Tag Archives: BBC SSO

Cumnock Tryst: BBC SSO

Posted on by

Barony Hall, Cumnock

The saxophone and the euphonium were invented in the same decade of the 19th century but the amount of repertoire created for each of them as solo instruments in the 180 years since could scarcely have been less equal.

While the sax made the transition from French marching bands to the new art form of jazz while forging a parallel path in classical music, the euphonium remained in the brass band world and never featured in symphony orchestras. Tellingly, one acquired a snappy, abbreviated nickname, but no-one has ever played the “yoof”.

The comparison may rarely be made, but this year’s Cumnock Tryst did so, and the work of the festival’s founder, Sir James MacMillan was key to that.

On Friday evening, at the state-of-the-art hall in Cumnock’s new Barony Campus, the strings of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra played music that featured both instruments in concerto soloist role, penned by MacMillan.

Scotland saw the premiere of his Saxophone Concerto, by Amy Dickson with the SCO and Joseph Swensen, in 2018 but Jess Gillam has recently made the work her own, with  a growing list of performances over the past two years. Its inspiration may be specifically Scottish, from traditional music and Gaelic Psalm singing, but the mix of lightning-fingered exuberance and melancholic melody suits her style perfectly.

The composer’s expressive conducting style also suits the work well, and the pair were a delight to watch together in the opening movement in which the March, Strathspey and Reel seem filtered through the cartoon scores of Carl Stalling or Raymond Scott.

 It was the slow movement, where beguiling overlapping string lines are led by the cantor voice of the saxophone in imitation of the psalm singing of the Western Isles, that yielded the most memorable moment of Gillam’s performance. The exquisite control of her closing phrases were absolutely breath-taking.

MacMillan described his more recent Where the Lugar Meets the Glaisnock as a “concertante”, and its combination of demanding work for the strings and showcase for solo euphonium is a single-movement concerto that is also a depiction of Cumnock itself, which grew up at the confluence of those rivers.

It was written for the concert’s soloist, David Childs, and premiered in his native Wales; he has since taken it around the globe as what he describes as the most important work for his own instrument in its history.

MacMillan’s inspiration – as well as the virtuosity of its dedicatee – was his grandfather, an Ayrshire miner and player of the euphonium in brass bands. The picture of the composer’s native turf that emerges is a warm and generous one. Like the Saxophone Concerto, this is very approachable modern MacMillan, packed with lyrical tunefulness, exploiting the range and tone of the euphonium to the full.

If it is a virtuoso work-out for Childs, and any other player of his instrument capable of taking it on, it also requires precision performance from the strings, initially just six front desk players and later precisely voiced chords behind the soloists.

In those elements, it spoke to the clever choice of opening work in the programme, Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, directed from the violin by the SSO’s long-standing Associate Leader, Kanako Ito. There was historically-informed-performance sensibility to aspects of this reading, but with a contemporary edge that meant the detail benefitted from the venue’s dryish acoustic.

All three works were recorded by BBC Radio 3 for future broadcast, although their transmission as a sequence may be a forlorn hope.

On Saturday, both soloists gave recitals in Cumnock’s Trinity Church, illustrating the parallels between their chamber music histories. Both began with earlier music – Corelli in Gillam’s case and a Hummel Fantasy, originally not for trumpet as one might have guessed, but viola or clarinet, from Childs.

The Telemann concerto in Gillam’s set was first intended for bassoon or recorder, while Childs included an early work by pianist Ludovico Einaudi that was written for cello. Accompanied by Christopher Williams at the piano, his modern choices also included the tango movement of a concerto commissioned by him from Sir Karl Jenkins, and a piece by the Canadian-Japanese composer Cait Nishimura, with a Welsh title, Hiraeth.

His most apposite choice was the three-movement Force of Nature by Sir James MacMillan’s student contemporary and brass-band colleague Peter Graham, of Prestwick. His depiction of Ernest Hemingway and his obsessions, from the bull-ring to sea-fishing, was well worth hearing.

Gillam attracted a larger audience, and with her partners, pianist Zeynep Ozsuca and double bassist Sam Becker, the music sometimes recalled the Jacques Loussier trio. More often, though, it was quintessential Jess Gillam, segueing from Nadia Boulanger into Barbara Thompson and Meredith Monk into Rune Sorenson (of the Danish String Quartet) and culminating in the bespoke calling card written for her by John Harle, RANT!

Keith Bruce

Picture by Stuart Armitt

BBC SSO / Wigglesworth / Bomsori

Posted on by

City Halls, Glasgow

Alexander von Zemlinsky cuts something of a phantom figure within the annals of musical history. Admired by Brahms, and as first teacher of Schoenberg, he was unquestionably well-connected and influential. As a conductor, Stravinsky rated him highly, while Mahler and the Second Viennese School were well-served by his championship. 

Yet his personal life was peppered with disappointment, not least when his young student and lover Alma Schindler abandoned him for Mahler; and his music, occupying an explorative twilight zone between Mahler and the serial modernists, made less of an impact than it deserved during his lifetime, eventually winning revival performances in the 1970s, 30 years after his death.

That, and for the practical reason it calls on immense forces, is why performances of his heavy-duty Lyric Symphony are few and far between, and why its presence in the BBC SSO’s season opener on Thursday was such a landmark event.

This 50-minute extravaganza was, by his own account, Zemlinsky’s response to Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, but one that argues its own synthesis of symphony and opera against Mahler’s conflation of symphony and song cycle. Thus the highly-charged eroticism contained in its emotionally turbulent, gauchely rhetorical score, and the dizzy theatricality of the seven songs, set – unlike the beauty and melancholy of Mahler’s Chinese texts – to words by Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, performed in alternating, uninterrupted sequence by soprano and baritone soloists.

It was clear from the outset that the SSO were well up for the challenge, chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth grasping the opening flourish with fearless determination – a curt fanfare motif straight out of the old Hollywood epic manual. His musicians responded with wholesome, electrifying vigour. 

What followed was unrelenting, even delirious. Where the intense heat of the orchestration fed into the more reflective moments, occasionally overwhelming the singers, both soloists – soprano Miah Persson and baritone James Atkinson – revelled in the ecstasy and torment their characters (a young girl and a prince) encounter. Persson’s purified longing for the “young Prince” in the lighter scored Mutter, Der Jung Prinz was a moment of sheer enchantment, her desperate sense of loss in the penultimate Vollende denn das Letzte Lied profoundly felt. Atkinson was every bit as versatile in his volatile journey from infatuation to accepting the inevitable. The final orchestral moments were as exhaustive as they were sublime.

It was a performance that made up for a rather disappointing, unfulfilling Beethoven Violin Concerto that preceded it. That was surprising, given the favourable memories of South Korean violinist Bomsori’s previous appearances with the SSO. There were certainly sizeable chunks in which Bomsori’s lyrical radiance sang with purity and purpose, and her virtuosity sparkled. Equally, though, she succumbed to uncharacteristic fluctuations in concentration, brief periodic episodes in which the focus in her tone became uncentred, intonation wavered and the momentum flagged.

Was it just an off moment? A dazzling encore – Fritz Kreisler’s Schön Rosmarin – revealed the Bomsori we’re much more familiar with.

Ken Walton

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

BBC SSO / Wigglesworth

Posted on by

City Hall, Glasgow

ANTON Bruckner famously worried over his Symphony No 4 for many years – Sir Simon Rattle recently claimed to have found more than a dozen different versions of the work. By way of comparison, Ryan Wigglesworth reworking a piece originally commissioned by the Halle and the Bergen Phil – who gave the premiere six months before he became Chief Conductor of the BBC SSO – may just be coincidental, but there were other points of parallel.

As Bruckner symphonies are lengthy, so Wigglesworth’s Magnificat is longer than many a composer’s setting of Mary’s prayer; Sir James MacMillan’s is only a little over a third as long. At half an hour, Wigglesworth’s is a big concert piece on its own and it was programmed here as the filling in a Bruckner sandwich, preceded by and flowing from his Ave Maria, with the symphony following the interval.

This Magnificat breaks the Latin text down into five movements, which allows for a lot of exploration of texture in the orchestration but perhaps serves the totality of the poetry less well. There is, nonetheless, some lovely word-setting, both for the soprano soloist – the composer’s wife Sophie Bevan, to whom the work is dedicated – and a small chorus, the BBC Singers.

The single word of the title was thoroughly explored at the start, gently at first by Bevan before being taken up by the choir. It was in the second movement, Et exsultavit, that the soloist was able to show off her operatic power and range, while in the third she was partnered with the eleven men of the choir. The full choral ensemble had to wait until the finale and the rhythmic Sicut locutus est for its best ensemble showpiece.

Does the work lack the coherence of brevity? Perhaps. There are times when Wigglesworth’s exploration of the capabilities of his large orchestral forces seems a little “Young People’s Guide”, but there are some wonderfully original uses of combinations of instruments and textures. Musically, if not lyrically, the structure of the piece is very beguiling even if its emotional heart is not revealed until the tutti of the last section.

Bevan sang at both the Bergen Phil premiere with conductor Ed Gardner and the Halle’s first performance in Manchester three years ago, with her husband conducting, where he teamed it with Mahler, whose approach to Bruckner 4 was to cut it. Wigglesworth’s context here seemed especially apposite though, and his direction of the Bruckner symphony as good as it gets, for a symphony that is the composer’s most accessible but slightly looked down upon by serious devotees. That “Romantic” label probably doesn’t help.

To my ears the SSO strings (across all sections) and brass were the conductor’s best allies on the night. Although principal horn Chris Gough was obviously awarded the first solo bow at the curtain-call, it had not been his finest hour. The composer’s replacement Scherzo is probably his most recognisable music to many ears, and it was crisply rendered in this performance, and the Beethovian echoes in the recapitulations of the Finale were unmistakeable. The handling of the diminuendo before the third (or fourth) last climax by Wigglesworth and the SSO strings was world class.

The concert was recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on June 11 and will be available for 30 days thereafter on BBC Sounds.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Ryan Wigglesworth by Gordon Burniston

BBC SSO / Hoving

Posted on by

City Halls, Glasgow

A little more than a year ago, young Finn Emilia Hoving made an instant impression conducting a demanding and colourful programme with the RSNO. Now here she was at the helm of the BBC Scottish for another testing concert of new music alongside an established repertoire favourite which was an unqualified triumph. It would be good to think that she might become a more regular feature on the podium in Scotland.

We can assume the opener was her choice. Finnish composer Outi Tarkiainen’s The Rapids of Life is a majestic piece of contemporary orchestral expressionism that has its inspiration in her own experience of giving birth and as a memorial to her illustrious kinswoman composer Kaija Saariaho, whose death occurred during the process of composition and to whom it is dedicated.

The BBC SSO co-commissioned The Rapids of Life and this was its UK premiere, for which Tarkiainen was in the audience. The audience – filling the lower level of the Grand Hall on Sunday afternoon – loved the piece, which is full of great organic swells of sound and delicious details from cello, flute and trumpet as well as contrabass clarinet, harp and celesta.

Its ten minutes or so would have been a normal serving of freshly minted music in many an orchestral programme, but it was the appetiser for the new accordion concerto written for Ryan Corbett by Jay Capperauld that followed. Almost all the work we hear from the Ayrshire composer at the moment is for and by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, where he is Associate Composer, but this piece was premiered last year by Corbett with the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland, and was richly deserving of this second hearing.

Capperauld’s fascination with the darker corners of science history are to the fore in Galvanic Dances, starting from the 18th century experiments of Luigi Galvani and the effects of electricity on moribund organic material, which also led to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

John Dowland, Tchaikovsky and Gregorian chant get the nod in a work that is quintessential Capperauld, which is to say both dramatic and often funny, albeit in a dark way. With four microphones on his instrument, the BBC were taking no chances in capturing the virtuosic work of the soloist, which will be well worth catching when the concert is broadcast.

Capperauld has written Corbett a very testing score, which he despatched, from memory, with unflustered poise. The unusualness of the accordion as a concerto instrument was immediately irrelevant, although there were bars recalling Jimmy Shand, Astor Piazzolla and Jack Emblow if you wanted to hear them. With widescreen cinematic orchestral scoring, but there were also moments that resembled American post-minimalism and Hoving clearly revelled in her job, with all the changes in tempo and dynamics of the work.

Corbett had a number of cadenzas, and one gently arpeggiating figure introduced the calmest section of the piece, although its delicacy still seemed a little sinister in the composer’s style.

Capperauld was also in the hall to be cheered to the rafters at the work’s end, and the confident swagger of his composition found an apposite echo after the interval in the “Montagues and Capulets” opening of Hoving’s selection from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet ballet music.

It was a generous one, opening and closing with pairs of movements from the composer’s Suite No. 2, bracketing five from the Suite No. 1. With minimal pauses, Hoving made the full three-quarters of an hour flow symphonically and there were too many solo turns of quality from the SSO players to name, but Gareth Brady’s tenor sax was an essential addition and punctuation from the snare drum absolutely on point.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Ryan Corbett by Andrej Grilc

BBC SSO / Volkov : Tectonics 2026

Posted on by

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.

BBC SSO: Ayanna’s Hometown Roots

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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.

BBC SSO: Pelleas et Melisande

Posted on by

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

BBC SSO / Lazarova / Duo Játékok

Posted on by

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

BBC SSO: Wigglesworth / Gerhardt

Posted on by

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

All Rise for EIF 2026

Posted on by

After a thinner programme last year, the Edinburgh International Festival boasts a return to full strength on the road to its 80th anniversary celebrations next year, writes KEITH BRUCE.

Orchestral residencies from the Los Angeles and Berlin Philharmonics and Wynton Marsalis’s Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, and the world premiere of Missy Mazzoli’s new post-pandemic opera The Galloping Cure are headline attractions in the full Edinburgh International Festival programme for August 2026, unveiled today.

The Mazzoli opera follows the acclaimed Breaking the Waves at EIF 2019 and reunites the composer with librettist Royce Vavrek, stage director Tom Morris and conductor Stuart Stratford in a production from Scottish Opera and Opera Ventures.

The cast is headed by Argentinian mezzo Daniela Mack, British soprano Susan Bullock and German baritone Justin Austin.

It joins the already-announced Zurich Opera production of Verdi’s A Masked Ball, a revival of Adele Thomas’s acclaimed 2024 staging, as the staged operas bookending the programme at the Festival Theatre.

Operas in concert at the Usher Hall are Mozart’s Don Giovanni from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Maxim Emelyanychev, with Konstantin Krimmel as Giovanni, Louise Alder as Donna Anna and Brindley Sherratt as the Commendatore, and Strauss’s Elektra from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and conductor Karina Canellakis with Irene Theorin in the title role, Vida Mikneviciute as Chrysothemis and Nina Stemme as Klytamnestra.

The Festival has a focus on work from across the Atlantic and its theme, All Rise, is the title of Marsalis’s epic Symphony No 1, whose 12 movements will be the Opening Concert at the Usher Hall on Saturday August 8, teaming the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and its founder, featured soloist and composer with the RSNO, the Edinburgh Festival Chorus and the Jason Max Ferdinand Singers, under the baton of James Gaffigan.

During the following week, the orchestra plays Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige with conductor Chris Crenshaw and then gives two concerts on the evening of August 12 with Yuja Wang at the piano in what is a world premiere collaboration. Marsalis, who is married to Festival director Nicola Benedetti, with whom he has a daughter, has recently announced that he will step down as artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center in the summer of next year.

The LA Phil residency comes in the final year of its conductor Gustavo Dudamel’s tenure as Music Director. Three concerts include two Beethoven symphonies, Nos 7 and 6, and a family concert teaming the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles with Sistema Scotland’s Big Noise musicians.

Zurich Opera brings Verdi’s A Masked Ball

The Berlin Phil and conductor Kirill Petrenko close the Festival on Sunday August 30 with Scriabin’s Symphony No 3, preceded by Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with soloist Augustin Hadelich. The previous evening the programme is Elgar’s Enigma Variations and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 4. A sextet from the orchestra gives the Queen’s Hall chamber music recital on the morning of Saturday August 29.

Other highlights at the Usher Hall include two concerts by the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal, the first of which is a rare modern-day performance of the full three-hours of Coleridge-Taylor’s The Song of Hiawatha with the Festival Chorus and tenor Nicky Spence among the soloists, and Sir Donald Runnicles conducting his old friends the BBC SSO and the Festival Chorus in Mahler’s Das klagende Lied, with soloists including mezzo Catriona Morison.

The Royal Scottish National Orchestra is in the pit at Edinburgh Playhouse for the visit of San Francisco Ballet. The European premiere of choreographer Aszure Barton’s Mere Mortals is danced to a score by Floating Points (Sam Shepherd), conducted by Martin West.

Colin Currie and his group play an all-Steve Reich programme, John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London celebrate the Golden Age of Hollywood, and Jordi Savall and Hesperion XXI perform an Atlantic-spanning early music programme.

A day of Bach at the Usher Hall on Saturday August 22 starts with an invitation to “Come and Sing” Chorales, and has Alisa Weilerstein playing all the cello suites and pianist Vikingur Olafsson giving a late evening concert.

There is a tribute to the late Scottish trumpeter John Wallace from the band he founded, The Wallace Collection in partnership with the Cooperation Band and musicians from all three Scottish orchestras under conductor Clark Rundell, and the Queen’s Hall programme includes a tribute to pianist Alfred Brendel in three recitals of music associated with the great stalwart of Festivals past by Steven Osborne, Paul Lewis and Pierre-Laurent Aimard.

Debuts at the Queen’s Hall include those of mezzo Beth Taylor and guitarist Sean Shibe and that series opens with Dunedin Consort performing Tansy Davies’s new work Passion of Mary Magdelene with Anna Dennis and Marcus Farnsworth. Scottish Ensemble combines forces with small-pipes virtuoso Brighde Chaimbeul in another world premiere collaboration.

A full jazz, traditional music and folk programme at the EIF’s Royal Mile home, The Hub also includes Benedetti’s Classical Jam and a return visit from the global stars of the Aga Khan Music Programme.

Introducing her fourth Festival, Benedetti said: “Marking 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, we put America firmly in the spotlight. The American story is filled with innovation and ingenuity, perseverance and prejudice – tensions that have fuelled some of the most extraordinary artistic achievements in history.

“Our 2026 Festival is an invitation to All Rise together, and in doing so we celebrate not only artistic excellence but the resilience and flourishing of the human spirit.”

Tickets for EIF 2026 are on sale from noon on Thursday March 26 with priority booking for members and friends opening a week earlier. Full details at eif.co.uk

Picture of Zurich Opera’s A Masked Ball by Herwig Prammer; Nicola Benedetti and Wynton Marsalis by Carl Bigmore

BBC SSO / EIF Chorus / Runnicles

Posted on by

Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Fundamental to this awesome Usher Hall performance of Mahler’s Symphony No 2 ‘Resurrection’ was the element of control: utter control, visceral and monumental. And the figure exercising it over a full-blooded Edinburgh Festival Chorus and hyper-receptive BBC SSO was the Edinburgh-born maestro Sir Donald Runnicles, whose track record for such epic occasions goes before him. There’s just something you can read from his physique – the bulk of a tighthead prop combined with the wily intelligence of a playmaker and masterful composure – that translates into electrifying, match-winning euphoria.

That this would be an unforgettable adventure was clear from the outset. From the lower SSO strings, biting rhythms prophesied the epic and volatile journey ahead, melodies caked in mournful heroism emerging from the woodwind, the initial gripping climax becalmed by magically whispered string reflections. The entire movement – the funeral rites of the dead hero – exposed its argument forcefully, Runnicles’ effortless need-to-know gestures gleaning crystalline details that knew their place in the grander scheme of things. 

Then came the charm, firstly with the gentle minuet that opens the second movement, tender and spirited before engaging in more fulsome pursuits, utterly bewitching in its eventual manifestation for pizzicato strings, like serenading mandolins. If the brief timpani wake-up call shocked the life out of one audience member near me, the third movement’s ensuing cheery Ländler, with its intermittent diversions, remained charged with acid humour and effervescent character to the point of its screaming climax and subsequent quiescence. 

Thus the ground was prepared for that melting opening phrase of Urlicht (Primal Light from Mahler’s own Das Knaben Wunderhorn), a moment savoured with bestirred ecstasy by mezzo soprano Karen Cargill. Her voice seemed especially ripe in this short but transformative setting, the engagement multiplied by her memorised performance, setting the scene for an ultimately ecstatic finale.

Here we first encountered the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, also performing off score, and as a result of which projecting with profound distinction. Whether in the muted mystery of their opening utterances (“Rise up”), or the effusive waves of crescendo that culminated in the symphony’s resplendent peroration, this was a chorus, rigorously trained by chorus director James Grossmith, that was sure in its purpose and magnificent in execution, topped by the transcendent finishing touches of solo soprano Jennifer Davis and Cargill.

Most of all, however, this was a BBC SSO in genuinely gripping form. It’s all about the person waving the stick and the chemistry that accompanies the partnership. There was a truly heroic flavour to this performance, superbly and intuitively paced by Runnicles, but above all driven by a charisma that – going by a tumultuous reaction – impacted every soul in a packed Usher Hall.

(Picture credit: BBC/Martin Shields)

Ken Walton

This performance was recorded for later broadcast on BBC Radio 3, after which it will be available on BBC Sounds for 30 days.

BBC SSO / New

Posted on by

City Halls, Glasgow

AFTER the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s programme brochure went to press, someone must have done the sums and realised that Thursday’s concert as initially conceived would not fill its Radio 3 live broadcast slot.

The addition of Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin proved a truly excellent concert-opening bonus, but the sequence it began, while full of good things, made less sense than the published plan. The original opener, John Adams’ “fanfare for orchestra”, Short Ride in a Fast Machine, instead began the second half and was the weakest ingredient of the evening, its demanding percussion part not as precise as it needs to be – regardless of conductor Gemma New’s meticulous direction. She at least ensured that the engine never threatened to stall.

That blip was in contrast to the work that it had been intended to precede in the first half, Samuel Barber’s Symphony No 1. Almost exactly 90 years on from its completion, it remains an uncategorisable piece of Romanticism with a Modernist edge, bowling through the structure of a Classical symphony in a single arc, and ending with a nod to early music in a con moto passacaglia, its repeated bass-line building the tension superbly under New’s baton before being passed to the brass for the explosive finale.

Earlier delights in the performance included the variety of tone and dynamics in Gordon Rigby’s timpani and his three-way conversation with the basses and tuba, which followed a compelling cross-stage dialogue between trumpets and horns. A plangent solo from guest first oboe Emily Pailthorpe, a featured soloist in everything bar the Adams, was a highlight of the Andante tranquillo section.

The symphony is a full-orchestra work-out but the large string section (26 violins, 10 violas, 8 cellos and 6 basses) was on the platform throughout and as immaculately drilled in the Ravel, where the other voices included the crucial single trumpet in the third movement Menuet. New was true to the memorial purpose of the work – for friends lost in the First World War as much as Ravel’s composition predecessor – while never losing a crispness in the music, especially notable in her direction of the closing codas of the movements.

The concert culminated in Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2 with Italian soloist Alessio Bax, whose career flourishes on both sides of the Atlantic. The composer’s most integrated work for these forces, it saves any keyboard fireworks for the Allegro finale and Bax was not of a mind to put much showmanship into them. Instead this was a real ensemble performance, the pianist always attentive of his orchestral colleagues and the communication between himself and the conductor seamless, notably in the flurry of tempo changes at the end of the opening movement.

It was a beautiful account of a familiar work, if never heart-stopping, and Bax added a modest encore in a piece of Scriabin for left hand only.

Broadcast live on Radio 3 and available for 30 days on BBC Sounds. Concert repeated at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh on Sunday at 3pm.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Alessio Bax by Marco Borggreve

BBC SSO: Volkov / Hodges

Posted on by

City Halls, Glasgow

For many City Hall attendees or BBC Radio 3 listeners, the first half of Thursday’s BBC SSO programme would likely have been a journey into the unknown: a symphony by the under-championed French composer Elsa Barraine, and a piano concerto by her direct contemporary, and equally underexposed, Moroccan-born Frenchman Maurice Ohana.

Beyond that, conductor Ilan Volkov and the SSO ventured into more well-worn Gallic territory: the perfumed ballroom swirls of Ravel’s Valse nobles et sentimentales, and Debussy’s intoxicating Nocturnes (who else recalls these from the 1970s Higher Music syllabus?) adorned in the final Sirènes by the upper voices of the RCS Chamber Choir. All in all, this was a colourful French feast that coupled tasteful gratification with explorative curiosity.

Why, for instance, do we rarely hear Barraine’s Second Symphony, written in 1938 as a chilling portent of impending war, and subtitled “Voina”, the Russian for war? Barraine was Jewish and remarkably successful in her youth, being only the fourth woman to win the prestigious Prix de Rome. Bitingly rhythmic, darkened by angular dissonance and tense textures, the Symphony’s punchy concision and brutal neoclassicism – a trend she otherwise generally eschewed – convey a powerfully trenchant message. 

You wonder just how personal this performance was, given Volkov’s recent outspokenness and brief arrest in relation to the Israel-Gaza conflict, or more generally the current volcanic European situation. There was certainly fire in the belly of the SSO as they negotiated the militaristic stringency of the opening Allegro, the haunting pathos and coiled heart-filled lyricism of the March Funèbre, and a Finale whose accumulating tension – a triumphalism borne out of vivacious dances, hints of a jazz vibe, even a glittering aura preemptive of Hollywood’s John Williams – offered a welcome, if wishful, release. 

Ohana’s 1981 Piano Concerto, with the thoroughly convincing Nicolas Hodges as soloist, took us to more avant-garde territory: a fantasy world of textures, whether densely ruminative, shimmering à la Messiaen, dramatised through truculent interplay, or wildly delirious as frenzied Bartok-like pianism vies with the orchestra’s dizzy iridescence. Present, too, are lingering references to the composer’s part-Andalusian lineage, dreamy whiffs of flamenco, and the spiralling ecstasy of the final climax, all of which combined in an often mesmerising performance.

As such, the Ohana also sat perfectly as a bridge to the Ravel and Debussy. Volkov milked the Valse nobles et sentimentales – a golden miscellany of waltz styles wrapped in a panoply of silken orchestral extravagance – of all its supple opulence, evoking subliminal references to the tidal surges of the same composer’s La Valse, or the playful delicacy of his Mother Goose Suite. The SSO embraced its charm at every juncture, be it the music’s ravishing ebb and flow or the wafting subtleties of the orchestration.

Finally Debussy, and the three dream-like “twilight scenes” that constitute Nocturnes. Colour and texture were again the prime focus, Volkov eliciting from the opening Nuages a magical luminosity, the images bold and tangible yet exquisitely interwoven, countered stirringly by the Carnival-like exuberance of Fêtes, its muted fanfares tempering any potential overindulgence. The choristers in Sirènes gave the final movement its ethereal glow, perhaps a little harsh to begin with, but settling to align with the wistful hues of the orchestra. 

Ken Walton

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

BBC SSO: 90th Anniversary Concert

Posted on by

City Halls, Glasgow

Ninety years is quite an achievement for any orchestra, so you’d expect there to be quite a song and dance about it as a matter of celebration. In the event – which was a “birthday concert” at its City Halls home, broadcast live on Radio 3 – the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth played it relatively cool. 

Nothing provocatively challenging; nothing blatantly celebratory (not even an impromptu chorus of “Happy Birthday”); nothing emblematically Scottish; more a regular BBC SSO concert boosted by the presence of eminent pianist Sir Stephen Hough in Grieg’s popular concerto (thank you Messrs Morecambe, Wise and “Mr Preview”), and a rare performance of Sir Michael Tippett’s wartime masterpiece A Child of Our Time, featuring the topnotch voices of the National Youth Choir of Scotland (NYCoS).

True, Radio 3 had despatched its fast-talking No 1 Scots presenter Tom Service to emcee the event, offering as some helpful context the fact that Tippett had actually conducted his oratorio with this very orchestra in the 1960s, though of course “not necessarily these players!”. And there was, let it be said, a new work commissioned as an opener to the occasion, Bacchanale by Ayanna Witter-Johnson.

To evoke the spirit required, London-born Witter-Johnson turned to her Jamaican ancestry for inspiration, notably the exuberance of the Caribbean carnival. Bacchanale burst explosively into life, an orgy of rhythmic intoxication, ecstatic trumpeting, belligerent ostinati, sensuous string tropes and ample side helpings of percussion. The problem is it quickly ran out of ideas, everything piled into the initial outburst beyond which it had little new to say – a bit like a party popper. Or, as one astute observer within earshot put it, “a piece of a thousand endings”.

It did eventually end, signalling the way for Hough and a take on Grieg’s Concerto that reflected this pianist’s very personalised intellectualism. That’s a good thing, in the sense that he established a tantalising atmosphere of anticipation. Melodies that most of us could whistle in our sleep were often reshaped with just a hint of unexpected hiatus or recalibrated emphases. 

There was enormous power in Hough’s delivery, fiercely rhetorical in the opening movement, ravishingly shaped and intoned in the Adagio, approaching giddy (if occasionally splashy) heights in the Finale. Hough’s idiosyncrasies and forceful personality presented an interpretational challenge for Wigglesworth and the SSO, who did well to read the majority of intentions. Explaining that his choice of encore was governed by the need to avoid a broken piano string, Hough transferred his thoughts elegantly to Chopin’s E flat Nocturne.

If anything epitomised the underlying solemnity of Thursday evening it was A Child of Our Time. Inspired by the 1938 assassination in Paris of a German Embassy worker by a stateless young Jewish refugee and the resultant escalation of pre-war Jewish persecution, Tippett’s harrowing secular oratorio recasts it as a profoundly universal parable framed within a sequence of African American spirituals.  How could the words, “we cannot have them in our Empire – they shall not work nor draw a dole”, not resonate chillingly today? Or Tippett’s emotive treatment of the interwoven spirituals fail to convey the rich seam of humanity entrenched in the music?

Wigglesworth gelled his forces well, helped enormously by NYCoS’ flawless, articulate solidarity. Immaculate intonation, glowing expressiveness and thrilling homogeneity belied their youth, adding a spiritual glow to a busily efficient orchestral canvas and solo vocal quartet whose animated storytelling proved a central fascination, not least the ravishing mezzo voice of Beth Taylor, John Findon’s euphoric tenor and Ashley Riches’ proficient bass. Where Pumeza Matshikiza’s soprano was a potent enough force, her diction let her down, occasionally her intonation. 

And that was it, a substantial programme that in so many ways could just have been a typical night at the SSO. Maybe that’s exactly what we were celebrating. 

Ken Walton

(Photo by Martin Shields)

This concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and is now available for 30 days via BBC Sounds. It was also filmed for future broadcast on Inside Classical, available after broadcast on BBC iPlayer

BBC SSO: Lazarova / Kanneh-Mason

Posted on by

City Halls, Glasgow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ken Walton

(Photo credit: Martin Shields)

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

BBC SSO / Brabbins / Gonley

Posted on by

City Halls, Glasgow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ken Walton

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

Forgotten Concerto Reborn

Posted on by

Robin McEwan tells KEN WALTON why an unperformed 1950s concerto by Ian Whyte was worth resurrecting for a BBC SSO world premiere nearly 70 years on 

The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra is celebrating its nonagenarian landmark with an official 90th Anniversary concert in December. But there’s a small part of this week’s regular Thursday Series programme (20 Nov) that celebrates a conductor and composer whose lengthy affiliation with the orchestra from its outset influenced more than most the shaping of the band we know today.

Ian Whyte was the BBC’s head of music in Scotland when the then BBC Scottish Orchestra was established in 1935, shifting to become its principal conductor from 1945 until his premature death, aged 58, in 1960. While the Scottish airwaves were awash with his compositions and arrangements throughout that epochal relationship, one piece that never saw the light of day was his Violin Concerto, written sometime in the 1950s for his friend, the Austrian-born virtuoso Max Rostal.

Seventy years on, and thanks to three decades of investigative effort by Paisley-born composer, arranger, conductor and musicologist Robin McEwan, that concerto will finally receive its world premiere by the orchestra Whyte helped create, featuring British violinist Stephanie Gonley as soloist and Martyn Brabbins as conductor.

Violinist Stephanie Gonley

The very existence of the piece was first brought to McEwan’s attention by the composer’s daughter-in-law, violinist Nan Whyte. “I was conducting a National Youth String Orchestra of Scotland (NYSOS) course in 1993, she was coaching the violins, and during a chat over some wine the conversation turned to Ian Whyte and the impact he had on the mid-20th century Scottish music scene, either through his compositions or his championing of such key symphonic composers as Sibelius,” McEwan recalls.

“My ears pricked up when she told me of a violin concerto that had never been performed. Max Rostal, who had taught Nan, had apparently played it through privately with the composer, but that was as far as things had gone. She was really keen for something to be done to finally get it performed.” At the time, McEwan was busily engaged as assistant music director with Phantom of the Opera in London, but his curiosity for the piece lingered, moving him eventually to visit the Scottish Music Archive in Glasgow and examine the manuscripts.

What he discovered was tantalisingly incomplete. “The full handwritten score was just about there, but lacking some critical information, such as a title page, detailed metronome indications of the tempi, even a clue to the date of composition,” he explains. More detailed examination revealed notes that were obscured by blotches, and what seemed like obvious omissions from the timpani part. Coupled with discrepancies between that score and Whyte’s own “sketchy” piano reduction, McEwan saw before him a daunting but worthwhile challenge.

Over the years, professional and personal constraints prevented him from allocating serious and sustained time to advancing the project. “But then came Covid and a space in my life that made that possible,” he says. 

“I started looking more deeply into the whole piece and began to appreciate Whyte’s real craft as a composer. It seemed, above all, to be very much of its time and reflective of the his particular musical passions. You sense, for instance, that same northern, Scandinavian ruggedness you find in Sibelius. Echoes of Richard Strauss and the violin concertos of Korngold and Waxman point to a lingering nostalgic Romanticism. Whyte was certainly not aligned to the 1950s European avant-garde camp of Schoenberg, Webern, Messiaen and Stockhausen,” McEwan argues.

He describes a gloominess that enshrouds the opening Allegro commodo, an intense inner struggle that lifts miraculously after a long cadenza, “like the sun illuminating a freshly cleared landscape”. After a lightly orchestrated Intermezzo, the vigorous Finale, fuelled by a spirited strathspey and reel, steers the concerto to its conclusion.

Completing an edition fit for performance was one thing, finding an orchestra wiling to take it on was quite another. The obvious first port of call was the BBC SSO, not least as Whyte’s orchestra was approaching such a significant birthday. “It took perseverance to get even a response, but with the help of Simon Webb [formerly Director of Manchester’s BBC Philharmonic, now Head of BBC Orchestras and Choirs], things finally fell into place,” explains Sheffield-based McEwan.” The resulting world premiere is in good musical company, prefaced by the work that rocketed Sir James MacMillan to national fame in 1990, The Confession of Isobel Gowdie, and followed by Rachmaninov’s ravishing Second Symphony. 

McEwan is delighted that Martyn Brabbins took such an interest in conducting the concerto. “Martyn immediately thought it was worth doing,” he recalls. And was there any advice McEwan could pass on to soloist Stephanie Gonley [best known in Scotland as co-leader of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra] that might enrich her understanding of the piece? “I just wanted to talk to her about the playing style of Max Rostal, particularly that intense rubato, the flexibility and musicianship you don’t always get with today’s players.” 

The violinist who planted the seed for completing the work in McEwan’s mind all those years ago, Nan Whyte, would have understood that connection first hand. She died in 1995.  

Does McEwan himself have any idea why the concerto was never properly completed and performed? “I think it was a combination of it being written in a hurry at a time when the composer was facing imminent death, and also that it was composed in a style that would have gone quickly out of fashion.” 

Well, fashions come and go, and as the BBC SSO celebrates its landmark birthday, it’s nothing less than fitting that we should hear for the first time a major work by the man who shaped its distinctive identity.

The BBC SSO premiere Ian Whyte’s Violin Concerto in the City Halls Glasgow on Thu 20 Nov. Full information at www.bbc.co.uk/bbcsso

BBC SSO: Bride of Frankenstein

Posted on by

City Halls, Glasgow

With its soundtrack studio operation in Killermont Street maintaining a new income stream for Scottish musicians and its regular concerts with screenings of popular block-busters, the RSNO might seem to have the movie-music market sewn up in Scotland.

The screen arts have a long history, however, and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra found a work that exactly matched its own pedigree in its 90th birthday year.

With very busy film music specialist Ben Palmer on the podium, James Whale’s 1935 opus Bride of Frankenstein, featuring Karloff as the Monster and Elsa Lanchester in the double role of writer Mary Shelley and his newly-created mate, was the perfect date movie. It is one of those rare instances where a sequel outstripped the original, and one of the chief reasons Bride is rated over Whale’s earlier Frankenstein is Franz Waxman’s superb soundtrack.

The composer had begun his career as a writer of film scores in Germany and fled to the US after he was beaten up by Nazi thugs. Whale had admired his work on Fritz Lang’s recent Liliom and in creating the through-composed score for Bride of Frankenstein, Waxman created a template for the horror movie genre and soundtracks in general.

There is a lot of music for the orchestra to play in the film’s hour-and-a-quarter and the SSO did so with great elan, while Palmer steered the ship with precision, matching images and the film’s sound perfectly. The video projection of a sparkling print of the film was similarly spot-on.

As well as onscreen, there were excellent individual performances on the stage, on keyboards from Lynda Cochrane and throughout the percussion section, especially timpanist Gordon Rigby, providing the heartbeat that drives the narrative of the long laboratory scene. Waxman’s writing is always gloriously orchestral though, with brass and horns crucial to the most dramatic moments of the storyline, and the SSO strings, guest-led by Kate Suthers (another important soloist), on top form.

Quite evidently the conductor knows this score very well, but the technical execution of the music was nonetheless of the very first rank, especially from an orchestra for whom this was an unusual, if not unprecedented, event. The adaptability of the SSO to anything it is asked to do is often admired, and as it celebrates being 90 years young, this was another stunning example of that strength.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Ben Palmer by Arturs Kondrats

BBC SSO / Glassberg

Posted on by

City Halls, Glasgow

The fingerprints of the BBC SSO’s chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth were all over this Thursday matinee programme, but the man himself was not there, having called off unwell.

That was very sad for him, not least because a concert in which only the concluding work, Ravel’s La Valse, was at all well known, attracted a good-sized audience for what was a very thoughtful programme, with no fewer than three featured soloists, in which everything spoke eloquently to everything else.

Conductor Ben Glassberg, who stepped up to the podium at a week’s notice, can take a great deal of the credit for that success. He has built his growing reputation in the opera houses of Europe – most recently with Deborah Warner’s staging of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw in Rome – and will be back in the City Halls in March to conduct the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in a concert featuring saxophonist Jess Gillam.

Glassberg’s energetic marshalling of the huge forces required for some of the music was as impressive as his precision direction of the musical haikus of the last completed work by Oliver Knussen, O hototogisu!, for just two dozen musicians.

It paired soprano Claire Booth with the SSO’s principal flute Matthew Higham. Beginning and ending his evocation of the bird of the title (a Japanese cuckoo with an altogether more extensive vocabulary than the European one) by making his notes resonate beneath the lid of a concert grand, Higham’s duet with Booth was a conversational delight. This sort of thing may be meat and drink to her, but there are precious few sopranos who could tackle Knussen’s demands with such relaxed confidence.

The piece closed a first half which had begun with Knussen’s friend, Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, looking to Europe, and specifically Debussy, in his 1967 piece, Green. Ear-grabbing from the start with bold opening statements from the winds, brass and percussion in turn, Glassberg set out his stall in the opening bars and maintained his tight grip on the dynamics of the music throughout.

Maurice Ravel’s three-song cycle Scheherazade followed, setting texts by his contemporary Tristan Klingsor (aka Leon Leclere) that were inspired by Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral suite. That lineage reflected the structure of this concert programme in some ways, but there was also an audible kinship with the Knussen that followed, which also directly referenced the work of Takemitsu.

Booth was on imperious form in the Ravel, which is not often enough heard, moving from an opening role where she was almost part of the wind section (her carefully calibrated singing matched by the measured playing of first horn Chris Gough) to a terrific climax in the long first song when the executioner wields the “great curved sabre of the Orient”.

In an orchestra with many impressive guests in key front-desk positions (viola, trumpet and percussion among them) guest leader David Guerchovitch and first flute Eilidh Gillespie made telling contributions, while the hugely affecting closing song was all Booth, her French diction immaculate.

In what was luxury casting, the first work in the second half featured viola virtuoso Lawrence Power playing a work he has championed, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s On Opened Ground. With a big orchestra onstage once more, and further sonically-fascinating tuned percussion, this was another side of the composer from his operatic triumphs, although it was easy to hear Power as a characterful protagonist and the other instrumentalists as the chorus in the opening exchanges. The soloist produced a huge sound from his instrument, but the colourful orchestration was often just as arresting in the opening movement, Cadenza and Scherzino.

The second part, Interrupted Song and Chaconne, was more contemplative with Glassberg embodying the liquid rhythm to which it returns after an intense gun-shot climax.

That structure in some ways mimicked the closing Ravel. If La valse was originally intended as a tribute to Johann Strauss II, whose bicentenary has lately been marked, it travelled a long way to its very French finished form. With superb playing from the SSO strings, Glassberg shaped the work perfectly, from the basses’ opening pulse to the sparkling complex finish.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Claire Booth

« Older Entries