SCO / Emelyanychev

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City Halls, Glasgow

For logistical reasons, the version of this season’s Scottish Chamber Orchestra concert with Nicola Benedetti that Inverness heard at Eden Court Theatre was radically different from that played in Edinburgh and Glasgow.

The only common ingredient was the violin concerto Benedetti played, the one by Mendelssohn which she recorded with the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields 20 years ago, at the age of 18. It was at the centre of an all-Mendelssohn programme in Inverness, opening with the Hebrides Overture and with the ‘Scottish’ Symphony in the second half.

Perhaps because that option was less appealing to BBC Radio 3, whose recording of the Glasgow performance is broadcast this evening, the Central Belt concerts opened with the much larger forces required for the Academic Festival Overture by Brahms, and had the same composer’s Fourth Symphony after the interval.

Most unusually for the normally adept SCO, the programme flowed less well than might have been guessed at, and presumably than the one heard in Inverness a day later.

It did get off to a splendid start with the Overture though, Brahms’s seamless assemblage of borrowed tunes now much better known than any of the ingredients, save perhaps the climactic “Gaudeamus Igitur” Latin hymn to the joys of youth. This is not a chamber orchestra work by any measure – and by specific design on the composer’s part – and conductor Maxim Emelyanychev revelled in the sonic potential of a vastly augmented SCO, who duly gave it laldy, although with no loss of detail in the performance.

The band was slimmed down, without losing any of the string strength, for the Mendelssohn, and natural horns and trumpets replaced modern instruments. The result was an impeccable balance between orchestra and soloist, for which Benedetti should take as much credit as the conductor. The rich sonorities of her lower string playing cut through as clearly as the nimbly fingered high notes on the E string, even when there was some glorious swells of ensemble playing from the SCO strings.

Obviously this is a work Benedetti has had under her fingers for at least half her lifetime, but the detailed thought she brought to the pivotal first-movement cadenza, the emotional heft audible in the Andante and the lightness of touch in the exchanges with the woodwinds in the finale were all the work of her mature talent.

The orchestrated version of Elgar’s Salut d’amour was an obviously appropriate encore, given that it, like the concerto and some of the music on her recent Violin Café small group album, revisits music she learned in her student years.

Perhaps it was chosen for another reason too, because the opening theme of the first movement of Brahms 4 turned out to be an eerily close cousin. Did Elgar have the Brahms in his head at the time he wrote it?

In other ways, however, the symphony followed on less well from the music in the first half. While there was still some excellent string playing and the SCO’s seasoned clarinet partnership were on stellar form, Emelyanychev seemed most in his element when the music most resembled the Academic Festival Overture, which it doesn’t very often. So the declamatory scherzo third movement was a burst of exuberance, and the clever chaconne or passacaglia form of the finale was at its best in the liveliest of the 30 variations.

Keith Bruce

The concert, sponsored by Quilter Cheviot, was recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Monday, March 2, and available on BBC Sounds for 30 days thereafter.

Picture credit: Christopher Bowen

BBC SSO / EIF Chorus / Runnicles

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Fundamental to this awesome Usher Hall performance of Mahler’s Symphony No 2 ‘Resurrection’ was the element of control: utter control, visceral and monumental. And the figure exercising it over a full-blooded Edinburgh Festival Chorus and hyper-receptive BBC SSO was the Edinburgh-born maestro Sir Donald Runnicles, whose track record for such epic occasions goes before him. There’s just something you can read from his physique – the bulk of a tighthead prop combined with the wily intelligence of a playmaker and masterful composure – that translates into electrifying, match-winning euphoria.

That this would be an unforgettable adventure was clear from the outset. From the lower SSO strings, biting rhythms prophesied the epic and volatile journey ahead, melodies caked in mournful heroism emerging from the woodwind, the initial gripping climax becalmed by magically whispered string reflections. The entire movement – the funeral rites of the dead hero – exposed its argument forcefully, Runnicles’ effortless need-to-know gestures gleaning crystalline details that knew their place in the grander scheme of things. 

Then came the charm, firstly with the gentle minuet that opens the second movement, tender and spirited before engaging in more fulsome pursuits, utterly bewitching in its eventual manifestation for pizzicato strings, like serenading mandolins. If the brief timpani wake-up call shocked the life out of one audience member near me, the third movement’s ensuing cheery Ländler, with its intermittent diversions, remained charged with acid humour and effervescent character to the point of its screaming climax and subsequent quiescence. 

Thus the ground was prepared for that melting opening phrase of Urlicht (Primal Light from Mahler’s own Das Knaben Wunderhorn), a moment savoured with bestirred ecstasy by mezzo soprano Karen Cargill. Her voice seemed especially ripe in this short but transformative setting, the engagement multiplied by her memorised performance, setting the scene for an ultimately ecstatic finale.

Here we first encountered the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, also performing off score, and as a result of which projecting with profound distinction. Whether in the muted mystery of their opening utterances (“Rise up”), or the effusive waves of crescendo that culminated in the symphony’s resplendent peroration, this was a chorus, rigorously trained by chorus director James Grossmith, that was sure in its purpose and magnificent in execution, topped by the transcendent finishing touches of solo soprano Jennifer Davis and Cargill.

Most of all, however, this was a BBC SSO in genuinely gripping form. It’s all about the person waving the stick and the chemistry that accompanies the partnership. There was a truly heroic flavour to this performance, superbly and intuitively paced by Runnicles, but above all driven by a charisma that – going by a tumultuous reaction – impacted every soul in a packed Usher Hall.

(Picture credit: BBC/Martin Shields)

Ken Walton

This performance was recorded for later broadcast on BBC Radio 3, after which it will be available on BBC Sounds for 30 days.

RSNO / Widmann / Eberle

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

If any single memory is destined to linger from this RSNO programme it will surely be Jörg Widmann’s extraordinary cadenzas for Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. To say the composer/conductor has gone full tonto in his mission to subvert the stylistic equilibrium of such a substantial Classical masterpiece is no exaggeration. 

Nor is that necessarily a criticism, given that for every listener addled by Widmann’s dissonant anarchy, manic deviation, eccentric theatre and unharnessed prolixity, there were undoubtedly others intoxicated by the sheer bravado of his off-the-wall confections, not least the time-travelling transitions that bridge Beethoven’s 18th century to Widmann’s 21st.

Widmann wrote the cadenzas during Covid for the German violinist Veronika Eberle, who subsequently performed and recorded her novel version of the concerto with Simon Rattle and the LSO. She was, once again, the protagonist on Saturday, this time with Widmann on the podium and an RSNO eager to champion such a mind-bending curiosity. 

It began as Beethoven intended, the opening timpani strokes presenting an enticing challenge for an orchestra whose strings were pared down to classical proportions, thus enabling the woodwind to explore infinite subtleties. Eberle’s playing was similarly clean, an unaffected precision that lent lyrical purity and finesse to the musical discourse. So far so good.

Yet even in these moments there was a sense that she and Widmann were not always on the same wavelength. Whereas Eberle seemed intent on pushing the momentum onwards, Widmann favoured a more mannered approach, holding tempi back and creating repetitive hiatuses through his tendency to overextend silences. The habit became irksome and led to audible uncertainties in attack. The ultimate outcome was one of the longest Beethoven Violin Concerto performances I’ve heard in a long time.

The extensive cadenzas didn’t help. Sure, they were entertaining as well as radical. That of the opening movement – the soloist joined by timpani and double bass – hurtled us into a world of weird pizzicatos, crepuscular ponticellos, violent incursions, even stabs at jazz, before winding ingeniously back to Beethoven. In the slow movement Eberle left us gasping with a moment of fantasy that soared to unimaginable heights before connecting tortuously, but magically, with the finale. For the final movement cadenza, Widmann went for bust with an explosion of pastiche and parody that had the soloists foot-stamping, bassist Nikita Naumov now in full jazz mode. All good fun, but a sense that Beethoven was being taken for a ride, at times going AWOL.

In light of all that, an encore might have proved too much had it not been such a snappy, pizzicato caprice for which Eberle enlisted the expert duo partnership of RSNO leader Maya Iwabuchi.

The second half opened with one of Widmann’s own short works, Con brio. It also revelled in Beethoven connections, using the latter’s themes to create something between a skit and a serious attempt, as the composer himself puts it, “to combine tradition with innovation”. The same musical psychedelia as the earlier cadenzas applied – a sea of cacophonous explosions, rapid cartoonesque mania, amorphous clusters and hard-edged quotes – yet this time with a self-contained purpose.

The programme ended with Mendelssohn’s Reformation Symphony, interesting in the sense that Widmann heavily inflicted his own personality on its tempi, shadings and rhetoric. Where that offered rare insights into the innermost details of the scoring – the contrapuntal writing was strikingly revealing – the momentum of the performance was frequently stalled by overindulgence. As with the Beethoven concerto, this was more about Widmann than Mendelssohn.

Ken Walton

(Picture credit: RSNO/Clara Cohen)

SCO / Emelyanychev

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City Halls, Glasgow/Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

It is not yet an imminent problem, but there are two succession issues that the Scottish Chamber Orchestra will have to address, and they both look challenging.

Scottish composer Jay Capperauld has set a very high bar for whoever follows him as the orchestra’s Associate Composer, in providing bespoke works that suit every aspect of the SCO’s multi-faceted schedule. He was at it again last week with the world premiere of his Stylus Scarlatti, arrangements for chamber orchestra of four keyboard sonatas from the first half of the 18th century by Domenico Scarlatti, precision-tooled to fit Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev’s now-annual “Baroque Inspirations” concerts.

In those, the conductor, often leading ensembles from the keyboard and throwing in some wind instrument playing during the interval, matches classic early music with more recent works that draw on that era. Capperauld’s new work was perhaps one the most straightforward pieces he has supplied to the SCO library, but in its nods to the way other modern composers – like Michael Nyman – have visited the same territory it was characteristically knowing, as well as containing music tailored to specific solo talents in the orchestra.

The other challenge will, of course, be the eventual departure of Emelyanychev himself. It is almost inconceivable that there may be someone else with his combination of talents and enormous, infectious, energy waiting in the wings.

On Sunday afternoon at the Queen’s Hall, “Maxim & Friends” teamed him with the SCO’s string section leaders for two Schumann chamber works from 1842: the Piano Quartet, Op 47 and the Piano Quintet, Op 44.

With the string players using gut strings, Emelyanychev’s keyboard was a London-built 1888 instrument from French piano-makers Erard, borrowed from Glasgow University. Its distinct ringing tone – absolutely clear even if it lacked the muscle of a modern concert grand – combined beautifully with the string sound in a performance that may have been very close to how the works were originally heard, but refreshed them bracingly for modern ears.

These demanding pieces, composed for Schumann’s virtuoso wife Clara and the top string players in Germany at the time, are among the sunniest he wrote, particularly the Quartet, with its lovely Andante Cantabile movement – set up here by a startlingly brisk account of the Scherzo.

Both are in E flat, but the Quintet is more epic in scale as the composer explores and reworks his material with the thoroughness of a Beethoven symphony. The performances of both, with Emelyanychev’s keyboard skills matched by those of violinists Stephanie Gonley and Marcus Barcham Stevens, Max Mandel on viola and Philip Higham on cello, were absolutely first rank.

At Glasgow’s City Halls on Friday evening, there was a very specific chamber approach to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No 3, played by just ten strings, opening a programme again played entirely using gut strings. Both warm and rustic-sounding, the sound gave a particular quality to an expanded ensemble for Britten’s youthful Simple Symphony which suited its folk-influenced music well.

For Handel’s Water Music, it was a more hybrid band on stage, with modern rather than natural horns joining the ensemble. Perhaps that was simply a pragmatic decision, for reliable accuracy of pitch, but the result was more than satisfactory, and the little harpsichord flourishes at the start of some movements were a characteristic Emelyanychev addition.

SCO Principal Condustor Maxim Emelyanychev directs the orchestra in a programme of Baroque Inspirations, featuring works by Bach, Handel, Britten and Schnittke, plus the world premiere of an arrangementt of Scarlatti keyboard sonatas for orchestra (‘Stylus Scarlatti’) by the SCO’s Associate Composer, Jay Capperauld.

As was the procession of a few of the players to the foyer during the interval, heralded by a drum beat and led by the conductor himself playing a selection of early flutes and recorders. Perhaps this ingredient had more impact when it was a complete surprise to the audience and front of house staff, but it was still great fun, even if the SATB choral Spanish work handed out on hymn sheets for audience participation was a challenge too far for many ticket-holders.

Friday’s programme ended with a work from the conductor’s native Russia that was composed by Alfred Schnittke just eight years before Emelyanychev was born.

There is indeed “Baroque Inspiration” to be heard in Schnittke’s Gogol Suite, a sequence of eight short pieces based on short stories by the writer, but there is also the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Mozart’s Overture to The Marriage of Figaro. At other times, however, it sounds as much like the Merry Melodies of Warner Brothers cartoons or the pantomime of Spike Jones and his City Slickers.

With the players still gut-strung, the band included perhaps the most integrated use of electric guitar and bass guitar that any composer has achieved, a vast panoply of percussion from the whole toy box to tubular bells, and no fewer than four keyboard players. Simon Smith was imperious on concert grand, Stephen Doughty and Andrew Forbes covered harpsichord, celesta, and something invisible in between, and Emelyanychev himself handled the centre-stage prepared piano which played out the ominous “Testament” at the end.

The expression “multi-tasking” barely hints at what the SCO’s Principal Conductor brings to the job.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Maxim Emelyanychev by Andrej Grilc; picture from City Halls foyer by Christopher Bowen

Westbourne Music: Meraki Duo

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Glasgow Art Club

The art deco gallery interior of Glasgow Art Club provided an apposite setting for the intimate flute-guitar coupling of the Meraki Duo. This Westbourne Music recital by the young British duo – Meera Maharaj on flute, James Girling on guitar – also happened to be their first ever Scottish appearance, marking the start of a wider Scotland/UK tour that culminates with the launch of their debut Delphian album in September. It was a programme perfectly suited to the lunchtime slot: light, varied, charming, even revelatory in the rare choice of repertoire.

Much of that required adaptation for this specific combo, clearly a role enjoyed by Girling, whose arrangements of works by William Grant Still, Dominique Le Gendre and Olivier Messiaen projected a personal imprint on the performances. 

Still’s Three Songs (he was an American composer who played in Blues legend W C Handy’s band, but studied composition with Varèse) echoed the composer’s eclectic tendencies, combining soft “soirée” appeal – emphasised by the oaken sensuousness of Maharaj’s alto flute – with a deftness of simple construction. Le Gendre’s Songs and Dances of the Island’s Suite, inspired by his Trinidad and Tobago heritage, upped the vibe, not least in the animated and exotically-coloured Biguine. Especially fascinating were the three miniatures selected from Messiaen’s 5 Leçons de solfège, essentially pedagogical works, yet masterfully conceived in a manner more akin to the fluid brushstrokes of Debussy than the composer’s more ecstatic modernist signature.

Takemitsu’s Toward the Sea for alto flute and guitar, written for Greenpeace in the 1980s with inspiration from Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, was equally illustrative of that composer’s more tonal proclivities. Its three sections – Moby Dick, The Night and Cape Cod – were warmly embraced by a performance honouring the music’s mellifluous sweep and undulating dynamic. Again, the voluptuousness of the alto flute was spell-binding, entwined with the expressive dexterity of Girling’s versatile guitar.

To close, the Duo turned to Bosnian guitarist/composer Miroslav Tadić’s Four Macedonian Pieces for alto flute and guitar. Besides evoking the folk essence of these songs and dances, Maharaj and Girling struck a convincing balance between the sardonic and the ebullient. In response to the reflectiveness of the song-based Zajdi, Zajdi, the quintuple-time Pajdushka bristled with energy. The melancholic undertones of Jovka Kumanovka were swiftly swept aside by the wild Bagpiper’s dance Gajdarsko Oro, a fitting finale to Meraki’s enjoyable Scottish debut.

Ken Walton 

Other Scottish performances by the Meraki Duo are at West Kilbride (20 Feb), Hawick Music Club (21 Feb) and Moffat Music Society (22 Feb). Further details at https://meeramaharaj.co.uk/meraki-duo

Scottish Opera: The Great Wave

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Theatre Royal, Glasgow

There’s no denying the ambition behind The Great Wave, a substantial full-length opera by composer Dai Fujikura and librettist Harry Ross that aims to project the extraordinary biography of 18th/19th century Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai as a universal embodiment of the creative spirit. At Thursday’s premiere of this undeniably bold co-production between Scottish Opera and Japanese concert agency KAJIMOTO (it travels to Tokyo after a mere four Scottish performances across Glasgow and Edinburgh) such dual ambition struggled to justify its two-hour presence in our lives.

Hokusai’s iconic Ukiyo-e printmaking and book illustrations effectively revolutionised the industrial scale commercialisation of art. He is best known for The Great Wave off Kanagawa, a dynamic man-against-nature, Persian blue image of fishermen battling a mountainous wave with Mount Fuji stoically set in the background. It later inspired Debussy’s La Mer, not to mention the popular Apple emoji for “wave”. Somehow, the image’s symbolic omnipresence in this production reflects more the opera’s resistance to momentum than any promise of compelling magnetism.

The Great Wave begins with Hokusai’s death, the lengthy silence surrounding his coffin broken by the devotional keening of his daughter Oi (soprano Julieth Lozano Rolong) and the release of his spirit musically scented by the ethereal breathiness of the Shakuhachi, a traditional Japanese flute. Episodes in his long life – he died approaching 90, was struck by lightning on two occasions and expected to live to 110 – are revisited in a sequence of flashbacks that attempt to substantiate his creative immortality. 

Some magical elements emerge in the process. By and large, Satoshi Miyagi’s stage direction is sharply expressive, stylised in a quasi-ritualistic sense, softened by genuinely compassionate interactions, if prone to weird bouts of silliness. Odd snatches of humour are underplayed or too compartmentalised to produce much more than a hesitant audience titter. 

Similarly Akiko Kitamura’s choreography makes effective use of the cast’s professional dancers and mechanically-synchronised chorus, but submits now and again to self-caricature. More consistent, and aligning persuasively with Miyagi’s figurative simplicity, are Junpei Kiz’s vivid set designs and their interaction with Sho Yamaguchi’s morphing video effects and Kayo Takahashi Deschene’s mono-toned costumes.

What disappoints repeatedly, though, is the impotency of Fujikura’s vocal writing and his struggle to sustain organic development: that sense of prolonged musical journey, of heightening lyrical tensions, of inevitably reaching a destination. That, in itself, may have accounted for some inconsistent performances on opening night. 

As Hokusai, Daisuke Ohyama struggled to project his lower register, but had no problem with the hysterical falsetto that animated a rather manically divergent scene about a “smelly fart”. After a shaky start, Lozano Rolong’s Oi grew in confidence. Tenors Shengzi Ren (doubling as Mr Tozaki and Hokusai’s publisher Yohachi) and Luvo Maranti (the artist’s grandson), along with Chloe Harris as Hokusai’s second wife Koto, provided the most sustained and memorable performances. Edward Hawkins (Toshiro) and countertenor Collin Shay (von Siebold) were relatively incidental, but needful presences nonetheless. 

The Chorus, engineered in a blunt reactive fashion, delivered a gutsy compulsive edge, purposefully motivated despite the occasional and repetitive banality of their bullet-point utterances. At one point, joined by children’s voices, an ecstatic leaning to Benjamin Britten informed one of The Great Wave’s most uplifting scenes.

But the winning key element of this new opera is surely to be found in the orchestra pit, where music director Stuart Stratford and the Orchestra of Scottish Opera issue a side to Fujikura’s creativeness that really does sing. His orchestral score harnesses a passion and narrative momentum absent from much of the vocal writing, presenting a captivating menagerie of detailed, magical imagery that rides atop a thrusting cinematic undercurrent. It’s just not quite enough to offset the weaknesses of substance and prolixity that surround it.

It’s worth mentioning, too, that Thursday’s opening performance was dedicated to the memory of Scottish Opera founder Sir Alexander Gibson, born 100 years ago this month. Who knows what he would have made of The Great Wave? At the very least he would have applauded the sincerity of the effort bravely undertaken by a company he loved.

Ken Walton

Further performances of The Great Wave are at the Theatre Royal Glasgow (14 February) and Edinburgh Festival Theatre (19 & 21 February)

(Photo credit: Mihaela Bodlovic)

RSNO / Sondergard

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

It would be foolish to ignore an obvious reason why Brahms’ Double Concerto for Violin and Cello is less often heard – it necessitates the paying of two quality soloists rather than just one. Yet there is something in the genesis of the work, the last orchestral piece the composer wrote, which also explains its comparative lack of success.

When the violinist for whom Brahms composed his immediately successful and perennially popular violin concerto, Joseph Joachim, suspected his wife of an affair, the composer’s sympathies lay with the woman, and a letter he wrote expressing them was cited in the divorce court. Unsurprisingly, that led to a rift between virtuoso and composer, which, three years later, the Double Concerto sought to heal, involving the cellist in Joachim’s quartet as a sort-of intermediary.

Perhaps that whole background could be painted as the story of the work’s first and most fascinating movement which begins with an orchestral statement, features long solo passages for cello and violin before the two join forces and become partners with the whole ensemble, but it is probably fruitless to pursue such an analogy.

What is true is that there is a lot of fascinating music for the soloists to play from the very start of the work, and it helps if they know one another’s style well. For this performance, the RSNO and conductor Thomas Sondergard had the American First Violin of the Berlin Philharmonic, Noah Bendix-Balgley and his Principal Cello colleague Bruno Delepelaire, an A-team by any standards.

They were superb, too, and – as orchestral musicians – supremely sensitive to their relationship with the players around them. It is possible that this was as fine a performance of the work as you are likely to hear, and the intricacies of that opening movement were the most fascinating part. Later it becomes a little more like the Brahms everyone knows and the RSNO horns and woodwind were on top form for the richly harmonic Andante, while the dotted rhythms and changes of pace in the folk-flavoured finale are the most obvious nod to the earlier violin concerto.

What is also true, however, is that there is no big tune in the whole work to compare with those in earlier Brahms concerti and symphonies, and that is surely a more compelling reason why it was poorly received in Cologne in 1887 and struggles to find a place in the repertoire today.

In this concert it was the first-half prelude to Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, and that was an exemplar of the fine, disciplined work that the RSNO and Sondergard do together.

Played not especially fast – although there are certainly longer Tchaik Fives available – there was a pace and energy about the performance that only helped communicate the restless ambiguity of the work. Although he wrote a lot of prettier music, the Fifth is where the composer works his material most thoroughly, and if Sondergard’s reading perhaps lacked a little warmth, the wonderful craftsmanship of the music could not have been clearer.

There is great music for clarinet, notably at the start with the low strings and in the counter melody in the slow movement. Principal horn Amadea Dazeley-Gaist was superb as the main soloist there, and her whole section was magnificent throughout.

There were no weak links on stage, however, the full might of the orchestra’s strings in absolutely top ensemble form and the brass as disciplined as the RSNO brass now always is.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Noah Bendix-Balgley by Nikolaj Lund

Hebrides: Music for Time

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Adelaide Place, Glasgow

All credit to British composer Arthur Keegan, not least for accepting an Olympian challenge to conceive a partner piece to Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. The latter, as iconic for its unique language and timeless spirituality as for the fascinating back story that led to its initial creation within a German prisoner-of-war camp, remains one of the 20th century’s most seminal, moving masterpieces.

What Keegan has produced – as demonstrated in its premiere performances by the Hebrides Ensemble while touring Cumnock, Edinburgh, Skye and Glasgow over the past week – does complete justice to the such a formidable task. Coalesce: Quartet for the Start of Life, commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society, is as much a homage to the Messiaen as a springboard from which Keegan’s imagination takes full independent flight. He addresses the genesis of time – “both biblical and biological” – as opposed to Messiaen’s Book of Revelations-inspired deliberations on the end of time.

As such, Coalesce’s impact in opening Hebrides’ “Music for Time” concert was instantly spellbinding. Scored for the same forces as the Messiaen – clarinet (Yann Ghiro), violin (David Alberman), cello (William Conway) and piano (James Willshire) – and initiated by a simple theatricality (two of the players processing from offstage during the opening bars), we witnessed what amounted essentially to a potent “atomised” splintering and reconstitution of the Messiaen sound world. 

From its fragile elemental opening, rich in atmosphere and awe, it was only a matter of time before Keegan’s purposeful writing revealed cleverly-integrated pre-echoes of Messiaen – snatches of exquisite birdsong and overall glittering euphoria. The performance keenly acknowledged these references, but equally embraced the genuine originality in Keegan’s writing, his solid command of texture, ingenious filtration of referenced material, and ability to surprise. What seemed like an added electronic backing towards the end, for instance, turned out to be the players muted vocalising. A magical closing moment.

At that point, would an instant segue into the Messiaen have added to the power of the musical coupling? Possibly. Instead, Keegan received well-earned applause, the players also requiring that moment to retune, leaving that question hanging teasingly in the air. Maybe worth a try at a future performance?

That said, the spell cast had lingered long enough to touch the opening of the Quartet for the End of Time, the subdued complexity of Liturgie de cristal acting like a mystical reset before the frenetic ecstasy of the Vocalise and Yann Ghiro’s agile monologuing in Abîme des oiseaux. If the Interlude proved more safety conscious than daringly playful, and despite some momentary lapses in absolute synchronisation, the onward journey offered up kaleidoscopic delights: Conway’s immutable cello playing in Louange à l’Eternité; the surreal sonic inventiveness of Fouillis d’arcs-en-ciel; Willshire’s supportive pianism; the infinite enchantment of Alberman’s solo violin in Louange à l’Immortalité climbing to its stratospheric sign-off.

More than anything, this was an inspired piece of programming. When the end result constitutes something much greater than the sum of its parts, you know you’ve witnessed a very special event.

Ken Walton

BBC SSO / New

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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

Orchestra of Scottish Opera

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Ayr Town Hall

The Orchestra of Scottish Opera summons a tangible sense of release when given the opportunity to feature centre stage rather than customarily hidden within the cloistered confines of the orchestra pit. Such euphoria was manifest in Ayr Town Hall on Wednesday, where the players were in full view for an Operatic Gala concert that coasted its way through a sequence of sundry operatic excerpts ranging from Mozart to Puccini.  

Swedish conductor Tobias Ringborg had no less a part to play, visibly consumed by the music, yet relaxed enough to give the band sufficient leeway to steer its own course through the more detailed expressive niceties. It was these nuances – reactive and instinctive support to the spontaneous whims of the evening’s vocal double act – that introduced a sense of adventure to mostly well-known operatic numbers.

That double act consisted of former Scottish Opera Emerging Artists Catriona Hewitson (soprano) and Ross Cumming (baritone) featuring variously in tandem as duettists, and individually in solo arias. Bristling with personality, their performances – if occasionally subsumed by the heft of the orchestra – oozed charm and instant adaptability. 

Music from just two operas took us up to the interval: Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro and Donizetti’s Don Pasquale. It provided a neat complement, the graceful good humour of Mozart thrust viciously aside by the restive bombast of Donizetti. The respective overtures brought mixed results, the orchestra more at home with the fulminating Pasquale than the rakish precision of Figaro. It was the starry adaptability of Hewitson and Cumming, self-assured in their animated characterisations, that captured the moments.

The second half introduced a wider miscellany. From Gounod’s Faust, the wild exuberance of Phryne’s Dance and sweet-scented Dance of the Trojan Women set the scene for Cumming’s noble vision of Valentin’s Act II aria Avant de quitter ses lieux. Howitson responded with the joyous  gymnastics of Je veux vivre from the same composer’s Roméo et Juliette. This French segment ended with Ernest Guiraud’s orchestral Suite No 1 from Bizet’s Carmen, the seductive spirit of the music more consistently conveyed than some of the instrumental detail. 

Thereafter, the focus shifted to Italy, firstly in a pairing of Puccini arias that occupied either end of the popularity scale. Love’s frustrations found a lofty emotional outlet in Cumming’s rapt performance of the lesser-known Questo amor, vergogna mia from Edgar, an early Puccini opera often considered his “biggest flop”. Gianni Schicchi’s O mio babbino caro, on the other hand, required no justification. Hewitson’s unaffected delivery bowed respectfully to its natural and popular appeal.   

Lusciousness prevailed in the instrumental Intermezzo from Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, before the duettists struck up a whimsical show stopping finale with Quanto amore from Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore. Except that wasn’t the end. It was back to Mozart for a well-earned encore, the instantly recognisable duo La ci darem la mano from Don Giovanni. 

Ken Walton

Dunedin Consort / Gordis

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Adelaide Place, Glasgow

The Dunedin Consort has been a unique part of the Scottish musical landscape for three decades now, not always in its current format as a flexible, all-encompassing Baroque ensemble capable of mixing and matching its instrumental and vocal resources to order. Nor has it escaped the occasional threat of extinction in the face of funding wrangles. That’s all in the past. Today’s Dunedin is well and truly fit for purpose, with a performance strategy that combines world-leading scholarship, tip-top performance standards, international prominence and award-winning recognition.

That applies even to the most intimate of presentations, such as Thursday’s French Connection programme (repeated Friday in Edinburgh’s Greyfriars Kirk), which featured a mere four players led by American guest harpsichordist Lillian Gordis, charged with tracing the seminal evolution of instrumental chamber music across the first half of the 18th century.

It amounted to a glowingly affectionate and eminently stylish musical soirée. The visual intimacy of these performances was matched by an easeful conversational interaction among the players – Gordis joined by Matthew Truscott (violin), Jonathan Manson (viola da gamba) and Rosie Bowker (flute). A quintessentially restrained and collaborative virtuosity, besides resonating with the simple soft-lit ambiance of this former baptist church venue, connected meaningfully with an assortment of illustrative pieces by Bach, Telemann, Rameau and the earliest of the featured composers, one Elisabeth Jaquet de la Guerre.

La Guerre’s Trio Sonata in B flat, despite dating from 1695, bore clear signs of where the forthcoming half-century was heading, its bright and breezy opening punctuated by quirky rhythmic hemiola, later tempered by deliciously deviant chromaticism. It followed Rameau’s Premiere Concert from his 1741 Pièces de clavecin en concerts, a thing of refinement if more of a slow burner than his Cinquième Concert that was later to close the programme.

That later Rameau’s liberating use of the viola da gamba, Manson now free to indulge in pungent double stopping and explore the topmost extremes of his instrument, proved a powerfully dramatic summation to the Bach and Telemann that preceded it. In Bach’s Trio Sonata from The Musical Offering, besides being the most substantial work in the programme, Gordis and her team dug deep into its polyphonic complexities and chromatic ambiguities. The musical interchange, refined yet movingly expressive, was as instinctive as it was disciplined.

Bach’s Trio Sonata in C major (organists will know it in its solo version for that instrument) provided a lithe opening to the concert’s second half, its slow movement tinged with neatly-aligned sensuousness. Then to Telemann’s Paris Quartet, an intriguing complement, suggesting perhaps that – of the two composers – he may have been much more of a party animal than Bach. A performance that fully embraced its whimsy, its menagerie of brightly-lit counterpoint, its exploration of instrumental freedom, its joie-de-vivre, was a potent reminder of Telemann’s equal standing in the fiercely-competitive German High Baroque.

If anything, this was a presentation that could perhaps have done with a little more informality, some words (Gordis spoke briefly once) to further contextualise the music. Then again, these inspired performances (let’s just forget the momentary confusion that led to one player starting the wrong piece) had plenty to say by themselves.

Ken Walton

SCO / Emelyanychev

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

The attendance was no disgrace, but really there should have been no empty seats in the Usher Hall for a Mozart gala featuring back-to-back performances of his last three symphonies. Written in a remarkable few summer weeks of 1788, it is still unclear for whom the cash-strapped composer dashed off the masterworks, and all sorts of theories have been advanced, some more credible than others.

Veteran German conductor and musicologist Peter Guelke, in his 1998 book Der Triumph der neuen Tonkunst, made the case for seeing them as a deliberate triptych, “a world in a cycle”, and the SCO’s energetic Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, seemed persuaded by that thesis.

He opened Symphony No 39, K543, with a strong statement of the opening theme, but one that was far from loud. The conductor had clearly worked on a very specific string sound for this programme, with extra players in every section, aiming for a rich intensity rather than volume, and the mellow sound of the first movement was a clear indication of what was to come.

Elsewhere on the platform, the forces were as usual, and the changes Mozart makes in the wind scoring (no oboes in No 39, no clarinets in No 41) and the role of timpanist Louise Lewis Goodwin – crisp but very quiet in No 39, absent in No 40 – seemed especially significant.

Although there were historically-informed ingredients in all the playing, this was a hybrid performance, best illustrated by the cello section where the front desk hugged their instruments with the knees, Baroque-style, with the three players behind using spikes.

If Emelyanychev was indeed focused less on authenticity than on an arc of performance that ran from the rich grandeur of the opening chords of the E-flat major symphony to the grand double fugue that concludes the Jupiter, it was an interpretation that embraced many contrasts and illuminated many parallels along the way.

The pace of the opening of No 40, one of the best-loved pieces in all Mozart but played in a wide range of tempi over the years, was not as fast as might have been expected but that allowed its dotted rhythms to shine as echoes of the bolder syncopation of the finale of No 39. Just as fascinating was the progression of the writing in the triple-time third movement, from the folksy clarinets in No 39 through a very fresh up-beat reply to the Andante in No 40 to the remarkable complexity of the ensemble scoring in No 41, again with a boldly quiet beginning.

There was, however, rather more exuberance and a sense of being off the leash in much of the Jupiter, as if the conductor had been keeping his powder dry until after the interval. That perhaps explains why it was the central G Minor work, K 550, that seemed to lack quite the verve it deserves and requires, but that reservation about No 40 may well have been remedied for the repeat performances in Glasgow and Aberdeen.

Keith Bruce

SCO / Borrani

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City Halls, Glasgow

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra has more “showbiz” personalities on its list of regular guest leader/directors, but Italian violinist Lorenza Borrani achieves a richness of string sound from just 24 players which immediately distinguished the opening bars of Haydn’s Symphony No 56 in C Major.

Hers was an approach to the composer of daringly deliberate tempi, with the fullest expression of every dynamic contrast – and there are many – in its four movements, underlining how Haydn was setting a template for his successors.

Occasionally a player ran a little ahead of her animated indications from the concert-master’s chair, and the intonation of the natural horns took a while to settle, but the contribution of the reed soloists to the slow movement was superb and the ensemble engagement with the music’s playfulness was always captivating.

That sense of fun is also crucial to Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso No 1, written 200 years later, even if the frolics are often veiled in darkness. The six movements range fantastically widely, with the more obvious ingredients including the baroque music of Vivaldi and Corelli suggested by the title, South American dance music and the prepared piano experiments of John Cage.

Jan Waterfield was in the place the composer himself filled for the earliest performances, at the harpsichord and an electric keyboard and lap-top set-up producing a digital version of the prepared piano part. Those opening and closing utterances are among the more sombre moments in the work, which is hugely virtuosic for the two violin soloists – Borrani partnered by the SCO’s Marcus Barcham Stevens – particularly in the climactic fourth movement cadenza. After that the slide into tango-time is a happy relief, but it did not seem in the least odd.

With the pizzicato exchanges by the violinists calling to mind duelling banjos, principal bass James Kenny contributing a fine jazz bass passage and the slow movement employing a chromatic descent similar to those found in music from Henry Purcell to Led Zeppelin, the work leaves few potential avenues unexplored. The quality of this performance of what is a hugely demanding score was its best advocate.

A fascinating balanced programme was completed by the two movements of Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony No 8. The opening in the cellos and basses again impressed for their resonance in the City Hall and there was nothing less precise about Borrani’s Schubert than there had been in the Haydn.

Only the three (crucial) trombones made this an unusually large SCO on stage, but it lacked nothing symphonically at all, just as the composer’s two movements stand perfectly well on their own.

Accuracy in pacing and dynamic expression was again the director’s way, and there was no playing to the gallery from the SCO’s excellent wind soloists, although all were on finest form.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Christopher Bowen

John Wallace

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Trumpeter John Wallace, who has died at the age of 76 following treatment for cancer, was one of the most dynamic musicians of his generation. Following a career on the front desks of three London orchestras and the founding of his own brass ensemble, the Wallace Collection, he was appointed principal of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in 2002.

His tenure at the institution, which ran until his retirement in 2014, was transformative, including the name change to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland to reflect the expanded range of the teaching portfolio, and the opening of the Wallace Studios next to Scottish Opera’s rehearsal space at Speirs Wharf.

Born in Methil in Fife, John began his musical career playing cornet in his father’s works band, the Tullis Russell Mills Band in Glenrothes. In more recent years he performed alongside current players as one of a series of engagements at the East Neuk Festival.

After the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, he studied music at King’s College, Cambridge, the Royal Academy of Music and York University.

A recipient of an OBE in 1995 and a CBE in 2011, he was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Music in 2021. He had been a featured soloist alongside Kiri Te Kanawa at the wedding of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer in 1981. He was made a Honorary Member of the Royal Philharmonic Society last year.

Professor Jeffrey Sharkey, who succeeded him as RCS Principal, said yesterday: “John Wallace was a legend in the music world – one of Scotland’s own who gave so much to the world as a performer, educator and leader. He was also incredibly warm and approachable.”

During his cancer treatment, John Wallace returned to his first study of composition and gave one of his last interviews to Vox Carnyx last year to publicise a concert featuring his own arrangements in aid of Glasgow’s Beatson Cancer Charity.https://voxcarnyx.com/2025/02/13/inspired-by-adversity/

SCO: Mozart Matinee

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City Halls, Glasgow

It wasn’t unusual for Mozart, in presenting concerts of his own music, to intersperse the movements of a major work with operatic arias, the odd overture, even bits of other major multi-movement works. He did so in Vienna in 1783, when the Haffner Symphony was split up to host concert arias, a couple of piano concertos, even two movements from the substantial Posthorn Serenade.

By all accounts that was a famously lengthy affair, unlike Friday’s Mozart Matinee by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, which adopted the aforementioned Serenade as its spinal column, with internal diversions ranging from an overture to assorted arias sung by Irish mezzo-soprano Tara Erraught, but doing so within the durational strictures of a standard two-hour concert. 

It was a refreshing scenario, not just for the lateral curiosity of its concept, but in the way it gave our ears a welcome breathing space within a luxuriantly lengthy piece. Bear in mind, the Posthorn was written for an academic graduation day, so may well have been regarded as background noise to some excitable student buzz. 

Mozartian muzak then? Absolutely not. This performance in particular, expertly directed with pincer-like extraction from the fortepiano by former SCO bassoonist (now highly-regarded conducting star) Peter Whelan, delved deep into the colourful vitality of the score. He opened with the first two movements, a wholesome and dramatic symphonic Adagio-Allegro complemented by a Minuetto rich in contrast and featuring the first of many assorted “concertante” showcases – flute and violin – that add lustre to the seven-movement Serenade. 

A direct segue into the aria Soffre il mio cor from a 14-year-old Mozart’s early opera Mitridate, rè di Ponto introduced the versatile Erraught. In this instance, while her technical virtuosity and vocal clarity was remarkable, a certain harshness affected this notably high-pitched piece.

Then it was back to the Posthorn for some classily consorting woodwind in the Concertante and a breezy Rondo that veered wickedly towards Rossini in its final moments. Erraught closed the first half with Parto, Parto from La clemenza di Tito, joined front stage by SCO principal clarinettist Maximiliano Martin in what amounted to a compelling, ultimately spectacular virtuoso dialogue. 

Opening the second half of the concert with the bristling overture to Der Schauspieldirektor was the perfect reawakening after a leisurely interval, a shot of adrenalin that fed neatly – given the commonality of key – into Temerari sortite … Come scoglio from Mozart’s Così fan tutte. Expressing Fiordiligi’s abandonment, Erraught was a tour de force, her now glowing presence feeding vociferously off the music’s febrile agility.

She was to make one more appearance beyond the quietening anguish of the Posthorn’s Andantino, in two contrasting excerpts from The Marriage of Figaro: firstly the Countess’ idyllic Dove sono, Erraught more naturally at ease with the opening recitative’s inherent drama than the long, breathless lyricism of the main aria; then in Susanna’s Guinse alfin il momento …. Deh vieni, non tardar, a role she is clearly in tune with, and with singing that was remarkable for its touching and tender expressiveness.

Old Copper Posthorn

Why is Mozart’s Posthorn Serenade so named? The answer was eventually to reveal itself in the penultimate Minuetto, where principal trumpet Peter Franks laid down his regular natural trumpet to pick up a gleaming modern-day replica of the functional instrument used in Mozart’s time to announce the arrival of the mail coach. 

What resembled a gold-plated yard of ale sounded just as the composer intended, rough and ready, so as to make its primitive mark against the orchestra’s polished refinement. Initially at extreme variance to the tuning around it, Marks’ brief but heroic championing of the parping hybrid inched towards a common pitch. The cuckoo-in-the-nest effect was not lost. Normality was restored in a regular Finale, a lithe and joyous conclusion to a well-considered, stylishly executed, and satisfyingly original programme. 

Ken Walton

SCO / Manze

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City Halls, Glasgow

With the exception of the four stalwarts of the cello section – whose leader Philip Higham was one of the evening’s first solo voices – there was an unfamiliar look to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra on Friday evening, in the strings as well as in the additional instrumentalists required for the programme.

The evening was entirely made up of music composed by John Adams and – given that it was all written in the last century, and necessarily excluded his largest works – it was a very useful introduction to his style for the uninitiated.

We began in the 1970s with the demanding performance challenge of Shaker Loops, clearly influenced by the music of his American minimalist colleagues but already finding original pathways from that inspiration. The glissandos of the second section and Higham’s solo in the third were evidence of that, and conductor Andrew Manze ensured that work’s finale was more dramatic and dynamic than might have been anticipated from the work’s somewhat hesitant, sotto voce beginning.

If Shaker Loops can be an austere listening experience, Gnarly Buttons is an entertainment, albeit a hugely challenging one for the clarinet soloist. The SCO’s principal clarinet Maximiliano Martin was equal to the task but he and his colleagues possibly left some of the humour in the score unexpressed, with the exception of the unmissable cattle noises in the keyboard samples.

The scoring for the piece is always ear-catching, and Manze ensured every detail was clear from the early combination of trombone, cor anglais and bassoon, through viola and pizzicato basses to the guitar and four-hands piano in the altogether simpler, plaintive finale. Of the many guest musicians onstage over the evening, it was Robert Carillo-Garcia who was crucial here, moving on to the guitar after his equally essential contributions on banjo and mandolin.

For the final work, 1988’s Fearful Symmetries, Stephen Doughty sat at the grand piano while Simon Smith and John Cameron exchanged keyboard riffs and four saxophonists joined the brass and woodwinds. If Gnarly Buttons is close kin to the symphonic Naïve and Sentimental Music, Fearful Symmetries shares orchestral similarities with the music played from the pit in Adam’s first huge opera success, Nixon in China.

There may be fewer exotic time signatures to negotiate in this score than in the other two works, and the through-written half hour supplied the most elegantly-played music of the programme, with by far the largest forces on stage. Here the individual elements, like the saxophone quartet and the sampling keyboards, were less startling individual ingredients than parallel elements, integrated with the brass and strings in a coherent whole which Manze communicated as one compelling narrative.

Keith Bruce

BBC SSO: Volkov / Hodges

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City Halls, Glasgow

For many City Hall attendees or BBC Radio 3 listeners, the first half of Thursday’s BBC SSO programme would likely have been a journey into the unknown: a symphony by the under-championed French composer Elsa Barraine, and a piano concerto by her direct contemporary, and equally underexposed, Moroccan-born Frenchman Maurice Ohana.

Beyond that, conductor Ilan Volkov and the SSO ventured into more well-worn Gallic territory: the perfumed ballroom swirls of Ravel’s Valse nobles et sentimentales, and Debussy’s intoxicating Nocturnes (who else recalls these from the 1970s Higher Music syllabus?) adorned in the final Sirènes by the upper voices of the RCS Chamber Choir. All in all, this was a colourful French feast that coupled tasteful gratification with explorative curiosity.

Why, for instance, do we rarely hear Barraine’s Second Symphony, written in 1938 as a chilling portent of impending war, and subtitled “Voina”, the Russian for war? Barraine was Jewish and remarkably successful in her youth, being only the fourth woman to win the prestigious Prix de Rome. Bitingly rhythmic, darkened by angular dissonance and tense textures, the Symphony’s punchy concision and brutal neoclassicism – a trend she otherwise generally eschewed – convey a powerfully trenchant message. 

You wonder just how personal this performance was, given Volkov’s recent outspokenness and brief arrest in relation to the Israel-Gaza conflict, or more generally the current volcanic European situation. There was certainly fire in the belly of the SSO as they negotiated the militaristic stringency of the opening Allegro, the haunting pathos and coiled heart-filled lyricism of the March Funèbre, and a Finale whose accumulating tension – a triumphalism borne out of vivacious dances, hints of a jazz vibe, even a glittering aura preemptive of Hollywood’s John Williams – offered a welcome, if wishful, release. 

Ohana’s 1981 Piano Concerto, with the thoroughly convincing Nicolas Hodges as soloist, took us to more avant-garde territory: a fantasy world of textures, whether densely ruminative, shimmering à la Messiaen, dramatised through truculent interplay, or wildly delirious as frenzied Bartok-like pianism vies with the orchestra’s dizzy iridescence. Present, too, are lingering references to the composer’s part-Andalusian lineage, dreamy whiffs of flamenco, and the spiralling ecstasy of the final climax, all of which combined in an often mesmerising performance.

As such, the Ohana also sat perfectly as a bridge to the Ravel and Debussy. Volkov milked the Valse nobles et sentimentales – a golden miscellany of waltz styles wrapped in a panoply of silken orchestral extravagance – of all its supple opulence, evoking subliminal references to the tidal surges of the same composer’s La Valse, or the playful delicacy of his Mother Goose Suite. The SSO embraced its charm at every juncture, be it the music’s ravishing ebb and flow or the wafting subtleties of the orchestration.

Finally Debussy, and the three dream-like “twilight scenes” that constitute Nocturnes. Colour and texture were again the prime focus, Volkov eliciting from the opening Nuages a magical luminosity, the images bold and tangible yet exquisitely interwoven, countered stirringly by the Carnival-like exuberance of Fêtes, its muted fanfares tempering any potential overindulgence. The choristers in Sirènes gave the final movement its ethereal glow, perhaps a little harsh to begin with, but settling to align with the wistful hues of the orchestra. 

Ken Walton

This concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and is available on BBC Sounds for 30 days

Concerto Budapest / Keller

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

It  might be tempting to see something formulaic about the recently regular visits of Hungary’s Concerto Budapest under the baton of Andras Keller. Like previous visits, this one featured a top rank piano soloist – Paul Lewis this time – and mainstream repertoire, including a repeat chance to hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, of all familiar old friends.

The thing is, this is Keller and the orchestra he has re-shaped during the past two decades, and when they play Beethoven 5 they do it singularly well. This conductor understands the importance of the work’s opening motif but doesn’t hang about to worry over it. The bracing pace of his opening movement set up a gloriously spacious slow movement, still not exactly slow and with magnificent ensemble playing from the low strings that was a feature of the whole piece.

The string sound of this orchestra is singular and special, and as impressive at its quietest as it is when giving its mighty best. The pizzicato strings at the end of the scherzo third movement were as boldly pianissimo as Beethoven clearly instructs, but some interpretations are just too impatient to indulge.

All the other important ingredients of the work, from horns and brass to the crucial piccolo in the finale, sparkled, every player clear in the precise volume of their contribution at every moment, and the flow of ideas across the sections an integrated, collegiate effort.

That same approach was evident in the same composer’s Piano Concerto No 3 from four years earlier, also in C Minor and setting Beethoven on the path to the symphony. On this final date of their tour, Lewis and the orchestra were in perfect balance, the soloist always poised and relaxed, but assertive in his delayed opening statement in the first movement and its later cadenza, before edging towards languid in the beautiful song-like melody of the Largo.

The other elements of the programme were far from make-weight. Tchaikovsky’s Dante – and Wagner – influenced Francesca da Rimini had huge narrative drive as a concert-opener, with the horns and eight brass vying for attention over the powerful precision strings and the orchestra’s timpanist making the first of her many memorable contributions to the programme for the evening.

Wagner also looms large over Franz Liszt’s Les Preludes, his “Symphonic Poem No 3”, and pretty much the only one much played now. Opening the second half, it was also dramatic stuff and a great showcase for the Concerto Budapest strings from the start, big music from a relatively compact band.

It was also the only acknowledgement of the orchestra’s Hungarian origins until the encore, which demonstrated how best to play Bartok with folk-dance fervour.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Andras Keller

RSNO: Šlekytė / Radulović

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Fashion statement or character statement? It was all that and much more with Serbian violinist Nemanja Radulović, whose Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with the RSNO on Saturday blew all popular conceptions of the work to the wall. 

Firstly, the visual statement. A collective intake of breath from the packed audience greeted Radulović’s flamboyant stage entrance: his flowing waist-length hair topped with high ball, while below an embroidered mini tail coat his capacious trousers and chubby platform shoes shouted circus clown. In this sense ironically. It all seemed part of a cunning deception.

For there’s something of the Shakespearean fool in Radulović. It’s a role he plays with masterful guile, disarming his audience with apparent nonchalance, a baiting perma-grin and a look in his eyes that says “you’ll never believe what I’m going to do next”. What he does do at all times is convey a musical message that, for all its eccentricities, is profound, challenging, truthful and virtuosically handled.

So this Tchaikovsky was full of surprises, not just for us, but surely also for the RSNO and its debuting guest conductor Giedrė Šlekytė, whose receptive alignment with the violinist proved as breathtaking as the unorthodox manner of Radulović’s free-spirited interpretation. He unfolded a narrative that openly questioned convention, holding back his opening solo gambit teasingly, unafraid to re-characterise tempi, playfully turning on his heels to goad the orchestra with a teasing turn of phrase or two. 

Such was his conviction, the whole thing made complete, if unexpected, sense. The opening movement proved a kaleidoscopic voyage of discovery, the heightened characterisation of its constituent themes intensifying the impact of its conclusion. Beyond the laid-back calm of the slow movement, the daredevil rapidity of the Finale shot the temperature off the scale. This was showmanship and sincerity in absolute harmony.

No question, an encore was required. Radulović beckoned RSNO leader Igor Yuzefovich to join him in a deliciously understated Shostakovich duet, the perfect complement to that mesmerising Tchaikovsky.

Where Šlekytė had exerted an impressive command over the orchestra in the concerto, she had the field to herself for Mahler’s First Symphony and took full advantage. With its eerie dawn opening, ensuing myriad allusions to nature, be it trilling birds or placid landscapes, and the distant hunting horns and embryonic fanfares, the first movement revealed quizzically its ominous ambiguities. That was shaken off by the the virile swagger of the second movement, mawkishly shrill but never schmalzy. 

The clarity Šlekytė brought to this performance, her no-nonsense baton technique and instinctive pacing, was particularly effective in giving the third movement funeral march an uncommon lightness of touch that was uplifting to witness. Yes, there was a lingering grief in its midst, but not a languishing one. Then the Finale, like a giant machine coming slowly to life, and when it did unleashing reminders of the previous struggles before resolving with ecstatic triumph.

Ken Walton 

BBC SSO: 90th Anniversary Concert

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City Halls, Glasgow

Ninety years is quite an achievement for any orchestra, so you’d expect there to be quite a song and dance about it as a matter of celebration. In the event – which was a “birthday concert” at its City Halls home, broadcast live on Radio 3 – the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth played it relatively cool. 

Nothing provocatively challenging; nothing blatantly celebratory (not even an impromptu chorus of “Happy Birthday”); nothing emblematically Scottish; more a regular BBC SSO concert boosted by the presence of eminent pianist Sir Stephen Hough in Grieg’s popular concerto (thank you Messrs Morecambe, Wise and “Mr Preview”), and a rare performance of Sir Michael Tippett’s wartime masterpiece A Child of Our Time, featuring the topnotch voices of the National Youth Choir of Scotland (NYCoS).

True, Radio 3 had despatched its fast-talking No 1 Scots presenter Tom Service to emcee the event, offering as some helpful context the fact that Tippett had actually conducted his oratorio with this very orchestra in the 1960s, though of course “not necessarily these players!”. And there was, let it be said, a new work commissioned as an opener to the occasion, Bacchanale by Ayanna Witter-Johnson.

To evoke the spirit required, London-born Witter-Johnson turned to her Jamaican ancestry for inspiration, notably the exuberance of the Caribbean carnival. Bacchanale burst explosively into life, an orgy of rhythmic intoxication, ecstatic trumpeting, belligerent ostinati, sensuous string tropes and ample side helpings of percussion. The problem is it quickly ran out of ideas, everything piled into the initial outburst beyond which it had little new to say – a bit like a party popper. Or, as one astute observer within earshot put it, “a piece of a thousand endings”.

It did eventually end, signalling the way for Hough and a take on Grieg’s Concerto that reflected this pianist’s very personalised intellectualism. That’s a good thing, in the sense that he established a tantalising atmosphere of anticipation. Melodies that most of us could whistle in our sleep were often reshaped with just a hint of unexpected hiatus or recalibrated emphases. 

There was enormous power in Hough’s delivery, fiercely rhetorical in the opening movement, ravishingly shaped and intoned in the Adagio, approaching giddy (if occasionally splashy) heights in the Finale. Hough’s idiosyncrasies and forceful personality presented an interpretational challenge for Wigglesworth and the SSO, who did well to read the majority of intentions. Explaining that his choice of encore was governed by the need to avoid a broken piano string, Hough transferred his thoughts elegantly to Chopin’s E flat Nocturne.

If anything epitomised the underlying solemnity of Thursday evening it was A Child of Our Time. Inspired by the 1938 assassination in Paris of a German Embassy worker by a stateless young Jewish refugee and the resultant escalation of pre-war Jewish persecution, Tippett’s harrowing secular oratorio recasts it as a profoundly universal parable framed within a sequence of African American spirituals.  How could the words, “we cannot have them in our Empire – they shall not work nor draw a dole”, not resonate chillingly today? Or Tippett’s emotive treatment of the interwoven spirituals fail to convey the rich seam of humanity entrenched in the music?

Wigglesworth gelled his forces well, helped enormously by NYCoS’ flawless, articulate solidarity. Immaculate intonation, glowing expressiveness and thrilling homogeneity belied their youth, adding a spiritual glow to a busily efficient orchestral canvas and solo vocal quartet whose animated storytelling proved a central fascination, not least the ravishing mezzo voice of Beth Taylor, John Findon’s euphoric tenor and Ashley Riches’ proficient bass. Where Pumeza Matshikiza’s soprano was a potent enough force, her diction let her down, occasionally her intonation. 

And that was it, a substantial programme that in so many ways could just have been a typical night at the SSO. Maybe that’s exactly what we were celebrating. 

Ken Walton

(Photo by Martin Shields)

This concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and is now available for 30 days via BBC Sounds. It was also filmed for future broadcast on Inside Classical, available after broadcast on BBC iPlayer

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