Category Archives: Reviews

SCO / Emelyanychev / Higham

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City Halls, Glasgow

Finding soloists within its own ranks is no longer a tactic the Scottish Chamber Orchestra reserves for summer touring to Scotland’s smaller halls, although that was where principal cello Philip Higham last played the Schumann Cello Concerto with his colleagues.

In another superbly-structured programme from Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev and the SCO, Higham’s performance of a work he has securely under his fingers was preceded by the young Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage and followed after the interval by the UK premiere of Jorg Widmann’s 5 Albumblatter, the composer’s concerto-like homage to Schumann, written as a competition piece for cello students. The orchestrated version of Debussy’s gorgeously melodic Petite Suite brought the concert to a sumptuous conclusion.

In contradiction of the printed programme, it was only in the Mendelssohn that we heard natural timpani, horns, and trumpets, the latter especially effective towards the end of the piece. Emelyanychev found a very wide range of orchestral sound and intricate balance in this brief piece, that might be seen as minor Mendelssohn.

Higham may know the Schumann well, but he never succumbed to the temptation of Romantic wallowing in the music. This was a rigorous performance of a work that surely now has its proper place in the pantheon of concertos for his instrument. If the opening is structurally similar to Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, the flow of the piece is all Schumann and the finale, with the soloist’s fiendishly tricky arpeggios in dialogue with the orchestra, surely influenced the composer’s revision of the Fourth Symphony.

Schumann’s chamber music for piano and cello (his own instruments) lie behind the fun and games of Widmann’s 2022 work, also highly technically demanding, but smile-making as well. There is some deconstruction of those influences in the opening movement, amusing dialogue with the bassoons in the rhythmic Liebelei, and a fourth movement that imagines Clara and Robert doing a Bossa Nova around the ballroom. The finale is entitled Mit Humor, but that is an instruction that seemed superfluous.

Debussy’s Petite Suite began as a work for two pianos and the first two movements contain two of his best known tunes. The orchestrated version his publisher commissioned becomes richer as  the four movements unfold, and, as he had with the Mendelssohn, Emelyanychev revealed the work’s riches incrementally. Like the Schumann, this is music that can become mushy, but that was never a danger here, in the conductor’s pin-sharp attention to detail. Pointillism, rather than Impressionism perhaps.

Keith Bruce

BBC SSO / Volkov : Tectonics 2026

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City Halls, Glasgow

It might seem nonsense to talk of an outlier in an event as experimental and diverse as conductor Ilan Volkov’s annual spring weekend of new music, Tectonics, but Saint Abdullah’s 40 minutes in the Old Fruitmarket warranted that description.

Following so recently on the BBC SSO’s evening in the Finnieston night-club SWG3 with Ayanna Witter-Johnston, here was music that might have been more at home there, but instead happened in blackout in the middle of a Sunday afternoon.

Saint Abdullah is the label used by Iranian-Canadian brothers Mohammed and Mehdi Mehrabani – although only one of them appeared to be onstage here. Their acclaimed recent collaborations have been with Brooklyn-based percussionist Jason Nazary and Irish producer Eomac (Ian McDonnell), but this intense tapestry of sound required no other ingredients.

Playing at maximum volume to begin, with industrial beat loops and what sounded not unlike a deconstructed recording of trombonist Joe Bowie’s Defunkt band, the set found gentler moments. Those included a long alto sax passage, what appeared to be an electronic concertina but resembled early Soft Machine in sound, birdsong and a chorus of children.

Most of this, obviously, was recorded and sampled, but the live ingredients were crucial to the immediacy of the music. Despite the relentlessness of some of it, you were left wanting more.

The world premiere that ended the SSO’s concert in the Grand Hall later that evening was similar in its encompassing of a great deal in a comparatively short time. Flautist and composer Nicole Mitchell’s Clues from the Rippling of Space-Time would indeed be difficult to pin to a specific date, but revealed long and deep knowledge of 20th century American music for large ensembles, both orchestral and big band, stretching from the interwar years to much more recently.

Mitchell herself was a soloist, and so too was her pianist duo partner Craig Taborn. Both altered their sounds electronically, Taborn producing a growly underscore at one point and plucking strings inside the Steinway at another, but their amplification was subtle and effective.

An equally large range of possibilities was, of course, available from the orchestra, and Mitchell seemed to exploit most of them in her half-hour piece, with some startlingly original orchestration as well as those passages echoing earlier styles. Everyone was very busy from start to finish in one of those works that it was impossible to appreciate fully on a single hearing.

It was the most successful of the programme, although Czech composer Martin Smolka’s Until time takes back its gift, the other brand-new BBC commission, was often fun. Its seven short pieces also covered the waterfront, opening with a strange diatonic scale on harp and ending with lush strings playing, seemingly oblivious to the discords elsewhere on the platform. This was investigative music, never happy to pursue a single direction, and occasionally very filmic, notably in the violins of the second piece and Lynda Cochrane’s piano in the fifth.

Noami Pinnock’s visual art-inspired I put lines down and wipe them away – a UK premiere – opened the closing concert and seemed to have taken us little further when it ended. Its restricted range was surely intended and some of its most original sounds – including a quartet of sanding blocks – were attractive, but it never became more than its limited ingredients.

In some ways the GBSR Duo’s Oliver Leith-composed good day good day bad day bad day was also a Tectonics outlier, because the piece, written specifically for – and indeed about – the couple, is now approaching a whole decade old. It followed Saint Abdullah in the Old Fruitmarket and simply listing the ingredients of George Barton’s percussion set up would be a mammoth job. His tasks began with varying the pitch of wine-glasses using immediately-discarded pipettes, featured a swanee whistle on a harmonica neck stand, and finished with a spoked wheel that could be plucked like a thumb piano or ethereally bowed.

Siwan Rhys might have been less mobile, but her keyboard skills, playing very different music on concert grand and electronic keyboard simultaneously, were extraordinary. Leith’s eight-movement journey through the banalities and anxious moments of a day was fascinating and often very beautiful.

Keith Bruce

Highlights from Tectonics will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s New Music Show on Saturdays 9 and 16 May and available on BBC Sounds for 30 days thereafter.

Pictures of Ilan Volkov and GBSR Duo at Tectonics 2026, credit BBC.

SCO / SCO Chorus / Minasi

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City Halls Glasgow

Mozart’s Requiem will forever pose the question “what if?”. If only he’d finished it, what level of masterpiece would we have been gifted? What happened is the stuff of myth, bordering on conspiracy. 

In short, Mozart was dying in 1791 and desperately accepted a clandestine commission from one Count Franz Walsegg-Stuppach via a mysterious agent. The Count, notorious for exercising ridiculous vanity projects in which he passed off such purchased works as his own, faced a dilemma when Mozart inconveniently died before completion. In a bid to fulfil the contract, Mozart’s wife charged his pupil Franz Süssmayr to finish the job, which is the version most commonly heard today, and which the SCO and SCO Chorus addressed to a packed City Halls on Friday.

These are forces that know their onions when it comes to Mozart. Gregory Batsleer’s choristers are a tight, gripping ensemble, even-toned throughout with just the right amount of pizazz, their compact numbers commensurate with the sleek, steely Classical machine that is the SCO. Even with a scoring that incorporates three trombones, it was remarkable to witness the elegant agility from that trio perfectly aligned to this performance’s sophisticated containment.

From Italian conductor Riccardo Minasi came a lead that was both urgent and passionate, rarely outstepping stylistic bounds. Where there was ravishing mystery in the opening bars and in many of those reflective sections within the Sequentia, there was also a living, breathing buoyancy enlivening the fugal Kyrie, belligerent Dies Irae and soul-stirring Offertorium. Subtleties in dynamic control gave voice to the most magical pianissimos, the Chorus’ verbal projection impressive at every level, the SCO forever attentive in support. 

Much was to be admired, too, in the solo vocal quartet, particularly distinguished by the cut-glass purity of tenor Julien Henric and affecting lyricism of bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch. Mezzo-soprano Hanna Hipp and soprano Louise Alder may have been less-consistently matched, not always in perfect step with the exactitude of the prevailing performance style, but both found moments of blissful magic with which to compensate. Perhaps complicit, Minasi’s gestural tendency to over-conduct led to periodic glitches in the rhythmic flow.

What was really striking about this performance, though, was the extent to which it revealed the unmistakable depth of personality in Mozart’s writing – those bits he did write – that wasn’t always as evident with Haydn in the evening’s partner work, the older composer’s war-inspired Paukenmesse. 

There’s no doubting the merits of the latter, not least the quirky colouring in the closing Agnus Dei where timpanist Louise Lewis Goodwin’s wooden-sticked rat-tat-tats conjured up a valedictory martial air. The delivery – using mostly the same forces as the Mozart – was unquestionably sound and faithful to the score; it just seemed, in this case, a tad functional, like the short before the main feature, selling it more as an off-the-shelf offering from a dutiful composer than a rare masterpiece. 

Ken Walton

SCO / Power

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City Halls, Glasgow

With the caveat that it had not occurred to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s management team (and that I have never been especially good at sums), I calculate that the SCO’s charismatic and popular Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev will become the longest serving in the orchestra’s history when he reaches the end of his latest contract extension – to 2031 “at least”.

That was the headline announcement in Chief Executive Gavin Reid’s unveiling of the orchestra’s new season before Friday’s concert – a season that will include the first four Beethoven symphonies and the composer’s Violin Concerto as the SCO’s contribution to the joint Beethoven 200 celebrations with the RSNO, BBC SSO and Scottish Opera.

Those future plans were tinged with sadness, however, as the funeral had taken place earlier in the day of Brian Schiele, a member of the viola section for more than 30 years who had resumed playing after major surgery only for his cancer to return. This season’s closing concerts next month, conducted by Emelyanychev, will be dedicated to his memory.

As it happened, this programme appropriately featured his instrument, in the hands of soloist Lawrence Power and in three of the compositions in the programme he directed. Its linking of Baroque music with more contemporary works was very much in Emelyanychev’s line, and Power’s selections made for just as interesting a listening lesson.

French Baroque pieces opened each half, Couperin’s Les barricades mysterieuses in a haunting quintet arrangement (bass clarinet, clarinet, viola, cello and bass) by Thomas Ades, and Rameau’s much more familiar Les Sauvages – which also started life on the harpsichord – performed in a style a little like that of Jordi Savall,  if more “salon”.

Power followed the Couperin with part of the Suite for Viola and Small Orchestra by Vaughan Williams which references Bach and also prefigured the Rameau in its rusticity. As well as some virtuoso stuff for the viola, it has a crucial role for harp in the Moto Perpetuo, which closed Power’s selection and traveled a long way from its Baroque inspiration.

Michael Tippett’s Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli was an especially fascinating inclusion, originally commissioned by the Edinburgh International Festival and part of a programme assembled by director Ian Hunter for the summer of 1953 that was little short of astonishing. Back then, the orchestra of Italian radio had played the original Corelli from which Tippett took his ingredients for a piece performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Here it required very specific deployment of the strings on the platform, which had very audible sonic significance, and solo roles for orchestra leader Stephanie Gonley and first cello Philip Higham as well as Power.

That 1953 EIF programme also included a new Viola Concerto for Scottish violist William Primrose by Paul Racine Fricker, and this programme concluded with the Scottish premiere of Magnus Lindberg’s new Viola Concerto, dedicated to Power. If it was difficult to hear Baroque antecedents there were certainly echoes of later classical composers in a very approachable piece.

As in the Tippett, there was a lot for the orchestral violas to do as well as the soloist, who has a real showpiece cadenza towards the end of a work that follows conventional structure but with real wit, and lovely symphonic swell and coda to finish.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Lawrence Power by Giorgia Bertazzi

RSNO / Wilson / Hough

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

There’s a stimulating book by the former Glasgow University music professor Hugh Macdonald called Music in 1853 – The Biography of a Year,  fascinating for the fact it applies “biography” in the lateral rather than vertical sense. Turning the axis of history on its side we perceive a vivid snapshot of music history, alerting us to an enriching concurrence of divergent musical voices, in 1853’s case primarily Brahms, Berlioz, Wagner and Liszt.

The works featured in this RSNO programme over the weekend were by no means products of a single year. But in bringing together Ravel’s saucy La valse (completed 1920), Rachmaninov’s truculent Piano Concerto No 1 (finalised 1919) and Vaughan Williams’ moodily colourful A London Symphony (original completion 1913, revised 1933) conductor John Wilson treated us to a panoply of roughly coexisting, yet divergent, styles. All three composers were born in the 1870s, lived through a turbulent period where the hegemony of Austro-German Romanticism faced challenges from new tonal frameworks and nationalist trends, each addressing the dilemma in their own way.

Ravel, of course, had French blood coursing through his veins, so the idea of celebrating a popular dance style (in this case the Viennese waltz tradition of Johann Strauss) must have been music to his Gallic ears. As Wilson’s rather enigmatic interpretation accentuated, Ravel’s approach was one of exaggerated fantasy, swirling irony and plentiful decadence. 

What made it interesting was the extent to which this performance aimed to realign emphases within the scoring. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. While attempting to increase the muffled mystery of the opening, important lines were lost, as if emanating from a subterranean echo chamber. Once it found its feet, though, and aside from encouraging bombastic explosions from bass drum and timpani, Wilson secured levels of woozy intoxication that seemed closer to the meaning of the notes.

We seldom hear Rachmaninov’s First Piano Concerto, but as soloist Sir Stephen Hough’s rhetorically intense performance verified, it deserves a worthier place among the composer’s more popular concertos. With Rachmaninov the Romantic spirit is fulsomely preserved, which Hough and the RSNO immediately captured in the feisty opening bars. 

As in his recent Scottish appearances – in December he gave Grieg’s famous concerto a highly-personalised going-over in the BBC SSO’s 90th Anniversary Concert – Hough loaded this performance with biting characterisation, instinctively-shaped melodic phrasing, and thunderously precise energy. There was even whimsicality in the central Andante, countering beautifully its initial mysterious charm. Rabid flippancy in the exuberant final movement added to its showpiece brilliance, but not without reflection that coloured the inevitable big tunes, or Hough’s occasional delving into the music’s fiery demons. Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat, as an encore, served its calming purpose.

Wilson seemed most naturally at home in Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No 2, its narrative of a now bygone London town – from the solemn tolling of Big Ben to winsome flower sellers and bustling streets – wrapped in the composer’s familiar modal nostalgia. Its misted opening, Wilson demanding the softest of pianissimos, set in motion a performance of searing cinematic flow and expansive vision. 

The awakening surge of the ensuing Allegro; the folksy resilience of the slow movement and its soulful, valedictory viola solo (movingly articulated by section principal Tom Dunn); the jaunty Scherzo; and the harsher reality, though ultimately distant reflection, expressed in the Finale; all found effusive voice and fluid context. As with the opening, the final bass notes were a magical whisper that evaporated timelessly into the ether. A spellbinding moment.

Ken Walton 

(Photo credit: RSNO/Clara Cowen)

BBC SSO: Ayanna’s Hometown Roots

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SWG3, Glasgow

The marketing team at the BBC Scottish will doubtless interrogate the result of this away fixture in a Glasgow Finnieston club venue looking for first-time ticket-buyers, but superficially it was difficult to see the advantages over the orchestra’s home at the City Halls and Old Fruitmarket.

In under ten days, after all, Ilan Volkov will demonstrate how that complex can be filled with new music – and its own audience – for the weekend of his annual Tectonics extravaganza. Perhaps some of those attracted to SWG3 will be tempted to that event’s more radical experimentation – and perhaps that will be a journey easier to make than one to the orchestra’s mainstream classical season.

It was also a happy coincidence that Ayanna Witter-Johnson’s concert with the SSO and pianist Fergus McCreadie occurred on the same day that Glasgow International Jazz Festival unveiled its 40th anniversary programme.

Witter-Johnson is an engaging personality, as she demonstrated at The Hub during the 2023 Edinburgh International Festival, and some of the ingredients of that performance were repeated here in what was something of a composer portrait, fronted by the woman herself.

The three movements of the Ocean Floor Suite were more thoughtfully presented this time around, prefaced by an improvisation from McCreadie and carefully narrated by the composer, whose voice and cello were otherwise accompanied by percussionists. It is a work rooted in personal experience, and so was the more surprising inclusion of songs by Glasgow-born rock and jazz bass-player and vocalist Jack Bruce earlier in the programme.

Like her, his student study was cello (at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama) and he had encouraged his daughter’s friend in her earlier years. Her reading of his Rope Ladder to the Moon, from the Songs for a Tailor album, first released more than 15 years before she was born, revealed a deep understanding of a revered classic, and it was equally fascinating to hear McCreadie bring his specific style to FM, which Bruce wrote and recorded in the early 1990s.

The evening built from a partnership with a string quartet of SSO desk principals through those selections to more substantial orchestrations of songs from Witter-Johnson’s Road Runner album, and the first half ended in a lovely Katie Chatburn arrangement of the jazz standard, Misty.

After the interval, the Ocean Floor Suite was followed by the opening movement from Witter-Johnson’s Windrush Reflections, entitled Mango Dreams and dedicated to her grandparents, with harp and bass clarinet joining the quartet, before the programme’s sole symphonic orchestral work, FAIYA!, an LSO commission that showed off her own orchestrating ability. Conductor Enyi Okpara, currently assistant conductor at the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, directed all the ensemble pieces, and he seemed less comfortable with that work, where assured opening and closing sections bracketed some rhythmic uncertainty in the middle that only the players’ professionalism kept on track.

A Chatburn arrangement of another Road Runner track, Rise Up, closed the programme, save for an encore of Witter-Johnson’s regular party-piece solo version of Sting’s Roxanne. It’s a crowd pleaser, but one this musician has long out-grown.

Keith Bruce

Concert was recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3

Picture of Fergus McCreadie and Ayanna Witter-Johnson, credit BBC

BBC SSO: Bluebeard’s Castle / Chan

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City Halls, Glasgow

Bartók’s one-act Symbolist opera Bluebeard’s Castle has enjoyed variously fascinating manifestations in Scotland over the years, not least in a memorably insightful reimagining at the 2023 Edinburgh International Festival that presented female protagonist Judith, not in traditional Gothic horror terms, but as a sufferer of dementia and its impact on her marriage to a strained and bewildered Bluebeard. Thought-provoking theatre at its psychological best. 

The fascination of Thursday’s concert performance by the BBC SSO was utterly different. The focus here was solely on the music, the sweltering interaction between the two soloists (Hungarian mezzo soprano Dorottya Láng and compatriot bass-baritone Gábor Bretz), the monumentally intense, expressive power of the orchestra, all functioning hungrily without theatrical props or movement under the direction of conductor Elim Chan. 

It made for an impressive and concentrated hour’s listening. The singers were extraordinary, their natural affinity to the original Hungarian text giving visceral authenticity to their performances. In particular, Láng’s seemingly limitless power, a mezzo voice enriched by effortless consistency at every point in its extensive range, captured the inexorable mounting tension as the seven mysterious doors reveal the pain and sadness of the memories within. Add to that Bretz’s magnificently stoical Duke Bluebeard, an enigmatic feast of tortuous cruelty, surprising empathy and ultimate submission. This was perfectly compatible casting.

Chan’s vision was equally in tune, guiding a fully-stocked SSO on the most colourful and potent of journeys. From its perfectly timed interaction with the quizzical spoken prologue, through the mountainous peaks and troughs of Bartók’s thrilling orchestral landscape, and in particular the explosive catharsis symbolising the revelation behind the fifth door, this was a knock-out performance. While Chan’s gestures were incisive and clear, the resulting response was emotionally expansive and thoroughly riveting. 

The first half of this afternoon programme was not as wholly successful. While Britten’s Sea Interludes from his opera Peter Grimes made sense as an appetiser to the Bartók, it did not feature the same polished delivery. There were moments that shone promisingly: the timelessness of Dawn’s opening bird calls, the jaunty pointedness greeting Sunday Morning, the shadowy reflectiveness of Moonlight and the ferocity of the Storm. But ragged edges got in the way: a rather raw-sounding first violin section, shoddy togetherness among the wind and brass, even the odd mistimed entry, all of which seemed contrary to Chan’s neat, energised lead. 

Then there was some audience confusion in response to Shostakovich’s biting incidental music for Hamlet, as gathered together in his 1932 concert suite. The programme note suggested we were hearing all 13 pieces of the Op 32a Suite, while in reality we heard five excerpts compiled from the Film Suites, Op 116 and116a. Satisfyingly gutsy as these performances were – I’d love to hear this crackling music within the context of an actual Hamlet production – the final moments were greeted by a pregnant silence as the confused audience weighed up the situation.

Thursday’s concert also coincided with the SSO’s launch of its 2026-27 Season, details of which are now available on the orchestra’s website.

Ken Walton

This concert is repeated in Aberdeen tonight (Friday 17 April) and was recorded by BBC Radio 3 for future broadcast, beyond which it will be available to stream for 30 days via BBC Sounds.

Siemens-Hallé Conductors Competition

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Bridgewater Hall, Manchester

What difference does a conductor make to an orchestra? There are few better opportunities to explore that question than at a major conducting competition, which partly explains a rare VoxCarnyx excursion to Manchester last week for the triennial Siemens-Hallé International Conductors Competition. 

There was also a tenuous Caledonian link. Among the international field of eight who had made it to the semifinals were Claudia Fuller, a former violinist with brief shop floor orchestral experience within the RSNO, and Oliver Cope, a former postgraduate student at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland where he won the Hugh S Roberton prize for orchestral conducting. Would either, or both, make it through to last Tuesday’s grand final at the Hallé Orchestra’s Manchester home, the Bridgewater Hall?

In the event, Fuller was the only British contender to do so, pitted against Swiss-born Nina Haug and Finnish-American Aku Sorensen. Each was tasked with a performance of Bernstein’s rip-roaring Candide Overture, coupled with a symphonic work of their own choosing. After a lengthy but fascinating process Fuller came third, Sorensen emerging as the outright winner, nudging Haug into second place.

Aku Sorensen, winner of the 2026 Siemens-Hallé Conductors Competition

What does such success mean for Sorensen? He now becomes assistant conductor of the Hallé where, over the next three years, he will benefit from mentorship by the orchestra’s new principal conductor and artistic advisor Kahchun Wong, conduct five public concerts annually, serve as music director of the Hallé Youth Orchestra, and experience first hand the day-to-day planning and administrative operation of a major orchestra.

It’s a doorway to a promising future. Previous incumbents have included Scots conductor Rory Macdonald, frequent RSNO guest conductor Jonathan Heyward, and the newly appointed principal guest conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Delyana Lazarova. 

While winning is clearly a significant leg-up for any budding maestro, it’s important too to remember that the Hallé will have had a vested interest in the outcome, which may have weighted the decision.  They’d surely be looking for a sufficiently seasoned self-starter capable of hitting the ground running, someone with enough hardened self-belief to earn instant respect from no-nonsense professional orchestral players, someone guaranteed to demonstrate leadership and recognise the specific needs of a Youth Orchestra. 

Reflecting that, the five-strong Siemens-Hallé jury included three of the orchestra’s key personnel: Kahchun Wong, chief executive David Butcher and artistic planning director Anna Hirst. They were joined by artistic director of the Siemens Arts Programme Dr Stephan Frucht and Dresden Philharmonic intendant Frauke Roth. Announcing their ultimate decision, Wong made it clear that the jury’s preference resonated with that of the orchestra. It chimed, too, with the audience vote, a secret ballot conducted online and revealed only after the event. No argument there; the outcome was unanimous. Sorensen won fair and square.

There was no denying the visible confidence he exuded, no doubt ingrained through his studies at Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy under Sakari Oramo, and his invaluable experience with some of Finland’s fine orchestras. He played safe with his symphonic option, a Brahms’ Third Symphony that charted a predictable, somewhat cliched course of sturdy tempi and heavily weathered dynamics, but hosted a brusque and engaging energy. Neither this, nor his Bernstein overture, offered the most deeply imaginative performances of the night, or the most tonally refined, but his animated stage presence clearly struck a triumphant chord.

As for Fuller, she also demonstrated a raw exuberance in her approach to the Bernstein, the downside being a lack of characterful response from the woodwind – untypical bland in execution – and unchecked dominance from the brass. She set her sights high with Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, but never really captured its poetic, expressive charm. Genuine connection with the orchestra seemed sporadic.

Compare that to Nina Haug’s compelling Bernstein, hers being a more internalised physical energy that instantly transformed the Hallé’s response. Here the rhythmic bite was visceral, excitingly focussed, yet incisively controlled. There was a resonant bloom now from the woodwind, Haug’s overall pacing and dynamic control of dynamics well judged, often electrifyingly. She followed that with Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony, for the most part a performance brimming with thoughtful nuance, though erring towards the elegiac in favour of full-on Nordic grit. For that reason she came over as perhaps the most interesting prospect among the finalists, a musician of exceptional potential, if not quite the finished article. 

What we, the audience, didn’t witness were the competitors’ interactions with the orchestra in rehearsal, or their strengths and weaknesses in earlier rounds. That will have played a part in the final decision.

Ken Walton

(Photos: Alex Burns)

RSNO / Sondergard / Loch

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

One of the most inventive creations during the Covid pandemic was VOPERA’s online production of Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortileges with players from the London Phil and a cast that included Karen Cargill as ‘Maman’ (review: VOPERA: L’enfant et les sortileges | VoxCarnyx).

In fact the RSNO gave the work’s Scottish premiere in 1975, 50 years after its first performance in Monte Carlo, and a further half a century later, the orchestra teamed up with the current crop of talent at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland to present a staging that not only had the perfect context in the orchestra’s season programme, but also used Glasgow’s concert hall impressively well.

To accommodate the performance behind and above them, the orchestra platform had been extended into the front few rows of the stalls, and the effect on the sound was revelatory from the first work in the concert’s first half.

That was Paul Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a wonderful piece of orchestration that didn’t need the Disney connection from Fantasia to be a well-chosen partner for the Ravel. With its brilliant use of contrabassoon and a series of other solo instrumental turns, it was ideal aural preparation for the cleverness  of Ravel’s magical story.

Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which followed, was probably the main attraction for many ticket-buyers, especially as it was played by Ethan Loch, whose performance was being filmed for an upcoming documentary. Soloist and conductor Thomas Sondergard – together with first clarinet Timothy Orpen – served up a perfect Rhapsody, utterly true to its genre-spanning intentions.

However much the pianist was actually improvising his interpretation, it was distinctive and individual, and the pace never let up. Loch’s flamboyant encore of a cadenza from his own piano concerto was less to my taste, but virtuosic.

The collective endeavour behind the 45-minute opera after the interval was nothing short of magnificent. From the choir stalls, the RSNO Youth Chorus made immaculately-drilled contributions, while the RCS Chamber Choir, prepared by Andrew Nunn, sang from stage left of the central playing area. Many of them were costumed for their step-out roles alongside the soloists cast by the Conservatoire’s Head of Vocal Performance and Opera, Jane Irwin.

Mezzo Anna Stephany, as the child, was the sole professional singer, but you’d hardly have known that from the performances of the students. Singling out any individuals would be invidious because this was a terrific collective effort, and as much staging as the piece requires. Ailsa Munro’s costumes and props were witty and apposite, and the direction of Roxana Cole, well-known from her work in challenging venues with Scottish Opera, made remarkably effective use of the limited space, with RSNO first flute Katherine Bryan enthusiastically part of the young company as the instrumental voice of the Princess.

The visible “pit band” in front of them was full of such inspired solo turns, and the skills of this cohort at the Conservatoire, both as soloists and in ensemble were uniformly impressive. If there were a lot of elements for Sondergard to keep working as a team, he appeared to be having the best time doing so.

Keith Bruce

Picture of rehearsal of L’enfant et les sortileges by Hope Connachan-Holmes

SCO: The Language of Eden

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City Halls, Glasgow

Had this sweeping, eloquent SCO programme featured only Jay Capperauld’s concise new oratorio The Language of Eden, it would still have been an altogether fulfilling experience. The Ayrshire composer’s tenure as the SCO’s associate composer has been one of the most visibly creative phenomenon in Scottish classical music of late. Each collaborative project, each new work, has exhibited a significant step forward for Capperauld, whose voice and facility are now representative of a mature and fertile creativity. His premieres are now highly-anticipated, not-to-be-missed occasions.

Of course, coming in at little over half-an-hour, there was considerably more to a concert in which The Language of Eden functioned as its magnificent finale. As the orchestra’s principal guest conductor Andrew Manze explained in his introductory spiel, the theme underlying the entire evening related not just to music’s relationship with language, but its subliminal function as a language is itself. 

We had Shakespeare – words from The Merchant of Venice – illuminated by Vaughan Williams in his moonlit Serenade to Music, its melting harmonies and liquid melodies gorgeously woven under Manze’s baton-less gesturing. The SCO and its mid-scale Chorus responded with sumptuous understatement which paradoxically heightened the music’s intoxicating spell.

That sense of relaxation rolled over into Elgar’s Serenade for Strings. Manze – himself a violinist – drew the loveliest of timbres and detailed tracery from the SCO strings: a wispy nonchalance in the opening Allegro; melodious charm in the Larghetto; and a luxuriant, ultimately glowing reserve in the final Allegretto. 

Equally autumnal was George Butterworth’s prophetic pre-First World War settings of six poems from E A Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, presented here in a tastefully generous orchestration by baritone Roderick Williams, who also took the solo role. In songs softly lamenting the futility of young lives lost before their time – the composer himself, at 30, was a casualty of the later 1914-18 French battlefields – Butterworth’s music draws equally on folkish naivety and sophisticated imagery.

Williams’ vocal delivery was smooth, lightly-nuanced and disturbingly calm, especially powerful in its emotional restraint, whether in the quiet pastoral reflection of Loveliest of Trees, the haunting folksong of The Lads in their Hundreds, or the spectral poignance of Is My Team Ploughing?. 

In the second half, Capperauld’s premiere was prefaced by an enticingly elemental performance of Haydn’s Representation of Chaos from his oratorio, The Creation. This made complete sense, given that The Language of Eden, composed to words by Uist-born poet Niall Campbell, is an imagined portrayal, amid the biblical creation story, of the birth of language. 

Adam, sung by Williams, is being “sculpted” by the collective “inhabitants” of Eden, who gift him the Four Elements as engines of the environment around him, and who motivate his ability to communicate through language, not least the innate power of music. 

The propulsive certainty underpinning Capperauld’s score was absolutely mind-blowing in this performance. Where a powerful aura of mystery prevailed, Manze drew also on a seething earthiness within – succinct and questioning in the opening scene-setter; atmospherically vivid and wildly animated in the dramatic depictions of Air, Earth, Fire and Water; quasi-religious as Adam became aware of the music within him; chillingly ritualistic in a fearful, ultimately thunderous portend to humanity’s approaching chaos (hideously pertinent in relation to current world affairs); and a soothing farewell steeped in idiomatic Scots flavouring.

The SCO Chorus were a vibrant presence, powerfully-voiced and physically comfortable with the marching-on-the-spot and breast-beating required of them. Williams, too, embraced his role with in-depth conviction. The SCO played its part with immaculate distinction. It was a veritable tour de force, Capperauld’s music exhilarating, often in the glittering manner of John Adams, hugely versatile in character, but most impressively contained within a singularity of purpose that had this audience on the edge of their seats.

Ken Walton

BBC SSO: Pelleas et Melisande

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City Halls, Glasgow

If few complain that Beethoven wrote only one opera, Debussy’s singular contribution to the canon is a frustration. Pelleas et Melisande may be a musical masterpiece, but by way of comparison it would have been good if the composer had completed his planned As You Like It and written some music for a robust heroine like Rosalind and a confirmed cynic like Jacques.

As it is, his adaptation of Maurice Maeterlinck’s symbolist play is unique, and not only in the composer’s own catalogue. Its tale of a mysterious princess who has lost her memory as well as her crown, and is drawn into the dysfunctional family of another court by the older, greying Golaud to become the obsession of his handsome younger brother is set to a wondrous orchestral score and asks the principal singers (and the audience) to do without the arias and ensembles that are the tasty morsels of opera heritage. Debussy was following in the footsteps of Richard Wagner, specifically Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal, but forging his own individual path.

Like Scottish Opera’s Tristan earlier in the month, there is a lot to be said for a concert performance that in this case sidesteps all the symbolic water features, towers and dungeons in the story and lets the score do its work. That said, the luxury cast of singers here would grace any staged production stylishly. Bass Alasdair Miles sang the role of Arkel in David McVicar’s beautiful Scottish Opera production in 2017, Huw Montague Rendall has been acclaimed as “the Pelleas of his generation” and Sophie Bevan, who has sung Melisande in Dresden, gave a nicely nuanced reading here of what is a tricky amorphous role.

It also is not an especially showy part for a soprano. Karen Cargill, as Genevieve, had the more ear-catching music of Act 1 although Melisande’s music does perk up once she has Pelleas to sing with. Montague Rendall, who alone sang from memory, has the ideal voice for the role, which straddles tenor and baritone range, while David Stout, who sang Golaud, is a baritone of richer lower strength, exactly as his music requires. His first entry in Act 1 was immediately commanding, and he brought a fine acting game to the performance as well.

The smaller roles – Richard Morrison’s Shepherd and Doctor and young soprano Beth Stirling in the (short) trouser role of Yniold – were no less well sung, and Stirling made a memorable young lad, even if the inclusion of her superfluous Act 4 scene, which is almost always cut from staged productions, made the second half seem very long indeed.

That decision of conductor Ryan Wigglesworth was understandable – a concert performance might as well include every note in the score – but it did make this an epic Pelleas, finishing fully three and a quarter hours after it began (including the interval). The extended demise of Melisande at the end of Act 5 seemed very long indeed, exquisitely written though it is.

For all of that time, Wigglesworth’s direction was exemplary, attentive to all the details and with excellent balance, including the off-stage elements of brass, percussion and a chorus of the RCS Chamber Choir, prepared by Andrew Nunn. There was terrific playing from all the wind soloists, the harps of Helen Thomson and Sharon Griffiths, and Chris Gough’s horn section.

The  BBC SSO strings were, however, the real stars of the evening, and for much of the time Wigglesworth seemed relaxed enough to enjoy their playing as much as the audience did. Brooding and intense when that was called for, and spicy in the more sensuous music, from the first violins to the basses, each section had memorable ensemble moments, and many of them.

Keith Bruce

The performance is repeated at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall on Sunday from 3pm and was recorded for future broadcast on Radio 3, after which it will be available for 30 days on BBC Sounds.

Picture: Huw Montague Rendall

Hebrides Ensemble

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Perth Theatre

Following fairly swiftly on the recent tour of Arthur Keegan’s new companion piece to Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, together with its inspiration (review: Hebrides: Music for Time | VoxCarnyx), here was another bold programme from cellist Will Conway’s Hebrides Ensemble, built around a world premiere.

The environmental concern of that piece, Shifting Baselines, by Dave Maric, was the ostensible linking agent, but the work’s form, using a selection of recorded voices in its three movements, and the background of the composer, who played piano in the Steve Martland band, were certainly other factors.

Martland’s early solo piano piece, Kgakala (Sunrise), opened the programme, James Willshire’s performance of the picturesque score, full of technical flourishes with hints of stride left hand, suggesting some of the theatricality that would follow. The composer’s much later Reveille, for string quartet, bass, piano and tuned percussion, was just as effective at the close, as a call to arms in response to all the evidence of calamity we’d heard.

The central section of Maric’s piece uses a vox pop of people in Alyth and Perth expressing ecological concerns, while the recordings on either side were a litany of animals exterminated on a Scottish estate and a more recent official report on species threatened with extinction. The composer’s musical response – mostly written for the quartet with piano chords and snare drum rim-shots – was compelling, with very democratic sharing of the lead voice amongst the string instruments.

Three women composers added works to the programme for smaller ensembles, two of them originally heard at Aberdeenshire’s Sound festival. Georgina MacDonell Finlayson’s Silent Spring, presumably referencing Rachel Carson’s famous book, is for solo flute with tape of birdsong and spoken word, and the sound design was brilliantly mixed in this space, while flautist Cormac Henry demonstrated his extended embouchure techniques.

Aileen Sweeney’s The Wooden Web, inspired by more recent writing about the communication networks of trees, was a delight. The most traditional music-influenced work of the evening, its instruments are viola, cello and flute, with the spotlight again very equally shared, but it ended with voices when Henry’s singing was joined by the vocals of Catherine Marwood and Conway in the piece’s gentle conclusion.

Eleanor Alberga’s violin and piano sonata, The Wild Blue Yonder, dates from 1995. Alberga was born in Kingston, Jamaica but violinist David Alberman revelled in music that seemed spun from the East European gypsy dance vocabulary that colours so much classical music, becoming increasingly propulsive and vigorous before also ending in a gentler closing movement.

The outlier in the programme was George Crumb’s 1971 Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale), the theatrical piece that ended the first half and included Henry’s first vocalising. He, Willshire and Conway all donned masks (over their spectacles) as the score requires, and the lights were dimmed. The pianist spent as much time inside the instrument as on the keyboard, damping strings and introducing objects, Henry again needed his extended techniques as well as whistling, and he and Conway added some delicate percussion. It was a highly eventful eight movements, the whale song delineating periods of geological time, often expressed in very literal tick-tock fashion.

This thoughtful programme could perhaps have done with a little more detailed explanation than Conway’s brief spoken introduction and the composer’s note from Maric for his work alone, and it is not unkind to say that the stage management was fastidious rather than slick, but it was musically packed with interest. It is repeated at Kings Place in London tomorrow evening.

Keith Bruce

National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine

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Perth Concert Hall

Was there a single soul in Saturday’s packed Perth Concert Hall who did not feel an anticipatory sense of goodwill and encouragement towards the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine? Cut down to Classical proportions for this all-Beethoven programme, and fulfilling their only Scottish date in a current UK and Ireland Tour, hopes were high for courageously impassioned music-making symbolic of their home country’s existential fight for survival.

Was that, perhaps, too much to hope for? What transpired was a series of rather routine performances from the orchestra under its chief conductor Volodymyr Sirenko, whose own loose-limbed physicality appeared to influence some of the carelessness and insipidness delivered by his players. In too many instances tutti entries were like minor car accidents, solo lines were subsumed where they needed to be heard, and a prevalent tenseness hung in the air. 

Such persistent irritations masked those moments where the orchestra hinted at its true worth. The opening chords of Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture were genuinely attention-grabbing, while flickers of intense drama gave periodic colour to conversing themes and their vying sentiments. But projection of the music’s richer depths rarely rose above tepid. An ending more perfunctory than consequential voiced its own judgement.

Proof that an inspirational catalyst was sorely needed revealed itself in the form of Ukrainian pianist Mariia Pukhlianko, whose instant response to the emphatic opening E flat orchestral chord of the ‘Emperor’ Piano Concerto was one of unrelenting mission. It was an awakening moment, beyond which the pianist’s electrifying domination, heightened by fiery articulation and unremitting momentum, raised the orchestra’s game. Now there were signs of passion and self-belief, an opening movement seething with blustery rhetoric, the heavenly serenity of a slow movement touched by Pukhlianko’s lyrical sensitivity, segueing to a Finale that breezed to a resolute conclusion.

Yet for all that the spirit of this Beethoven was well-served, vexatious weaknesses prevailed. Why were key woodwind melodies subsumed beneath inessential background textures. Why have the first violins play arpeggiated accent chords rather than more affirmative divisi between desk partners when the former led to such chaotic indecision? Again, Sirenko seemed not to have dealt with important and obvious detail.

Similar issues recurred through the Seventh Symphony. But here at least there seemed to be a more convincing composure and incision (the Allegretto second movement’s graceful unfolding as convincing as the needle-sharp precision of its internal fugato), and a candid playfulness in the Scherzo. The norm is to proceed to the Finale uninterrupted with a swift attacca. Sirenko opted not to, encouraging a ripple of audience applause and a hiatus that halted the directional impetus. When it did get going, though, this spirited symphony rocked its way – despite the brass section’s untamed overindulgence – to ultimate jubilation. Even the players were now smiling.

Ken Walton

RSNO / Poska

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Estonian conductor Kristiina Poska, once a regular visitor with the SCO and now a guest conductor with the RSNO, has a distinctive style as well as immaculate tailoring on the podium. She uses a baton in her left hand but just as often her rigorous time-keeping is indicated with her right: Poska may be ambidextrous, but she is never ambiguous.

The RSNO gave her an interesting challenge in the middle of her latest programme – the world premiere of Elena Langer’s The Lives of Birds, the latest of a sequence of works the orchestra has championed by the Russian-born British composer.

The concert began, however, on more familiar turf for the conductor with Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten by her compatriot Arvo Part. It is an emblematic work from the Estonian composer, instrumental but rooted in early choral music and the sound of bells.

A single tolling bell signals the dense writing of the canon for strings, and – in partnership with RSNO leader Maya Iwabuchi – Poska had the RSNO players produce an intensity of sound from the first bars that was perfect for the piece. A work of elegant simplicity, it packed a punch in this performance.

Fortunately perhaps, a brief explanation of her new work from Elena Langer separated the Part from her new piece. Like Jonathan Dove, Langer brings a fondness for the comedic to her composition, and The Lives of Birds, which imparts human characteristics to her avian subjects, is no exception.

These birds are stalked by their vision of the Grim Reaper, a white cat, and their brief existence is concerned with territorial mastery and preening in the mirror, as well, of course, as singing.

The soloist was soprano Anna Dennis, like librettist Glyn Maxwell a regular associate of the composer, and a singer whose ability to master a difficult modern score and perform its huge demands of pitch and range with something approaching effortless ease is very well known.

Dennis sang to her usual high standard, her enunciation of Maxwell’s excellent text conversationally precise, and her imparting of distinct personalities to Ashleaf, Moss and Robin Red the best the work could want.

The music itself is far from light, and as well as the work of the singer, the ingredients for the orchestra are sumptuous, filled with bird calls in the percussion as well as the winds, depictions of the landscape and the ticking of that threatening clock measuring the cycle of life.

If the narrative of those works was never obscure, that of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony has been worried over since its composition. Not by Poska and the RSNO in this performance however – what they gave us was a celebration of the score as superbly orchestrated music.

The Fourth is full of brilliantly simple ideas given the fullest possible expression, from the “fateful” minor-key fanfare with which it begins, through the lovely melodious Andantino slow movement to the demanding pizzicato Scherzo and the gloriously expressive finale.

Poska shaped that musical story superbly, and the players added the details of solo exuberance and ensemble cohesion to what was a thrilling performance.

Keith Bruce

Rehearsal picture by Clara Cowen

SCO / Kuusisto / Dreamers’ Circus

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Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

It is customarily Pekka Kuusisto who springs the surprises on his annual visits to direct the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, but in Edinburgh on Tuesday – where his popularity with the audience assured not a seat was unsold – the crowd turned the tables.

Kuusisto’s programme also involved Dreamers’ Circus, a three-piece Nordic traditional music group who have been appearing at Glasgow’s Celtic Connections festival for over a decade but, surprisingly, were making their Edinburgh debut.

Pianist Nikolaj Busk introduced their second half opener as “a tune from Switzerland from 1532”. It turned out to be from the Geneva hymn book and known to Scots from its number in their old hymnary as The Auld Hundreth, All People That On Earth Do Dwell. The Queen’s Hall duly treated it as a Lutheran chorale and joined in, to the initial surprise, but gratification of the band.

Beethoven would have recognised the response as exactly what Bach would have expected from a church congregation, and that was fitting because the whole evening was built around Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.

The much-quoted summary of that work by Richard Wagner as “the apotheosis of the dance” is not especially useful to understanding it, and even putting that remark in the context of its entire sentence, as the programme did, doesn’t help a great deal. What Kuusisto did was to parse the symphony, preceding and interspersing its movements with music from the trio, much of it of their own composition, although traditional in style, and a fair amount of it orchestrated.

Those arrangements for the SCO to play were a million miles from Beethoven, and not only in details that meant the horn and brass players discarding their period instruments for modern ones. In style they were a little like the film scores of Bryce Dessner or Jonny Greenwood, and the most interesting of them, played before the interval and after the second movement of the Beethoven, transcended its song basis to become a fascinating contemporary passacaglia with a filigree piano figure.

When performing on their own, Dreamers’ Circus were always fascinating, Busk playing accordion as much as the Steinway, Rune Tonsgaard Sorenson the violin soloist of the night, and cittern-player Ale Carr, who played with Kuusisto and the SCO in a similar excursion on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons two years ago, doubling on fiddle himself. Small wonder the conductor felt able to concentrate on directing the orchestra, only picking up his own fiddle to join in the symphony’s boisterous stop-start rhythmic fourth movement.

And hugely exciting that last movement was, while the stop-start nature of this performance of Beethoven 7 never really impaired appreciation of the detail of Kuusisto’s individual reading of the score, full of colour with interesting pauses and tempo adjustments.

Even the separation of the end of the Scherzo from the Allegro con brio finale, which looked potentially problematic, worked, and the prefacing of the opening movement made a very different listen of its slow start before the symphony bursts into vigorous life. In this performance the slow march of the second movement was never likely to seem at all funereal.

As well as the featured soloists, plaudits should go to two of the guests in the orchestra ranks, Frenchman Yann Thenet at first oboe and American Nivanthi Karunaratne, whose playing of the demanding low line on natural horn made the third movement.

Keith Bruce

Concert repeated at Glasgow City Halls tonight and Aberdeen Music Hall on Saturday.

Portrait of Pekka Kuusisto by Kaapo Kamu

BBC SSO / Lazarova / Duo Játékok

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City Halls, Glasgow

Thursday’s BBC SSO programme wasn’t quite what everyone expected. From the advertised line-up of Lutoslawski, Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky, Lutoslawski’s short Little Suite had been quietly excised to facilitate the continuity of BBC Radio 3’s live broadcast. According to foyer intelligence circulating beforehand, manoeuvring two concert grands onstage for a Mendelssohn double concerto so soon into the programme would have played havoc with the ears of radio listeners. 

As it happened, they, and we, were treated to a blaring pop song mid-Mendelssohn from an errant mobile phone, its panicked owner struggling to silence it. Radio presenter Kate Molleson couldn’t have been much clearer in her concert preamble: “turn them off!” 

Despite all that, the resulting programme proved evenly-balanced and not short of revealing, enjoyable, even thrilling moments. At the helm was conductor Delyana Lazarova in only her second appearance as the orchestra’s principal guest conductor. These are early days for her with the SSO, but already she cuts a confident, motivational presence. Not everything fell perfectly into place – mistimed tutti attacks in the concerto, balance issues in Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony – but there were plentiful highs in the performances to suggest a fruitful partnership ahead.

The orchestra were joined by Duo Játékok – aka French pianists Naïri Badal and Adélaïde Panaget – in Mendelssohn’s Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra in A flat major. It’s a monumental piece – around 45 minutes – which the composer wrote when only 15. In both scoring and style it bears considerable witness to Beethoven, and where the content doesn’t always justify its length (not least the mammoth opening movement), youthful exuberance pervades a score in which Mendelssohn’s nascent fingerprint is unmistakably persistent. 

It certainly suited the bubbly personalities of Duo Játékok, instantly demonstrated in the conversational to-ing-and-fro-ing of the hectic piano writing. It was like watching a Wimbledon rally as phrases were parried back and forth with increasing insistence, the first movement rippling with high-energy drama, the slow lyrical Andante (once the phone had stopped) calmly pre-echoing the composer’s many Songs Without Words, then a whirlwind of contrapuntal complexity driving the swashbuckling finale to its perfunctory conclusion. 

There was splashiness in some of the piano playing, but the French twosome made up for that in dexterity and spirit, and in a calming encore – Kurtag’s piano four-hand arrangement of Bach’s Sonatina from the Cantata Actus Tragicus – which they memorably included in an earlier SSO visit four years ago.

After the truculent youth of Mendelssohn, the second half turned to the near-death utterances of Tchaikovsky in his Sixth Symphony. You have to admire Lazarova for the risk she took in adopting such an achingly slow tempo in the initial Adagio. While logic supported it – a heaving sigh of resignation – in practice it failed to fully convince, ripped of genuinely soulful intensity. Where the opening is repeated after the long pause, it was as if Lazarova was saying “okay, let’s try that from the start again”. Thankfully the arrival of the Allegro came with a keen sense of purpose and direction. 

Where the opening movement was now awash with impetuous turmoil, the quirky lilt of the ensuing 5/4 waltz, introduced glowingly by a suave cello section, offered smiling respite before the emphatic pomp of a third movement whose exultant ending frequently tricks audiences into thinking it’s the end of the symphony. No exception here, as the applause rang out, only to be hushed by the return of the sombre opening mood for the actual finale, a powerfully exhaustive, despairing farewell. 

Tonight’s Aberdeen performance replaces the Mendelssohn concerto with Mozart’s Violin Concerto No 5 and soloist Esther Yoo, and opens with Lutoslawski’s Little Suite.

Ken Walton

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

Steven Osborne & Martin Kershaw

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Linlithgow Academy

ENCORES from the catalogues of jazz piano masters, often in his own transcriptions, have long been a feature of the practice of Linlithgow’s international classical piano star, Steven Osborne. In this recital that side of his musical personality was given free rein in a duo with the alto and soprano saxophones of Martin Kershaw.

The recital began, however, in more familiar solo piano mode, with a first half “based around the waltz” presented in informative and witty style for Osborne’s home crowd. That meant a very thorough explanation of the narrative of Schumann’s theatrical Papillons and a fascinating sequence that began with a plangent Gymnopedie No 3 by Eric Satie melding into Lily Boulanger’s D’un Jardin Clair.

The pianist’s mother, who lives in Linlithgow, cast a long shadow over the evening, her absence explained, if I understood correctly, because her philatelic expertise was required elsewhere. It was a jewellery box she owned that explained the young Osborne’s early enthusiasm for Anatoly Liadov’s A Musical Snuffbox, but more crucially her antipathy to jazz that partly prompted her son’s mission to explain it to a classical audience.

In his solo set it was Bill Evans’ Waltz for Debby and Osborne’s transcription of a live performance of Gershwin’s I Loves You Porgy that introduced the music, before the rollercoaster-ride that is Frederic Rzewski’s Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues, a composition filled with socialist protest song anger that embraces industrial noise as readily as any recognisable style of music.

After the interval, Osborne was joined by jazz saxophonist and stalwart of the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra Martin Kershaw for a duo set that, apart from Kershaw’s ballad reading of Someday My Prince Will Come, primarily featured arrangements by Osborne.

The pianist was at pains to stress how Kershaw had brought the required jazz sensibility to their rehearsals, but it was notable that Osborne was mostly playing from memory (as he had performed the first half) while it was the improvising saxophonist who had a music stand.

There was familiar ground in the music of Duke Ellington and Jerome Kern – the pair swapping 8-bar phrases in All The Things You Are – but esoteric choices as well, including a version of Will Stratton’s Tokens, the opening track on the American singer-songwriter’s acclaimed 2021 album The Changing Wilderness, and Scots saxophonist Rob Hall’s Across the Sound, from his 2005 set with pianist Chick Lyall, The Beaten Path.

If that tune is punningly titled, it was nothing to the rhythmic mayhem Osborne and Kershaw went on to create in a singular version of Gershwin’s perennial I Got Rhythm.

The bold choice of encore, on the day Ireland had thwarted the Scots at rugby, was another Osborne arrangement, of the altogether gentler Londonderry Air.

Keith Bruce

Steven Osborne and Martin Kershaw play in Dundee’s Marryat this evening and then tour to Peebles (Thursday) and Nairn (Saturday).

Portrait of Steven Osborne by Ben Ealovega

SCO / Glassberg

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City Halls, Glasgow

Although the wide range of age in the audience and a DJ working in the foyer are not unusual at Scottish Chamber Orchestra Friday evening concerts, there was a fresh and unfamiliar feel to this one with saxophone star and broadcaster Jess Gillam the soloist.

The conductor on the podium was Ben Glassberg, last seen in the City Hall stepping in at short notice to deputise for Ryan Wigglesworth for a BBC SSO programme in the autumn that was very much of the chief conductor’s devising. The orchestra itself, although led by Stephanie Gonley, had just five principals in their places, and the many guests on the platform made sure that none of the regular faces were missed.

The programme began with a work of the SCO’s recent illustrious past. Sound and Fury was written for the orchestra early in the tenure of Anna Clyne as its Associate Composer and premiered with Pekka Kuusisto conducting. It is a wonderful piece that begins as a rethinking of early classical music – Haydn in particular – and contains some rich string writing, including a beguiling Eastern melody, and culminates in a taped reading of Macbeth’s last soliloquy in Shakespeare’s play.

That sounds an odd journey in print, but makes wonderful sonic sense as a musical score, and one clearly written for chamber orchestra forces.

The other two works without Gillam were for the 24 string players alone. George Walker’s Lyric for Strings has a genesis oddly adjacent to that of Samuel Barber’s better-known Adagio, as the two were students together. Walker’s work is also elegiac but more varied within a tighter time-span. It made a lovely interlude in the concert’s first half.

The second half began with Caroline Shaw’s Entr’acte, which also nods to Haydn (and Beethoven) and has become a very popular modern piece in its string ensemble version. With a lovely harmonics solo from Gonley and a guitar-like one from guest principal cello Caroline Dale, its pizzicato passages, ranging from robust to very quiet, present a particular ensemble challenge for this number of musicians – one to which Glassberg and this group rose with ease.

Entr’acte is a work in the repertoire of the Scottish Ensemble, and the central piece of Gillam’s trio of works was written for them in the mid-1990s when Dave Heath was a very busy composer-in-residence. The Celtic has since had a second life in a version for soprano sax rather than violin soloist, which suits the music very well, which is a sort of three-movement love-letter to Scotland.

The opening one, Ceilidh, clearly owes a debt to the most pictorial music of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, while the slow Lament for Collessie, which should be the proud boast of the Fife village where the Heath family made their home, featured an exquisite duet between Gillam and guest first viola Jessica Beeston. The boisterous finale, The Cooper of Clapham, links Fife with the London home of a craftsman maker of flutes (Heath’s own instrument) but also serves extraordinarily well as a celebration of the range of the soprano sax.

The other two pieces Gillam played were composed especially for her. She closed, save a party-piece encore of Pequena Czarda by Pedro Itturalde, with Rant!, written by her teacher John Harle, whose role as populariser of classical sax she has taken on with gusto. Following nicely on from the Heath, its uses folk melodies from her native Cumbria, and also, unmistakably, a chord sequence from The Beatles’ Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

The newest work in the programme was Dani Howard’s 2024 Saxophone Concerto, which closed the first half and proved to be another delightfully bespoke composition. With a central slow movement of defiantly unresolving ambience, its scoring cleverly emulated the sound of the larger members of the saxophone family, with a particular role for Maximiliano Martin and William Stafford, resonantly playing their clarinets in the low chalumeau register.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Christopher Bowen

BBC SSO: Wigglesworth / Gerhardt

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City Halls, Glasgow

Cross-connections played a part in making sense of Thursday’s matinee programme by the BBC SSO under its chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth. Take Shakespeare for a start. Thea Musgrave’s brief concert piece, Aurora, extracts its titular inspiration from a mention in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, while Elgar’s symphonic study Falstaff hones in on that eponymous rogue’s mixed fortunes in the Henry plays. Mention of A Midsummer Night’s Dream reminds us of Benjamin Britten, whose substantial Cello Symphony and Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra closed both concert halves respectively. Thus a tenuous tangled web was woven.

In the end, though, it was the conflicting essence of the programme’s components that created a sense of unity-in-diversity, a journey of incongruous stop-offs. That said, there was more than a whiff of Brittenesque imagery in Musgrave’s Aurora – a hugely self-contented work written in 1999 by the Scots-born composer, now two years short of her 100th birthday, for the awakening minds of Los Angeles’ Colburn School of Performing Arts students – that gave it context as an appetiser to Britten’s Cello Symphony.

This was the softer, less clinically acerbic side to Musgrave, a ravishing viola solo (movingly introduced by principal violist Andrew Berridge) giving rise to an enchanting reverie that also featured prominent solos by leader Emma Steele and lead cellist Rudi de Groote. The full ensemble caressed the music, its rise and fall exquisitely measured, its single-note ending profound in its simplicity. Once or twice the detailed textures seemed to slacken in purpose, but only momentarily. 

It was therefore an easy step from that scene-setter to Britten’s 1963 masterpiece, the substantial Cello Symphony written originally for Rostropovich and performed here by German cellist Alban Gerhardt. This orchestra and soloist were no strangers to the concerto, having collaborated in a recording under Andrew Manze in this very hall back in 2013. 

Self-assured authority made its presence felt instantly, Gerhardt responding to the amorphous lower strings with growing belligerence, the intensity escalating before the opening movement’s exhaustive final breath. The ensuing Scherzo released a frenzy of nervy hyperactivity before the dark entanglements of the Adagio, the complex introversion of Gerhardt’s cadenza (partly in fiery combination with Gordon Rigby’s timpani), and a finale touching on the burlesque and resolving in splendour and resolve. Wigglesworth captained a mostly impressive SSO display.

Elgar’s Falstaff rarely sees the light of day, which seems perplexing in a performance that so effectively captured the multi-faceted persona of the enigmatic hero, yet at the same time reflected Elgar’s insistence that “Falstaff is the name, but Shakespeare – the whole of human life – is the theme”. For there is a universal spirit to this music that is forever Elgar – a complexity of pompous themes, chattering humour and aching sentimentality – and that is what Wigglesworth and an expansive SSO observed.

From arrogance to debauchery, drunkenness to practical jokiness, sentimentalist to banished fool, the musical outcome was riveting. The SSO responded with tingling virtuosity, from gushing warmth and heraldic grandeur to febrile vivacity. As such, though possibly by accident, it was the perfect preparation for the more clinical orchestral dissection of Britten’s Young Person’s Guide. In what was veering towards an overlong concert, the masterful succinctness and sheer dexterity of Britten’s musical ingenuity secured a refreshing finale. And, unlike the Elgar, one that ended on a high note.

Ken Walton

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

Scottish Opera: Tristan und Isolde

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

It has become a convenient cliché for cash-strapped companies that the operas of Wagner are best served by minimalist stagings, and Tristan und Isolde is probably the work where that approach is most established.

Concert performances have the huge advantage of the visibility of the orchestra at work, and – especially in this one – those crucial moments when the musicians, singers as well as players, are not visible, but audible from offstage.

In fact this staging was much more than a concert, fully costumed in quasi-medieval style by Scottish Opera’s Lorna Price (in her last show before moving to Glyndebourne), directed by Justin Way, and performed on an apron stage built out from the platform. A second conductor (Toby Hession) was working for the singers from a specially-constructed prompt box, to supplement main man Stuart Stratford’s video-relayed  direction on the podium behind them.

If it was a compromise, it was a hugely successful one. There was just one moment in Act 3 when tenor Gwyn Hughes Jones struggled to make himself heard over the swell of the score, and the balance between singers and orchestra, off-stage and on-stage elements, solo instrumental voices and ensemble precision (particularly all sections of the strings and Sue Baxendale’s horns) was nigh-on perfect all night.

Tristan und Isolde is remembered for its set pieces – the Act 1 Prelude and Act 3 Liebestod and the rapturous duet of Act 2 – but those are part of a narrative flow of music that was, and should still sound, revolutionary, as it did here. Stratford’s shaping of the whole work, every note serving the story-telling, was always captivating; longeurs were there none in over four hours of music.

The cast had lost its King Marke – Richard Wiegold, a veteran in the role, stepping in – and was vocally superb from title roles to the smaller parts, and not excepting the boisterous twenty seamen of the male chorus in Act 1.

Katherine Broderick was imperious as Isolde, consistently delivering those high notes in Wagner’s demanding music from her first entrance to the final scene, seemingly without effort. If the voice was astonishing, the nuances of her acting performance were just as remarkable. This was a fully realised, and deeply flawed, Isolde.

Matching her was mezzo Khatuna Mikaberidze’s Brangane, similarly characterful and powerfully sung, allied to accomplished handling the staging’s few essential props.

If Gwyn Hughes Jones initially seemed to be holding something back, his stoic, even cynical, performance also hinted at an intriguing Tristan that never quite emerged. Perhaps that ambiguity was deliberate, however, as a counterbalance to the ebullient loyal enthusiasm for his master from his batman, Kurwenal – a terrific turn from Korean baritone Hansung Yoo.

Leaving the hall’s platform to the orchestra, the principals made all their entrances and exits to their playing area via the stage-side auditorium doors, and a plinth that incrementally lost sets of steps on either side to become Tristan’s death-bed in Act 3 was the only additional staging. It was also the excuse for the only slacking of pace in the drama when Hughes Jones or Weigold sat on it and there was a suspicion that it was not their characters who were taking the weight off their feet.

For those of us sitting out in the auditorium, this was a five hour feast (including two longer intervals) that passed with remarkable swiftness. The suggestion is that the company plans more Wagner presented in similar style in seasons to come, and that is an enticing prospect.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Khatuna Mikaberidze as Brangane and Katherine Broderick as Isolde, credit Christopher Bowen

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