VoxCarnyx

City Halls, Glasgow

AFTER the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s programme brochure went to press, someone must have done the sums and realised that Thursday’s concert as initially conceived would not fill its Radio 3 live broadcast slot.

The addition of Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin proved a truly excellent concert-opening bonus, but the sequence it began, while full of good things, made less sense than the published plan. The original opener, John Adams’ “fanfare for orchestra”, Short Ride in a Fast Machine, instead began the second half and was the weakest ingredient of the evening, its demanding percussion part not as precise as it needs to be – regardless of conductor Gemma New’s meticulous direction. She at least ensured that the engine never threatened to stall.

That blip was in contrast to the work that it had been intended to precede in the first half, Samuel Barber’s Symphony No 1. Almost exactly 90 years on from its completion, it remains an uncategorisable piece of Romanticism with a Modernist edge, bowling through the structure of a Classical symphony in a single arc, and ending with a nod to early music in a con moto passacaglia, its repeated bass-line building the tension superbly under New’s baton before being passed to the brass for the explosive finale.

Earlier delights in the performance included the variety of tone and dynamics in Gordon Rigby’s timpani and his three-way conversation with the basses and tuba, which followed a compelling cross-stage dialogue between trumpets and horns. A plangent solo from guest first oboe Emily Pailthorpe, a featured soloist in everything bar the Adams, was a highlight of the Andante tranquillo section.

The symphony is a full-orchestra work-out but the large string section (26 violins, 10 violas, 8 cellos and 6 basses) was on the platform throughout and as immaculately drilled in the Ravel, where the other voices included the crucial single trumpet in the third movement Menuet. New was true to the memorial purpose of the work – for friends lost in the First World War as much as Ravel’s composition predecessor – while never losing a crispness in the music, especially notable in her direction of the closing codas of the movements.

The concert culminated in Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2 with Italian soloist Alessio Bax, whose career flourishes on both sides of the Atlantic. The composer’s most integrated work for these forces, it saves any keyboard fireworks for the Allegro finale and Bax was not of a mind to put much showmanship into them. Instead this was a real ensemble performance, the pianist always attentive of his orchestral colleagues and the communication between himself and the conductor seamless, notably in the flurry of tempo changes at the end of the opening movement.

It was a beautiful account of a familiar work, if never heart-stopping, and Bax added a modest encore in a piece of Scriabin for left hand only.

Broadcast live on Radio 3 and available for 30 days on BBC Sounds. Concert repeated at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh on Sunday at 3pm.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Alessio Bax by Marco Borggreve