judged recital at Queen’s Hall on Saturday. This was horn playing of marvellous dexterity and expressive range, reaching its emotional peak in Poulenc’s poignant Elégie, itself composed in the aftershock of Brain’s untimely demise.

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