Tag Archives: Andreas Landin

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

RSNO / Sondergard

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

It could be a fanciful notion, but the briefest work in the RSNO’s diverse programme may have held the key to it. Mendelssohn’s Overture to Son and Stranger is obscure because the music-theatre work it prefaces was never intended for more than domestic purposes, to amuse family and friends.

The overture is a bright, lively six minutes for a small orchestra, instantly identifiable as the work of the composer, which prefaced Thomas Sondergard’s fine reading of Beethoven’s Symphony No 7 and followed a first half that had a distinct family feel.

It began with the first performance of a bespoke work for the RSNO Changed Voices, a choir of young men who have recently left behind the world of trebles and altos, which is celebrating its 20th birthday this year, although none of its current members will be of that vintage just yet.

For what also became a retiral present for its director since 2009, Frikki Walker, composer Cheryl Frances-Hoad and librettist Kate Wakeling collaborated with the young singers on You Have to be Realistic About a Perfect Day, its poetry derived from conversations in February, then set by the composer.

If the music was compelling, and followed a very readable arc from teenage angst to an energetic, colourful optimistic conclusion, its sumptuous orchestration also contrived to stay well out of the way of the young voices, which yet lack power. It was a singularly successful commission.

If any of that cohort of singers pursue a career in music, they may well learn the two famous numbers among Vaughan Williams’ setting of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Songs of Travel: opener The Vagabond and Whither Must I Wander?. On Saturday they were performed, alongside the other seven, by Swedish baritone Andreas Landin.

He was making his debut with the orchestra (and returns at the end of the month as one of the quartet of soloists for Mozart’s Great Mass in C) but knows Glasgow well, as he is the husband of Thomas Sondergard, now in his eighth season as RSNO Music Director, with six as Principal Guest Conductor before that.

Landin’s career is chiefly on the Scandinavian opera stage, where he is Don Giovanni soon, but he did not over-dramatise the Vaughan Williams songs, their orchestration by Roy Douglas as well as the composer but very much of a piece.

Heard in full, those familiar late Victorian party-pieces are balanced in the cycle by the more wistful Youth and Love and elegiac In Dreams and it was on those that the soloist’s voice, and especially his full-toned upper register, shone.

Sondergard’s Beethoven Seven was the final triumph of this eclectic evening, the main feature after a diverting supporting programme. With the orchestra’s core staff players in their places and no extras, this was a lean and vigorous RSNO, playing swift, clean, dynamic Beethoven. Sondergard took a brief pause before the Presto third movement, but otherwise it was a non-stop rendition of what is the composer’s most ebullient symphony. Those repeated swells of sound were always sharp-edged and the variations in tempi and volume flowed with eloquent precision.

Keith Bruce