VoxCarnyx

City Halls, Glasgow

HE may be long dead, and in his career as pragmatic as any composer in pursuit of a bawbee, but Igor Stravinsky was the most challenging and abrasive voice in Thursday evening’s concert reuniting the BBC Scottish with Principal Conductor Ilan Volkov for the first time in 2024.

Stravinsky’s Petrushka was the work in the second half and this was a glorious account of it, with marvellous playing all over the platform. It was the SSO strings that made the startling initial impression: muscular playing that was pin-sharp. That example was swiftly followed by their colleagues, either individually – Lynda Cochrane at the piano – or collectively in the brass and percussion departments.

Sitting between the Firebird and the Rite of Spring, the musical drama of Petrushka may be subtler but it is no less colourful storytelling and Volkov and the SSO ensured the narrative unfolded in all its kaleidoscopic splendour. Yann Ghiro’s clarinet section in particular were on stellar form.

This was the more compact 1947 revision of Petrushka and it was preceded at the start of the concert by the less often heard Four Etudes in the 1952 version of a score that also started life many decades earlier. The third of them, the more contemplative Cantique, is perhaps the most compelling section but the rhythms of the other pieces are all vintage Stravinsky and, although they began as piano works, eloquent studies in orchestration.

We were in a very different world for the rest of the programme, but not, perhaps surprisingly, a more rarified one. Composers Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton, veterans of Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra and a performing duo themselves, were both present to hear their works and acknowledge the applause, and Volkov dedicated the concert to their associate and contemporary John White, who died on January 4.

Skempton’s Piano Concerto, from 2015, references Stravinsky as well as Morton Feldman, but is altogether more Broadway than that would suggest. Soloist Joanna MacGregor revelled in the bluesy serialism of the central movement and the climax of the work which is a jazzy, brassy march. For a contemporary piece, it proved surprisingly easy listening, and perhaps rather slight in the context of the programme. Even more melodic and pretty was MacGregor’s encore, Skempton’s dedication to Cardew, Well, Well Cornelius.

There was nothing especially “difficult” about the newest work of the evening either. Parsons’ LEVELS for Orchestra was also a BBC Commission and appears to have had to wait a few years for this world premiere. The composer draws a distinction between “chords” and the stratified aggregation of notes in his work, but I doubt that matters much to many listeners. Whether we were hearing the contrasting timbre of the orchestral sections in sustained harmony or sequential notes, the piece was – like the Stravinsky Etudes – an exercise in hearing the make-up of an orchestra. Whether Parsons says anything new on that subject is a matter of opinion.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Joanna MacGregor