‘We’re here for her,” the man next to me says, pointing to Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha’s name on the programme. He’s not alone. The South African soprano – winner of the song prize at 2021’s Cardiff Singer of the World and more recently the Salzburg festival’s starry Herbert von Karajan prize (fellow laureates include Daniil Trifonov, Janine Jansen and Lise Davidsen) – is the real deal: a singer with a voice of sumptuous, indecent beauty, and serious musicality. So the chance to hear her join the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra for Strauss’s Four Last Songs brought out a healthy midweek audience.
And with good reason. Rangwanasha’s Strauss is still under construction, still finding the ebb and flow of these autumnal farewells to life, art and love, but there are the makings of a generational performance here. Youthful and wide-eyed in Frühling, an airy wonder in her delivery, she brought a backlit glow to the central songs, before allowing it to suffuse and engulf the texture in the welcome release of Im Abendrot.
She wasn’t always helped by the RPO, who resisted every expressive invitation extended by conductor in residence Kevin John Edusei, delivering an oddly pinched, poorly tuned account, landing on the composer’s evanescent closing chords with a thump. Only the lovely horn solo that closes September suggested a different possibility.
Intonation issues also plagued the concert’s opener, Canadian Samy Moussa’s 2024 Adgilis Deda: Hymn for Orchestra. Moreover, Moussa needed to give his work’s filmic swell greater scope than its compact, 12-minute architecture, if he wanted it to earn epic climaxes with gong and brass.
It was a different orchestra that returned to the stage for Beethoven’s Symphony No 7: taut, energised, precise. Fizzing with kinetic charge, this was an account that leaned into the work’s wildness, discontinuities and abrupt changes of direction. Edusei exaggerated dynamics and speeds to create a dazzling but often disconcerting performance – a Rossinian scherzo that came close to parody, a finale of manic intensity returning obsessively to fanfares surging towards the composer’s first ever triple fortissimo. If the Strauss had us saying our goodbyes to life, this was the electric shock treatment that brought us convulsively back.
