VoxCarnyx

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Most listeners have no problem liking George Gershwin and Sergei Rachmaninov – the headline composers here – but self-proclaimed “Bad Boy of Music” George Antheil still has the ability to divide opinion a century after the deliberate provocation of his Ballet Mecanique.

The judgement of history on his “Glandbook for a Questing Male” article for Esquire magazine is likely to be harsh, but his music, for all its cut-and-paste chaos, remains diverting and fun. In this hugely entertaining RSNO concert it also set the tone for the first half at least.

The orchestra’s Principal Guest Conductor Patrick Hahn was the piano soloist for Antheil’s A Jazz Symphony, composed in 1925, partly as a response to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and played here in the revised, rather more concise but  equally mis-named, 1955 revision.

It was great to hear Hahn displaying his pianistic chops on the challenging score, and the RSNO matched him – doubtless counting like mad – as the score sampled everything from Dixieland to big band to cabaret versions of the jazz idiom, careering wildly across them all at break-neck speed with many abrupt switches of pace and tempo.

On  the podium, and keeping the crazy vehicle on track, was German musician Frank Dupree who then – amidst much appropriate pantomime – became the piano soloist for his own arrangement of Gershwin’s own response to Rhapsody in Blue, his Piano Concerto in F, which premiered in New York in 1925.

Dupree’s “jazz trio” version is perhaps contradictory to the original’s symphonic ambitions, but works extraordinarily well on its own terms. Dupree was rarely heard on his own, with most of the solo piano part accompanied by the double bass of Jakob Krupp and the drums and cymbals of Obi Jenne, culminating in an extended last movement cadenza that incorporated a nod to Rhapsody in Blue itself.

In this orchestral democracy there was great support from the RSNO players too, with muted horn, three clarinets and especially first trumpet Chris Hart all on fine jazzy form. The encore – which we would surely have heard even if the audience reception had been more muted – was a rollicking take on Duke Ellington’s Caravan with Hahn, Dupree and his rhythm section joined by the entire percussion section, displaying amusingly diverse degrees of enthusiasm.

After the interval Hahn returned to the podium to direct an interpretation of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No 3, from 1935/6, that was significantly less a throwback to Romanticism than might have been anticipated. Its three movements each contain a reference to the piano-featuring Rhapsody that preceded it (the one on a Theme of Paganini) as if it too was making a more serious statement after the flash of its predecessor.

Those rhythmic signatures were especially clear in Hahn’s reading, as were the orchestration debts that the score owes to earlier 20^th century music, especially Debussy. The RSNO strings, under leader Igor Yuzefovich, delivered top-drawer playing, and the work emerged as every bit the equal of the much more frequently played Second Symphony.

Keith Bruce

Recorded by BBC Radio 3 for broadcast and available  for 30 days thereafter on BBC Sounds.