RPO/Edusei/Masabane Review Cecilia Rangwanasha – What Makes a Strauss Classic | classical music

‘W“I’m here for her,” says the man next to me, pointing out Masapane Cecilia Rangwanasha’s name on the programme. He’s not alone. The South African soprano – winner of the Song Prize at the 2021 Cardiff Singers of the World and most recently the star-studded Herbert von Karajan Prize at the Salzburg Festival (whose laureates include Daniel Trifonov, Janine Janssen and Lise Davidsen) – is the real deal: a singer with a stately voice, immodest beauty, and serious musicianship, so great was the opportunity to hear her join the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra for the songs of Strauss played the final four, bringing in a healthy midweek crowd.

And for good reason. Strauss’s Rangwancha is still under construction, still finding the ebb and flow of autumnal farewells to life, art and love, but there is something to the making of a generational performance here. Youthful and wide-eyed in Frühling, an airy marvel in her delivery, she brought a backlit glow to the central songs, before allowing it to spread out and swallow up the texture in the welcome version of Im Abendrot.

She was not always helped by the RPO, who resisted every expressive invitation offered by resident conductor Kevin John Edosi, offering a strangely pinched and poorly tuned account, landing on the composer’s fleeting concluding strings with a powerful thump. Only the beautiful trumpet solo closing September suggested a different possibility.

Intonation issues also plagued the concert’s opening act, Canadian Sami Moussa’s 2024 Adgilis Deda: Hymn for Orchestra. Moreover, Moses needed to give his filmography greater scope than its compact 12-minute architecture if he wanted to reach an epic climax with bell and brass.

It was a different orchestra that returned to the stage for Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7: taut, energetic, and precise. This account, full of kinetic charge, was prone to brutality of action, interruptions and sudden changes of direction. Edusei exaggerated the dynamics and speeds to create a dazzling but often disorienting performance – a Rossini scherzo that verged on parody, a finale of manic intensity that obsessively returned to the mounting noise towards the composer’s first-ever triple bastion. If the Strauss family made us say goodbye to life, it was electroconvulsive therapy that brought us back convulsively.