VoxCarnyx

City Halls, Glasgow

Long-term followers of the BBC SSO would have recognised in its final season programme of Beethoven, Sibelius and a contemporary concerto a concert that played to its strengths. It’s around 30 years since the orchestra’s heroic and revelatory Beethoven and Sibelius symphonic cycles under Osmo Vänskä, and you can still sense the legacy of that in the SSO’s palpable self-motivation. Similarly, even the most demanding of modern repertoire is easy meat to a band that, only a few weeks ago, sailed painlessly through the uncompromising trials of its own Tectonics Festival.

So nothing in Thursday’s live broadcast concert for BBC Radio 3 presented the slightest discomfort. Beethoven’s Haydn-inspired First Symphony bore a zestful shared familiarity, contrasting later with the same composer’s belligerent, lesser-known ‘Namensfeier’ Overture. The tactile subtleties of Hans Abrahamsen’s 2019 Horn Concerto, with the Berlin Philharmonic’s principal horn Stefan Dohr as dedicatee and soloist, were voiced in this Scottish premiere performance with haunting, subliminal delicacy. Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony more or less played itself.

It was when chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth’s own particular strengths struck common currency with his orchestra that the most satisfying moments occurred. He’s clearly in tune with the music of Abrahamsen, championing the Dane as the SSO’s composer-in-residence, and in this performance responded to the tantalising haziness of its sound world with nuggets of textural detail that illuminated the soloist’s patiently emerging eloquence. 

From the amorphous intangibility of the opening bars – as puzzlingly indistinct as any Morse soundtrack – through a maze of motivic manipulation tinged with spectral hues and darkening shadows towards a quickening pulse and more glistening optimism, Wigglesworth shaped the work’s slow-winding progress with perceptive definition. Crowning that, Dohr’s horn playing was exceptional, a gradual quest towards the rhapsodic, the mild distortion of the instrument’s natural harmonics peppering the solo line with moments of discomforting allure.

In the Beethoven and Sibelius, Wigglesworth did what was necessary, which was generally to play safe. There was nothing wrong with Beethoven’s First Symphony, save to say it was predictable, which slightly sold us short on the slow teasers that open the first and final movements. But there was a joyous inner spirit to the performance that compensated, and some scintillating interplay within the wind section.

The Beethoven Overture – a work the composer seemed to lose interest in in the course of its composition – proved an unexpected delight. If anything measured up to the common vision of the composer as a tetchy intolerant individual, this did. The curtness of its motivic dialogue, the glorious grinding irritation of its dissonances, were fully embraced by this feisty performance. There was even a sense that this piece is not in fact without flaws, which lent it a certain spoof quality, assuming it’s indeed possible for a composer to do so with his own work.

Seriousness lies at the heart of Sibelius’ Fifth, albeit warmed by the journey it traces towards the horns’ swirling climactic “Swan Hymn” in the final movement. What this performance didn’t fully grasp was the minutiae, the details required to give a buzz, to animate what otherwise become neutered textures. Wigglesworth seemed content to leave these largely unattended, offering a bland landscape in its wake. There was enough colourful initiative from the SSO itself to maintain interest, and the overall framework of the symphony was proportionately satisfying. But Sibelius is much more than that, as SSO audiences of old know well.

Ken Walton

This concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and is available on BBC Sounds for 30 days