SCO / Kuusisto

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City Halls, Glasgow

Time and Tides was no ordinary Scottish Chamber Orchestra gig, nor was it a typical SCO audience. But then, when has the versatile Finnish musical phenomenon Pekka Kuusisto – violinist, director and funky entertainer – ever made claims to doing things the traditional way? In this, the last of his current four-programme residency with the orchestra, it was anything but business as usual.

Nor were we short-changed. As well as two astonishing UK premieres – former SCO associate composer Anna Clyne’s violin concerto and a new song cycle by Helen Grime, written 2023 and 2021 respectively – Kuusisto, doubling on violin and miniature harmonium, teamed up with Scots fiddler Aidan O’Rourke to introduce some of the traditional melodies used by Clyne in her concerto. Thus, perhaps, the reason for the wider-sourced audience, one that was encouragingly young and vocal. And there was more besides.

First and foremost, this was a programme devised with arched intent. It began with a hint of provocation, the curved-ball dissonant writing of Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür as witnessed in his orchestral piece Lighthouse. Its combination of harshness, meatiness and slithery translucence, also its retro-Baroque inflexions, makes for an atmospheric gem. Under Kuusisto, and with the assured SCO strings, it had a beguiling, delirious impact. 

At the other end of the evening came Einojuhani Rautavaara’s avian curiosity Cantus Arcticus, surreal in the way he overlays a luscious orchestral landscape with a cacophony of recorded birdcalls, but also a kind of traditional night cap bringing us back to earth after the concert’s central highlights.

As previously mentioned, Kuusisto’s plan was to ease us into the Clyne Concerto – Time and Tides – by way of a stylistic gear change, he and O’Rourke intimately calming the air with folk tunes from Scotland and Finland, joined ultimately by some upper string backing in close harmony. If physically it wasn’t the smoothest transition, it served its purpose, sharpening the sensitivities required to appreciate the multiplicity of Clyne’s folk-inspired creation. 

Written especially for Kuusisto, his eccentricities were exploited – his knack of whistling while playing, his unlimited vocabulary of violin/non-violin skills – and built into a glittering suite of five movements that embraced everything from zany pastiche and wit to reflective soulfulness and airy pastoralism. Within this, the integrity of Clyne’s chosen folk songs – from Scotland, Finland and America – remained hauntingly intact, especially when the players added their own singing voices to the closing mix.

Helen Grimes’ It Will Be Spring Soon – optimistic texts by Philip Larkin, Sandra Cisneros and Jane Hirshfield set to luminous, opulent music – was delivered engagingly by one of its dedicatees, soprano Ruby Hughes (the other being violinist Malin Broman, whose obligato role was conveniently taken here by Kuusisto). Written with echoes of Britten, Grimes creates a magical relationship between the sprightly strings/harp scoring and the soprano’s controlled intensity. 

Just how effective the foyer presence of DJ Dolphin Boy (Andy Levy) was during the interval likely depends on personal experience, but with him tucked almost anonymously into a tight corner along from the interval drinks, I’m guessing his efficient efforts may have passed some people by. Good idea; more a venue issue perhaps.

Ken Walton

RSNO / Søndergård

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Between them, the Mendelssohn siblings lived the aggregate equivalent of one lengthy life span: Felix shuffling off this mortal coil at the age of 38, his big sister Fanny in the same year, 1847, aged 41. Felix, as a man of his time, clearly got the better deal when it came to exposure as a composer, yet it’s often claimed that Fanny, had she been gifted a more even societal hand, would have been recognised as equal, if not better, in creative terms. It’s a moot point, though enough evidence of her talent exists to at least sustain the question.

One of these pieces is the Overture in C, her first orchestral work written as a married mother and therefore attributed to Fanny Hensel. A work of exceptional craftsmanship, neatly sculpted, engagingly tuneful and touched by a Weber-like sense of the theatrical, it was an energising springboard to a programme that would later end with one of her brother’s theatrically-inspired masterpieces. 

Music director Thomas Søndergård’s firm belief in it emerged instantly, a tropical warmth emanating from the strings, enhanced by a sweet, often playful interplay among the woodwind and brass, and a rhythmic energy that was excitedly crisp, precise and punchy. Moments passed where echoes of her brother’s lyrical virility took hold, and there were lengthy paragraphs where Beethoven’s ghost was the reference point, but there was never any denying the genuinely cohesive worth of this artful overture.

Saturday’s programme was also a showpiece for the RSNO Youth Chorus, currently flourishing under its director Patrick Barrett. They produced an absolute gem in the form of British-born composer James Burton’s The Lost Words, settings of poems from Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’ eponymous book mourning the loss in some dictionaries of certain childhood vocabulary: words like “Conker”, “Bluebell” and “Wren”. 

The vocal animation in Burton’s music, his sense of fun and pawky irony, is a perfect match for such young singers, who delivered its rhythmical jokes and stylistic variability – the whimsical word-play of Newt, the bluesy Bluebell, a wistful Willow and Disney-style Wren – with remarkably clear enunciation and accuracy. Though written five years ago, this was the first full performance of Burton’s orchestrated version, a luxuriously expanded illumination of songs that are so intrinsically characterful.

Returning to the Mendelssohn family, the concert ended with Felix’s atmospheric incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, featuring Scots actor Christine Steel as the lucid, unshowy narrator, the duetting charms of Carine Tinney (soprano) and Rosamond Thomas (mezzo-soprano) and once again the spritely voices of the Youth Chorus. 

Søndergård, like a veritable circus ringmaster, exerted immaculate control of his forces, the performance unfolding with impeccable timing, seamless tempi and generous sprinklings of musical fairy dust. Mendelssohn’s genius – his exquisitely detailed instrumental palette and the pertinent charm of the vocal writing – cast its exquisite spell.

Ken Walton 

Leif Ove Andsnes

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Perth Concert Hall

Composer and pianist Geirr Tviett is a problematic figure for Norwegians because of his association with the neo-Heathen nationalist movement and its links with the Quisling puppet-administration in the Second World War. Like his jazz pianist contemporary Tord Gustavson, however, Leif Ove Andsnes is concerned with what little of his music survives to be performed – almost all of it was destroyed in a fire at the composer’s home in the year both men were born.

In this recital, a UK exclusive performance from Andsnes in Perth, the pianist spoke to the audience only to give some of that background before playing Tveitt’s Sonata No 29, the sole surviving score of around 30 such works for the keyboard. Named “Sonata Etere” (Sonata of the ether), one of its distinguishing techniques requires the pianist to hold down a long block of notes with the left forearm while playing a staccato line with the right hand, each note resonating the harmonics of the depressed keys. The device is introduced in the variations of the second movement and then revisited at the end of the finale.

Those are the simplest and sparest moments of the half-hour work, which is highly virtuosic elsewhere. The opening movement is filled with unresolved tension, not unlike orchestral Shostakovich, while the edgy third, driven by a propulsive left hand, becomes a frenetic, even possessed, and then exhausted dance. In this player’s hands it was unarguably compelling.

Andsnes presented his countryman in the context of music that was often just as dark. Schubert’s 1823 Sonata in A minor, D784, seems to be the composer interrogating himself, or the universe, on the uncertain future, posing unanswerable questions and receiving the most tentative of replies. It too, ends in a troubled, frantic finale.

The later Impromptu No 1 in F Minor, D935, is superficially lighter but, like the contemporaneous song-cycle Winterriese, has a darker heart. Schubert is quite technically specific in his expressive instructions, and the pedal work of Andsnes was as precise as his eloquent fingering.

Apart from a Chopin Mazurka by way of a cheerier encore, the recital was completed by the late Brahms sequence Fantasien, Opus 116, Andsnes launching into them swiftly after the Schubert Impromptu and taking only small pauses between the three Capprici and four Intermezzi. If the first of the latter is quintessential late Brahms, sad and lovely, and the final one, in E Major, sounds like the careful tying up of loose ends of the narrative, the two between seemed startlingly modern in Andsnes’ reading. Here was Brahms foreshadowing the compositional journey of the 20th century, and influencing what we now know as The Great American Songbook.

From this great pianist these four works emerged as distinct, utterly enthralling stories in themselves. Since Perth’s superb hall was first opened almost 20 years ago it has provided some of the finest piano recitals Scotland has heard – and this was another to add to that distinguished list.

Keith Bruce

RSNO / Sondergard

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Lovers of French music can enjoy a purple patch of programming in Scotland, with the SCO combining Berlioz with more local fare in an “Auld Alliance” concert with Karen Cargill this month and the Hebrides Ensemble using the same title for a programme doing a similar thing with Debussy and Ravel at May’s Perth Festival.

The RSNO were first out of the blocks, however, with their evening showcasing French composers, although it ended up being rather briefer than planned. In Perth and Edinburgh, featured soloist Catriona Morison had sung Chauson’s setting of Maurice Bouchor, Poeme de l’amour et de la mer, as advertised, but she was too unwell to do so on a third night.

By way of what would have been a not unpopular substitute, ticket holders were advised that first flute Katherine Bryan would now be the soloist for Francoise Borne’s arrangement of the hit tunes from Bizet’s opera, Carmen. During the afternoon rehearsals of that piece, however, the flautist was taken ill, leaving the orchestra without both half an hour of music and its principal flute for the Debussy and Ravel in the rest of the programme.

It says a great deal for the strength-in-depth of Scotland’s musical community, and the RSNO in particular, that the concert we heard seemed so little compromised. Shifting Ravel’s Une barque sur l’ocean – the only one of the Miroirs piano works the master orchestrator fully scored – to open the programme, the impromptu flute partnership of the promoted Jenny Farley and sight-reading last minute recruit Adam Richardson were called on to play the evening’s first bars of music and they never looked back.

That piece was always intended as an appetiser for the work that now had the second half of the concert to itself, Debussy’s La mer. One of the most popular works of symphonic impressionism, every detail of this performance, from Henry Clay’s cor anglais solo at its opening to the huge brass climax at the end, was superbly played. Conductor Thomas Sondergard’s handling of the architecture of the work was absolutely masterly, that enticing first movement ending in particularly robust pizzicato basses and the central Play of the waves maintaining the lightest touches so that the finale could build with a marvellously-paced unfolding power.

Before the interval, the work that had been planned for the start of the concert actually found a more advantageous slot. Melanie Bonis has a novelistic life story and her music is ripe for rediscovery. A student of Cesar Franck at the Paris Conservatoire, she wrote a series of celebrations of “Femmes de legend” for piano at the start of the 20th century and her orchestrations of three of them – Ophelia, Salome and Cleopatre – were only published this century and premiered by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Jessica Cottis in 2015.

The resulting suite sat very comfortably in the exacting company of Ravel and Debussy because Bonis was a highly accomplished orchestrator herself. If her picture of Hamlet’s doomed girlfriend was more pastoral than tragic, Salome emerged as a saucy minx and the Eastern flavour continued in the very colourful, and more substantial, tone poem Le Songe de Cleopatre. Concerns that International Women’s Day can seem tokenistic can be overlooked when the result is the discovery of little-known gems like these.

Keith Bruce

SCO / Kuusisto

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City Halls, Glasgow

THREE centuries on from its first publication, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons has withstood any number of revisions and re-interpretations. At the end of May, the Perth Festival of the Arts has a concert by Il Giardino d’Amore which includes the responses of Astor Piazzola and Max Richter alongside the original, and Nigel Kennedy, who took it to the top of the charts in 1989, revisited it again a decade ago.

Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto is 20 years Kennedy’s junior, and his soloist foil in this concert with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Swedish cittern-player Ale Carr, is not yet 35. They share the sort of eclectic musical experience straddling the classical and traditional music worlds that made this version of the old warhorse work as fresh and vital as anyone might wish.

With the SCO string players around them, mostly standing, Kuusisto and Carr turned the suite into a folk session, combined with the rhythmic rigour of the best baroque ensemble practice. With the support of the SCO front-deskers, Marcus Barcham Stevens (concert-master this week), Max Mandel, Philip Higham and Gordon Bragg, Kuusisto’s direction moved seamlessly between the music Vivaldi wrote and a varied selection of other tunes, some from Nordic traditional sources as advertised, but others from nearer home or familiar in the concert hall. Unpicking this tapestry would be complex and pointless – the intention was to present the result as a whole, Kuusisto’s “shoplifting”, as he styled it, creating additional cadenzas for the 18th century Venetian suite.

Kuusisto is not the first musician to think that Vivaldi might benefit from the addition of a rhythm guitar, but Carr’s contributions on cittern went far beyond that, looking every bit the axe-hero in his leather trousers. The Finn’s additions to the score also included some choreographed page-turning and humming by the ensemble and gleefully embraced a car revving in Albion Street outside.

The Italian composer’s representation of bird song in The Four Seasons shaped the rest of the concert programme. Only listeners as old as this writer will immediately associate the opening of Respighi’s suite Gli ucelli (The Birds), which itself repurposes earlier music, with Arthur Negus and the BBC TV antiques show Going for a Song.

When Grieg’s Holburg Suite is so regularly trotted out, it is strange that we don’t hear this colourful work more often. It is a perfect partner for the Vivaldi, full of colourful pictorial writing, with lovely solos for flute and oboe in particular and harp and celeste decorating the superb orchestration you would expect from this composer.

The icing on the cake of this clever programme was Andrea Tarrodi’s Birds of Paradise. Daughter of trombonist and composer Christian Lindberg, the Swedish composer has, in fact, written a Four Seasons of her own. The orchestrated version of Birds of Paradise, originally for strings, requires some extended techniques on strings and winds alongside bowed percussion to produce startlingly accurate ornithological imitation.

It begins, contrastingly, with specific subdivisions among the string players in a structure of overlapping phrases that alludes to American minimalism but produces a very different sonic result. As a contemporary addition to the musical aviary the piece was a fascinating seven minutes.

Keith Bruce

Pictured: Ale Carr

BBC SSO / New

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City Halls, Glasgow

On the eve of International Women’s Day, here was a celebration of female artists, as well as a showcase for New Zealand (home of conductor and soloist) and of youth – the soloist and programme’s living composer both being in their 20s.

For those who could not be there in person, the concert was filmed for future screening on BBC4 as well as being broadcast live on Radio 3. That meant attention was paid to the lighting, with a back projection that vaguely suggested art nouveau roses, all of which mostly added to the occasion rather than being in any way distracting.

The opening orchestral collage by American composer Sarah Gibson, warp & weft, matched that floral image well. It is a celebration of domestic creativity, inspired by the artist Mirian Schapiro and full of original colours in the way it combines the instruments. With orchestral pianist Lynda Cochrane playing a treated Steinway, her hands inside the instrument as well as flying around the keyboard, principal percussionist Dave Lyons was also kept very busy. The opening tuneful flute line, underscored by the bass winds, was followed by equally prominent roles for clarinet and oboe, and the SSO strings needed to come up with a big rich sound to match all this activity – which they did.

That set the pattern for the rest of the evening, with conductor Gemma New encouraging some big screen welly from the strings for the vistas of Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto. It might be best to draw a veil over the initial shortcomings of the concert lighting on soloist Geneva Lewis, because that’s what it did to her face. Lewis is a tall young woman, and clearly that had been missed in the lighting design, although she was bathed in a lovely rosy glow. The 26-year-old is not a demonstrative player, but showed herself assertive enough as the piece unfolded, through the slow movement dialogues with the wind principals and especially in her crisp performance of the very fast finale.

New and Lewis observed distinct and deliberate pauses between the movements of the concerto and the conductor continued that practice after the interval in Brahms’ Symphony No 4. This was big-boned Brahms, but not missing any dynamic subtlety, and distinguished by the warmth of the SSO’s string sound in the City Hall when it is on its best form. Utterly different from the way the Scottish Chamber Orchestra played the same work in the same hall under Robin Ticciati, it was a magnificent success on its own terms.

New is a marvellously lucid conductor, fond of big gestures and quite balletic on the podium, but the most memorable moments of this interpretation were when she was almost still: in the questioning opening of the slow second movement and for the initial statement of the chords that will be the basis of the variations in the finale. Every work in this concert had a dramatic finish, but the tension created within the last movement of the Brahms reached a particularly cathartic climax in its coda.

Keith Bruce

The Bruce

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Dunfermline Abbey

In a remarkable example of serendipity, the first of the four performances of this new “cathedral opera”, composed by Kazakh student Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin as part of his doctorate and marking the 750th anniversary of the birth of Scottish hero King Robert the Bruce, landed on the 100th birthday of the current clan chieftain, Andrew Bruce.

The 11th Earl of Elgin and Kincardine was a guest of honour at the last of the four, in Dunfermline Abbey, where his illustrious ancestor is buried, and he must surely have been well-pleased with this remarkable new work. Abdyssagin, who turned 25 last month, is already a hero in his native land to judge by the air-time given to his work already on Kazakhstan TV. In this performance, however, he shared that status with the dozen young singers from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland who realised his score, and especially tenor Alfred Mitchell who sang the title role.

Not to rain on his parade, but the composer’s claim to have created a new genre of “cathedral opera” is pushing it a bit. What Abdyssagin has composed is to all intents and purposes an oratorio, and one in the established format of organ, choir and soloist, albeit that it was costumed, colourfully and with a healthy quotient of bling, from the Kate Kennedy Trust collection at St Andrew’s University. Britten’s church parables are also a clear antecedent.

Other crucial figures were conductor Lucy Callen and Professor Alan Riach of Glasgow University in the role of poet John Barbour, whose words supplied the libretto. He is also one of a long list of academic advisers the young composer credits as consultants for both the words and the music.

The former were selected from the Early Scots dramatic poem that first chronicled the exploits of King Robert, while the latter was uncompromisingly modern, drawing on contemporary writing for the pipe organ and played with superb fluidity by the composer himself. The power and complexity of the instrumental part was matched initially by Riach’s declamatory recitation and then in the dialogue with the choir, who were as often unaccompanied, with music that was full of challenging intervals and inventive cadences, multi-layered and very demanding.

The same could be said for the solo part which Mitchell tackled with admirable confidence and assurance, revealing a full-toned tenor voice, especially impressive at the top of his range. Abdyssagin had written increasingly complex ornamentation for him as the work progressed, but it was the relatively simple setting of the final couplet – translated by Riach as “Freedom gives solace to everyone, You live at ease when you live free” – that concluded the performance on a gentler and moving note.

It is 35 years since R. S. Silver’s play The Bruce did not materialise at the 1989 Edinburgh International Festival, despite director Frank Dunlop’s enthusiasm for it. A bold promoter would book a Fringe run for this new Bruce and give this year’s programme some meaty tourist-fodder.

Keith Bruce

Pictured: Allan Riach, Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin and Alfred Mitchell with the RCS ensemble

Scottish Opera: The French Collection

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

It’s true what Scottish Opera’s music director Stuart Stratford said in his introduction to The French Collection: that the French really know how to do passion with nuance. He was conducting the Orchestra of Scottish Opera and a superbly-matched solo vocal quartet in a programme of operatic excerpts representative of the 19th century French lyric tradition that more than proved his point.

It was, first and foremost, a showcase event for the orchestra, iridescent and often lusty scores giving them plenty to get their teeth into. On their own, in the boisterous Fête Polonaise from Chabrier’s Le roi malgré lui that set the ball rolling, they unleashed a feisty exuberance in this intoxicating soup of punchy fanfares, rhythmic eccentricities and schmaltzy dance. Complementing that as a second half opener, the exotically wild Bacchanale from Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila, with its in-vogue orientalism, oozed sensual enchantment. 

But it was with the singers, and two substantial Goethe-inspired chunks of Massenet and Gounod, that this concert really took flight. Scots mezzo-soprano Catriona Morison set the ball rolling as Charlotte in part of Act III from Massenet’s Werther, a character tortured by doubt, Morison’s rich mezzo penetrating the very heart of her dilemma in tandem with tenor Alok Kumar’s impassioned Werther. Soprano Alexandra Lowe allowed her sparkling vocal acrobatics as Sophie (Charlotte’s sister) to introduce a lighter hue.

The mainstay of the second half was from another Act III, this time Gounod’s Faust, in which Faust (Kumar) makes advances on Marguerite (Lowe) on the advice of Méphistophélès. The latter was sung by Roland Wood, fresh from the title role in Scottish Opera’s recent hit production of Jonathan Dove’s Marx in London!, and a last-minute stand-in for advertised bass Callum Thorpe. 

Kumar’s and Lowe’s big opening arias cemented the sexual tension from the outset, ardent and seductive, sumptuously enhanced by Stratford’s sharpening and shading of the orchestral colours and the music’s rhythmic elasticity. Wood may have been reading from a score (understandably), but his portrayal, offsetting mischief with menace, captured the essence of his character. And Morison was there again (as she will be later this week with the RSNO), revealing a wittier dimension to her persuasive stage armoury as the scheming Marthe.

Adding further to the programme’s bipartite symmetry, the two male soloists signed off the first half with Bizet’s well-worn duet from Les pêcheurs de perles, while the female twosome added the unscheduled Flower Duet from Delibes’ Lakmé as a second half encore. All in all, a perfectly balanced programme all the more special for the impressive calibre of its delivery.

Ken Walton

SCO / Borrani

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City Halls, Glasgow

So you think you know Beethoven 7? Think again, because the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s latest guest leader/director, Lorenza Borrani, can make you hear one of the most popular symphonies in the classical canon with fresh ears.

The over-cited opinion of Richard Wagner that it is “the apotheosis of the dance” – quoted in full in the concert programme – is nonsense word salad (in English anyway) when presented alongside a performance which made the point from the first chord, which sounded uncannily like a fiddle orchestra embarking on a set of reels. Borrani is the apotheosis of what a player/director should be, the eyes of all the musicians – and many in the audience for that matter – on the concertmaster and her eloquent bow.

For faithful SCO-followers – a growing band if this fine Glasgow concert attendance is any indication – Borrani was instantly recognisable as having been the guest leader for previous principal conductor Robin Ticciati’s memorable cycle of Schumann symphonies, recorded on the local Linn label. The pandemic postponed plans for her debut directing the orchestra, but it should be a regular feature of SCO seasons from now on. Borrani’s understanding of the significance of the space between the notes in Beethoven’s score, of the spicy rhythms of the music and the precision gradations of the dynamics were all served with ensemble precision that was at times quite startling.

Of course the SCO’s excellent winds brought their A-game to the performance, but it was the strings that really shone in Borrani’s reading, with a particular swinging, legato approach from the lower strings and especially the cellos, that was simultaneously quite different and clearly absolutely correct . The section’s four note phrase towards the end of the opening movement and the theme at the start of the Allegretto second movement set the pattern for an approach that was sustained throughout the  work. The energy of the scherzo and syncopation of the finale occasioned wide smiles both on stage and in the auditorium.

This revelatory account of the Seventh Symphony was preceded by a first half similarly full of fascination. Borrani’s selection of seven pieces by colourful 20th century Venetian Bruno Maderna from his reworkings of the 1501 collection Odhecaton suggest that she is very much a fellow-traveller with SCO principal conductor Maxim Emelyanychev. As violinist Siun Milne put it in her amusing spoken introduction to the concert, the invention of the printing press meant this collection of early music “went viral” (in contemporary parlance) at the start of the 16th century. Maderna’s arrangements, while faithful to the originals, recasts them for modern instruments in what was plainly a fun exercise for composer and players alike.

It would be wrong to say the same thing of Gustav Mahler’s orchestral arrangement of Beethoven’s “Serioso” String Quartet for the Vienna Philharmonic, even if the composer’s purpose was similar. Whether Mahler’s treatment of the dense work enhances the quartet in any way is still debatable, even if David Matthew’s performing edition has rescued it from obscurity. The power and concentration of the piece survives, but the sharp edges are perhaps dulled.

What is beyond debate is that the resulting score sounds fiendishly difficult to play with the level of ensemble coherence Borrani and the SCO strings brought to the project. The slow movement, unsurprisingly, sounded the most Mahleresque, but the way the players rose to the challenge of the phrasing and rhythms of the faster music was more impressive.

Keith Bruce

BBC SSO / Chauhan

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City Halls, Glasgow

At least the errant mobile phone momentarily delaying the opening of Bruckner’s Symphony No 9 in D minor was in the right key. If audible to those listening at home to the live Radio 3 broadcast, be assured this belligerent and persistent D was not part of the some newly discovered revision of the symphony by a composer prone to such second thoughts. That, of course, could never be in this case here, as he died before completing this final symphony.

As it happened, Thursday’s conductor Alpesh Chauhan was quick-thinking. He not only waited for the ring tone to cease, but had the presence of mind to segue perfectly into the trenchant solemnity of Bruckner’s opening movement, effectively creating art out of an accident. (The last time I witnessed something like this was with the same orchestra in a Mahler Symphony, where the lonesome final note on double basses was matched uncannily by a passing plane, the inevitable Doppler effect unfortunately turning fortuitousness into farce.)

That aside, this was a Bruckner bicentenary performance by the BBC SSO that made its own luck. Chauhan weighed in with bullish bravado, which ensured the symphony’s mountainous peaks towered magnificently over the expansive landscape. At the other end of the spectrum he stood back from the fray, tempting the strings in particular to voice their own verdant response to the lower-lying pastures. But the middle ground was messy, imperfections of tempo change, attack and intonation (especially the woodwind), that emphasised the potential pitfalls of Bruckner interpretation, and the need for an unstoppable sense of trajectory to counter the composer’s block-like mentality.

To his credit, Chauhan’s Scherzo was a particular delight, its puckish Trio sounding like Prokofiev before his time. Either side, the extant outer movements acted as solid bookends, as cathartic as they were despairing. The hushed conclusion had question mark written all over it. Had he lived, where would Bruckner have taken us next?

Chauhan had already taken us to Italy and Russia, opening with two Puccini Intermezzi from his operas Madama Butterfly and Manon Lescaut before charting unfamiliar Tchaikovsky territory in his symphonic fantasy Fatum (Fate), a work the composer chose to destroy after its second performance, but which was reconstructed after his death. Thankfully so, for it is particular interesting, its heraldic power-driven unisons and punctuating ballistic chords not unlike a Puccini opera opening. We heard a volatile work, heated and febrile, if swithering ambivalently between operatic and symphonic ambitions. 

No such question with the Puccini, though aspects of Chauhan’s performances seemed emotionally constrained in this concert hall context. The Madama Butterfly Intermezzo opened magnificently, its heaving expectant anacrusis giving way to swooning lyrical enchantment and exotic colours, the players adding whistling to emulate the twittering birds. Principal cellist Rudi de Groote’s molten solo, in particular, set in motion a moody Manon Lescaut extract, even if later tutti moments seemed tempered by ragged entries. Nor, to be honest, did this performance absolutely capture the all-pervading resonance and glow Puccini’s music ought to inspire.

Ken Walton

This concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, and is available for a further 30 days on BBC Sounds. The SSO performs Bruckner 9 again at The Glasshouse (formerly The Sage), Gateshead, on Sunday 3 March

The Wallace Succession

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As he steps down as chairman of The Glasgow Barons, retirement is still a no-no for John Wallace, he tells KEN WALTON. He’s even been writing operas about Nicola Sturgeon and Joe Biden.

It’s ten years since John Wallace retired as the pugnacious principal of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Far from sailing off into the sunset, and now fast approaching his 75th birthday, the tireless Fifer – best known for his starring trumpet solo alongside Dame Kiri Te Kanawa in Handel’s Let the Bright Seraphim at the 1981 Royal Wedding – is busier than ever. “I suppose I’ve semi-retired,” he concedes. “I now watch things like Death in Paradise on telly.”

Mostly, though, he’s doing the things he enjoys doing when he wants to. Given the extent of that – chairing arts bodies and think tanks, running and performing in his longstanding brass ensemble The Wallace Collection, composing operas, masterminding school educational programmes in Fife through St Andrews University where he holds an honorary professorship – this is what most of us would consider full-time employment.

This week, he steps down after seven years as chair of Glasgow Barons, the groundbreaking music-based regeneration programme in Govan founded and run by another tireless Scot, conductor Paul MacAlindin, the centrepiece of which is the project’s eponymous orchestra. 

“Paul is a genius at getting things going among locals in this former shipbuilding town,” he says. “For a start he actually lives there, so understands the problems first hand. Besides the orchestra, which has done so much for new music and Scottish composers, the project has its own choir and goes into schools with its Baby Strings and Baby Brass programmes. Its Musicians in Exile initiative has been phenomenally successful in giving asylum seekers a sense of integration and belonging.”

On Thursday, Wallace himself will direct his farewell concert, which reflects the very essence of the Barons’ successes. It features The Wallace Collection alongside Govan’s century-old Cooperation Band in Govan Linthouse Parish Church. Included is a performance of Jay Capperauld’s As Above So Below, written for the 2017 Cumnock Tryst Festival where it was premiered by The Wallace Collection and Ayrshire’s famous Dalmellington Band. 

“The balconies in Govan are perfect for the spatial element of this piece”, says Wallace, as they will also be for Derek Bourgeois’ Concerto for Brass Quintet and Brass Band, and Wallace’s full band arrangement of Giovanni Gabrieli’s polychoral Sonata No 20. 

He’s quick to stress that far from being the end of an era, there’s an element of transition attached to his departure. One of his Wallace Collection colleagues, fellow trumpeter Bede Willliams, is to take on the vacant chair. “Like all New Zealanders, he’s very get up and go. He has a lively interest in new music and in the social benefits music can have equally for younger and older people.” Williams is also head of instrumental studies at St Andrews University.

Nor is Wallace leaving to free up time for himself. “I’ve done seven years with Govan. It needs fresh energy. Rather than do another seven I felt it was time to cast around for younger blood.” Inevitably our conversation turns to certain American politicians who refuse to give way to younger blood. “Which brings us neatly to my operas,” chortles Wallace.

He’s keen to talk about a trilogy of short operas, the last of which – So Much Hot Air…… – features a certain Joe Biden, its title taken from actual words spoken by the US President at COP26 in Glasgow. The characters also include Boris Johnson and Greta Thunberg. “Boris’s words are all his, and for Biden I’ve scored in a tenor banjo to colour his music. Greta’s the only one who talks any sense so she’s surrounded by a combination of alto flute and harp.”

As for the earlier two operas, the first, Opsnizing Dad, deals with dementia and how healthcare might look by the end of this century. “My daughter-in-law had written this short story about dementia which won a prize. I thought it would be brilliant to set it to music, full of aphorisms and really concise.” The second, They Two Fush, is altogether more satirical, dealing with the recent infamous contretemps between Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond. “It’s a rather lurid comedy set in Nicola’s living room.”

Wallace has begun a recording process with Opsnizing Dad already committed to disc on his own label, complete with two preview tracks from They Two Fish – an “independence Tango” and the closing number, “Time for a cup of Tea”. Central to his preferred casting is Scots tenor and broadcaster Jamie McDougall. “I’d always imagined these operas as small things that would suit [Glasgow’s] Òran Mór or television, and with Jamie in my mind’s eye,” Wallace explains. “He’s such a fantastic character actor.  For the COP 26 opera, McDougall is perfect for the Boris role.”

It doesn’t bother him much that live performances are proving slow to materialise. Opsnizing Dad did receive one in St Andrews, and was even nominated in 2021 for an Ivor Novello Award. “I didn’t mind being beaten in the end by Thomas Ades, who couldn’t attend the ceremony because he was conducting his own opera that night at La Scala Milan. Such is the calibre of that particular pool, Ades in his great big ocean, me in my dub in Langside.”

And that’s the thing with Wallace, whose modesty comes with good humour. “I just get on with things, and once they’re done they’re past, and it’s time to get on with something else,” he chuckles. 

Which rather undersells his lifelong contribution to British music: the ambitious Fife kid who made it to King’s College Cambridge from Buckhaven High School; the trumpeter whose stellar orchestral career spanned principalships with the LSO, Philharmonia and London Sinfonietta; whose solo career saw him premiere trumpet concertos by Arnold, Maxwell Davies, MacMillan and Muldowney; whose leadership of the RCS led on to his influential spearheading of the Music Education Partnership Group, which continues to influence political support for music tuition in schools; who late in life has returned to composition – including the completion and recording of a monumental Symphony for Brass Band he began as a student – and is just as content working with school children in Fife as performing with The Wallace Collection on the world’s stage. 

Will he ever fully retire? “I don’t think so,” he muses. “I’m like a musical lollipop man now, trying to guide kids repeatedly across the same crossing. Them getting so much joy from their music gives me satisfaction. Unless I’m happy in myself, I’m never happy. Right now, I’m happy!”

John Wallace’s Glasgow Barons’ Farewell Concert featuring the Wallace Collection and Cooperation Band is at Govan Linthouse Parish Church on Thu 29 Feb 7.30pm. Full details at www.glasgowbarons.com 

For information on CDs by The Wallace Collection, including the opera Opsnizing Dad, go to www.thewallacecollectionshop.world

SCO / Emelyanychev

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City Halls, Glasgow

The music commentary cliché “luxury casting” is usually wheeled out to describe starry concert performances of operas like those that have distinguished Edinburgh International Festivals in recent years, but it seems appropriate to dust it off for this concert, smaller in scale but no less spectacular in success.

As part of what is shaping up to be a very memorable 50th anniversary season, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra has a three-concert residency from Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto, and he will also be directing the other musicians onstage in the other two. For the first, however, the SCO’s equally individual and idiosyncratic principal conductor Maxim Emelyanychev was in charge (he is very rarely “on the podium”), only ceding that position to Kuusisto for a specific moment around the cadenza of Magnus Lindberg’s Violin Concerto.

If there were any risks in having two such powerful personalities share the platform, the result was only positive. The Lindberg is a very clever, demanding work, using a Mannheim Mozart ensemble to create uncompromisingly 21stcentury music, and it requires both a rigorous strict time conductor and a virtuoso soloist – being both at the same time would be impossible.

Although he did not give the New York premiere, Kuusisto is surely the perfect soloist for the work, dealing with its technical demands – not least in that cadenza – almost playfully, but also finding emotional depth alongside its theatricality.

There was an element of theatre in the presentation of the entire programme, albeit a subtle one. From the positioning of the players for the four movement suite of music from Faure’s Pelléas et Mélisande, basses at the back and clarinets off to the right, through to the extra strings added for Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony, the music of his Eighth String Quartet in the 1967 arrangement by Rudolf Barshai, this was a concert always in a state of flux and without a single superfluous ingredient.

That was most obvious in the smallest ensemble of the evening, for Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks, where 15 musicians huddled around Emelyanychev, unusually perched on a stool, in the centre of the stage. Here that starry cast also included the five wind soloists, but elsewhere the spotlight fell as often on the strings, with cellist Philip Higham having a particularly prominent – and practically perfect – night.

The programme was a profound repertoire statement from a conductor, and indeed an orchestra, more readily associated with earlier music. It was, beyond debate, world class in execution and a magnificent statement of the range of the SCO’s capabilities.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Christopher Bowen

BBC SSO / Berglund

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City Halls, Glasgow

Previous attempts by Norwegian conductor Tabita Berglund to debut with the BBC SSO were scuppered due to Covid-related issues. Last week in Glasgow and Perth, however, things finally came together and the rising star and former cellist directed a substantial crowd-pulling programme of Dvorak and Tchaikovsky, prefaced by a short opener by the mildly eccentric 20th century composer Geirr Tveitt as a kind of musical visiting card from their shared homeland.

Also from Norway was cellist Truls Mørk featuring as soloist in Dvorak’s Cello Concerto. For some reason, what should have been a significant highpoint in the programme never quite got off the ground. There was a cloud of disquiet pervading this performance, slow to assert itself, unsettled in tempi, with suspicions of panic in terms of aligning the orchestra with Mørk’s sometimes wayward intentions. Berglund seemed slow to anticipate, resulting in misfired coordination, and too often allowed the brass overwhelming free rein. Even where Mørk spun his signature magic, an air of tension hovered menacingly.

Best to discard that as a momentary glitch, for what surrounded the concerto revealed Berglund to be someone in full command of her thoughts and her ability to engage with the players. Tveitt’s gorgeous orchestral realisation of the Norwegian Hardanger folk tune Vélkomne med æra (a song to welcome guests at harvest time) cast an instant spell, its tranquil impressionism and rippling colours evoking a fireside warmth. Berglund caressed its gentle contours and fluid textures, drawing pulsating heat from the sumptuous SSO strings and reduced woodwind. 

She ended with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 5, presenting this symphonic warhorse as if the wrapping had been removed for the first time. It was remarkable for its lucidity, particularly the main thrust of the opening movement which was refreshingly light-footed but still robust in its message. The third movement Valse unfolded with effortless glee, and the finale never once succumbed to thick-set overindulgence. Here, the brass redeemed themselves with well-tempered precision. Only the slow movement lacked in melodic character, though effectively acknowledging the febrile mood shifts at its centre. 

The Dvorak aside, this was an impressive SSO debut for Berglund. There’s an honesty in her musicality – already witnessed in an earlier appearance with the RSNO – that points to an promising future. And going by the unending cheers that greeted her in Glasgow on Thursday, she already has a raucous Scottish fan club. They’ll want her back!

Ken Walton

Thursday’s Glasgow concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and is available for 30 days on BBC Sounds.

BBC SSO / Morlot

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Eden Court, Inverness

It’s been four years since the BBC SSO last visited Inverness, but its audience has not lost interest. A well-packed Eden Court Theatre greeted the SSO’s return on Friday, and a programme that on paper might have seemed a random assemblage of Puccini, Tchaikovsky, Panufnik and Rachmaninov, but which in practice proved engaging, colourful and purposeful.

Much of that was down to a conductor who wasn’t meant to be there in the first place. As a last-minute replacement for the indisposed Valentina Peleggi, Ludovic Morlot – currently music director of the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra, and latterly of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra – struck a rapport with the SSO that was so natural and flowing you’d have thought they were meant for each other.

There was glowing tenderness in a little-known Puccini opener, his Preludio sinfonica, written while a student in 1882, which angles towards the emotional heat of La Boheme but with a cooler  countenance that Morlot coaxed out clearly and calmly. Even with the mild challenge of the dryish Eden Court acoustics, there was a simmering sumptuousness, particularly from the strings, in a performance that smoothly negotiated its shifting contours.

It was the perfect appetiser, too, for Tchaikovsky’s Dante-inspired symphonic fantasia Francesca da Rimini, on one hand the hell-raiser you’d expect from a depiction of Dante’s second circle of hell, on the other an impassioned love story. Morlot captured that equivocation, its wild, impatient frustrations of a stormy background allayed by the sensuous allure of the lovers. Here, the acoustics suffocated to some extent the amplified glow this music breathes, though not so much as to quash its tempestuous exhilaration.

The songs of Alma Mahler, wife of Gustav, with their rare beauty and poetic depth, have only recently come to prominence through recordings. Roxanna Panufnik has recast three of them – Hymne, Ansturm and Hymne an die Nacht – as re-imaginations for orchestra. Or, as she calls them in quasi-Mendelssohn terms, Alma’s Songs Without Words. 

She doesn’t hold back, applying harsher layers of sound to climactic points than you might expect, given the golden sumptuousness of Alma’s expressive style, but Panufnik does offer so much in the way of imaginative colour – from hazy atmospherics to busily entwined melodic tapestries – that there is an unceasing sense of genuine discovery. Morlot took that in hand and moulded a sequence that was both thrilling and reflective.

It might seem unusual to finish a programme with Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2, but few will have regretted having pianist Boris Giltburg’s towering performance as the memory to carry home. His wasn’t a typical account, more a heightened personal viewpoint that set out to challenge the accepted rhetoric of this popular warhorse. It was clear from Morlot’s intense concentration that he, too, was prepared for the unexpected. Such a duelling sense of danger added significantly to the theatre of the performance.

Giltburg’s playing was bold and gestural, radiant flourishes accented by a tendency to play provocatively with the tempi, though never to the point of disruption. Inner textural gems were projected unexpectedly, adding that element of surprise and delight, which the SSO responded to with equal suppleness and sparkle. Inevitably, Giltburg responded to the cheering audience reaction with an encore, and again – in Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C sharp minor – showed that he only does things his own way. 

Ken Walton

Thursday’s Glasgow performance of the same programme is available to listen to on BBC Sounds

Marx in London!

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Theatre Royal, Glasgow

There’s a craftsmanship throughout Jonathan Dove’s operatic scores that is both cinematically detailed and musically invigorating. Marx in London!, written originally for its German premiere in 2018, and which Scottish Opera this week introduced to the UK, upholds these qualities. Just as importantly, it’s a rib-tickling night out.

In mounting the UK premiere, Scottish Opera has brought together the tried and tested creative partnership of Dove and stage director Stephen Barlow, both of whom gave Scotland a memorable production of Dove’s Flight in 2018. That was set in an airport. Marx in London! covers a day in the life of Karl Marx, set in his London home and playing to a side of Marx that was, if we are to believe it, more Groucho than Karl. 

It’s a madcap comedy centred on the accepted belief that the famous German political philosopher, while sternly didactic in his social theories, was an absolute catastrophe when it came to mundane domestic responsibilities. What’s more, Scottish Opera gave the green light to Barlow to create a brand new production, having adjudged the original Bonn production, which didn’t involve him, short of the mark. 

The result is exuberant, quirky, action-packed and wickedly ridiculing, hitting somewhere between Mozartian opera buffa and Springtime for Hitler. Marx is broke, bailiffs empty his house, he’s party to convoluted sexual entanglement involving his wife, the housekeeper and, it transpires, a son Freddy courtesy of the latter. 

Charles Hart’s libretto is bullet-like, Barlow’s direction is ceaselessly inventive, Yannis Thevoris’ playful designs bear an animated picture book charm, Kally Lloyd-Jones’ choreography bristles with irony – all embracing Dove’s music, which is vigorously minimalist in essence.

Not one of this cast fails to honour the challenge. Central to that is Marx himself, baritone Roland Wood’s portrayal ricocheting from one bumbling escapade to the next, comical with the merest hint of sage. He’s to some extent swamped by the people and events surrounding him: long-suffering wife Jenny (the passionately-voiced, ultimately Brünnhilde-like, Orla Boylan), flighty daughter Tussi (her vocal acrobatics sung fearlessly by coloratura Rebecca Bottone), enigmatic housekeeper Helene (the warm-hearted mezzo voice of Lucy Schaufer), the searching young Freddy (played engagingly by William Morgan), and a stoically forbearing Friedrich Engels (sung by tenor Alasdair Elliott).

A confection of characters sharpen the periphery, among them Jamie MacDougall’s prowling Prussian Spy and John Malloy’s indignant pawnbroker. The chorus add vocal girth to well-engineered high points. Conductor David Parry – another seasoned Dove collaborator – ensures the music’s cut and thrust does its vital job, realised by a Scottish Opera Orchestra in truly vibrant form.

It’s a show that knows exactly how to celebrate slapstick, satire and farce without veering towards the ridiculous. And guaranteed, you won’t take Marx seriously ever again.

[Photo credit: James Glossop]

Ken Walton 

Further performances in Glasgow (15 & 17 Feb); and in Edinburgh (22 & 24 Feb)

SCO: The Great Grumpy Gaboon

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Perth Concert Hall

ALL orchestras have education and outreach departments these days, but the Scottish Chamber Orchestra was a trail-blazer with admired initiatives from its earliest days. So it is more than fitting that its 50th anniversary season  should include another ground-breaking project.

The orchestra’s current composer-in-residence Jay Capperauld has achieved something very special with the 45 minute piece he has written for young people. Not only are the tastes of his target audience of four to eight year-olds not fully-formed, but it is also impossible to predict what music they will have been exposed to at home or at nursery and primary school.

Capperauld’s solution is to cover many possibilities. The suite of music he has written for this collaboration with story-teller and illustrator Corrina Campbell includes a little of everything. It opens with a Broadway-like overture, and includes a fair amount of jazz-inflected material, but there are also moments of Scottish traditional fiddle and ceilidh reels, a journey through the countryside with an English pastoral feel, and a drum-kit-led big band excursion. There are many clap-along moments in the score, which suited the very young audience as much as the slapstick action on stage.

Those performances are the other remarkable element of The Great Grumpy Gaboon. Aside from an effective but never intrusive voice-over by director Chris Jarvis, there are no extra performers in this SCO project. Although the bulk of the orchestra are in concert black attire, seven players, alongside conductor Gordon Bragg, are named characters in the narrative, with extravagant head-gear, props and costumes, and a very mobile approach to playing their instruments.

The title role is played by first bassoon Cerys Ambrose-Evan and that rhyming with their instruments is carried through the others, excepting her nemesis, Screature, played by bassist Nikita Naumov. If such expansive performance seems in character for some of the players, regular concertgoers will see long-serving first trumpet Peter Franks and principal flute Andre Cebrian in a new light.

There are details in the narrative that probably don’t come across as they should just yet, and the message of the story (“be kind”, basically) probably escaped a fair percentage of the audience at the first performance, but it is impossible to fault the gusto with which the musicians went about their extra-musical work, with daft dancing, silly clowning and roaming into the auditorium all part of the show.

Without a shadow of a doubt The Great Grumpy Gaboon will get slicker, and the orchestra has clearly invested in it with an eye to many future performances. What is beyond argument is that Capperauld has given the SCO a score that makes the effort completely worthwhile.

Keith Bruce

Dunedin Consort: Leipzig 300

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Perth Concert Hall

During his pre-concert remarks, Dunedin Consort director John Butt implied that this early 2024 recreation of what Johann Sebastian Bach was composing exactly 300 years ago in Leipzig may be the beginning of a longer exploration of his cycles of weekly-composed cantatas. If so, the first one was perhaps undersold as an excellent start to the project, bringing together the University of Glasgow professor’s universally-admired scholarship, a quartet of fine singers and an expanding ensemble of versatile instrumentalists.

As is well known, Bach was third choice for the Leipzig composer and choirmaster job, and Butt presented three of his cantatas performed at the start of 1724 alongside works by the other two, Christoph Graupner’s eight-movement Ouverture in E flat major preceding Telemann’s Viola Concerto in G, with Telemann’s setting of a German paraphrase of Psalm 100 between two of the Bachs in the second half.

Of the singers, bass Matthew Brook had the best of the night, with the Telemann cantata, a “voice of God” aria accompanied by oboes d’amore in Bach’s Jeus schlaft, was soll ich hoffen (BWV 81), the opening Recitative in Gleichwie der Regen und Schnee von Himmel fallt (BWV 18), and the opening Aria of Leightgesinnte Flattergeister (BWV 181), which he attacked with articulate verve. (If there was some numerological significance to the coincident recurrence of the digits in the catalogue numbers, Professor Butt was silent on that point.)

The other voices – soprano Julia Doyle, mezzo Helen Charlston, and tenor Nicholas Mulroy – each had their own solo high spots, including Doyle’s aria Mein Seelenschatz ist Gottes Wort, Charlston’s Wohl mir, mein Jesus spricht ein Wort and Mulroy’s Der schadlichen Dornen unendliche Zahl, where his duet partner was leader Huw Daniel’s expressive violin.

The four also combined expertly in the chorales, led by Doyle, and the tempi Butt found for those were always revealing – rarely do the chorus hymns sound so much part of the shape of the cantatas as they did here.

That rhythmic assurance was just as impressive among the instrumentalists, from the opening Graupner suite with its pizzicato passage and finale full of changes of pace, through violist John Crockatt’s solo turn on the Telemann concerto, to the superb continuo playing in the closing Bach, cellist Jonathan Manson on crisp, precise form as usual.

As well as playing the oboes, Oonagh Lee and Frances Norbury provided the recorders Bach added to the score of BWV18 for its Leipzig outing, where second violins Anna Curzon and Emilia Benjamin switched to violas, the only cantata Bach wrote requiring four of them, and no fiddles.

With the natural trumpet of Paul Sharp joining the ensemble later, the sonic palette was constantly finding new colours in a programme that showed exactly how music was developing three centuries ago. As is the practice of this ensemble, that lesson was always as entertaining as it was educational.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Julia Doyle by Louise O’Dwyer

SCO / Leleux

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City Halls, Glasgow

A familiar presence at Scotland’s orchestral concerts into his 90s, Hedley Wright, who died last year, was also one of Scottish music’s great philanthropists, both in cash and in gifts for performers and promoters of the Springbank whisky produced in Campbeltown by the family firm.

Last week’s Scottish Chamber Orchestra concerts were dedicated to his memory and, as he sponsored the orchestra’s first oboe chair for many years, appropriately featured that instrument. French oboist Francois Leleux was conductor and soloist but it was the holder of that chair, Robin Williams, who had the first solo word in Mozart’s Symphony No 25, the G Minor work he wrote on his return to Salzburg from Vienna in 1773.

If, as has been suggested, the piece documents the teenage composer’s first heartbreak, Leleux certainly made the case for the symphony as an early Romantic work, but without sacrificing any of the SCO’s Classical precision.

Leleux’s own arrangements of arias from Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute opened the second half of the concert, a delightful bit of bold appropriation of the music for his own instrument. The two Papageno songs in particular were treated in a theme-and-variations fashion, becoming show-off party-pieces for oboe – part juke box, part musical box.

The other soloist in the programme was soprano Carolyn Sampson, in absolutely unmatchable form on the Berlioz cantata Heminie. As theatrical as everything the French composer wrote, it provided the musical theme for his masterwork, the Symphonie Fantastique, but is fascinating in its own right. Setting text by poet and playwright Pierre-Ange Vieillard it is the monologue of the titular Muslin princess, in love with Christian crusader Tancredi, the enemy of her people – Romantic story-telling that ranges from dramatic exclamation to anguished prayer. Sampson’s delivery of the composer’s response to the words was masterly, at ease with abrupt changes in tempo and bold leaps across her range. The cantata has an exquisite musical arc too, and the linking of its discrete sections by Leleux and Sampson became persuasively more fluid as the work progressed.

That sense of narrative continuity was also present in Leleux’s account of Ravel’s Ma mere l’oye (Mother Goose) which brought the concert to an end. Ravel’s response to the fairytales of Charles Perrault and Madame d’Aulnoy may be individually readable, with details like the clarinet as Beauty and contrabassoon as The Beast, but it is the use of the full range of instrumentation, including percussion details, harp and celeste, and solos from flute, piccolo and front desk strings, that make the orchestration of the whole work a compelling tale.

Leleux took a symphonic approach to the suite so that the full orchestral climax was a glorious finish to a very colourful, clever programme.

Keith Bruce

BBC SSO / Wigglesworth

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City Halls, Glasgow

As chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth’s programmes with the BBC SSO go, this was one of his most conservative offerings. Yet even with such loveable mainstream workhorses as Elgar and Brahms at its core, he threw in a fascinating new BBC commission – “An acre ringing, still” by Australian-born composer Lisa Illean – for good measure. As a substantial concert opener it provided food for thought – intrinsically beautiful but uniquely challenging, to some extent discomforting.

Scored for chamber orchestra, 11-piece “consort” and pre-recorded electronics, it’s a work defined by expressive containment, an ephemeral sound world played at minimal volume, with even its climaxes teasingly frustrated. Lasting around 20 minutes, that’s a powerful proposition, and this performance elicited the most magical, imaginative colourings, amplified paradoxically by their quiet intensity. That the electronic dimension was so subtly embedded within the textures as to be barely perceptible is a positive observation.

As for any discomfort, you could sense an acute tension within the audience, unused to such dogged musical hypersensitivity. The tiniest crinkle of a programme brochure, the practised tiptoeing of an usher, the squeak of a seat, even in this case the wagging tail of a guide dog seemed like a heightened sonic distraction. In a sense, we were asked to play our part, which was perversely exciting.

There was mild perversity, too, in the approach of Japanese soloist Dai Miyata to Elgar’s Cello Concerto, inasmuch as his was a highly personalised interpretation, generously poetic, but too often wildly poetic.

It was mildly unnerving in the opening minutes, where Elgar sets up his stall with gathering thoughts, but which needs a binding momentum to make directional sense. Miyata’s over-egging, and an initially lagged response from Wigglesworth, brought to mind Wilfred Owen’s “cursing through sludge”. Once free of that, the journey ahead was surer of foot. 

The best moments emerged in the sublime tranquility of the Adagio, its timeless opening theme, and in the closing moments of the finale, where – despite a sense that Wigglesworth was following rather than anticipating events, notably in the offbeat chords – a triumphant oneness and tempered resolve took hold.

Brahms’ Third Symphony was what you might term a “pipe and slippers” affair, fireside Brahms that seemed content to follow time-honoured interpretational traditions rather than chance anything more thought-provoking. Wigglesworth and the SSO gave a solid performance: casually-paced, heftily textured, sweeping but emotionally reserved in the outer movements, while recognising the lighter hues of the Andante and the gracious lyrical warmth of the gorgeous Allegretto. A fuller string sound would have better matched the substantiveness of the wind and brass, but for those who like their Brahms safe and reliable, this will have done the trick.

Ken Walton

This concert was recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3, when it will be made available on BBC Sounds for 30 days. A repeat performance takes place tonight (Friday 2 Feb) in Aberdeen Music Hall

BBC SSO / Volkov

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City Halls, Glasgow

HE may be long dead, and in his career as pragmatic as any composer in pursuit of a bawbee, but Igor Stravinsky was the most challenging and abrasive voice in Thursday evening’s concert reuniting the BBC Scottish with Principal Conductor Ilan Volkov for the first time in 2024.

Stravinsky’s Petrushka was the work in the second half and this was a glorious account of it, with marvellous playing all over the platform. It was the SSO strings that made the startling initial impression: muscular playing that was pin-sharp. That example was swiftly followed by their colleagues, either individually – Lynda Cochrane at the piano – or collectively in the brass and percussion departments.

Sitting between the Firebird and the Rite of Spring, the musical drama of Petrushka may be subtler but it is no less colourful storytelling and Volkov and the SSO ensured the narrative unfolded in all its kaleidoscopic splendour. Yann Ghiro’s clarinet section in particular were on stellar form.

This was the more compact 1947 revision of Petrushka and it was preceded at the start of the concert by the less often heard Four Etudes in the 1952 version of a score that also started life many decades earlier. The third of them, the more contemplative Cantique, is perhaps the most compelling section but the rhythms of the other pieces are all vintage Stravinsky and, although they began as piano works, eloquent studies in orchestration.

We were in a very different world for the rest of the programme, but not, perhaps surprisingly, a more rarified one. Composers Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton, veterans of Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra and a performing duo themselves, were both present to hear their works and acknowledge the applause, and Volkov dedicated the concert to their associate and contemporary John White, who died on January 4.

Skempton’s Piano Concerto, from 2015, references Stravinsky as well as Morton Feldman, but is altogether more Broadway than that would suggest. Soloist Joanna MacGregor revelled in the bluesy serialism of the central movement and the climax of the work which is a jazzy, brassy march. For a contemporary piece, it proved surprisingly easy listening, and perhaps rather slight in the context of the programme. Even more melodic and pretty was MacGregor’s encore, Skempton’s dedication to Cardew, Well, Well Cornelius.

There was nothing especially “difficult” about the newest work of the evening either. Parsons’ LEVELS for Orchestra was also a BBC Commission and appears to have had to wait a few years for this world premiere. The composer draws a distinction between “chords” and the stratified aggregation of notes in his work, but I doubt that matters much to many listeners. Whether we were hearing the contrasting timbre of the orchestral sections in sustained harmony or sequential notes, the piece was – like the Stravinsky Etudes – an exercise in hearing the make-up of an orchestra. Whether Parsons says anything new on that subject is a matter of opinion.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Joanna MacGregor

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