Category Archives: Reviews

Colin Currie Quartet

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Boswell Centre, Auchinleck

In the second leg of its current Scottish Tour, the Colin Currie Quartet found itself pounding the beat, literally, in Auchinleck on a sunny Saturday night. Were they a delicate string quartet, the experience might have been diminished by the counterpoint of children screaming happily in the play area immediately outside the town’s amenable Boswell Centre. 

But Currie’s ensemble is, as most of this East Ayrshire town will now know, an all-percussion collective with the fire power to overcome the most rumbustious opposition. No competition? Well, almost. One dramatic musical silence gave way to a shrill playground countdown, one of those lighthearted moments where chance interruptions turn to memorable highlight.

Little in this compelling programme, promoted by the Cumnock Tryst Festival as part of its extended year-round activity, proved anything less than compelling. The mere sight of these four black-shirted virtuosi – Currie himself, Owen Gunnell, Adrian Spillett and Sam Walton – huddled in successive configurations, was powerfully visceral, given the physicality involved and the heated communication between them.

The two opening pieces by American percussionist and composer Andy Akiho were from his trailblazing Seven Pillars project, their accumulating might coloured by intricate rhythmic conversations and textures tickled by the curiosities posing as instruments – empty wine bottles, a kitchen sieve and much more bric-a-brac besides. What these guys can’t do with everything but the kitchen sink simply isn’t worth talking about.

What the young Scottish composer (and accordionist) Aileen Sweeney has done with her new work Starburst is well worth mention. This was the subtlest music-making of the evening, opening with the gentle unfolding of a basic motif on delicate hand chimes, reaching its highpoint with a hypnotising rock groove, before unwinding to a hushed conclusion. It gave short shrift to the notion that all percussion playing carries a health warning.

In Dave Maric’s nature-inspired Nascent Forms for mallet instruments the emphasis on quick fire repetition was mesmerising in itself, the performance scintillating for its dextrous precision and intoxicating interaction. For their send-off, the quartet turned to four drum kits and the Reich-like adrenalin rush of Julia Wolfe’s Dark Full Ride. Yes, it veered towards the deafening at times, but with a sense too of artful exhilaration as this dazzling floor show powered towards its final emphatic thump.

Cumnock Tryst founder and artistic director also used this celebrity occasion to announce his plans for the 10th Festival Programme, which runs from 2-6 October, one day longer than previous events. Among the artists featuring will be pianist Steven Osborne, British tenor Joshua Ellicot, the excellent Maxwell Quartet, folk music from Alastair Savage and Friends and locally-based Seán Gray, and jazz from the Tommy Smith Youth Jazz Orchestra and The Euan Stevenson Trio. Local groups also feature, notably the Tryst Festival Chorus and Dalmellington Brass Band among others in a special Tenth Birthday Gala Concert. 

MacMillan also announced the launch of a new Cumnock Tryst Ensemble, consisting of some of Scotland’s finest classical musicians, led by cellist, improviser and composer Christian Elliott. 

Ken Walton

The Colin Currie Quartet continues its current tour in Castle Douglas (27 April) and Biggar (28 April). Details at www.colincurrie.com

Full details of this year’s 10th Cumnock Tryst Festival are available at www.thecumnocktryst.com 

BBC SSO / Wigglesworth

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City Halls, Glasgow

Although it was surely the presence of pianist Stephen Hough as soloist on Rachmaninov’s perennially popular Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, alongside an invitation to subscribers to hear about the coming season, that attracted a such good house to the Candleriggs on Thursday evening, the rare performance of Stravinsky’s 1928 The Fairy’s Kiss that took up the second half of the concert was a particular delight.

A stellar example of the contrary character of the composer, the drama  of this Hans Christian Andersen-derived score might be a deal more subtle than Stravinsky’s earlier ballet music, but it is there nonetheless. Unusually for him, it does seem a little prolix, but the orchestration is as full of interest over its entire 45 minutes, and there was some especially fine playing here, particularly from the SSO winds.

Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth was clearly concerned with the arc of the whole suite, the four scenes having a quasi-symphonic structure, but there were one or two moments where the tempi wavered uncertainly. Stravinsky drew on songs and piano works by Tchaikovsky for his musical material and the work references his predecessor’s own distinctive orchestrations, but the final result, and particularly the dying fall of the last bars makes its own unique impression.

The programme had opened with a contemporary interpretation of the same writer in Hans Abrahamsen’s Three Fairy-Tale Pictures from ‘The Snow Queen’. Wigglesworth’s affiliation with the orchestra’s current Composer-in-Association produced a performance that made the most of the huge orchestra required, with singular ingredients like the four flutes all doubling on piccolos. There was something distinctly MacMillan-esque about the build-up of the work, and especially the use of brass and percussion – and Sir James was in the audience to hear it.

Characteristically, Stephen Hough brought a very thoughtful approach to the fireworks of Rachmaninov’s Paganini variations, and Wigglesworth – himself a pianist of course – was very much his ally in that. Here was an account of the work that lost none of its Romantic intensity but where as much space and attention was given to the less virtuosic music. There was marvellous cohesion in the variations of tempo and a wonderfully meaty mid-range sound from the orchestra.

It was the fine detail of the soloist’s playing that really sealed the deal, though, culminating in what was surely the least showbiz despatching of the witty final bars possible.

Keith Bruce

Tippett: New Year

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City Halls, Glasgow

It would be premature, in truth ill-informed, to assess the BBC SSO’s concert-style revival of Michael Tippett’s final opera, New Year, as creating a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. For how many of us have actually witnessed this bizarre work in its fully-staged totality? Completed by the ailing septuagenarian Tippett in the late 1980s, it was only ever subject to one staged production, by Peter Hall, with performances in Houston Texas in 1989, transferring to Glyndebourne, then in a modified form by Glyndebourne Touring Opera. Since then, nothing.

What Saturday’s semi-staging by Victoria Newlyn offered was just one facet of the whole – the musical score – predicated on the fact that NMC, as partners to the event, were usefully recording it to create the first commercial recording of New Year. It will be available, rather conveniently, “early in the new year”.

The issue arising from this sharp-edged Glasgow performance, in which the SSO under Martyn Brabbins were joined by a dedicated cast and the BBC Singers, was not so much what we did hear, as what we didn’t see. 

It’s a plot you need regular help with: a tale of two worlds colliding, the urban banality of “Somewhere and Today” and the utopian “Nowhere and Tomorrow” somewhere in space, constructed by Tippett in naively futuristic Wellsian terms. The literal interaction between the two sets of beings – an earthly trio rescued from dysfunction by an otherworldly trio of spaceship travellers – is puzzling enough, but not to witness the actual physicality of the substantial, presumably pivotal, dance scenes leaves the full visual impact of Tippett’s fantasy concept incomplete.

As for the music, this has to rank, if not quite the rantings of an elderly esoteric composer, as an impatiently wild and cathartic compositional exorcism. There’s no limit to the juxtapositional chaos of clashing styles – moments of gorgeous post-pastoral Englishness thrown to the wind by the intervention of crunching 20th century dissonance; the lugubrious twang of an electric guitar enlivened by the onslaught of rap and reggae; the electronic datedness – Blake’s 7-style – of the space ship sound effects; even a stirring Ne’erday chorus of Auld Lang Syne shredded by scintillatingly combatant counterpoints. 

What Brabbins did so successfully was to masterfully harness such fragmentations, making energetic sense of it in the same way a good Bernstein Mass performance makes sense of its stylistic incongruences. He was abetted fully by a trusty cast. Alan Oke – a one-time regular with Scottish Opera in the 1980s – commanded a stentorian central presence as the Presenter; soprano Rhian Lois sang powerfully and alluringly as the chief protagonist Jo Ann, Ross Ramgobin somewhat gauche as her Afro-Caribbean foster brother Donny. Foster mother Susan Bickley bore a stirringly stoical countenance.

The white suited time-travellers offered a potent contrast – Roland Wood typically imposing as computer wizard Merlin; Robert Murray lustrously impassioned as space pilot Pelegrin; with their boss Rachel Nicholls’ radiant soprano powering through, exhilaratingly so. The BBC Singers contributed animated rearguard support. 

For all its crazy merits though, including the nostalgic aura of what is essentially mood music and sound effects of the time, this experience constantly felt as if it were one dimension short. If New Year is already a silk purse, we need full theatrical proof. Anyone keen to test that might be tempted by Keith Warner’s new production for Birmingham Opera Company opening this July. The conductor is another SSO regular, Alpesh Chauhan. 

Ken Walton

This concert was recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3, after which it will be available via BBC Sounds for 30 days

BBC SSO / Lazarova

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City Halls, Glasgow

It’s hard to tell exactly what attracted such a large audience to this afternoon concert by the BBC SSO, but even if it was purely a matter of chance none will have gone away unsatisfied. 

It could, of course, have been for Sean Shibe, the cool Scots-born guitarist, who complimented a recently-composed concerto for his instrument with the more famous one of Jaoquín Rodrigo, the Concierto de Aranjuez. Or it may have been the sunny coupled attractions of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol and Stravinsky’s suite The Firebird.

More surprisingly, perhaps, it might have been for Bulgarian-born conductor Delyana Lazarova, who is not yet so familiar a name here, but who certainly made a significant impact on the SSO players – eagerly responsive to her invigorating lead – and on an audience, cheering noisily in the wake of dynamic, warm-hearted performances.

Rimsky-Korsakov’s exuberant Spanish portrait provided a glittering opener, the Mediterranean ecstasy of the juicy tuttis charmingly offset by prominent solo writing, not least for violin, breezily executed by SSO leader Kanako Ito, and clarinet, Adam Lee bewitching us with beguiling virtuosity. Especially exciting was the visible, energised synergy between Lazarova and the orchestra.

In the first of the two concerto appearances, Shibe fronted a new chamber orchestra version of Turia by the Spanish trombonist-turned composer Franciso Coll. By his own admission, Coll “sees” his music in pictorial terms. “Sometimes I don’t know if I’m composing or painting, because I don’t see much difference,” he has said. The visual stimulus here is a dried-out riverbed in his native Valencia, now transformed into a verdant sea of flora and fountains. 

From its wistful opening – spectral brushstrokes on guitar finding firmer footing as the orchestra’s rhythmic presence increases – a sequence of five movements capture successive musical images. Awe and mystery give way to frenetic concision, before the scene turns eerie once again. A sonorous calm envelops the penultimate movement, blown aside by the dizzy rapture of the finale. Shibe’s absorbing performance was lustrous yet breathtakingly precise.

Then, after the interval, he returned for that most famous of guitar concertos by Rodrigo, its swashbuckling opening chords signalling the radiance that was to follow. The opening movement sparkled with joie de vivre. The central Adagio, assisted by James Horan’s exotic cor anglais solo, introduced an elusive sensuality before the incisive brevity of the finale, in which Shibe’s sizzling virtuosity – strangely emphasised by a markedly stoical countenance – was spiritedly amplified by Lazarova’s sharp-witted superintendence.

She, alone, moulded the conclusive tour de force that was Stravinsky’s The Firebird, a narrative of extremes countering the fickle magic of the Firebird’s opening dance with the Russian succulence of the Round Dance, the demonic heat of the Infernal Dance with the fetching elegance of the Berceuse, and finally the purposeful triumph of a hymn-like apotheosis. Lazarova, one hopes, will be back before long.

Ken Walton 

Recorded for future broadcast by BBC Radio 3, after which it will be available for 30 days on BBC Sounds.

RSNO / Afkham

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

If, as seems likely, this was her last full concert appearance before taking maternity leave, Nicola Benedetti chose an ideal work from which to take a step back, because it begged her swift return to performing.

I am sure I was not the only listener left in two minds by Mark Simpson’s Violin Concerto, co-commissioned by the RSNO, specifically written for Benedetti and twice postponed before she gave its Scottish premiere with the orchestra. The need to hear it again before coming to judgement is unarguable, because it is a packed, full-throttle piece for much of its length.

There are a lot of notes for the soloist to play, and much of it is the high-octane stuff at which Benedetti excels in established repertoire works. Her virtuosity was clearly as much of an inspiration as any external influences, and the composer’s citing of the Covid pandemic and lockdown as one such factor is not immediately obvious.

Written in five movements, but played uninterrupted, perhaps there is a catharsis in the manic second movement, but the more readily appreciable moments came later in the work. With a lot of work for a large percussion section and the brass, much of the earlier music was very loud, although the trombones and tuba were at their most interesting muted.

The concerto does calm down a little later, but still makes considerable demands of the soloist with double stopping and other virtuosic techniques even when the underscore was pared back to low strings and gong, or Pippa Tunnell’s harp. The harmonic flavour of the work draws on a wide range of ingredients, sometimes very Eastern sounding but ending in another boisterous movement that sounds very American, mixing the concert hall with the world of movie soundtrack.

Was there a discernible narrative arc to the whole piece? Further listening is required, but conductor David Afkham certainly shaped – and, crucially, balanced – the sections with great attention.

The German has been at the helm of the Spanish National Orchestra in senior posts for a decade and has extensive American experience as well. This was his RSNO debut and the Shostakovich Five he directed after the interval suggested a very useful partnership already. Under earlier chief conductors, this orchestra played more of this composer’s music than we have heard of late, but it still revels in it.

The Fifth, of course, was Shostakovich’s 1937 response to Stalin’s criticism (of the “muddle” of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk), and much has been written and said about decoding its message. Afkham’s approach to the score was refreshingly direct, quite brisk in places that give other conductors pause, and, I think, entirely free of irony. It is a pretty bleak work in places, and the slow movement had a tangible feeling of utter resignation, but the RSNO wind soloists were on stellar form and the strings magnificent in the relentless single note that brings the work to its compelling conclusion.

Keith Bruce

Picture shows the curtain call at Friday’s Usher Hall concert (credit: RSNO)

SCO / Emelyanychev

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City Halls, Glasgow

Alongside world class musicianship and a breadth of programming that leaves few ears unengaged, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s 50th anniversary season has been distinguished by very thoughtful and original programming. This concert, built around the world premiere of a new choral work by Sir James MacMillan, was a stunning example of that.

MacMillan’s Composed in August – not a diary note but the real title of the Robert Burns lyric known mostly by its first line Now Westlin Winds – is an SCO commission with partner organisations in Estonia and Sweden. Once they have had their premieres, it is likely to become a very popular piece with choirs, challenging in parts but tune-filled, and unusual in being a secular work from MacMillan for these forces.

The singers have to employ a range of techniques and the excellent SCO Chorus members were as assured in their diction of the rhythmically overlapping phrases as in the wordless music at the gentle finish. The instrumental music is for the SCO’s standard set-up, with the odd extra string player, and echoes the pastoral music of the Baroque era in the strings, horns and woodwind birdsong while still bearing the clear signature of the composer. With a wealth of different music over the five stanzas, it is an exquisite piece.

The work of two Ayrshire lads was followed by a Mancunian’s impression of Orcadian celebration, with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s perennially popular An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise. There are few conductors who so obviously enjoy their work as Maxim Emelyanychev, but the young Russian was in ecstatic form here, enjoying all the theatre of the piece with foot-stomping enthusiasm. That included a tray of drams being brought on for himself and leader Stephanie Gonley as the work slides into inebriation, greeted with a hilarious massed “slanj” of hipflasks from the chorus, still seated in the choir stalls.

If the larks set up the arrival of piper Robert Jordan, in full regalia, from the back of hall to perfection, there was also a characteristic precision in every detail of their performance – especially the “tuning up” moment, which Emelyanychev surely recognised as being a gag partly at his own expense.

The programme began with a French composer’s way with Scots romanticism, Berlioz’s Rob Roy overture, which takes Burns’s tune Scots Wha Hae and finds a lot of different things to do with it. With some period instrumentation, it is a curious and fascinating response to Sir Walter Scott’s novel, full of colour and a reminder, perhaps, that the melody makes a strong claim to National Anthem status.

The overture teed-up a superb performance of the same composer’s La mort de Cleopatre with mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill on her best form. Rather than a soloist at the front of the stage she was embedded in the music, but at the same time gave an expressive reading that was straight off the opera stage. The low string pulse that sets up her welcoming of death sounded startlingly contemporary, and emblematic of how this orchestra and its associates span the centuries.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Karen Cargill by Nadine Boyd

BBC SSO: Verdi Requiem

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City Halls, Glasgow

I’ve no idea what Thursday’s live broadcast performance of Verdi’s Requiem by the BBC SSO and Edinburgh Festival Chorus sounded like over the airwaves – though it’s easy enough to find out by dialling it up on BBC Sounds – but in the flesh, in the limited acoustical sound box that is Glasgow City Halls, and untamed by production tricks, it veered close on its mightiest occasions to deafening. That won’t be the case on Sunday, when the same performers under SSO chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth repeat this showpiece work in the spaciousness of Edinburgh’s Usher Hall.

That said, reservations lay not entirely with bricks and mortar. What Wigglesworth gave us on Thursday evening was a Verdi Requiem rich in golden moments, at times particularly thought-provoking, but which was otherwise erratic in its piecing together of what is essentially fluent impassioned opera dressed in sacred concert hall formality. 

The very opening was full of theatrical promise – the slow, considered cello motif faintly whispered, embracing a brooding, mysterious tone from which the opening Introit and Kyrie looked set to rise and fall with mountainous persuasion before the ensuing Dies Irae, with its savage drums, venomous energy and protracted drama. 

The full-bodied Festival Chorus, trained by its director James Grossmith, was instantly impressive, wholesome and confident, wide ranging in its expressive power, diction crystal clear. Enter, too, the solo vocal quartet, notable initially for the piercing operatic tenor of Antonio Poli, to which soprano Miah Persson, mezzo soprano Alice Coote and bass William Thomas added both their corporate heft and, where it mattered, intuitive sparks of individuality. The SSO responded dutifully with supportive playing and matching sumptuousness, despite the brass being actively encouraged to overwhelm the chorus. 

All this gave Wigglesworth scope to add his own thoughts – glimpses of often ignored orchestral detail he felt needed emphasis, though some were more awkwardly manufactured than naturally emergent; weighted tempi that, when judiciously applied, magically drew breath. What we didn’t always get was a sense of complete organic synergy – the SSO left ever so slightly behind the beat at times – or sufficient seamless vision to give the piece its macro-visceral grip.

The later, shorter movements produced the same peppering of delights: the soloists revelling in the transformational piety of the Offertory; an ecstatic choral Hosanna to round off the Sanctus and Benedictus (despite its exquisitely busy violin countermelody – the icing on the cake – being barely audible); the spiritual awe and intensity of the Lux Aeterna, including a dynamic floor show from the double basses whose synchronous, animated pizzicato resembled an archery display; and then the Libera Me, its gorgeous a cappella “Requiem Aeternam”, Persson soaring ethereally above, like a precious preparatory moment before the work’s exhaustive, final plea for deliverance. 

If this was a performance that occasionally seemed one rehearsal short of complete readiness, Sunday afternoon’s repeat at the Usher Hall should redeem that. And there. of course, the brass can let off steam without causing any offence.

Ken Walton

Idomeneo

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Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow

It would be fruitless to pretend that the Alexander Gibson Opera School’s end-of-term production of Mozart’s pivotal early opera was not compromised by the indisposition of the tenor cast as Idomeneo.

Canadian James Schouten was onstage, and walked, mimed, and occasionally coughed, through the title role, while New Zealander Aidan Thomas Phillips sang the part from the side of the stage. Plaudits to them for their perseverance, but by the end of the night it was clearly a stretch for both, and the brave efforts of their colleagues could do nothing for the skewed balance of Act 2’s beautiful “farewell” trio and the ground-breaking quartet featuring all four main characters in Act 3.

Rehearsals had apparently been dogged by illness, but even if everyone had been well, it would be hard to enthuse about PJ Harris’s production. The imposing set, by Anna Yates, is dominated by “Neptune’s column” a lighthouse-like edifice which contains the god (sung by Joshua McCullough) and is mounted on a rocky plinth which later opens up to become the grotto/allotment of the captive Trojan princess, Ilia (Audrey Tsang). With the upper playing area being home to a collection of props – a safe, a crown, a tomahawk – that are the subject of much distracting stage business, and the restricted space below permitting only processional choreography of chorus and principals, the reason why David McVicar’s Scottish Opera production took a minimal approach to staging the same work was all too apparent. Perhaps all this opaque symbolism referenced a recently-popular fantasy TV series, but if so, so what? And, indeed, why?

Musically the performances were mostly very fine indeed. Tsang was in superb voice from the start – although her better solo music comes later in the score – and Rosie Lavery, dressed in scarlet as Elettra, Ilia’s rival for the affections of Idamante, was even more commanding vocally and the most confident performer onstage, ideally cast for the drama of her solos in Act 3. In a simpler staging, the decision to make Idamante the daughter of Idomeneo, rather than a “trouser role” in the traditional sense, might have seemed more significant, but making it almost incidental may well have been entirely deliberate. Charlotte Bateman sang well, and although her less powerful voice did not match the work of either of her suitors, the three blended beautifully.

The best ensemble work, however, came from the chorus, who also have their best music later in the work, and produced the goods in their eloquent commentary on the shenanigans of their supposed superiors. In the pit, conductor John Butt has the student orchestra as well-drilled as you would expect, while his own harpsichord playing characteristically drives the soloists’ accompagnato to fine narrative effect.

Picture by Robbie McFadzean/RCS

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

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.

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