RSNO / Hahn
Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
The RSNO ends October with Shostakovich’s massive Seventh Symphony, the wartime ‘Leningrad’, and it began the month with the same composer’s Fifth, an ambiguous expression of the composer’s more personal battles.
Both works are presented in thoughtful contexts, the Fifth packaged with Schnittke’s Viola Concerto, from Soviet Russia half a century later and played by the master of the instrument Lawrence Power, preceded by Bach as reimagined at the end of the Second World War.
The popular arrangements of Leopold Stokowski, a British conductor who found huge fame in the USA, have long fallen from fashion in the face of global enthusiasm for historically-informed authenticity, so it was intriguing that the RSNO’s Principal Guest Conductor Patrick Hahn chose to begin his first concert of the new season with one of them.
Stokowski’s orchestration of the sacred song Komm, susser Tod could scarcely be further from today’s period instrument approach to the composer but worked beautifully here on its own terms, as an opening gambit by the RSNO strings, who would go on to have a sensational night, with the brass and winds joining in muted fashion. Far from saccharin, it made a real impact as a powerful opener.
After which the focus was on the lower strings of the orchestra, because Alfred Schnittke’s 1986 Viola Concerto dispenses with the violins altogether and asks for as many basses as there are cellos and violas, as well as piano, harpsichord and celesta and two sets of tubular bells.
Regardless of this singular sound-world, the focus is firmly on the soloist much of the time, and Power was predictably authoritative in his role, even as he was attentive to the ensemble, and especially Felix Tanner and the violas immediately behind him.
Schnittke’s music may be to some extent a technical exercise on a theme based on the letters of the name of the work’s dedicatee, Yuri Bashmet, but it is appreciable without knowing that for its dramatic explosions, skewed waltz and other vaguely familiar samples of music. While there is obvious drama in the soloist’s cadenzas, at other times it can be difficult to pinpoint the exact source of some theatrical sounds in what ends as a slightly disturbing listen.
Many have come to the same conclusion about the ambiguous triumphalism of the finale of Shostakovich Five, the composer’s famous response to Stalin’s criticism. Hahn let the music do its work there, having prepared the way perfectly. There was no sense of foreboding in the beautiful string playing of the opening movement, or indeed the more plangent third, although intimations of unrest from piano and brass were never far away.
The RSNO players revealed their own deep understanding of the piece in a superb collective performance with individual moments of excellence from leader Maya Iwabuchi, first horn Amadea Dazeley-Gaist, principal flute Katherine Bryan and harpist Pippa Tunnell, among many.
Keith Bruce
Picture by Clara Cowen