RSNO / Sondergard
Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
It could be a fanciful notion, but the briefest work in the RSNO’s diverse programme may have held the key to it. Mendelssohn’s Overture to Son and Stranger is obscure because the music-theatre work it prefaces was never intended for more than domestic purposes, to amuse family and friends.
The overture is a bright, lively six minutes for a small orchestra, instantly identifiable as the work of the composer, which prefaced Thomas Sondergard’s fine reading of Beethoven’s Symphony No 7 and followed a first half that had a distinct family feel.
It began with the first performance of a bespoke work for the RSNO Changed Voices, a choir of young men who have recently left behind the world of trebles and altos, which is celebrating its 20th birthday this year, although none of its current members will be of that vintage just yet.
For what also became a retiral present for its director since 2009, Frikki Walker, composer Cheryl Frances-Hoad and librettist Kate Wakeling collaborated with the young singers on You Have to be Realistic About a Perfect Day, its poetry derived from conversations in February, then set by the composer.
If the music was compelling, and followed a very readable arc from teenage angst to an energetic, colourful optimistic conclusion, its sumptuous orchestration also contrived to stay well out of the way of the young voices, which yet lack power. It was a singularly successful commission.
If any of that cohort of singers pursue a career in music, they may well learn the two famous numbers among Vaughan Williams’ setting of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Songs of Travel: opener The Vagabond and Whither Must I Wander?. On Saturday they were performed, alongside the other seven, by Swedish baritone Andreas Landin.
He was making his debut with the orchestra (and returns at the end of the month as one of the quartet of soloists for Mozart’s Great Mass in C) but knows Glasgow well, as he is the husband of Thomas Sondergard, now in his eighth season as RSNO Music Director, with six as Principal Guest Conductor before that.
Landin’s career is chiefly on the Scandinavian opera stage, where he is Don Giovanni soon, but he did not over-dramatise the Vaughan Williams songs, their orchestration by Roy Douglas as well as the composer but very much of a piece.
Heard in full, those familiar late Victorian party-pieces are balanced in the cycle by the more wistful Youth and Love and elegiac In Dreams and it was on those that the soloist’s voice, and especially his full-toned upper register, shone.
Sondergard’s Beethoven Seven was the final triumph of this eclectic evening, the main feature after a diverting supporting programme. With the orchestra’s core staff players in their places and no extras, this was a lean and vigorous RSNO, playing swift, clean, dynamic Beethoven. Sondergard took a brief pause before the Presto third movement, but otherwise it was a non-stop rendition of what is the composer’s most ebullient symphony. Those repeated swells of sound were always sharp-edged and the variations in tempi and volume flowed with eloquent precision.
Keith Bruce