RSNO / Hahn
Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
The young team were in charge at Scotland’s national orchestra, and it was an excellent advert for the RSNO’s recruitment policy. Both still in their late 20s, soloist Randall Goosby and Principal Guest Conductor Patrick Hahn made a fine partnership, and their programme, sourced from the other side of the Atlantic, made superb narrative sense. If the pair had any advice for the audience, it was: “Of course you know these tunes, but listen to the music.”
The evening culminated in Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony and as fresh a take on that old war horse as you might hope to hear, a long way from cobbled streets and Hovis bread. That second movement cor anglais melody was performed with a crisper rhythm, taken up by the front desk strings when they are passed the tune, and that brisk approach ran through the entire performance, from the very carefully-measured dynamics of the opening bars to the switching of focus between the different sections of the orchestra 40 minutes later.
It is perhaps debatable whether the young Austrian has yet imposed his personality on the RSNO, but his relaxed approach to the direction of the concert’s opening work suggests he already knows when that is unnecessary. With a jazz piano side to his own musical make-up, the Duke Ellington Orchestra’s singular take on Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker music suited what we know of Hahn. This was a recent orchestration of Ellington and Strayhorn’s arrangement of 65 years ago, by Jeff Tyzik, who made his European conducting debut with the RSNO back in 2010.
Tyzik’s arrangement is for concert orchestra, the strings giving the suite a symphonic character, requiring fewer jazz soloists. These were past and present stalwarts of the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra: drummer Alyn Cosker and bassist Calum Gourlay as the rhythm section and soloists Ryan Quigley, on trumpet, and Martin Kershaw, doubling alto and tenor saxophones.
Kershaw shone especially brightly, but the orchestra’s own winds and brass were also on swinging form. What might have been an odd hybrid was a resounding success on its own terms.
Violinist Randall Goosby is the RSNO’s Artist in Residence this season and his approach to the Barber Violin Concerto chimed perfectly with the conductor’s to the entire concert, leaving no room for the sort of sentimentality the material can sometimes encourage.
Goosby was in his element in the more challenging sections of the outer movements, and his interpretation gave the piece animated propulsion towards the virtuosic finale.
He followed it with an encore that was equally taxing. Its composer, Coleridge Perkinson, is every bit as fascinating as his young advocate suggested, and he also ignored musical boundaries in a fashion very similar to this programme.
Keith Bruce