VoxCarnyx

Eden Court, Inverness

It’s been four years since the BBC SSO last visited Inverness, but its audience has not lost interest. A well-packed Eden Court Theatre greeted the SSO’s return on Friday, and a programme that on paper might have seemed a random assemblage of Puccini, Tchaikovsky, Panufnik and Rachmaninov, but which in practice proved engaging, colourful and purposeful.

Much of that was down to a conductor who wasn’t meant to be there in the first place. As a last-minute replacement for the indisposed Valentina Peleggi, Ludovic Morlot – currently music director of the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra, and latterly of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra – struck a rapport with the SSO that was so natural and flowing you’d have thought they were meant for each other.

There was glowing tenderness in a little-known Puccini opener, his Preludio sinfonica, written while a student in 1882, which angles towards the emotional heat of La Boheme but with a cooler  countenance that Morlot coaxed out clearly and calmly. Even with the mild challenge of the dryish Eden Court acoustics, there was a simmering sumptuousness, particularly from the strings, in a performance that smoothly negotiated its shifting contours.

It was the perfect appetiser, too, for Tchaikovsky’s Dante-inspired symphonic fantasia Francesca da Rimini, on one hand the hell-raiser you’d expect from a depiction of Dante’s second circle of hell, on the other an impassioned love story. Morlot captured that equivocation, its wild, impatient frustrations of a stormy background allayed by the sensuous allure of the lovers. Here, the acoustics suffocated to some extent the amplified glow this music breathes, though not so much as to quash its tempestuous exhilaration.

The songs of Alma Mahler, wife of Gustav, with their rare beauty and poetic depth, have only recently come to prominence through recordings. Roxanna Panufnik has recast three of them – Hymne, Ansturm and Hymne an die Nacht – as re-imaginations for orchestra. Or, as she calls them in quasi-Mendelssohn terms, Alma’s Songs Without Words. 

She doesn’t hold back, applying harsher layers of sound to climactic points than you might expect, given the golden sumptuousness of Alma’s expressive style, but Panufnik does offer so much in the way of imaginative colour – from hazy atmospherics to busily entwined melodic tapestries – that there is an unceasing sense of genuine discovery. Morlot took that in hand and moulded a sequence that was both thrilling and reflective.

It might seem unusual to finish a programme with Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2, but few will have regretted having pianist Boris Giltburg’s towering performance as the memory to carry home. His wasn’t a typical account, more a heightened personal viewpoint that set out to challenge the accepted rhetoric of this popular warhorse. It was clear from Morlot’s intense concentration that he, too, was prepared for the unexpected. Such a duelling sense of danger added significantly to the theatre of the performance.

Giltburg’s playing was bold and gestural, radiant flourishes accented by a tendency to play provocatively with the tempi, though never to the point of disruption. Inner textural gems were projected unexpectedly, adding that element of surprise and delight, which the SSO responded to with equal suppleness and sparkle. Inevitably, Giltburg responded to the cheering audience reaction with an encore, and again – in Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C sharp minor – showed that he only does things his own way. 

Ken Walton

Thursday’s Glasgow performance of the same programme is available to listen to on BBC Sounds