VoxCarnyx

City Halls, Glasgow

The programme was entitled Ad Absurdum – “to the point of absurdity” – and it lived up to its name. In a good way. For this was a collection of music that mostly walked on the wild side. That’s not necessarily a label you’d attach to James MacMillan’s seminal early work Tryst, but the company it kept – the barmy creative mind of Jörg Widmann and a side to John Adams seething with cartoonesque irony – smacked of ballsy insurgence and irreverent fun. As SCO principal viola Max Mandel’s introductory remarks pithily warned us, there was comedy in this music …… of the alternative variety.

If MacMillan’s Tryst – a work dating from the 1989 St Magnus Festival that first established his definitive orchestra style (his first big popular success, The Confession of Isobel Gowdie, came a year later at the BBC Proms) – offered a more serious opening gambit, this was a performance by the SCO under chief conductor Maxim Emelyanychev that highlighted the inspired individualism and latent edge of the then young MacMillan. 

Those screaming clarinets countering the pulsating strings at the start, the paradoxic blood-curdling serenity of the contrasting second section, the dagger-like shards that challenge any prevailing calm, and ferocious dances ignited by incendiary rhythms, all fused tantalisingly together as a potent reminder of where it all began for this now ennobled composer.

Then came the fun and fireworks, firstly in Widmann’s extraordinary trumpet concerto ad absurdum, effectively the title track of the evening – a breathless moto perpetuo that, had the musicians been paid by the note, would have secured them a considerable fortune for the gig, not least its soloist, Israeli-Russian trumpeter Sergei Nakariakov. His was a mind-blowing display of supersonic tonguing, Schnittke-like exaggeration, virtuosic eccentricities and infinite stamina, not to mention the infectious musicality through which he elicited lyrical nuance from a swarming volcanic morass.

The same composer’s Con Brio threw the spotlight on the orchestra itself. To some extent it’s a skit on Beethoven, written originally to partner two of his symphonies, pitting snapshots of his idiosyncratic rhetoric – often just an isolated chordal explosion or momentary quote – against a sea of hi-octane musical psychedelia. Both Widmann pieces were a veritable showcase for the SCO’s in-house expertise, not least a solo theatrical break by timpanist Louise Lewis Goodwin that a frenzied Keith Moon would have been rightly proud of.

All of which led to John Adams’ Chamber Symphony, disarmingly mis-titled, in that any perceived influences (declared by Adams himself) from a similarly-named precedent by Schoenberg were instantly swept aside by the more dominant and truculent sway – also self-declared – of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale and Milhaud’s street savvy La Création du monde. 

An animated Emelyanychev inspired a performance of sizzling energy and infinite hues. The compact 15-strong ensemble sounded way greater than the sum of the parts, invoking the raw jazz-infused menagerie of the opening Mongrel Airs, the weird bittersweet cool of the central Aria with Walking Bass, then in Roadrunner a helter-skelter race to the finish line reinforced by the grizzly synthesiser presence. A glorious end to a night of infinite surprises, breathless excitement and unrelenting absurdity.

Ken Walton