VoxCarnyx

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

With the addition of four minutes of music at its start, RSNO Principal Guest Conductor Patrick Hahn made a concert of the apparently tricky task of combining the RSNO Chorus’s performance of Mozart’s Requiem with the Berg Violin Concerto the orchestra had been recording with soloist Carolin Widmann during the week.

Widmann’s Berg will appear with the Britten Violin Concerto it undoubtedly influenced, and if her performance of it on Saturday is a guide, that will be a disc worth looking out for. In the second of its two movements her technical virtuosity shone, while the first established as fine a demonstration of partnership with a conductor and orchestra as you might hope to hear. The composer’s adaptation of the structures of serialism to his own purpose are part of what distinguishes the 1936 work, but it was the meticulous attention to the work’s own structure that really impressed here.

It was composed as a memorial to the 18-year-old daughter of Walter Gropius, Manon, and the other works in the programme also remembered women who died very young, the Mozart Requiem commissioned by Count Franz Walsegg-Stuppach as a memorial for his wife, who died on Valentine’s Day, 1791, aged just 20.

Mozart’s progress on the commission was interrupted by the first performances of his penultimate opera, La clemenza di Tito, and work on The Magic Flute, and the operatic flavour of the Requiem was given its best expression in the ensemble work of the soloists – soprano Mhairi Lawson, mezzo Hanna Hipp, tenor Jamie MacDougall and baritone Laurent Naouri (replacing the advertised Daniel Okulitch).

In parallel, the full might of the RSNO Chorus was given full attention by Hahn, and there was occasionally a suspicion that his tempi were a shade faster than they might have liked. This was a brisk Requiem, and not an especially affecting one, but it was full of colour, particularly from the orchestra, with a pair of basset horns present as scored, and the trombone section on top form.

Those four minutes of music that knitted the two masterworks together came right at the beginning of the programme. Beethoven’s Elegischer Gesang was written in memory of the wife of the composer’s friend and supporter Baron Johann Baptiste Pasqualati, who died in childbirth at 24. The choral miniature is a late rarity in the composer’s catalogue and Hahn used it to preface the Berg, into which it segued without a pause.

Even if the the men of the RSNO Chorus were less assured in its opening bars than they would be later for the Mozart, it was a highly effective idea. The dynamic ideas Beethoven rehearses in this compact gem clearly found fuller expression in the finale of the Ninth Symphony.

Keith Bruce

Picture from Katie Kean/RSNO