VoxCarnyx

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Glyndebourne Festival Opera’s Music Director Robin Ticciati is still best known in Scotland for his tenure of nearly a decade with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and that may well have been a crucial attraction for ticket buyers at Saturday’s concert in Glasgow. He has just ended a slightly shorter stint with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and, curiously, the figures replacing him on the podium in the German capital over the next few weeks include current RSNO Principal Guest Conductor Patrick Hahn, previous RSNO Principal Guest Conductor Elim Chan and Ticciati’s successor as SCO Principal Conductor, Maxim Emelyanychev.

The hall may also have included a few fans of pianist Francesco Piemontesi, once a regular partner of the SCO, both live and on acclaimed recordings for Glasgow’s Linn record label, and more recently seen in concerts with the RSNO and its Music Director Thomas Sondergard.

There again, the sheer novelty of having a visiting orchestra in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, which used to boast entire seasons of international guest orchestras, may have been the draw. The London Phil, which will be back in Scotland for an Edinburgh International Festival appearance with the National Youth Choir of Scotland in August, has not played in Glasgow, or Scotland, since the year before Ticciati took up the baton at the SCO.

Just as likely, though, music-lovers were in their seats for the programme: Schumann’s Piano Concerto and Mahler’s Fifth Symphony – works both closely associated with the women in the lives of the composers, Clara and Alma.

By the time Robert Schumann eventually completed his concerto, his wife was as busy bringing up his children (and looking after him) as pursuing her playing career, although she gave its first performances, which met with mixed responses.

It is much more recently that audiences have taken it to their hearts and Piemontesi gave a masterly account of the work, he and Ticciati leaving plenty of space in a reading that was sometimes languid but, at others, robustly rhythmic. The score is a true partnership between soloist and orchestra and the LPO’s wind principals and a rich, broad string sound to which the lower instruments made a crucial contribution, were as important as the soloist’s virtuosity.

The Adagietto fourth movement of Mahler 5 is the bit everyone knows, whether from the film Death in Venice or another funeral. That association may half-derive from the march at the start of the work, for which Ticciati again set out his strict-rhythm stall, and with which principal trumpet Paul Beniston was entirely onboard.

He and first horn John Ryan were the most prominent solo stars of the symphony, the latter delivering a kaleidoscope of tonal colour, but there was excellent playing everywhere and Ticciati was always faithful to the instructions on the score. That meant only the merest pause for breath after that Adagietto, which was certainly “very slow” but far from as glacial as Karajan’s 12 minutes.

Whether or not it was actually written for Alma, it was just one course in the full feast in this performance. The way the orchestra and conductor delivered the complex counterpoint of the preceding Scherzo and the equally rapid elaborations of the Rondo-Finale was just as impressive.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Robin Ticciati by Marco Borggreve