Tag Archives: BBC SSO

BBC SSO / Wigglesworth

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City Halls, Glasgow

With the programme brochure boldly trumpeting the word “Mahler”, the intention was clear – the intended focal point and mighty peroration of this BBC SSO season opener was to be Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. That it emerged as the least exciting event in a long evening didn’t so much lead to overall disappointment – though as such it defied expectations – as throw the spotlight onto a side of SSO conductor Ryan Wigglesworth that is absolutely his forte.

This was the Scottish premiere of his own Piano Concerto, written originally for the 2019 BBC Proms, and played in this instance by the unshakeable Scots pianist Steven Osborne. It was the one moment in Thursday’s concert where the stars fully aligned. Osborne, it goes without saying, commanded the stage with a performance that magically fused the music’s glistening fragility with its expansive climactic peaks. The SSO, responding to Wigglesworth’s natural mastery of the score, offered its own multicoloured insight. In total, the experience was breathtaking.

The most touching aspect of this performance was its detailed sensitivity. The writing is beautifully concise, precise and tantalisingly understated. It was like that from the offset – elemental motifs pithily suggested by the orchestra, taken up by the pianist and jointly toyed with in an opening Arioso notable for its alluringly poetic journey. 

Even in the Scherzo, where Wigglesworth explores a more austere, lightly modernist sound world, the assimilation of microcosm and macrocosm was deftly fulfilling. The Notturno, playing ghostly polytonal mischief with a Polish folk melody (think Lutoslawski), and running straight into the final Gigue, maintained its volatile intoxication, ultimately dissembling into a valedictory piano solo. 

What came before was also something of a discovery, the Heroic Overture by Johanna Müller-Hermann. She lived and worked in Vienna at its fin-de-siècle height, clearly conscious of the prevailing winds of stylistic change. In this stormy overture, one eye is on the turbulent excesses of Richard Strauss, the other looking tentatively at the new revolutionary order of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. Wigglesworth recognised that in a solid but sensuous performance, ripely and robustly delivered.

If all that ought to have been the perfect set-up for Mahler Four, the outcome was less impressive. Wigglesworth presided over an unsettled opening, his tempi changes unconvincing, in some cases awkward. What he did achieve from the SSO in the second movement was clarity of texture, but stodgier moments – in relation to orchestral tone – killed the magic. 

Even in the slow movement, often exquisite with shafts of timeless beauty peeking through, there was still a sense the conductor was painting by numbers, and by the time we reached the finale and its sublime Das Himmlische Leben for solo soprano, any hope of achieving the truly sublime had dissipated. Soloist Sally Matthews did not seem entirely comfortable in this instance, her delivery unfocused, periodically insubstantial. 

It made a long concert seem longer, which begged the question, why play an encore? The applause had all but died down, and many were already leaving the hall when Wigglesworth announced “more Mahler”. It was an error of judgement.

Ken Walton 

Lammermuir: BBC SSO / Wigglesworth

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St Mary’s Church, Haddington

After 12 days of world class music making, a star-studded procession of international stars, everything from opera to symphonic, choral and chamber music, an impressive 82% box office of which 30% were new attendees, regular visitors from as far afield as Washington DC, and an Indian summer to boot, the Lammermuir Festival came to a thundering close with a potently optimistic programme by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra of Tippett and Beethoven.

Again, there wasn’t a seat to be had in the sizeable nave of St Mary’s Church. The palpable buzz was reflective of a communal warmth, friendship and exceptional quality of music-making that has embraced this 14th, and unarguably the best, Lammermuir Festival ever: an event Scotland, East Lothian, and the powers that govern this country ought to be immensely proud of.

Yet, as we reported last week in VoxCarnyx, this is a Festival that Creative Scotland unbelievably withdrew its funding from at the eleventh hour. As you’d expect from Lammermuir’s co-directors James Waters and Hugh Macdonald – two of the most skilled, experienced and globally respected classical music impresarios in the UK – the news was greeted with disbelief and puzzlement, but also a dogged determination to overcome the odds. 

In a brief speech before the final concert, Waters acknowledged the goodwill and support that had been forthcoming, stating “a determination to run a campaign to maintain the festival, to find a way of securing the funding of a festival we have grown together.” He even announced proposed dates for 2024.

With that, Festival Patron Steven Osborne took his place at the piano to perform Tippett’s Piano Concerto, a work whose combination of subliminal magic and robust Beethovenian rhetoric perhaps reflected our prevailing thoughts – music’s ability to apply utopian diversions to the grounded reality of everyday life. A metaphor, perhaps, for the incalculable value of such threatened events.

Osborne was magnificent, his tried and tested mastery of Tippett’s elusive language – there’s no better testimony to this than his Hyperion recordings – colouring this performance with a vital luminescence and mind-blowing virtuosity. His interaction with the SSO was as instinctive as it was authoritative, those moments where the piano is encased within a toy box world of ethereal celeste and fluttering woodwind exquisitely enhanced by the spacious acoustics. The preternatural world of Tippett’s opera The Midsummer Marriage, written around the same time, is never far away.

Neither, though, is the inspiration the composer himself declared came from Beethoven. It was there, without doubt, in the tumultuous surges that inhabit and shape the outer movements, but also in the intertwining lyrical threads – every one of them surreally definable as Tippett – that inform the structural flow, especially in the central slow movement. 

SSO principal conductor Ryan Wigglesworth supported Osborne’s mindset well, eliciting lustrous empathy from his players. If the slow movement fell short in achieving a genuine tranquillo – Wiggleworth’s direction favoured a more restive lamentation – the rest was a triumph of transcendent rapture.

The concert ended with Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, and a performance that didn’t hang about, giving it the necessary vigour and clarity to succeed in such a diffusive environment. There were superlative moments from the orchestra – the brooding basses in the Funeral March, the sky-bound horns in the Scherzo, golden woodwind solos, and the strings meaty and resplendent throughout. 

As a whole, Wigglesworth engineered a purposeful and ultimately exhilarating reading. Not every tempo felt rigidly stable – he has a tendency to add spasmodic flicks to his beat that audibly impact on rhythmic discipline – but it was a version of a visionary, revolutionary symphony that celebrated its most profound and affirmative qualities. And, needless to say, Lammermuir’s.

Ken Walton

BBC SSO / Canellakis

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Conductor Karina Canellakis has some big opera projects on both sides of the Atlantic in the coming season, with Janacek’s Makropoulos Case, The Damnation of Faust by Berlioz and Wagner’s Siegfried in the Netherlands where she is based, and Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss at Santa Fe Opera. She may have begun musical life as a violinist, but her conducting career shows an affinity with singers.

That was very evident at the Closing Concert of this year’s Edinburgh Festival, when she was clearly enjoying the performance of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus in the work that brought this year’s classical music programme to a close, Rachmaninov’s The Bells.

It was also the work that concluded the tenure of Aidan Oliver as Chorus Director, as he moves to Glyndebourne and is succeeded by James Grossmith. The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland conducting graduate inherits a choir on very fine form indeed, wonderfully crisp in their opening utterances in the work’s “Sleigh Bells” start and then in lock-step with the orchestra for the climactic third movement.

The soloists – tenor David Butt Philip and then soprano Olga Kulchynska – have relatively smaller roles until the funereal finale when the chorus partners the baritone, Alexander Vinogradov.

If the symphonic arc of The Bells covers nothing less than human existence from cradle to grave, the two works of the first half were more basic in their concerns. The strings of the BBC Scottish gave Canellakis their best work as she shaped the distinctive sound of Wagner’s Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde. This trailer for his opera features the famous Tristan chord, but after hanging in the air for much of the piece, it reached a glorious climax at the end.

For the work in between, Scriabin’s Le Poeme de L’Extase, extra horns and trumpets, harps, celesta, organ and even, handily, bells were added. The composer sometimes referred to this 17-minute tone poem as a symphony, but it really has more in common with the Wagner or modernist works to come in the 20th century.

For all Scriabin’s mystical leanings, the wave upon wave of instrumental climaxes and cascading orchestration in the music seemed to suggest activity rather more physical than cerebral. Canellakis and the SSO paced the work beautifully to its orgasmic last bars.

Keith Bruce

EIF: BBC SSO / Wigglesworth

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

For many of a generation older than Nicola Benedetti’s (specifically, mine) the question the new director of the Edinburgh International Festival is posing on the cover of her first programme and in the title of this concert, Where Do We Go From Here?, is less the last book completed by the Rev Martin Luther King before his assassination, and more a line from the debut hit single five years later by David Essex, Rock On.

It is not too flippant to add that in the case of the final work in this short concert, Three Screaming Popes by Mark-Anthony Turnage, the name of the teen heart-throb’s chart-topper would not be an inaccurate answer. Turnage’s youthful, visceral response to the paintings of Francis Bacon was by far the oldest work of the four the BBC Scottish played under the baton of Chief Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth, and its power and intensity, and dramatic conclusion with a referee’s whistle and  dying piano chord could only really have been placed at the end of the programme.

Where we journeyed before that, as Benedetti, writer and broadcaster Tom Service and the conductor guided us through a trio of 21st century pieces, was no less musically rewarding, especially the longest and most recent work, Hans Abrahamsen’s Let Me Tell You, with soprano Jennifer France.

The soloist has the commanding starring role in this three-part song-cycle which gives voice to Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, drawing inspiration from music writer Paul Griffith’s experimental novel. France was superb, but Wigglesworth’s introduction, deconstructing the composer’s method with the help of the SSO musicians, ensured that this audience was also paying close attention to the instrumental score.

Although no-one mentioned it – in an event that had clearly drawn a good audience partly because of its verbal component – Griffith’s other work as a librettist, on Tan Dun’s EIF-commissioned Marco Polo and Elliot Carter’s sole opera, What Next?, also chimed rather fortunately with this year’s Festival.

Between those two works, the presentation team employed the established tactic of having the orchestra play a new work twice to give the least well-known piece a chance to win us over. Elizabeth Ogonek’s vibrant as though birds is just four minutes long, so that was eminently feasible, and to my ears it sounded sharper, not in pitch, but in precision of performance, the second time around – but that could equally have been my ears.

The concert had begun with Virga by Helen Grimes, a modern pastoral piece which has at its heart some exquisite string-writing – and playing in this performance – decorated by harp, celeste and percussion and more robust brass and wind colouring.

Of the quartet featured, she was the only composer present in the audience. Would I have preferred to hear her talk about the work? Perhaps. But without the Benedetti attraction, this programme – an encapsulation of the director’s whole approach to her new job – would surely never have put so many bottoms on Usher Hall seats.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Jennifer France by Nick Cutts

Lammermuir 2023

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With its programming including a concert staging from Scottish Opera as well as music performed by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the Royal Northern Sinfonia and the BBC SSO, Lammermuir Festival has outgrown any impression of it as a showcase for small-scale chamber music in pretty East Lothian churches, although it is that as well.

All of its dozen venues bar one, Garvald Village Hall, still fit that description, but Dunbar Parish Church has joined St Mary’s in Haddington as capable of accommodating larger ensembles and performances – most recently April’s community opera Catriona and the Dragon. Just as Lliam Paterson’s work demonstrated the range of Lammermuir, the September Festival runs from a first Scottish performance of Richard Strauss’s late opera Daphne to an enticingly diverse sequence of solo and duo recitals.

They include this year’s Artist in Residence, harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani, playing Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier as well as more recent music pairing his instrument with live electronics. Both JS and CPE Bach feature in his recital with violinist Antje Weithaas and then in a concert with the SCO.

The box office violin and piano partnership of Alina Ibragimova and Festival Patron Steven Osborne play Debussy, Prokofiev and Part, and Osborne returns a week later to close the Festival with the SSO and Ryan Wigglesworth, playing Michael Tippett’s Piano Concerto alongside Beethoven’s Third Symphony. A duo of tenor Nicholas Mulroy and Ryan Corbett on accordion promises a programme ranging from Monteverdi to Joni Mitchell.

Return visitors from last year include French string quartet Quatuor Agate and the NYCOS Chamber Choir and other chamber music ensembles include a debut from international group Spunicunifait, playing Mozart (whose made-up word gives them their name), and three concerts by Kaleidoscope, whose Tom Poster and Elena Urioste will also be revisiting their Juke Box lockdown selections, live.

The Maxwell Quartet begin a three-year association with Lammermuir, working with baritone Roderick Williams and pianist Christopher Glynn in the second of their two performances, and Dunedin Consort continues its association with soprano Nardus Williams in a concert of music by women composers of earlier years.

With Fretwork and Gesualdo Six celebrating the 400th anniversary of William Byrd in St Mary’s, Rory McCleery’s Marian Consort and historian Lizzie Swarbrick combine forces to celebrate the venerable venue and its musical heritage on the festival’s first Saturday, marking the 50th anniversary of the restoration of the building.

Lammermuir Festival runs 7-18 September. General booking opens on Friday.

BBC SSO / Wigglesworth

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City Halls, Glasgow

Edward Elgar’s well-documented disappointment in the lukewarm reception accorded the premiere of his Second Symphony is more often remarked than that reaction itself. If the audience in 1911 expected memorable melodies and a climactic finale, they might indeed have been confounded by the piece.

The BBC SSO’s Chief Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth perhaps chose to end his first year with the work more because it is a suitably big piece for a season finale, requiring large forces on stage to perform the rich orchestration, rather than from a desire to leave the City Halls audience with a spring in its step and a song in its heart.

It was the conclusion to a concert that began with Richard Strauss’s rampantly colourful tone-poem Till Eulenspiegel, which not only shared those qualities, but was a fun place to start – especially in this particularly lively performance by the SSO musicians. From the opening statement of Till’s tune by guest first horn Christopher Gough onwards, the “merry pranks” of Strauss’s romp through the adventures of the medieval folk-hero were played with enthusiastic vigour, including fine E flat clarinet from Adam Lee.

Laura van der Heijden brought as much energy to the world premiere that followed: the BBC-commissioned Cello Concerto composed for her by Cheryl Frances-Hoad. Wigglesworth will have earned the thanks of cellists for helping this piece to funded completion, as Frances-Hoad, a Menuhin School cellist herself, has given them a substantial new work.

While the focus is on the soloist from the start, the composer has created orchestration which sat well with the past masters of the art on either side of it in this programme. There were moments towards the end of the opening movement when Van der Heijden’s busy fingering was not completely audible above the orchestra, but that may have been intended, and the broadcast of the concert on Thursday May 25 should clarify the question.

The work has an environmental inspiration – very clearly explained in the composer’s lucid programme note – and the final movement, entitled Air, seemed to balance the forces onstage more successfully. The work’s heart, however, is the slow movement, Sea, which not only seemed to evoke its inspiration most successfully, but brought to mind the classic concertos for the instrument by Dvorak and Elgar.

The latter’s Symphony No 2 featured the SSO strings in the top form we’d heard them all evening, with specific details, like the contrapuntal pizzicato bass line in the second movement, shining through. Great work from the trombones as well, while the five-strong percussion section, guest-led by Alasdair Malloy, put in a terrific shift.

Keith Bruce

BBC SSO / Menezes

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City Halls, Glasgow

In what is now a fairly regular occurrence among orchestras, the BBC SSO was forced to field a last-minute replacement for its advertised conductor. Out went indisposed Estonian Kristiina Poska; in came Brazilian conductor Simone Menezes for an unchanged programme of Saariaho, Ravel and Mendelssohn.

It was a concert that began well, but seemed to lose its mojo in the second half. 

First up, Menezes addressed the sonic adventurism of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s Laterna magica, a beautifully illusory response to the notion of the magic lantern – the machine that created the earliest moving cinematic images – and in particular its influence on the work of Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman. Saariaho’s title is a direct lift of that which Bergman gave his autobiography.

It’s a work that progresses on its own terms, an overarching timelessness in which Saariaho presents her ideas patiently and confidently, with more than a touch of the surreal. Those weirdly drooping notes, the spectral floating chords, those shimmering dreamy textures compounded by words whispered by the players, all contributed to the slow-setting scene-opener. An eventual change in mood was predictable – given the presence of six horns and double timpani – coming in the form of a near cataclysmic climax rich in percussive glitter and ripened brass. 

Menezes adopted a mainly pragmatic role in sewing together the wistful, complex threads of this enchanting music, outwardly business-like and leaving the SSO to work its own magic. 

In Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, it was Russian soloist Denis Kozhukhin who took the commanding lead. Dramatic and uncompromising, his steely view of the opening movement dictated a performance that took Ravel’s expressive contrasts to their utmost extremes. There was lightning lustre and willowy calm, leisurely reflection and impatient vivacity, and a finality that brought us crashing back to earth.

Still to come was the melting lyricism of the slow movement, its unaccompanied opening theme searingly and effortlessly projected; and a finale bursting with an ebullience and effervescence aimed mercilessly at exaggerating its sardonic brevity. The SSO fed off Kozhukhin’s musical charisma with a sharpness and definition of its own.

Compared to that, Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony seemed disappointingly cumbersome. Menezes showed intent in narrating the lengthy first movement discourse, but did so with slowish, stolid pacing. There was spirited uplift in the swifter second movement, despite misjudged balance that left key melodies overwhelmed by over-inflated accompaniment. The slow movement evolved with pleasing unpretentiousness, but there was little sense of a returning joie de vivre in the finale, its closing maestoso curiously projected as an overripe afterthought, which it isn’t.

Ken Walton

This concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and is available on BBC Sounds. 

The programme is repeated on Sunday 14 May at 3pm in the Usher Hall, Edinburgh. Details at www.usherhall.co.uk 

Concerto partners

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Cellist Laura van der Heijden and composer Cheryl Frances-Hoad tell Keith Bruce how a Scottish world premiere came about

A very busy and multi-faceted musician, cellist Laura van der Heijden is not an especially regular visitor to Scotland, but she is the soloist with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in the next few weeks, oddly with both conducting Wigglesworths, Mark and Ryan, on the podiums.

The 2012 BBC Young Musician winner when she was just 15, Van der Heijden is playing Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No 2 with the SCO this week in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen, and then returns in the third week of May to premiere a new cello concerto written for her by Cheryl Frances-Hoad, one of Ryan Wigglesworth’s first commissions as Chief Conductor of the SSO.

“I am in panic learning mode at the moment!” she told VoxCarnyx. “It’s my first time with the Shostakovich as well and I wonder if there will be more flexibility with Cheryl’s piece, while with the Shostakovich everything is on the page. But then I have never played Shostakovich 2 with an orchestra either – so all will be revealed in the coming days!

“It was the SCO who suggested the Shostakovich and I have always wanted to learn and play it, so I said ‘yes’. There is so much dialogue between the orchestra part and the cello part – there are some of the coolest classical music moments in that piece.”

With composer Frances-Hoad also part of our on-line conversation, it is clear that the new bespoke concerto holds as much exciting promise for the soloist. The BBC commission will be heard in Glasgow’s City Halls, replaced in the SSO’s Aberdeen concert by the Walton concerto that was her victory piece in 2012. When both are broadcast, listeners may spot some shared vocabulary.

“I love the opening of the Walton concerto and that shimmering sound and that’s something that comes up in Cheryl’s piece. I also mentioned the Martinu cello concerto to her and the brass stabs that I love in that piece – and we’ve definitely got brass stabs in hers too. Those are textures that I really enjoy and both of those appear in the concerto.

“But I haven’t heard it live yet, and I think there’s a lot that I am going to be surprised by. There’s no way of experiencing what it will really be like before I meet with the orchestra – playing it through with the piano is not the same.”

The Frances-Hoad concerto has come together with such easy synchronicity, both player and composer seem mildly astonished.

“We only started talking about it in Spring of last year,” says Frances-Hoad, “so it’s amazing because these things usually take ages.

“Laura sent me a message saying she was interested in me writing a concerto for her and I was overjoyed as I have always really enjoyed her playing.

“We had some discussions and then Ryan Wigglesworth rang me and said he was interested in commissioning me to write a concerto for Laura and the BBC Scottish, so instead of having to raise funding, Ryan made it all fit magically into place.”

“I might have mentioned to him that I’d like to have something by you,” adds Van der Heijden, “but it did seem as if the BBC commission was unconnected with that.

“It’s the first time I’ve ever been involved in the process of commissioning a piece and although I’ve done other new works, this feels like a new adventure. We had quite a few conversations, but I knew Cheryl’s music speaks to me and my playing style and it would be something I could connect to.

“We spoke about some ideas behind the piece and that we’d like it to be inspired by the environment and be a celebration of nature, rather than some sort of climate crisis appeal. But that’s just the inspiration behind the music, and it doesn’t need any programme.”

For Frances-Hoad, who began her musical life as a cellist at the Yehudi Menuhin School, the big work is an important milestone in her composing career.

“When I was 14 or 15 I wrote a 15 minute cello concertina and that was what won me a BBC Young Composer Award in 1996. In 2013 I then wrote a piece called Catharsis for wind quintet, string quintet and solo cello. It was a cello concerto in ambition, but I haven’t written a proper cello concerto until now.

“I recently had an amazing year as a Visiting Fellow in Creative Arts at Merton College, Oxford – which extended to 20 months because of Covid – where I had a studio and made friends with people from different areas of study and wrote a lot of pieces inspire by stuff they told me about – it was just a really productive, wonderful time.

“So I asked one of the biologists for ideas when I was writing the cello concerto, and he told me about this phenomenon of algae in the ocean that feeds off sunlight and carbon and blooms and grows incredibly fast, making beautifully patterns in the sea.

“What I love doing as a composer is learning about things like that because it makes my mind work in a different way. In the second movement, the harmonies are my response to the life-cycle of the algae.

“It’s a mind-gym that means I come up with ideas that I wouldn’t have done. The piece is a celebration of the beauty and wonder of nature, rather than bashing heads together about the importance of its preservation.

“But at the same time I was always thinking about writing a proper cello concerto, and about the balance in the orchestration. I wanted it to be a fulfilling piece to play with a proper slow movement where you can really appreciate the soloist’s musicianship, and show-off the talents of the soloist.”

Laura van der Heijden plays Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No 2 in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall this evening with the SCO under Mark Wigglesworth. The concert is repeated at Glasgow City Halls on Friday and Aberdeen Music Hall on Saturday.

Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s Cello Concerto has its World Premiere at Glasgow City Halls on Thursday May 18. Soloist Laura van der Heijden plays the Walton Cello Concerto in Aberdeen Music Hall with Ryan Wigglesworth and the BBC SSO the following day.

EIF 2023

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As the first Edinburgh Festival programme from new director Nicola Benedetti is announced, KEITH BRUCE delves into the musical treats in store

The question new Edinburgh International Festival director Nicola Benedetti poses on the front of her first programme brochure derives from the recently-republished last book Reverend Martin Luther King wrote before his death. However, she also describes “Where do we go from here?” as a challenge to the Festival itself as it moves on from the celebration of its 75th anniversary last year.

Sharing the platform at the media briefing launching this year’s event with Creative Director Roy Luxford and Head of Music Andrew Moore was a clear indication of continuity, and her stated intention of making the most of the talent the virtuoso violinist and passionate music education advocate found in place in the organisation. Significantly she has not taken on Fergus Linehan’s role of Chief Executive, now filled by Linehan’s Executive Director, Francesca Hegyi.

And there is much about that brochure, and the shape of the programming, that will be familiar to regular Festival attenders, no doubt reflecting the fact that many of the building blocks of the 2023 programme were already in place when Benedetti was appointed. What is very different is the way the events are listed, not by genre or venue, but in sections that continue her engagement with the philosophy of Dr King: Community over Chaos, Hope in the Face of Adversity, and A Perspective That’s Not One’s Own.

That makes perusal of the print a different experience, but not radically so, and it is clear that the new director’s pathways to engagement with the work of the artists invited to this year’s Festival have followed the programme, rather than shaped it.

What’s there to see and hear – the actual meat of this year’s event – will please a great many people, and perhaps even fans of the most hotly debated element of any recent Edinburgh Festival. Opera magazine speculated in the editorial of its May issue that there would be “no major staged opera for the first time in decades” and those precise words are probably strictly true. However, there will be many for whom the UK premiere of a Barry Kosky-directed Berliner Ensemble production of Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera in the Festival Theatre is more than just the next best thing, and Theatre of Sound’s retelling of Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle as a contemporary two-hander with the Hebrides Ensemble at the Church Hill Theatre in the Festival’s final week looks most intriguing.

Concert performances of opera, a regular highlight of recent Edinburgh programmes, maintain their high standard. It is perhaps surprising that Wagner’s Tannhauser will have its first ever performance at the Festival in the Usher Hall on August 25, with American tenor Clay Hilley in the title role as local hero Sir Donald Runnicles conducts Deutsche Oper Berlin.

A fortnight earlier, Maxim Emelyanychev conducts the orchestra to which he has just committed a further five years of his career in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Andrew Moore introduced this as the first of a series of concert performances of Mozart operas by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra with its ebullient Principal Conductor. The same orchestra undertook the same project under the baton of Charles Mackerras in the 1990s – although The Magic Flute was not part of that series.

It was also in the last decade of the 20th century that Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra first wowed Edinburgh audiences and that team provides the first of this Festival’s orchestral residencies. Beginning with an evening of music presented in a transformed Usher Hall with beanbags replacing the stalls seating, the orchestra also plays Bartok and Kodaly with Sir Andras Schiff and the National Youth Choir of Scotland’s National Girls Choir. Benedetti is involved as presenter of the first of the orchestra’s concerts, and also joins the BBC SSO and Ryan Wigglesworth on stage on the Festival’s first Sunday for a concert of new music that poses the question on the brochure cover. The young singers of NYCoS have their own concert, with the RSNO, at the Usher Hall on August 13, preceded by a demonstration of the Kodaly music teaching method that is pivotal to its success.

If those events clearly reflect the new director’s commitment to access and education, her use of the EIF’s home, The Hub, below the castle at the top of the Royal Mile, is another crucial ingredient. She intends The Hub to be the Festival’s “Green Room” but open to everyone and “a microcosm of the whole Festival” and it has events programmed most nights, most of them music and often drawing in performers who have bigger gigs in other venues.

They include players from the London Symphony Orchestra, which is 2023’s second resident orchestra, playing Rachmaninov and Shostakovich under Gianandrea Noseda and Szymanowski and Brahms with Sir Simon Rattle before turning its attention to Messiaen’s epic Turangalila-Symphonie, prefaced by a programme of French music that inspired it, with Benedetti again wearing her presenting hat.

The final residency is of the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela with conductors Gustavo Dudamel and Rafael Payare, prefaced by a concert by some of the musicians at The Hub. The Usher Hall also sees two concerts by the Oslo Philharmonic with conductor Klaus Makela and its programme begins with Tan Dun conducting the RSNO and the Festival Chorus in his own Buddha Passion and closes with Karina Canellakis conducting the BBC SSO and the Festival Chorus in Rachmaninov’s The Bells. Outside of the concert hall there will be free music-making in Princes Street Gardens at the start of the Festival and in Charlotte Square at its end, details of which will come in June.

With a full programme of chamber music at the Queen’s Hall as usual, a dance and theatre programme full of top flight international artists and companies also includes works of particular musical interest, specifically a new revival of choreographer Pina Bausch’s work using Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which premiered in Edinburgh in 1978, and Deborah Warner’s staging of Benjamin Britten’s Phaedra.

More information at eif.co.uk, with online public booking opening on May 3, and in-person booking at the Hub available now.

BBC SSO / Brabbins

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City Halls, Glasgow

It’s over 25 years since the BBC SSO performed William Wallace’s “Creation” Symphony in C sharp minor. It was a studio session in Glasgow recorded for BBC Radio 3 and a Hyperion CD. So it’s not before time that conductor Martyn Brabbins included it in his “Sound of Scotland” matinee programme with the same orchestra last Thursday, a performance that sealed its aesthetic and technical worth, but equally pointed to a London-based Scots composer responding in the 1890s to a musical world still starstruck by Wagner, while living amidst the stirring potency of Elgar.

These are the overriding influences in this symphonic representation of the biblical creation story, its dark opening groping steadily and Parsifal-like towards successive peaks through which Wallace demonstrates a mastery of orchestration and structuring. 

Such repertoire is right up Brabbins’ street, his relaxed, authoritative lead capturing the momentousness of the score, almost film-like in its epic ebbing and flowing. The SSO responded with infectious self-belief, going all the way with the first movement’s sugar-coated conclusion, the sunbursts that offer glimpses of character in the occasionally bland Andantino, a scherzo-like Allegro verging on jolly-hockey-sticks joie-de-vivre, and a finale oozing pride and pomp, as if Wallace was saying: “And God created the British Empire, and he saw that it was good”.

Such was the climax to a programme that began with Judith Weir’s tribute to the geometric Swiss painter Paul Klee, her Heroic Strokes of the Bow based on his musically-inspired “Heroische Bogenstriche”, but also mixed and matched a refreshing couple of viola duos with Iain Hamilton’s virile Clarinet Concerto.

Where Weir transforms Klee’s images into sparkling sonic gestures and whirlwind textures, all dramatically threaded through this pellucid performance, Hamilton’s early concerto proved an eye-opener for those more familiar with the acerbic rigour that dominates much of his later music. Soloist Richard Plane had the full measure of the piece, packing his delivery with physical vitality, athletic virtuosity, and where called for, sweet lyrical charisma.

Why the interspersed viola duos? It just seemed, Brabbins explained, an opportune moment to showcase the SSO’s front desk principals – Scott Dickinson and Andrew Berridge – who had used the restrictions during Covid to seek out new repertoire for themselves. Here were two of a still-growing collection: James MacMillan’s Canon for Two Violas; and the world premiere of Camino by none other than the unassuming Brabbins.

There was a satisfying complementarity between both works, the plaintive intimacy of MacMillan’s, with its wistful melodic charm and softly intermeshing complexities, countered by the sparkier interactions of Brabbins’ Camino, its more impulsive introspection inspired by his daughter’s solitary pilgrimage along the Camino Santiago de Compostela. In each case, Dickinson and Berridge brought accomplishment and poetic empathy to their performances.

Ken Walton

Recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3

SCO’s half-century and other seasons

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The Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s jubilee caps a promising orchestral programme for the year to come, writes Keith Bruce

In the run-up to its 50th anniversary, the SCO is understandably cock-a-hoop to be able to preface its new season announcement with the news that Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev has extended his contract with the orchestra to 2028.

As the young Russian’s reputation continues to grow globally, and his dizzying schedule takes him to the most prestigious concert halls and opera houses, he has clearly established an important mutually-supportive relationship with the Edinburgh-based ensemble. In the coming season that is as diverse as ever, opening with a seven date Scottish tour of Beethoven’s “Eroica” and a new work by the orchestra’s Associate Composer, Jay Capperauld.

Emelyanychev’s SCO season ends with Mendelssohn’s Elijah, which he, the orchestra and the SCO Chorus will perform in this summer’s newly-announced BBC Proms season.

The RSNO also kicks off with Beethoven, with Lise de la Salle the soloist for the Third Piano Concerto, when Music Director Thomas Sondergard also conducts Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben. Sondergard’s season ends with Berlioz’s Grande Messe and also features two concerts including piano concertos by Saint-Saens with the season’s Artist in Residence Simon Trpceski, and an evening of French music with Scots mezzo Catriona Morison the soloist.

At the BBC SSO, Chief Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth continues to make an individual mark, opening with a concert that includes his own Piano Concerto with Steven Osborne the soloist, alongside Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, with soprano Sally Matthews. He also focuses on Elgar, with the Symphony No 1 and Dai Miyata playing the Cello Concerto, and continues his exploration of Stravinsky’s ballet music with Orpheus and The Fairy’s Kiss, with Principal Guest Conductor Ilan Volkov adding Petrushka in January 2024.

Wigglesworth also conducts the Verdi Requiem next March as the SSO continues its association with the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, and there is much for lovers of choral music to enjoy elsewhere as well.

The RSNO Chorus is celebrating its 180th anniversary in style, including a “Come and Sing” Verdi Requiem in January and Jeanette Sorrell conducting the annual New Year Messiah following an end-of-November concert of Sir James MacMillan’s Christmas Oratorio, conducted by the composer. As well as that Berlioz Grande Messe, it also features in a John Wilson-conducted concert of Ireland, Elgar and Holst – and the RSNO Youth Chorus has an equally busy concert year.

The SCO Chorus can boast a MacMillan premiere with his Burns-setting Composed in August, and Capperauld gives them another first performance with his setting of Niall Campbell’s The Night Watch. It also sings Bach’s B Minor Mass, under conductor Richard Egarr, and Schubert’s Mass in A-flat.

Mezzo Karen Cargill joins the SSO and conductor Alpesh Chauhan for Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and is the soloist for a Scottish Chamber Orchestra programme celebrating the Auld Alliance with France. The SCO’s big birthday line-up of soloists also includes percussionist Colin Currie directing an evening of Steve Reich, Julia Wolfe and Arvo Part, Steven Osborne playing Ravel and Pekka Kuusisto returning for three concerts, one in partnership with Emelyanychev.

Violinist Nicola Benedetti, whose first programme as director of Edinburgh International Festival is unveiled on Monday, plays the Beethoven Violin Concerto with the SCO at the end of the year and gives the much-delayed Scottish premiere of Mark Simpson’s concerto written for her with the RSNO next March.

Full details of all the seasons at sco.org.uk, rsno.org.uk and bbc.co.uk/bbcsso

BBC SSO / Wigglesworth

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City Halls, Glasgow

On the same night the BBC SSO released its plans for a challenging and adventurous new 2023-24 season, its chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth was pre-echoing that explorative spirit directing a concert dominated by one of the eight tableaux, The Sermon to the Birds, from Olivier Messiaen’s only opera, the epic Saint François d’Assise. 

Completed late in the French composer’s life, and premiered in 1975, it’s an encapsulation of Messiaen’s life and music. A self-styled radical, he called on the ecstatic freedom of birdsong, the distinctive qualities of systematic modes and Eastern-inspired rhythms from which his harmonic and melodic sound world was derived, and an engrained Catholicism, to formulate one of the most distinctive modernist 20th century voices.

The tableau performed here from the opera’s central act – The Sermon to the Birds – is perhaps the most demonstrative of this: the cathartic extravagance of its avian counterpoints rich to the point of wild cacophony; the powerful juxtaposition of compressed harmonic colour, constant rhythmic surprises and searing melodies; the spine-tingling exuberance from a colossal of the percussion section; and the heart-stopping intensity delivers by those high-density major chords that finally appear as if to ground the whole experience.

Wigglesworth and an expanded SSO gave it big licks in Thursday’s riveting performance, one which, with the help of assistant conductor Emilie Godden and the luxury of three penetrating Ondes Martenot, was a triumph of controlled and mostly well-coordinated intent. The two soloists, Scots tenor Nicky Spence and bass-baritone Ashley Riches, proved a solid, complementary and emotive pairing, though audience access to the text – surtitles perhaps? – would have facilitated a more detailed appreciation of the French narrative. 

The Messiaen followed an earlier paean to nature, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. Wigglesworth’s approach may have been essentially cautious – we’ve witnessed far more impetuous storms and expansive countryside greenery from the SSO in the past – but in this performance he elicited such endearing warmth from the strings and meaningful fluidity from the wind that any brief moments of laxity proved inconsequential. 

The programme is repeated at the Usher Hall Edinburgh on Sunday 16 April, 3pm

Ken Walton

This concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and is available on BBC Sounds. It is also repeated at the Usher Hall Edinburgh on Sun 16 April at 3pm

Now show unwrapped

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Following the reprieve for the BBC Singers, BBC Scotland has now decided that the demise of radio’s Classics Unwrapped is not the end of classical music programming presented by Jamie MacDougall on a Sunday evening.

Occupying the same time slot, 7pm to 9pm, and with the popular Scottish tenor still wearing the headphones, “Classical Now” debuts tomorrow evening, April 2. The new show does not use Unwrapped’s magazine format with interviews and commercially-available recordings, but will focus on live performances. The first show recycles music from two concerts first broadcast on Radio 3 – Ryan Wigglesworth’s debut as Chief Conductor of the BBC SSO in September of last year with Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe, and last month’s Scottish premiere of Nico Muhly’s Violin Concerto “Shrink” by Pekka Kuusisto and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

The Dunedin Consort completes  the line-up as Classical Now lays out its stall as a platform exclusively for Scottish artists and with longer works played in full. Whether the show has come about in response to the protests and petitions about the axing of Classics Unwrapped is unclear, but a BBC insider noted that the new show will be significantly cheaper to make.

The programme’s producer, Laura Metcalfe, is actively seeking stories and recordings from Scottish-based musicians. Classical Now is being pitched as “an opportunity for Scottish orchestras, ensembles and other performers to expand their reach to all households across Scotland via Radio Scotland and BBC Sounds” and those who wish to grab that offer should email laura.metcalfe@bbc.co.uk.

BBC SSO / Oramo

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City Halls, Glasgow

The colourful personality and striking originality of South African cellist/singer/composer Abel Selaocoe created a sensation the last time he appeared with the BBC SSO. That – and his growing international reputation – no doubt accounted of the anticipatory excitement that filled the City Halls foyer on Thursday, where notable swarms of young people and the accompanying buzz gathered noisily with the traditional BBC SSO audience. There was certainly something in the air!

Before long, in the main concert hall, that “something” had made its indelible mark, though not initially. Arvo Pärt’s Fratres, in its version for strings and percussion, provided first a softly pungent scene-setter, the SSO initiating an unplanned fresh partnership with the young Finnish conductor Taavi Oramo (son of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s chief conductor Sakari Oramo). Brought in last minute to replace the advertised Anu Tali, he launched slightly cautiously into the Estonian composer’s hypnotic meditation.   

Oramo seemed a little tense to start with, the oft-repeated string incantations and punctuating  percussive tick tock of the claves rather coldly configured, but later finding a more sublime inner soul, enchantment and ultimate tenderness. 

Against such solemn quietude the ebullient appearance of Selaocoe, oozing rock star charisma, was like a bolt of lightning. Dressed in traditional South African outfit, he acknowledged the crowd as if he was headlining at Glastonbury. He spoke of his latest “release” – the imminent world premiere of his concerto Four Spirits – in which he would combine his own ethnic singing style with virtuoso cello performance, but also incorporating a dynamic inner dialogue with guest percussionist and collaborator Bernhard Schimpelsberger, placed within the orchestra but visually prominent in beanie hat and casual clothes.

What transpired as the four movements revealed themselves was a work of powerful emotional worth and democratic involvement, Selaocoe remaining seated only when issuing kaleidoscopic effects on his cello, but otherwise on his feet to broadcast mesmerising vocalisations ranging from piercing paeans of joy to subterranean rumbles and bewitching chants. 

The score, which explores various aspects of human purpose and community, cast in a language that fuses African and Western idiom, calls on the orchestral players to use their voices. Mention should also be made of orchestral percussionist David Kerr’s matching partnership with Schimpelsberger. And what a gloriously moving peroration as Selaocoe inspired the audience to join in singing the final moments. It all seemed so natural, so visceral, something very different and unforgettable. 

There was no option beyond that but for an encore. Schimpelsberger came front stage to join with Selaocoe in Wake Up, a possibly improvised dialogue that found its natural endpoint in dazzling jazz riffs and dizzy virtuosity.

How do you follow that? The answer here was Sibelius’ Second Symphony, a challenge that Oramo  met with coolness and taut discipline. There was an assuredness in his overall vision of the symphony – from the craggy inevitability of the opening movement and heart-rending intensity at the core of the Andante to the euphoric explosiveness of the Scherzo and radiant heroism of the Finale – but there were moments, too, where judgment erred, whether mis-balancing conversational solo lines or allowing the brass to over project.

But, no matter, for this concert will be remembered almost exclusively for the phenomenon that is Abel Selaocoe. 

Ken Walton 

BBC SSO / Chauhan

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The Sage, Gateshead

It’s always refreshing to have a change of scenery, and that applies as much to orchestras like the BBC SSO who were on Tyneside – literally – on Friday to repeat the all-action programme it had delivered the previous evening to its home audience in Glasgow and live across the nation on BBC Radio 3. A healthy turn-out greeted the visitors to Gateshead’s smart riverside Sage venue, where the SSO’s outgoing associate conductor, Alpesh Chauhan, addressed the swashbuckling adventurism of Richard Strauss’ Don Quixote alongside the questioning euphoria of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony.

Such intense repertoire was subjected to inquisitive exploration, at times probing originality, by Chauhan. Where he sought restless irascibility in the Strauss, the focus of his Shostakovich was surely its tangible dichotomy, a work written “in response” to Stalin’s personal attack on what he saw as increasingly “non-Soviet” tendencies in the composer’s music (chiefly in his opera The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District), but which has nowadays come to represent a stinging, concealed expression of intellectual, if not political, dissent.

The latter was the most thoroughly convincing of the evening’s performances, all the more for the horrifying relevance it harnesses right now as the west faces up to – and maybe Russians themselves begin to question – the humaneness of one man’s repressive, dictatorial will. Chauhan elicited an all-important steeliness: those endless aching melodies that take flight in the opening movement offset by a chillingly spare dehumanisation; the throwaway curtness brutally exaggerated in the Scherzo; the breathtaking sumptuousness of the slow third movement soaked in irony as a deceptive foil to the agonising, empty ecstasy of the finale.

There was an unpredictability to Chauhan’s tempi that enhanced the boldness of the message, which the SSO responded to with fearsome exhilaration, the richness and focus of the ensemble as thrilling as the exceptionalism of the passing solo contributions. 

Where the Shostakovich was spine chilling, the concert opener – Don Quixote – seemed happier just to tickle the senses. The former bore the 3-D vibrance of an oil painting defined by the physicality of its bold brushstrokes, whereas the latter conveyed more the pallid self-contentment of a pretty watercolour.

This wasn’t so much an issue with the soloists, guest cellist Pablo Ferrández playing the starry-eyed eponymous hero against flamboyant support from SSO principal viola Scott Dickinson (in evocative conversation also with orchestra leader Laura Samuel), and prominently featuring tenor tuba, bass clarinet and ravishing oboe. And for the most part, Chauhan captured the cut and thrust of the music, its stormy abandon, wild cameos and generally restive abandon.

What it missed in places was a more piercing precision, sharper orchestral colourings to bring the narrative more vividly to life. There were plenty rosy moments, those characteristic Straussian eruptions filling the hall with wholesome enchantment, but such curious cacophonies as the discordant bleating sheep needed greater confidence in themselves to make a convincing musical point. 

That aside, this substantial pairing went down a storm with the local audience, making the SSO’s day trip to Newcastle in such unpredictable weather a more gladdening experience than it might otherwise have been.

Ken Walton 

BBC SSO / Wigglesworth

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City Halls, Glasgow

There is a suggestion that Bach’s 1738 harpsichord concerto in E major, BWV 1053, has come down to us as a keyboard work having begun life as an oboe concerto. Whether or not that is the case, it shares melodic material with two cantatas Bach wrote for Leipzig’s Thomaskirche, so the sense of a singing solo line is understandable. It is not always in the hands of the soloist, however, with the strings – who would have been the composer’s music college students at the first coffee house performances – having their share of the tune, especially at the start of the Siciliano slow movement.

Played here on a modern concert grand piano by the SSO’s Chief Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth, this was more the kind of performance one might hear in this hall from Maxim Emelyanychev and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, but the ever-versatile BBC Scottish proved equal to the challenge of leaping across the centuries in the second of Wigglesworth’s interesting programmes pairing Bach with Stravinsky.

When Bach created a concerto for the keyboard he was at the cutting edge of musical development, and that was certainly one thing that linked the work with that of the Russian composer on Thursday evening, although logistical considerations meant it preceded the two Stravinsky works rather than being the filling in the concert’s musical sandwich as originally intended.

In the 1953 score for Balanchine’s Agon Stravinsky is concerned with stripping things back to their essence for a work that is all about the number 12 and its divisions. That was the size of the company of dancers from New York City Ballet when it was premiered in 1957 (memorably re-created by Scottish Ballet at the 2006 Edinburgh Festival) and it is also the number of the notes in the chromatic scale and the structure for using them proposed by Arnold Schoenberg.

Stravinsky playfully combines the twelve-tone row techniques of serialism with classical forms (Sarabande, Galliarde, and Bransle rather than Siciliano here) in twenty minutes of music that is less austere than it at first appears. Exotic combinations of instruments, with percussion and brass joined by a mandolin as well as solo violin, are featured over the twelve movements, but the large orchestra never plays as an ensemble.

Just as Balanchine made work on his dancers very differently from Nijinsky, so the music of Agon is very different from that of The Rite of Spring, from four decades previously. Wigglesworth’s Rite was not riotous in the least, and much more about precision than passion. If it lacked the excitement of some performances of the work, it would undoubtedly have served the purpose for which it was composed very well indeed. As we had heard in Agon before the interval, the conductor never forgot that this was music composed for dancers.

Keith Bruce

Available for 30 days on BBC Sounds

BBC SSO / Sanderling

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City Halls, Glasgow

Musical dynasties can be problematic for some, but not, it would seem, in the case of conductor Michael Sanderling, son of Kurt and brother/step brother of fellow conductors Stefan and Thomas. He proved his independent worth, without question, in the driving seat of the BBC SSO last week.

The former cellist – and one of considerable, international prizewinning note before he picked up the baton full time just over a decade ago – established instant chemistry with the orchestra in a relatively youthful symphony by Mozart, his 13th, written mostly in Milan at the age of 15. Sanderling wasted no time sourcing a stylish bite from the players – just horns and oboes in addition to the reduced strings – that captured the music’s exuberant decency.

It was a neat touch reducing the Menuetto’s trio section to solo strings, giving added intimacy to this airborne movement, and in the broader context of a performance that packed no shortage of musical surprises and delights, from the teasing tunefulness of the Andante to the rhythmic dash of the outer movements.

Mozart featured again in this affable afternoon concert, as seen through the thicker lens of heavy-duty German Romantic composer and academic Max Reger, his Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Mozart. The theme in question is the siciliano-like opener from the A Major Sonata, which in Mozart’s hands was already subjected to exhaustive variation. Reger, as you’d expect, deals with it in more circumspect, a times torrid, terms. 

Sanderling never once allowed dark clouds to assert their presence, instead giving a fleetness of foot to Reger’s restless harmonic contortions – some pretty ingenious ones at that – and therefore freer flight to internal chromatic meanderings that, in less-intuitive hands, might so easily have muddied the momentum. Such, too, was the refinement and grace of the orchestral colourings that the journey towards the concluding fugue, and its exultant closing restatement of the Mozart theme, was one of several thrills and much overall satisfaction.

Coming back to musical families, the afternoon’s solo spot was filled by one of the many prodigious Kanneh-Mason siblings currently in circulation. This was Isata, a pianist of growing stature and musical maturity, as witnessed in recent previous appearances in Scotland. She featured this time in Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, noted for its bristling energy and dynamic physicality, but also for the quintessential mysticism that offers some spellbinding contrast in the central movement.

Kanneh-Mason’s performance was beautifully poised and not without fire. She doesn’t yet have the full shoulder power to fully address the ferocious dimensions of this concerto, but the fiery agility of her finger work compensated, and where gentle reflection was called for she delivered it with poetic perfection.   

Ken Walton

BBC SSO / Runnicles

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City Halls, Glasgow

If Sir Donald Runnicles proved anything in this unmissable reunion with his former Scottish orchestra (he is, of course, still connected to the BBC SSO as conductor emeritus), it was that great conductors have an innate ability to connect viscerally and impulsively with the players, even when they’ve been apart for some time. 

As such, there was a deep-rooted nostalgia hard-wired into this thrilling performance of one single, monumental work – Mahler’s Ninth Symphony – in which the Edinburgh-born maestro reminded us just how electrifying and passionate the SSO can sound working in response to such magnetic charisma.

Mahler’s last completed symphony, written in the final years of his life, takes us on a journey of initial despair – the so-called “faltering heart beat” – and elemental frustration, to the all-but- Bacchanalian frenzy of its central escapism, and to the grim acceptance of a finale that fades to nothing yet powerfully encapsulates the unquenchable rapture of inner peace.

It all looked so easy for Runnicles, a robust mainstay of a figure on the podium whose economy of gesture gave all the signals necessary to mine essential and complex detail, while also allowing the big picture to unfold with inexorable potency and organic inevitability. What resulted was a spine-tingling awareness of the SSO working with him, not for him: moments where little was asked for but absolutely every telling morsel was delivered.

Capturing that big picture is so important when much of Mahler’s writing in this symphony is like an endless tapestry of broken threads, dizzy intertwining snatches of signature, recollected material that collide in mid-air, often abruptly dismissed, yet making such unquestioning sense in this all-consuming performance.

The Andante comodo was marked by virtuosic savagery at its height, but in the course of its steady progression combined molten resignation with the penetrating incision of multiple competing motifs. The inner movements oozed Mahlerian grotesquerie, tantalising and mischievous in the deliberate Ländler-like awkwardness of the second movement, endlessly high-spirited and ultimately brutally dismissive in the Rondo-Burleske. Runnicles’ finale was truly breathtaking, its prime thematic cell – essentially a drawn-out musical turn – single-mindedly dominating the overriding, at times crushingly euphoric, solemnity. The dissipating ending was met by stunned silence. 

There are moments when we are drawn so deeply into a performance that the world outside ceases momentarily to matter. This was one of them.

Ken Walton

This concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and is available to listen to on BBC Sounds. It was repeated in Aberdeen (10 Feb), with a final performance on Sunday (12 Feb) at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh 

BBC SSO / Volkov

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City Halls, Glasgow

If anything marks the BBC SSO out as distinctive in Scotland – and there have to be certain benefits to that in a climate where strangulation of the arts is an existential threat – it is surely its commitment to the most challenging outposts of contemporary music. No other orchestra would or could place such unapologetic emphasis on it, let alone take the commercial risk.

Thursday’s programme was specifically designed, and recorded, for BBC Radio 3’s New Music Show, yet it was also a weirdly entertaining revelation for a sizeable audience curious to discover who composers Stefan Prins and Øyvind Torvund were, and how a concerto for electric guitar and a reworking of 1950s pop “exotica” might brighten up a drizzly Glasgow evening.

It probably wouldn’t have done so without SSO principal guest conductor Ilan Volkov, whose track record in exploring and communicating the wilder horizons of the contemporary landscape is second to none. With a few words of welcome, and an invitation to enter a psychedelic twilight zone, madcap ideas were transformed into stimulating sonic experiences.

Both performances were UK premieres, and both were delivered with utter commitment and consummate skill, right down to violinists bowing over aluminium foil-clad fingerboards in Prins’ 2021 concerto, under_current, or the simultaneous virtuoso whistling that cast an anarchic, playful mystique over the opening of Torvund’s The Exotica Album. 

Such were the bracing novelties of these substantial works. The visual power of under_current was awesome, electric guitarist Yaron Deutsch using his instrument more as a generator of effects facilitated by the pedals, cables and signal processing units surrounding him, and the totemic presence of a towering thunder machine centrally positioned behind the large orchestra.

There wasn’t a melody, hardly even a motif, in sight. With guttural explosions from the guitar, wailing responses from the orchestra, Prins’ 40-minute work consciously defies conventionality, perhaps over too long a time scale. But so visceral and purposeful was the playing that Deutsch silenced the audience during the final applause to say this was the best orchestra he’d ever played with. It was a tough gig for all of us, but Volkov’s self-belief turned this seeming jumble of nuts and bolts into something organically akin to a kinetic sculpture.

Where Prins’ music is uncompromising, Torvund’s The Exotica Album (Sinfonietta with modular synthesiser and saxophone) is a triumph of exaggerated nostalgic indulgence. Taking its lead from the origins of late-1950s “exotica” – Martin Denny’s album Quiet Village – Torvund sharpens the concept of seriousness versus kitsch to such the point it transmits as the musical equivalent of an LSD trip. 

Set in ten short movements – with titles like Starry Night, Wind up Paradise Birds, Rainbow Crystal and Jungle Alarm – the overriding sensation was one of escapism, where soaring Hollywood-style strings vied with synthesised birds and frenetic electronic bloops, courtesy of Jørgen Træn on “modular synthesiser and noise”, and the pungent, provocative sax of Kjetil Møster. 

It was enormously pleasant to listen to, those whistlers in the opening Ritual 1 initiating a prophetic sense of the surreal, later moments where you might imagine noted bird-enthusiast Messiaen encountering the Clangers, the occasional confectionary spillover into wacky cartoon land, the sassy honking polyphony of Jungle Alarm, but altogether a feast of titillating excess that proved the perfect complement to the earlier concerto, and transformed a journey into the unknown into an invigorating night of discovery. 

Ken Walton

Recorded for later broadcast on Radio 3’s New Music Show, then available for 30 days via BBC Sounds.

BBC SSO / Wigglesworth

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City Halls, Glasgow 

This was a programme that invited multiple layers of curiosity. How does Bach sit full-on, head-to-head with Stravinsky? Is repertoire that uses bits and pieces of a symphony orchestra, but never its full complement at one sitting, an efficient use of resources? Would such a stylised programme from the BBC SSO, augmented by the London-based BBC Singers, pull in the crowds? Under the programme’s originator, SSO chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth, these questions were duly answered.

The pairing of Bach and Stravinsky was, indeed, an inspired proposition, especially as the latter was represented by two of his Neoclassical hits – the chilling intensity of the Symphony of Psalms and steely austerity of the Symphonies of Wind Instruments – and Stravinsky’s own arrangement of Bach’s Canonic Variations on “Von Himmel hoch”, originally for organ, here impishly rewired for mixed-bag ensemble and chorus. 

Against that, Bach’s funeral cantata, “Komm, Jesu, komm!”, and his exuberant D major Magnificat offered contrasting visions of a composer whose life’s work was dedicated “to the greater glory of God” – the contemplative genius reaching deep into the human soul, and the unharnessed virtuoso illuminating the famous Song of Mary with inimitable lustre.

It was a juxtaposition well worth savouring and contemplating. Wigglesworth seemed infinitely more at ease with Bach. In the cantata, requiring only a three-man continuo in support of the chorus, he adopted a poetic approach, which certainly gave the singers ample latitude to express the suppleness of the writing. In the wake of the Canonic Variations, a veritable cornucopia of Stravinskian hooliganism, the calming aura of such pure-grained Bach was a welcome touch.

It also cleared the air for the ensuing Symphony of Psalms, now with a larger ensemble in a work that uses near-mystical restraint to power its emotional soul. A cautious start from Wigglesworth had its worrying moments. His grasp tightened as the performance progressed, but not always with enough rhythmic tautness, or that vital sting in attack, to generate the “wow” factor. More a safe performance than a moving one.

Similar issues denied the Symphonies of Wind Instruments the sustained captivation and momentum it crucially needs. Not so with Bach’s Magnificat, though, which earned its place as the evening’s sparkling peroration. Now there was fire in the belly, spirited and stylish Baroque playing from the SSO topped by the nimble virtuosity of the trumpets, deliciously eloquent obligato solos from the woodwind, and a polished, solid performance from the BBC Singers, the solos issued from within its ranks.

So yes, this programme, courageous and ingenious, was also stimulating and coherent. The smooth choreography that eased such extreme switches in orchestration and layout between successive pieces was, in itself, a work of art. And there was enough of an audience to appreciate the boldness of the venture and to play its part in animating the live broadcast on BBC Radio 3. 

Ken Walton 

This programme was repeated in Perth. Listen again on BBC Sounds

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