VoxCarnyx

City Halls, Glasgow

The fingerprints of the BBC SSO’s chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth were all over this Thursday matinee programme, but the man himself was not there, having called off unwell.

That was very sad for him, not least because a concert in which only the concluding work, Ravel’s La Valse, was at all well known, attracted a good-sized audience for what was a very thoughtful programme, with no fewer than three featured soloists, in which everything spoke eloquently to everything else.

Conductor Ben Glassberg, who stepped up to the podium at a week’s notice, can take a great deal of the credit for that success. He has built his growing reputation in the opera houses of Europe – most recently with Deborah Warner’s staging of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw in Rome – and will be back in the City Halls in March to conduct the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in a concert featuring saxophonist Jess Gillam.

Glassberg’s energetic marshalling of the huge forces required for some of the music was as impressive as his precision direction of the musical haikus of the last completed work by Oliver Knussen, O hototogisu!, for just two dozen musicians.

It paired soprano Claire Booth with the SSO’s principal flute Matthew Higham. Beginning and ending his evocation of the bird of the title (a Japanese cuckoo with an altogether more extensive vocabulary than the European one) by making his notes resonate beneath the lid of a concert grand, Higham’s duet with Booth was a conversational delight. This sort of thing may be meat and drink to her, but there are precious few sopranos who could tackle Knussen’s demands with such relaxed confidence.

The piece closed a first half which had begun with Knussen’s friend, Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, looking to Europe, and specifically Debussy, in his 1967 piece, Green. Ear-grabbing from the start with bold opening statements from the winds, brass and percussion in turn, Glassberg set out his stall in the opening bars and maintained his tight grip on the dynamics of the music throughout.

Maurice Ravel’s three-song cycle Scheherazade followed, setting texts by his contemporary Tristan Klingsor (aka Leon Leclere) that were inspired by Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral suite. That lineage reflected the structure of this concert programme in some ways, but there was also an audible kinship with the Knussen that followed, which also directly referenced the work of Takemitsu.

Booth was on imperious form in the Ravel, which is not often enough heard, moving from an opening role where she was almost part of the wind section (her carefully calibrated singing matched by the measured playing of first horn Chris Gough) to a terrific climax in the long first song when the executioner wields the “great curved sabre of the Orient”.

In an orchestra with many impressive guests in key front-desk positions (viola, trumpet and percussion among them) guest leader David Guerchovitch and first flute Eilidh Gillespie made telling contributions, while the hugely affecting closing song was all Booth, her French diction immaculate.

In what was luxury casting, the first work in the second half featured viola virtuoso Lawrence Power playing a work he has championed, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s On Opened Ground. With a big orchestra onstage once more, and further sonically-fascinating tuned percussion, this was another side of the composer from his operatic triumphs, although it was easy to hear Power as a characterful protagonist and the other instrumentalists as the chorus in the opening exchanges. The soloist produced a huge sound from his instrument, but the colourful orchestration was often just as arresting in the opening movement, Cadenza and Scherzino.

The second part, Interrupted Song and Chaconne, was more contemplative with Glassberg embodying the liquid rhythm to which it returns after an intense gun-shot climax.

That structure in some ways mimicked the closing Ravel. If La valse was originally intended as a tribute to Johann Strauss II, whose bicentenary has lately been marked, it travelled a long way to its very French finished form. With superb playing from the SSO strings, Glassberg shaped the work perfectly, from the basses’ opening pulse to the sparkling complex finish.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Claire Booth