VoxCarnyx

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

For the planners of this RSNO season opener, which paired Rachmaninov’s Fourth Piano Concerto and Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, how fortuitous might it have been for history’s sake had the latter composer once conducted the former as soloist in that very same concerto? 

Death got in the way, Mahler well gone by the time Rachmaninov penned his original version of the work in 1926, never mind its revised manifestation of 1941. For the record, Mahler did – in 1910 – conduct Rachmaninov as pianist/composer, in the more popular Third Piano Concerto at New York’s Carnegie Hall. By all accounts it was quite a show.

As was Saturday’s, given the spectacle of the vastly extended player numbers required for the Mahler symphony and the cornucopia of percussion additives, from shimmering cowbells to the gargantuan, cartoon-like mallet that signals the “blows of fate”. It was just a pity, due to hall’s difficulties in adding the regular stage extensions, that the orchestra was seated at ground level, limiting sight lines. Thankfully the sound quality was not affected.

That was certainly true of Russian pianist Alexander Malofeev, making his RSNO debut with a combination of electrifying virtuosity and sweeping poeticism. Where this concerto shoots off in directions that seem exploratory for Rachmaninov – harmonies that stretch tonality to the brink, melodies that wink at modernism, textures of uncharacteristic leanness – Romantic Russian blood still courses through its veins. Malofeev’s performance was as clean as it was powerful, effortlessly fiery and flamboyant in the outer movements, enchanting in the central Largo, supported crisply by conductor Thomas Søndergård and the orchestra.

The same calculated precision informed Søndergård’s vision of the Mahler, which bore a vivid transparency from the outset: neatly calibrated mood swings and tempo changes, and a perceived wish to let the often tortuous drama emerge unforced. Where that excelled was its focus on the intricacies, those jarring twists and turns that seem initially to challenge logic, yet somehow fall into place in the wider context. 

Such structured discipline lent the long opening movement a sense of gravitational solidity, scintillatingly precise, if a little understated emotionally. There was a sense, too, in the Scherzo that more could have been made of its side-stepping eccentricities, its parodic grotesquerie. The Andante moderato, though, was spellbinding, an oasis of relative calm amid the surrounding sea of brutal torment. The finale, devastatingly conclusive both in its apocalyptic climaxes and ultimate descent into nothingness, was a veritable tour de force.

It was a long evening, but one that set a high bar for the season ahead. It also provided a public opportunity, right at the start, for the chief executive of the Royal Philharmonic Society, James Murphy, to present RSNO chairman Gregor Stewart with the prestigious RPS Ensemble Award, won earlier his year by the RSNO for the extent, versatility and ambition of its creative operation. 

“Here is an orchestra firing on all cylinders, everything a 21st century orchestra should be,” Murphy announced, adding that the RSNO are the first symphony orchestra to win this award since 2014.

(Photo: Martin Shields)

Ken Walton