Category Archives: Reviews

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

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

Nicola Benedetti: Violin Café

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Decca Classics

Scottish violin star Nicola Benedetti’s new group is not without antecedents. Guitarist Martin Taylor’s Spirit of Django, with veteran accordionist Jack Emblow, and its inspiration, the Quintet of the Hot Club of France, with violinist Stephane Grappelli, were jazz groups but the ensemble sound was similar.

Here, however, there is usually just the one soloist, the violinist herself, and that seems like a missed opportunity, not least because the exceptions stand out in the set. Sarasate’s Navarra may be a well-aired party piece, but duetting with violinist Yume Fujise – who has also joined the quartet on tour for that one number – lifts the track from the other violin party pieces on the disc.

The live dates also seemed to feature cellist Maxim Calver rather more prominently than Thomas Carroll, who is on the recording, but it is really guitarist Plinio Fernandes and the accordion of Samuele Telari that it would have been good to hear more of, for their own virtuosity at least as much as for the variety.

The other exception is the trio of tracks in the middle of the album arranged by and in duet with Brighde Chaimbeul and her Scottish smallpipes. Only one of these, Skye Boat Song, is well-known, and that benefits hugely from her fresh approach. The swerve into traditional music is less awkward than could have been predicted, but the sharing of the limelight is one of the strengths of that sidestep that might have been emulated elsewhere.

Sit Peter Maxwell-Davies’s Farewell to Stromness – in an arrangement by Paul Campbell – is a step on that road earlier in the album, and it is lovely to have Benedetti playing that and tunes like Ponce’s Estrellita, but sometimes the arrangements commissioned for the album – and the four-square production – make you long for a little more risk.

There’s nothing wrong with Violin Café, and it will doubtless fill many Christmas stockings, but it’s more cappuccino than a shot of espresso.

Keith Bruce

RSNO / Sondergard

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Clara Schumann’s piano pieces and Lieder may be much more regularly heard now, but her choral work is still a novelty, perhaps because there is so little of it. The story behind her uninspiringly-named Three Mixed Choruses is a good one, however.

Settings of the poetry of Emanuel Geibel, they date from the Dresden years of the Schumanns, when Robert was in full creative flow and directing a community chorus he had established. His wife wrote and rehearsed them in secret and they were unveiled as a birthday present for her husband.

The a cappella trio sound like they might, perhaps, have been performed by a choir in the music competition that masks the escape of the Von Trapps at the climax of The Sound of Music, and the RSNO Chorus gave a fine account of them under the baton of chorus director Stephen Doughty.

Geibel’s verse may not be of the first rank, but the music is varied, melodious and exploits the full range of the voices. The choir’s sopranos seemed a little hesitant in the opening Ave Maria but the basses were impressive and the middle range voices rich and rounded. On the more upbeat, marching Onward, the top notes rang much clearer and the ensemble sound on Gondola Song – the most instantly likeable of the three – was relaxed and warm.

The chorus remained on the stage platform, behind the orchestra, for Mozart’s Great Mass in C Minor, and that integration with the instrumentalists undoubtedly helped a work that cannot help but seem a little piecemeal, despite the best efforts of those who completed it – and of conductor Thomas Sondergard.

The big choir set pieces, like the opening of the Credo and the Sanctus, are the most predictable parts of the score, and the brief chorale finale of the Benedictus that follows the soloist’s quartet (including the only use of baritone Andreas Landin and just the second of tenor Edgardo Rocha) is almost ridiculously short. There are more interesting sections for the choir to get their teeth into in the Gloria and those were where the singers really shone.

The two sopranos, Brenda Rae and Katie Coventry, had the best of it, though – and Rae in particular, a late replacement for the indisposed Mojca Erdmann, made a strong impression.

The choir had also stayed in their places for the other work in the programme, Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto with the orchestra’s Principal Trumpet, Christopher Hart, the soloist.

It is a testament to the ambition of both Joseph Haydn and the virtuoso for whom he wrote the work, Anton Weidinger, that a composition written to take advantage of what turned out to be a transitional phase in the development of the instrument remains a mainstay of the repertoire of the valve trumpet of today – and the third movement one of Haydn’s best known pieces.

With his colleagues a chamber-orchestra-sized RSNO, Hart’s familiar burnished tone was especially suited to the song-like central slow movement and his crisp articulation of the faster music as accomplished as this audience knows to expect.

Their acclaim was rewarded with a very lovely encore arrangement of Debussy’s Prelude The Girl With the Flaxen Hair, in which Hart’s solo trumpet was backed by just the front desk strings.

Keith Bruce

SCO/Emelyanychev

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City Halls, Glasgow

Some members of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra Chorus doubtless sang Hector Berlioz’s L’Enfance du Christ under the baton of Emmanuel Krivine when the SCO last performed the oratorio in Glasgow City Halls almost a decade ago – but equally many of the current cohort of singers will have been tackling the work for the first time. It is surely that constant process of renewal, under chorus director Gregory Batsleer (who has just extended his contract with the choir), that makes the SCO Chorus so special.

It was on its finest form for this concert, making The Shepherds’ Farewell, the best known music of the score, sound newly-minted, its luscious harmony delivered with ideal balance and precision, and then exceeding that achievement with the closing a cappella hymn, surely some of the finest and most perfectly calibrated singing ever heard in this venerable venue.

It included two sopranos singing from outside the choir stalls door and tenor soloist Andrew Staples moving from the front of the stage below to behind the choir to deliver his contribution. If the quieter elements of all this were daringly demanding of the silent attentiveness of the audience, the chorus of offstage Angels at the end of Part One  delivering their ethereal Hosannas had already prepared the ears.

Batsleer and conductor Maxim Emelyanychev had evidently planned the delivery of Berlioz’s theatrical music very carefully, and that extended to the instrumentalists as well, not just Michael Bawtree’s harmonium, located somewhere invisible alongside the women of the chorus.

The composer’s own libretto adds  a lot to the bare bones of Mary and Joseph’s flight to Egypt as it is recounted in the Bible, with the encounter between Herod (Callum Thorpe) and the Soothsayers (the men of the choir) owing much to the one between Macbeth and the Witches. Much of the narrative of the work is in the music, with that section, for example, using a superb combination of low strings, natural horn and bassoon.

All of these details could not have been clearer under the conductor’s meticulous direction, and nor could the architecture of the piece, with the odd-time-signatured ritual music of those mystics in Part One mirrored by the instrumental interlude of home-making in Part Three. Typical of Emelyanychev, the maestro took a chair amongst his string players to enjoy the pastoral trio that followed from flautists Claire Wickes and Carolina Patricio and Eleanor Hudson’s harp.

The vocal soloists, then, had to be content to share much of the spotlight that usually falls on them, but their contributions were of equally high standard. Roderick Williams set the standard for French diction with his animated Polydorus before becoming a more sedate Joseph, while Paula Murrihy’s Mary was radiant, with just the right measure of anxiety.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Paula Murrihy by Barbara Aumuller

BBC SSO: Lazarova / Kanneh-Mason

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City Halls, Glasgow

This wasn’t Bulgarian-born Delyana Lazarova’s maiden encounter with the BBC SSO, but Thursday’s concert did represent her first official appearance as the orchestra’s new principal guest conductor. It’s a marginally more relaxed role than chief conductor, but it does enable the incumbent to exert meaningfully something of his or her personality on the orchestral response. What this performance told us was that Lazarova is a disciplined, energetic musician capable of combining such marked precision with interesting musical thought.

At least, that was the majority impression on Thursday, instantly conveyed in Strum, a virile, catchy showpiece for strings (its origins being the composer’s initial 2006 string quintet version) by New Yorker Jessie Montgomery. It’s not new repertoire for the SSO – having performed it outdoors under Marin Alsop and under canvas during Covid times at the 2021 Edinburgh International Festival – but this indoors version bore an infectious immediacy that got the new relationship off to a snappy start.

There was quirkiness in abundance, generated initially by jousting solos, a rock-fuelled riot of strummed rhythms and catchy ostinati gradually building to a full-scale menagerie bearing the heady influence of American folk and dance styles with the heated undercurrent of minimalism. 

Fast forward and the second half pitted a rare Samuel Barber work against the familiar sumptuous seascape that is Debussy’s three symphonic sketches, La Mer. 

Medea’s Dance of Vengeance, adapted from the dance score Barber wrote in the 1940s based on Euripedes’ Medea for the groundbreaking American contemporary dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, unleashes a side to the composer at odds with his more typically Romanticised persona. Dissonant and harsh, at times viciously thrusting, but equally touched by magic and mystery, Lazarova embraced the score’s heaving feverish sentiments to the full, eliciting a performance that journeyed inexorably towards its fulminating conclusion.

Her Debussy was the perfect foil. The richness of its colourings, tidal sweeps loaded with emotive ebb and flow, breathtaking moments of calm, delicacies of touch like the textures of a Turneresque sea-spray, all played their part in defining a consummate performance.

What, then, of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto, which came earlier in the opening half and featured the British soloist Isata Kanneh-Mason? There was no denying the technical prowess informing her performance, its remarkably articulate finger work and fiery, insistent energy. 

But it was frustratingly self-centred. Those moments where the pianist can lay low and allow the orchestral subtleties to shine through were entirely ignored, even by Lazarova who seemed content to accept the situation, descending into something of a tonal mishmash in heightened parts of the finale. Give and take was not on the menu. 

Even where the piano is firmly in the spotlight, expectations were often dashed, such as Kanneh-Mason’s tone production, its tendency despite honest intentions to flatline across the melodic phrase. The music’s lyrical dimension was weakened as a result. Kanneh-Mason has proven her worth on many occasions, but on this one her understanding of the concerto’s inner depth felt like work in progress. 

Ken Walton

(Photo credit: Martin Shields)

This programme is repeated in Aberdeen tonight (28 Nov) and will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in Concert on Tuesday 20 January, beyond which it  will be available to stream for 30 days on BBC Sounds

RSNO / Hahn / Dupree

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Most listeners have no problem liking George Gershwin and Sergei Rachmaninov – the headline composers here – but self-proclaimed “Bad Boy of Music” George Antheil still has the ability to divide opinion a century after the deliberate provocation of his Ballet Mecanique.

The judgement of history on his “Glandbook for a Questing Male” article for Esquire magazine is likely to be harsh, but his music, for all its cut-and-paste chaos, remains diverting and fun. In this hugely entertaining RSNO concert it also set the tone for the first half at least.

The orchestra’s Principal Guest Conductor Patrick Hahn was the piano soloist for Antheil’s A Jazz Symphony, composed in 1925, partly as a response to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and played here in the revised, rather more concise but  equally mis-named, 1955 revision.

It was great to hear Hahn displaying his pianistic chops on the challenging score, and the RSNO matched him – doubtless counting like mad – as the score sampled everything from Dixieland to big band to cabaret versions of the jazz idiom, careering wildly across them all at break-neck speed with many abrupt switches of pace and tempo.

On  the podium, and keeping the crazy vehicle on track, was German musician Frank Dupree who then – amidst much appropriate pantomime – became the piano soloist for his own arrangement of Gershwin’s own response to Rhapsody in Blue, his Piano Concerto in F, which premiered in New York in 1925.

Dupree’s “jazz trio” version is perhaps contradictory to the original’s symphonic ambitions, but works extraordinarily well on its own terms. Dupree was rarely heard on his own, with most of the solo piano part accompanied by the double bass of Jakob Krupp and the drums and cymbals of Obi Jenne, culminating in an extended last movement cadenza that incorporated a nod to Rhapsody in Blue itself.

In this orchestral democracy there was great support from the RSNO players too, with muted horn, three clarinets and especially first trumpet Chris Hart all on fine jazzy form. The encore – which we would surely have heard even if the audience reception had been more muted – was a rollicking take on Duke Ellington’s Caravan with Hahn, Dupree and his rhythm section joined by the entire percussion section, displaying amusingly diverse degrees of enthusiasm.

After the interval Hahn returned to the podium to direct an interpretation of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No 3, from 1935/6, that was significantly less a throwback to Romanticism than might have been anticipated. Its three movements each contain a reference to the piano-featuring Rhapsody that preceded it (the one on a Theme of Paganini) as if it too was making a more serious statement after the flash of its predecessor.

Those rhythmic signatures were especially clear in Hahn’s reading, as were the orchestration debts that the score owes to earlier 20th century music, especially Debussy. The RSNO strings, under leader Igor Yuzefovich, delivered top-drawer playing, and the work emerged as every bit the equal of the much more frequently played Second Symphony.

Keith Bruce

Recorded by BBC Radio 3 for broadcast and available  for 30 days thereafter on BBC Sounds.

BBC SSO / Brabbins / Gonley

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City Halls, Glasgow

Thursday’s lengthy but well-balanced programme represented all that is good about the BBC SSO. It revived a James MacMillan classic – the work through which this orchestra rocketed him to fame at the 1990 Proms; it brought belatedly the world premiere of a major work by the legendary SSO co-founder and conductor Ian Whyte, a Violin Concerto written almost 70 years ago but never performed; and with the heft of Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony proved how intensely powerful this orchestra can be in mining the expressive depths of the Romantic symphonic repertoire.

MacMillan’s The Confession of Isobel Gowdie, at its first hearing 35 years ago, sent a Royal Albert Hall audience into vocal paroxysms, its emotional potency, frenzied extremes and gruellingly-sustained coherence defying even the doubters among the then BBC hierarchy who might have questioned the wisdom of such a major commission going to a relatively unknown composer from the sticks. How misjudging they were!

In this performance the original shock factor – it deals with a 17th century witch trial, the torture and burning of an innocent woman – may naturally have abated through usage, but under Martyn Brabbins, even in what might be considered a clinically-crafted reading, that same intensity was impossible to ignore. The mystical undercurrent of the Requiem plainsong Lux aeterna, disguised initially within the quietly undulating woodwind but later igniting such horrifying, seismic explosions, held the narrative together while paradoxically heightening its defiant conflicts. The utter daringness of the music – epitomised in the 13 uncompromisingly violent hammer blows – still packs a vicious punch.

Could we say the same about Whyte’s Violin Concerto, a work the composer tried out privately on piano in the 1950s with its intended dedicatee, violinist Max Rostal, but which never made it to full performance till now, facilitated by a new performing edition by Scots musicologist Robin McEwan? 

It certainly found optimum favourability in the hands of soloist Stephanie Gonley, whose arrestingly focussed playing unearthed the best from a strangely unfocussed score. She teased genuine rhapsodic warmth from the evolving melodic thread of the opening Allegro commodo, negotiated its mercurial path to a lengthy cadenza with directional persistence, a point beyond which Whyte strangely signs off with a seemingly pointless, perfunctory cadence.

In the slow movement Gonley’s rich lyrical sonority spread a layer of reflective melancholy over the darker orchestral undercurrents, lifting its spirits towards a final ghostly chord. If the Finale immediately unleashed its puckish debt to Prokofiev, it was with a pronounced Scots brogue as various reels and other folksy tunes – a little Brigadoon-like at times – generated the energy. 

At its best, we heard a concerto that owes much of its quicksilver disposition to the likes of Korngold, colourful and excitable, almost filmic in the early Hollywood sense. Yet it struggles to hold a consistent, continuous argument, aspirationally modern yet glued to the less progressive style that was Whyte’s comfort zone. That said, it was absolutely right of the SSO and McEwan to allow it the public airing it deserves.

The most interesting aspect of the Rachmaninov that followed was to witness the same detailed definition of the previous performances spill over into such a well-weathered symphonic warhorse. Despite its considerable length, there was an unfaltering inevitability flowing through this compelling interpretation. Brabbins let the slow opening dictate its own character, the ensuing complexities of the first movement as profoundly gravitational as they were exhilarating. The Scherzo bristled with fiery energy, finding its perfect response in the luscious embrace of the Adagio. The Finale served its purpose, a virile coruscating conclusion to a towering symphony and a satisfying concert.

Ken Walton

This concert will be broadcast on Radio 3 in Concert on Wednesday 26 November beyond which it will be available on BBC Sounds for 30 days

SCO / Marwood

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City Halls, Glasgow

On the face of it, the composer line-up for this SCO matinee concert – Handel, Mozart and Schumann – was popular mainstream. In reality, it offered this Friday afternoon audience some fresh perspectives. Besides youthful Mozart and some pre-English Venetian Handel, the outer framework of Schumann – an early “sinfonie” to open with and and the late and troublesome Violin Concerto as a programme finale – proved a refreshing exploration.

The man in charge was violinist Anthony Marwood, leading the ensemble from the front desk where appropriate, but taking centre stage for the two concertos. If that lent a certain intimacy to the performances, it also inspired a visceral interaction among the main body of players, both visually and audibly, the outcome of which was to imbue much of this music with frissons of risk and excitement.

Schumann’s Overture, Scherzo and Finale, a loose-limbed triptych dating from the composer’s hot-headed advances and marriage to Clara Wieck, set a spirited tone; though not so much in the slow opening bars, their dramatic character gestures less convincingly addressed than the breezy vistas that followed. The remaining Overture, opulent and debonair, gave way to the measured frivolity of the Scherzo, responded to in turn by a Finale brimming with Germanic lustre and a grand Mendelssohn-like apotheosis.

Mozart’s Violin Concerto No 1 in B major is the least known of the five he wrote in his teens, and likely the earliest he composed at the age of 17, which explains its clean, exuberant persona (and an opening theme that could so easily be viewed as a prototype for that of the later G major concerto). Marwood’s charming, unassuming playing suited the piece, whether in the sunny elegance of the outer movements, or the lyrical expansiveness of the neatly-crafted central Adagio. It wasn’t an accident-free performance, but refreshingly on-message musically.

By itself, Handel’s Overture to his 1709 opera Agrippina assured a vivaciously melodramatic opener to the second half; but Marwood had other ideas, segueing immediately into the stormy landscape that opens Schumann’’s Violin Concerto. It was an inspired move, the same furious scales that drive the Handel prominent too in the sweeping mood-music of the later work.

That said, Marwood’s solo performance was a little touch and go in matters of intonation and generating a genuinely wholesome tone. If the opening movement seemed to exhaust itself prematurely, that was rectified in an idyllic slow movement, SCO principal cellist Philip Higham’s melting dialogue with the soloist a motivating highlight. Uncertainties resurfaced in the Finale, some blotchy solo passage work, but Marwood and the orchestra captured enough of the dance vibe – albeit a tad galumphing at times (Schumann’s fault?) – to sign off convincingly.

Ken Walton

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