BBC SSO / Bihlmaier
City Halls, Glasgow
ON the day that the BBC Proms line-up was announced – with the SSO boasting six concerts instead of its customary four because it is the band for Claudia Winkleman’s Traitors Proms – the BBC Scottish was conducted by the Principal Guest Conductor of Manchester’s BBC Philharmonic, Anja Bihlmaier.
Her contributions to the programme asked for a rather different orchestra than the Mozart-sized one we heard in the middle, but the SSO, as usual, demonstrated its infinite adaptability.
The opener was a suite that was not really conceived as such by its composer, but is having a vibrant 21st century life in that guise. Trois femmes de legende: Salome; Ophelia; The Dream of Cleopatra, by Mel Bonis, brings together three orchestrated piano pieces from the start of the 20th century. Bonis studied at Paris Conservatoire with Cesar Franck and her music has much in common with Impressionism while anticipating the influence that would have on American composers.
So masterly is her orchestration that there is little sense of their piano beginnings, with flutes to the fore in Salome, horn and oboe solos in Cleopatra, and bass clarinet hinting at Ophelia’s fate in what became a busy night for the orchestra’s Simon Butterworth.
With no real narrative within the individual pieces, or linking them, Bihlmaier nonetheless shaped a suite that has a grand finish in the Cleopatra work.
With the SSO reduced to what was a chunky chamber orchestra of 40 strings and seven winds for the Mozart, Spaniard Javier Perianes was as reliable as ever as soloist, even if he was reading the score some of the time, including the composer’s own cadenzas. His unshowy panache was the lighter side of the onstage equation, with Bihlmaier maintaining robust propulsion in the low strings in the slow movement and finding a fascinating darker tone in the middle of the upbeat finale.
The real treat of the programme came after the interval with the 2016 “Symphonic Suite” of the music from Richard Strauss’s early opera Elektra. Arranged by the Austrian conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra Manfred Honecker and Czech composer Tomas Ille, it is one of a number of similar projects the pair have to their name, including Dvorak’s Rusalka and Janacek’s Jenufa.
With a huge orchestra at her command, Bihlmaier’s treatment of the dynamics of the score was superb, revealing how much of the opera this arrangement manages to cram into a little over half an hour and orchestrating the climax of the narrative gloriously. As much as the big sound the full forces produced, it was the detail of the quieter moments, with just a few players, that impressed.
Unlike similar reductions of Wagner operas, there are the tone poems of Strauss to measure the result against and this orchestral Elektra does so with considerable merit – although much of that should go to this conductor and these players for this performance. Bihlmaier brought Butterworth forward with his big clarinet to take his own individual bow at the end of what was his last concert as a BBC SSO staffer after almost 37 years.
Keith Bruce
Portrait of Anja Bihlmaier by Phil Sharp/BBC Philharmonic