VoxCarnyx

City Halls, Glasgow

At this year’s Edinburgh Festival, Head of Music Nik Zekulin was making no secret of his exasperation with the inability of audiences to switch off their mobile devices for the duration of a concert, Ryan Wang’s Chopin recital at the Queen’s Hall being only the most spectacularly disrupted.

Before the opening concert of the BBC SSO’s 90^th anniversary season, R3 presenter Gillian Moore made the usual plea for audience members to ensure their phones were silenced for the live broadcast, but Chief Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth was forced to halt the last movement of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No 3 and recap a few bars when a ringtone persisted beyond endurance.

It was, perhaps, small consolation, but the efficiency with which the interruption was dealt  spoke eloquently of the focus of players and conductor on the music. The impression that remains is of a sparkling and detailed account of the work with Wigglesworth steering its many changes of tone and direction with great style.

Without being quite as flamboyant, the symphony shares a lot of DNA with the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini that preceded it, the starring role of the piano instead shared across the orchestra. The SSO, with six guests in key positions, including leader Clio Gould, was full-sized for the first time in the evening and the big percussion section, five horns and brass all made their presence felt in the climax of a superb season-opening programme.

It had begun with the Scottish premiere of Wigglesworth’s for Laura, after Bach, his musical memorial to the orchestra’s former leader Laura Samuel, who died at the end of 2024. First unveiled at the end of July in the Royal Albert Hall, it is a work for string orchestra that the composer has spun from the Gigue in Bach’s Partita No 3, which Samuel recorded during her final illness. It is a captivating tribute, more celebratory than elegiac and should find a lasting place in the repertoire for its fascinating way with the source material.

The concert’s guest soloist was young violinist Daniel Lozakovich whom the orchestra first met in South Korea during its Proms tour there at the end of last year. He followed Schumann’s Violin Concerto with an encore of the Sarabande from Bach’s Partita No 2 in what was a particularly apt and lovely way to end the first half.

That addition spoke of Lozakovich’s keen musical intelligence, which had already been very evident from his performance of the concerto. Few violinists of his age and experience know this work as well as he clearly does and he and Wigglesworth shaped this performance to make the best case for it. The balance between soloist and orchestra was as perfect as one might hope, the slow movement a narrative of beguiling beauty from its opening dialogue with first cello Rudi De Groote, and the remarkably upbeat finale defying its tricky reputation.

Keith Bruce