VoxCarnyx

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

The puzzlement of Berlioz’s Grande messe des morts, written in the 1820s in honour of French military casualties, is the vivid paradox it presents between sight and sound. 

To see it performed, as RSNO audiences in Edinburgh and Glasgow did at the weekend under Thomas Søndergård’s baton, is to witness a visual feast of excess. The RSNO was effectively doubled in size, with students from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland scattered among its now gargantuan ranks. Spread above, alongside and behind the audience were the additional four brass bands effecting a captive sonic experience. Behind the orchestra, a rearguard of ten timpanists (like nodding dogs as they variously leant forward to tune their instruments), and in the choir stalls an RSNO chorus to complete the epic vision.

To hear if performed, however, is to recognise that Berlioz, with his inimitable revolutionary blue sky thinking, was not preoccupied with ear-splitting volume. Sure, there were moments on Saturday when the floor shuddered underfoot, for instance when those timpani struck fortissimo beats with fearsome unanimity, or where the multiple brass merged into one hair-raising phalanx of sound.  But for much of the time, as Mahler would later do, Berlioz finds extensive inner chamber-like possibilities, even within the chorus, that play mischief with the listener’s visual expectations.

So we find right at the start of the opening Introit a slow gathering of thought, a questioning development of a succinct unison motif, a sense of symphonic unravelling that begged, and received, a probing, reserved intensity in this performance. Even the Dies Irae – a slow burner that eventually erupts with the Tuba mirum – demanded much transparent subtlety from the chorus and orchestra. 

You could see on Søndergård’s face – he frequently turned round to signal to the furthest-away brass – the concentration required to hold this juggernaut together, and there were instances where this lacked his customary tidiness. Yet there was so much to savour within the bigger picture, from the wistful delicacy of Quid Sum Miser and gathering storm of the Rex Tremendae, through the seraphic haze of Quaerens Me and bucolic belligerence of the Lacrymosa, to the hearty male voice opening to the Hostias and heavenward lift of the Sanctus (featuring the brief, soulful appearance of tenor soloist Magnus Walker). 

Ultimately, and summed up in the hushed acceptance of the closing bars, this was a performance that emphasised the fragility of a Requiem setting in which Berlioz takes us to the brink of protean uncertainty. Challenging but fulfilling.

This close of season programme bore its own personal tribute, to dedicated RSNO supporter and benefactor Hedley G Wright. It also marked the retirement of long-serving trombonist Lance Green, whose final concert this was after 42 years with the orchestra.

Ken Walton