Grasping persuasively the conflict of mood and momentum at the start of Sibelius’ challenging Second Symphony is one thing; sustaining that formidable, ambiguous tread through to the bitter end is another. In this performance by the BBC SSO under Ludovic Morlot – returning to the orchestra in his own right after a highly impressive stand-in appearance two seasons ago – what initially promised gold eventually delivered bronze.
In other words, this was a perfectly worthy performance, if not a record-breaking triumph. It got off to a gripping start, the stop-start multiplicity of Sibelius’ opening themes like dramatic fragmentations, yet galvanised by an overarching vision of continuity, grizzly tensions that lingered through the Allegretto’s silences and gear changes, tempi that constantly refreshed the emotional thrust.
Such qualities again played their part in the ensuing Andante, which felt, as it should, like the symphony’s mindful, but still restive, centrepiece. The spareness of the initially lonesome walking basses cast an immediate aura of introspection, Morlot’s unlaboured pacing avoiding any necessity for knee-jerk tempo shifts later on, letting the heightening inner tussles speak for themselves. The flow of the final movements proved less heated, Morlot’s grip faltering at times, lessening the euphoric arrival and light-giving impact of the final heroic theme.
In all of this, too, was an occasional sense of undernourished, sometimes misjudged, texturing, most noticeably from the woodwind. Where was the abrasive edge that brings Siblelius’ writing so vividly to life, a belligerence so in keeping with the composer’s character? It rarely surfaced in a performance that almost, but didn’t quite, lead the field.
The first half was all Mozart: a relative novelty in the case of five entr’actes composed in the 1770s for Tobias Philipp von Gebler’s heroic play Thamos, King of Egypt; and one of Mozart’s best-known Piano Concertos – No 24 in C minor – with the redoubtable Elisabeth Leonskaja as soloist.
For all that the incidental music bore a certain fascination – its three call-to-attention chords boldly pre-echoing The Magic Flute, and the “theatre” implicit in Mozart’s writing smacking of operatic prototype – there was an overriding sense of a missing dimension. Nor was the performance as tight and together as might have captured more convincingly its stormy thrills and spills.
If such inconsistencies spread to the concerto – some glaringly uncoordinated attacks sadly diminishing its overall preciseness – there was much in Leonskaja’s performance that earned her the adulation her admirers visibly hold.
She is her own woman, issuing a style of Mozart playing that eschews the intellectualism of, say, the late Alfred Brendel, the sweet lyrical precision of Mitsuko Uchida, or the golden tone-production of a Steven Osborne or Paul Lewis. Her playing offered a sort of resigned simplicity, a performance given to sudden flights of lightning virtuosity (Brahms’ high-calorie cadenza for one) against moments of seemingly detached calm.
While these were instances to savour, there were equally ones that felt as if the lights had been dimmed and the heat went off, as in Leonskaja’s tendency not always to shape or caress the lyrical line, or simply to mishit notes. Maybe that’s what led to the periodic nervousness emanating from Morlot and the orchestra.
That aside, Leonskaja’s style remains a matter of taste, and a sizeable audience for Thursday’s live BBC Radio 3 broadcast clearly enjoyed it. She responded with smiling gratitude and, as an encore, the charmed innocence of the Andante from Mozart’s Piano Sonata in C, K545.
Ken Walton
This concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 beyond which it is available for 30 days on BBC Sounds
One of the truly local successes of James MacMillan’s Cumnock Tryst festival has been its very own Festival Chorus. Populated by singers from the wider Ayrshire diaspora – including much of the Tryst management and MacMillan himself on Saturday – it has played an integral part in defining the home-grown element of the event, not least its willingness to address challenging contemporary repertoire over the years.
The beauty of American composer Taylor Scott Davis’ Magnificat, however, of which this was the Scottish premiere, is the extent to which this half-hour-long work lends itself to such enthusiastic amateur outfits. Written to a predominantly singable formula – the soft-centred comfort blanket of Rutter-like lyricism and golden harmonies never far away – and illuminated by a filmic orchestral glow courtesy here of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, this left ample freedom for conductor Eamonn Dougan to elicit the unpretentious expressiveness behind the notes. For the listener, it was a sincere and comforting ride.
If eclecticism was in full view, so was the Texan-based composer’s craftsmanship in knitting together a stream of recognisable influences. Where the energised sparkle of the opening spoke freely of John Adams, such was the sweep of ongoing references – fleeting echoes of so many Hollywood soundtracks – that the magpie-like mind of John Williams seemed a permanent resonance.
Scott Davis, the Texan-based composer, was himself in Cumnock to witness the performance, members of his Texan choir also making the trip to swell the vocal masses. Thus the red-ripe confidence greeting the opening Magnificat anima mea, the silken underpinning of ravishing solos by soprano (and former Scottish Opera Emerging Artist) Catriona Hewitson, the subdued acquiescence of the Et misericordia, and the ultimate euphoria of the Gloria.
This wasn’t a long concert – most of the Cumnock programmes come in at around an hour apiece – but it was a fulfilling one, opening with a deliciously light-fingered, joyously articulated account by SSO players of Dvorak’s Serenade for Wind Instruments (the added cello and double bass essential, but so like cuckoos in the nest) under MacMillan’s direction. A brief a cappella choral performance of MacMillan’s own wholesome six-part communion motet Benedicimus Deum caeli (from the Strathclyde Motets) followed, deftly conducted by chorus director Andrew McTaggart.
All of this took place in the Barony Hall, the central auditorium within Cumnock’s Robert Burns Academy, which worked really well acoustically, save for a vigorous air-conditioning system that gave intermittent life to a rack of tubular bells at points when they weren’t prescribed.
NYOS Camerata conducted by Matthew Coorey
Earlier, Saturday’s afternoon concert was in a rather chilly Cumnock Town Hall, so thankfully we had an hours’ worth of Richard Strauss to warm the cockles and counter the remnants of Storm Amy outside. This featured the National Youth Orchestras of Scotland Camerata, a kind of elite squad at the apex of the NYOS family, performing ex-Berlin Philharmonic oboist Nigel Shore’s classy wind ensemble distillation of Strauss’ opera Der Rosenkavalier under the baton of British-based Australian conductor Matthew Coorey.
Word is that some last-minute call-offs had required emergency changes to the ensemble line-up, which may have accounted for the unevenness, even some nervousness, in the score’s adrenalin-fuelled opening flourish and other key tutti points. Yet there were plentiful moments where character and skill took hold, such as those deliciously flighty figurations from the flutes, or the oboe’s plaintive lyrical poignance.
Coorey’s taut direction brought alertness and cohesion to a monumental task. Yes, there were instances that tested the young musicians, but there was seldom a moment where Strauss’ calorific masterpiece didn’t feel like a meal you simply didn’t want to end.
At this year’s Edinburgh Festival, Head of Music Nik Zekulin was making no secret of his exasperation with the inability of audiences to switch off their mobile devices for the duration of a concert, Ryan Wang’s Chopin recital at the Queen’s Hall being only the most spectacularly disrupted.
Before the opening concert of the BBC SSO’s 90th anniversary season, R3 presenter Gillian Moore made the usual plea for audience members to ensure their phones were silenced for the live broadcast, but Chief Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth was forced to halt the last movement of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No 3 and recap a few bars when a ringtone persisted beyond endurance.
It was, perhaps, small consolation, but the efficiency with which the interruption was dealt spoke eloquently of the focus of players and conductor on the music. The impression that remains is of a sparkling and detailed account of the work with Wigglesworth steering its many changes of tone and direction with great style.
Without being quite as flamboyant, the symphony shares a lot of DNA with the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini that preceded it, the starring role of the piano instead shared across the orchestra. The SSO, with six guests in key positions, including leader Clio Gould, was full-sized for the first time in the evening and the big percussion section, five horns and brass all made their presence felt in the climax of a superb season-opening programme.
It had begun with the Scottish premiere of Wigglesworth’s for Laura, after Bach, his musical memorial to the orchestra’s former leader Laura Samuel, who died at the end of 2024. First unveiled at the end of July in the Royal Albert Hall, it is a work for string orchestra that the composer has spun from the Gigue in Bach’s Partita No 3, which Samuel recorded during her final illness. It is a captivating tribute, more celebratory than elegiac and should find a lasting place in the repertoire for its fascinating way with the source material.
The concert’s guest soloist was young violinist Daniel Lozakovich whom the orchestra first met in South Korea during its Proms tour there at the end of last year. He followed Schumann’s Violin Concerto with an encore of the Sarabande from Bach’s Partita No 2 in what was a particularly apt and lovely way to end the first half.
That addition spoke of Lozakovich’s keen musical intelligence, which had already been very evident from his performance of the concerto. Few violinists of his age and experience know this work as well as he clearly does and he and Wigglesworth shaped this performance to make the best case for it. The balance between soloist and orchestra was as perfect as one might hope, the slow movement a narrative of beguiling beauty from its opening dialogue with first cello Rudi De Groote, and the remarkably upbeat finale defying its tricky reputation.
Mendelssohn’s Elijah was an odd choice to end the 2025 Edinburgh International Festival and the 60th birthday season of the Festival Chorus. As a programme note online by Professor Eric Levi pithily explained, it is a work that has been as much lambasted as acclaimed, for musical as well as political reasons, since its Birmingham premiere in the mid-19th century, although the Victorians – and the Queen and her husband in particular – generally liked it.
And although performances are not that common in our time, it had been given a memorable one in the Usher Hall just over a year previously when it closed the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s 50th anniversary celebrations.
This one was on a larger scale, both vocally and instrumentally, but that meant that there were larger forces to manage, and the benefit was dubious, especially as it has been this choir’s skill in singing quietly with intensity that has impressed this year.
There is a lot of choral content in the structure of the work, but it is in two different voices (narrative and of “The People”), which is only one of the difficulties in story-line which follows the prophet’s life-story chronologically (Baal in Part 1, Jezebel after the interval) but uses texts from across the Old Testament and some of Matthew’s Gospel as well.
The soloists were the stars, Christopher Maltman magnificent in the title role, mezzo Karen Cargill adding a more dramatic performance than soprano Mari Eriksmoen and tenor Ben Bliss in powerful voice as Obadiah. Martha Johnson delivered The Youth authoritatively but the four Rising Stars singers took a moment to settle into an ensemble for their first quartet.
While there were some fine solo voices in the orchestra too, and the brass and horns were on dependable form, this wasn’t a classic performance from the RSNO, great at the choral climax of the work but with a few dips in coherence along the way.
The Festival Chorus had a much finer showcase three days previously with the rather briefer Chichester Psalms by Leonard Bernstein, and the team with whom they had closed the 2023 Festival, conductor Karina Canellakis and the BBC SSO.
That they had to sing in Hebrew rather the English mattered little, the choir dealing with the music’s challenging rhythms with aplomb. Countertenor soloist Hugh Cutting, with his part memorised, was just as commanding as Maltman would be, and first cello Rudi De Groote took his solo as beautifully as RSNO principal Pei-Jee Ng did in the Mendelssohn.
Sadly, the EIF’s Rising Stars were disadvantaged here too, the (different) SATB quartet located next the orchestral percussion between choir and instrumentalists and initially barely audible.
With the choral feature bracketed by Messiaen and Stravinsky, the concert was also a great opportunity for the SSO. In Les Offrandes oubliees we heard string playing just as quiet and demanding of attention as the smaller numbers of Poland’s NFM Leopoldinum had demonstrated ten days earlier, and Petrushka was a delight from start to finish. Canellakis was absolutely on it for the frantic moments of the score, but equally happy to give soloists enough leeway to make the theatrical musical jokes as rewarding as really good players can tell them.
Long-term followers of the BBC SSO would have recognised in its final season programme of Beethoven, Sibelius and a contemporary concerto a concert that played to its strengths. It’s around 30 years since the orchestra’s heroic and revelatory Beethoven and Sibelius symphonic cycles under Osmo Vänskä, and you can still sense the legacy of that in the SSO’s palpable self-motivation. Similarly, even the most demanding of modern repertoire is easy meat to a band that, only a few weeks ago, sailed painlessly through the uncompromising trials of its own Tectonics Festival.
So nothing in Thursday’s live broadcast concert for BBC Radio 3 presented the slightest discomfort. Beethoven’s Haydn-inspired First Symphony bore a zestful shared familiarity, contrasting later with the same composer’s belligerent, lesser-known ‘Namensfeier’ Overture. The tactile subtleties of Hans Abrahamsen’s 2019 Horn Concerto, with the Berlin Philharmonic’s principal horn Stefan Dohr as dedicatee and soloist, were voiced in this Scottish premiere performance with haunting, subliminal delicacy. Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony more or less played itself.
It was when chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth’s own particular strengths struck common currency with his orchestra that the most satisfying moments occurred. He’s clearly in tune with the music of Abrahamsen, championing the Dane as the SSO’s composer-in-residence, and in this performance responded to the tantalising haziness of its sound world with nuggets of textural detail that illuminated the soloist’s patiently emerging eloquence.
From the amorphous intangibility of the opening bars – as puzzlingly indistinct as any Morse soundtrack – through a maze of motivic manipulation tinged with spectral hues and darkening shadows towards a quickening pulse and more glistening optimism, Wigglesworth shaped the work’s slow-winding progress with perceptive definition. Crowning that, Dohr’s horn playing was exceptional, a gradual quest towards the rhapsodic, the mild distortion of the instrument’s natural harmonics peppering the solo line with moments of discomforting allure.
In the Beethoven and Sibelius, Wigglesworth did what was necessary, which was generally to play safe. There was nothing wrong with Beethoven’s First Symphony, save to say it was predictable, which slightly sold us short on the slow teasers that open the first and final movements. But there was a joyous inner spirit to the performance that compensated, and some scintillating interplay within the wind section.
The Beethoven Overture – a work the composer seemed to lose interest in in the course of its composition – proved an unexpected delight. If anything measured up to the common vision of the composer as a tetchy intolerant individual, this did. The curtness of its motivic dialogue, the glorious grinding irritation of its dissonances, were fully embraced by this feisty performance. There was even a sense that this piece is not in fact without flaws, which lent it a certain spoof quality, assuming it’s indeed possible for a composer to do so with his own work.
Seriousness lies at the heart of Sibelius’ Fifth, albeit warmed by the journey it traces towards the horns’ swirling climactic “Swan Hymn” in the final movement. What this performance didn’t fully grasp was the minutiae, the details required to give a buzz, to animate what otherwise become neutered textures. Wigglesworth seemed content to leave these largely unattended, offering a bland landscape in its wake. There was enough colourful initiative from the SSO itself to maintain interest, and the overall framework of the symphony was proportionately satisfying. But Sibelius is much more than that, as SSO audiences of old know well.
Ken Walton
This concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and is available on BBC Sounds for 30 days
The last thing you want to do when presenting difficult music, not least the extreme experimentalism that defines such contemporary music festivals as Tectonics, is to do so with a sense of trepidation, even apology.
Thankfully, there’s no danger of that in this annual Glasgow jamboree, which ran over the weekend with its intrepid founder/curator/conductor Ilan Volkov at the helm and – in the case of Saturday’s climactic opening night orchestral performances – the one band you can always rely on to tackle the most testing, sometimes near-impossible, demands of composers many of us have not yet heard of – the BBC SSO.
That guarantee of witnessing the music in its best possible light is what gives Tectonics the integrity it has earned, what encourages the fan base it has garnered over the years, but more importantly aids judgement on what works and what doesn’t quite pass muster. Any composer featured in Tectonics is given the best possible platform.
The SSO’s second performance slot on Saturday evening was a classic example of that. The two pieces featured – the UK premiere of Clara Ianotta’s strange bird – no longer navigating by a star and world premiere of Timothy McCormack’s a vapour (no body, no image) – were ravishingly played, but where the former proved hypnotically compelling, the latter, for all its detailed fascination, struggled to live up to the expectations of its stated programme.
There was no doubting the sincerity of McCormack’s intentions: a heartfelt musical reckoning on “how queer individuals learn of, reconcile, grieve, and hold space for the lost generation of queer and gay individuals who died during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and ‘90s”. Yet for all its sustained and pained intensity, a lack of genuine bite conveyed more a sense of submission than successful intent.
Nor was the work’s message sharpened by the stentorian growls of vocal performer Ty Bouque, strangely attired in string vest, presumably uttering words (from the journals of writer and AIDS victim Hervé Guibert) that were difficult to make out. Even the music’s final utterance – a dismissive orchestral chirrup – seemed frustratingly inconclusive.
Ianotta’s work is also about loss, based on poetry by Dorothy Molloy, yet her intentions proved so much more convincing in a performance that made a feature of the score’s nebulous fascination. Even where passions seemed to be suppressed, frissons of excitement persistently tickled the senses. Volkov’s ear for detail illuminated the textural subtleties – a sound world more suggestive than prescriptive, yet heaving with animated undercurrents – while his grasp of the big picture ensured a satisfying sense of completeness.
If any one work summed up the adventurousness of Tectonics, it was Øyvind Torvund’s 40-minute Symphony, previously championed by Volkov in Oslo and Bergen, now disclosing its thought-provoking unorthodoxy to a Scottish audience. It’s a piece whose perception is determined by the actions of the audience itself, and here’s why.
Øyvind Torvund’s Symphony (Photo: Alex Woodward)
Firstly, sections of the orchestra and three soloists are placed in disparate areas of the entire venue. For Saturdays performance the strings occupied the first floor bar; the wind in the foyer outside the Recital Room; solo saxophone Kjetil Møster, percussionist Jennifer Torrence and synth/electric guitarist Jørgen Træen variously on stair landings and balconies, while the brass cut a noble presence as sole occupiers of the main auditorium stage. Linked to Volkov’s beat via TV screens, the combined sound was perceivable everywhere via speakers.
In turn, we were instructed – without talking! – to walk freely around, each audience member effectively creating their own personalised “mix”. It was genuinely thrilling to be able to shift the emphases between the blanket density of the strings, the insistent chattering of the woodwind, and the profundity of successive brass flourishes by simply altering your vantage point.
And that was the point. Volkov’s theme for this Tectonics was “the profound art of listening”. To give us control of that was a practical and visceral revelation. And a reminder that Tectonics is guaranteed to make you think way out of the box.
ON the day that the BBC Proms line-up was announced – with the SSO boasting six concerts instead of its customary four because it is the band for Claudia Winkleman’s Traitors Proms – the BBC Scottish was conducted by the Principal Guest Conductor of Manchester’s BBC Philharmonic, Anja Bihlmaier.
Her contributions to the programme asked for a rather different orchestra than the Mozart-sized one we heard in the middle, but the SSO, as usual, demonstrated its infinite adaptability.
The opener was a suite that was not really conceived as such by its composer, but is having a vibrant 21st century life in that guise. Trois femmes de legende: Salome; Ophelia; The Dream of Cleopatra, by Mel Bonis, brings together three orchestrated piano pieces from the start of the 20th century. Bonis studied at Paris Conservatoire with Cesar Franck and her music has much in common with Impressionism while anticipating the influence that would have on American composers.
So masterly is her orchestration that there is little sense of their piano beginnings, with flutes to the fore in Salome, horn and oboe solos in Cleopatra, and bass clarinet hinting at Ophelia’s fate in what became a busy night for the orchestra’s Simon Butterworth.
With no real narrative within the individual pieces, or linking them, Bihlmaier nonetheless shaped a suite that has a grand finish in the Cleopatra work.
With the SSO reduced to what was a chunky chamber orchestra of 40 strings and seven winds for the Mozart, Spaniard Javier Perianes was as reliable as ever as soloist, even if he was reading the score some of the time, including the composer’s own cadenzas. His unshowy panache was the lighter side of the onstage equation, with Bihlmaier maintaining robust propulsion in the low strings in the slow movement and finding a fascinating darker tone in the middle of the upbeat finale.
The real treat of the programme came after the interval with the 2016 “Symphonic Suite” of the music from Richard Strauss’s early opera Elektra. Arranged by the Austrian conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra Manfred Honecker and Czech composer Tomas Ille, it is one of a number of similar projects the pair have to their name, including Dvorak’s Rusalka and Janacek’s Jenufa.
With a huge orchestra at her command, Bihlmaier’s treatment of the dynamics of the score was superb, revealing how much of the opera this arrangement manages to cram into a little over half an hour and orchestrating the climax of the narrative gloriously. As much as the big sound the full forces produced, it was the detail of the quieter moments, with just a few players, that impressed.
Unlike similar reductions of Wagner operas, there are the tone poems of Strauss to measure the result against and this orchestral Elektra does so with considerable merit – although much of that should go to this conductor and these players for this performance. Bihlmaier brought Butterworth forward with his big clarinet to take his own individual bow at the end of what was his last concert as a BBC SSO staffer after almost 37 years.
Keith Bruce
Portrait of Anja Bihlmaier by Phil Sharp/BBC Philharmonic
The double bass, as demonstrated by two of Scotland’s leading orchestral practitioners, appears to be in season at the moment. Less than month ago, Peter Eotvos’ theatrical concerto gained its UK premiere with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in the hands of former SCO, now RSNO, principal bassist Nikita Naumov. Last week it was the turn of BBC SSO principal Kai Kim, performing Estonian composer Eduard Tubin’s Concerto for Double Bass in an SSO matinee concert conducted by present-day Estonian Anu Tali.
A work dating from Tubin’s self-imposed exile to Sweden in the 1940s – precipitated by his native country’s Soviet reoccupation – it bears something of the austere abstraction that crept into his music as he distanced himself from earlier fascination with the folk tunes of his homeland. There’s a darkness, too, which stamps its immediate presence in the opening bars, demonic, gaunt, to some extent foreboding. But soon enough, it is the freneticism of this concerto – a restlessness that seems deliberately cold, to some extent frustrating in its refusal to completely settle – that dominates, taking time to reach its boiling point, and when it does signing off with a somewhat glib “that’s all folks”.
In Thursday’s performance Kim exhibited solid command of the solo role, making the most of the bass’s trenchant lower register, instigating a pulsating rhythmic thrust as the tempo picked up and a jazzier persona emerged. The impish whimsy of a central movement soaked in Shostakovich-like ironic mockery, and a dizzying climactic cadenza, paved the way to a riotous finale, screaming blue murder at its height. Kim powered his way purposefully through its twists and turns.
Less convincing was Tali’s exploitation of Tubin’s orchestral colourings, slightly bland in part, missing many of the detailed interactions with the soloist, but at least matching in spirit those moments where a prolonged head of steam took hold. I couldn’t help thinking there was more to this music than the occasion presented.
Similar issues arose in the two pieces surrounding the Tubin concerto. Tali opened with the 1991 strings and percussion version by Arvo Pärt of his own Fratres, a ruminative, incantation the appeal of which is its hypnotic repetitiveness, underpinning drone, punctuating percussion and patient swell. While it played to the letter of the score, neat and disciplined, that aura of timeless wonderment that is its transporting soul largely eluded it.
The spirit of Dvorak’s Seventh Symphony was more convincingly captured, especially where Tali applied ample exuberant charm to the Scherzo and directional force to the ultimately triumphant Finale. But where there was such eventual confidence and gutsiness, there was – especially in the opening movement – a rigidness in Tali’s direction that seemed to constrain the orchestral response. Nervous openings were a tell-tale sign, as were lost instrumental subtleties and a tendency to allow the brass a tad too much freedom.
Thursday also saw the launch of the SSO’s new season brochure outlining the riches of a 2025-26 90th anniversary season that opens with a new work – for Laura, after Bach – by SSO chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth, written in memory of former SSO leader Laura Samuel who died earlier this year; and in March next year promises a momentous Mahler 2 under conductor emeritus Sir Donald Runnicles. Full details at www.bbc.co.uk/bbcsso.
It’s over fifty years since Ravi Shankar’s concerto for sitar made such a powerful statement on how potent the fusion of Eastern and Western instrumentalists could be. It was one of the late Shankar’s close collaborators, Indian tabla supremo Zakir Hussain, who in 2023 took things further with a Triple Concerto for tabla, sitar and bansuri just as fascinating in its cross-cultural proposition.
Hussain’s concerto was the opening work in Thursday’s East-meets-West programme by the BBC SSO, playing under its former associate conductor Alpesh Chauhan, who previously championed the work with the Symphony Orchestra of India. Hussain, himself, was due to feature in Thursday’s concertante trio, but died last December, his place taken by his equally-talented brother, Fazal Qureshi.
Its foremost strength proved to be the superb Indian front line, the tactile intricacies of Qureshi’s tabla playing matched by the charismatic, at times rock-leaning, Niladri Kumar on sitar, and the beguiling bansuri (bamboo flute) playing of Rakesh Chaurasia, whose lung capacity facilitated moments of superhuman breath control. Their presence, sitting crosslegged on decorated daises, was visually and musically theatrical, playing out a metaphorical scenario of conflict and resolution. These interactions were mesmerising, exhilarating and imbued with action-packed spontaneity.
Against this, the orchestral writing did seem relatively bland, modally-confined, in short knowing its place in the hierarchy of things. Yet its background cinematic role benefitted from the warmth and expansiveness of the SSO’s richness and the soft relevance that emanated from that understanding. Chauhan was a consummate ringmaster, deftly in control, inspiring slick communication between the starry trio and backline support.
The remainder of the programme demanded far greater orchestral nuance and virtuosity. In Rachmaninov’s symphonic poem The Isle of the Dead, inspired by the dark and mysterious eponymous painting by Swedish artist Arnold Böcklin, the former quality was powerfully evoked, its haunting, lugubrious opening charged with ominous premonition, its arc-like structure thrillingly heated in the crashing climaxes. If the momentum occasionally faltered, it was only marginal, Chauhan handling the shaping and colouring well.
As he did with the invigorating sound world of Stravinsky’s revised 1919 suite, The Firebird. This was an electrifying conclusion to an intriguing evening. There was expectant thrill in the atmospheric turbulence of the Introduction, menace in the Firebird’s fitful dance, exotic scents peppering the Princesses’ Dance, exhaustive depravity in the Infernal Dance, and beyond the queasy whiffs of the Berceuse the resolute triumphalism of the Finale.
Ken Walton
This concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, subsequently available on BBC Sounds for 30 days
There are moments in the life of a music critic when a concert is thrust into the musical stratosphere by a performance that is literally out of this world. These are precious occasions, few and far between, and it happened on Thursday when the RCS-trained mezzo soprano Beth Taylor unleashed her first subliminal utterances as the Angel in Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius.
Up to that point, this account by the BBC SSO and joint singing forces of the Huddersfield Choral Society and RCS Chamber Choir in a voluminous Paisley Abbey had paced itself steadfastly under chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth, who treaded positively but carefully in likely reaction to the building’s tricky geography.
For it was a major challenge asking the distantly-placed choirs to successfully penetrate the foreground welter of a full symphony orchestra. Details were inevitably lost, but there was a stalwart precision in a delivery that gave this Gerontius enough spiritual fruitiness and physical space to satisfy its religious theatricality.
The demons and troubled souls expressed within the high-minded Catholicism of Cardinal Newman’s text may have lacked absolute full-blooded venom or visceral pain at times, but there was plentiful sincerity of purpose, Wigglesworth’s unhurried deliberations urging genuinely liquid sonorities from the SSO and a tidy sense of the music’s operatic scope.
Much of that was down to a well-matched solo team. As Gerontius – the sinning soul whose final journey takes him before his God before finding eventual peace through redemption – tenor Brenden Patrick Gunnell was a towering protagonist. His eye-contact with the audience – he sang predominantly off the book – was as compelling as the calculated vocal engineering and nuanced phrasing that together ensured such a commanding portrayal. Neal Davies’ profound and penetrating bass performance as Priest and Angel of the Agony offered an powerful foil.
Crowning all this, however, was Beth Taylor’s mesmerising performance as the Angel. Here was a voice that instantly transfixed, reverberating with voluminous magnitude in its gravelly lower reaches, effortlessly thrilling at its soaring climactic heights, served by crystal clear annunciation and unceasingly intuitive musicianship. A former grand finalist in the 2023 Cardiff Singer of the World, she’s undoubtedly a name to watch.
So much to enjoy in a Gerontius that was only marginally constrained by the challenges of the venue. That’s unlikely to be the case in Sunday’s Edinburgh Usher Hall repeat. Worth catching if you can.
Ken Walton
This programme is repeated at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh on Sunday 2 March at 3pm, which will be recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3. Full information at www.bbc.co.uk/bbcsso.
At the end of the week when the BBC Scottish announced a new Principal Guest Conductor in Delyana Lazarova, we should have been seeing her predecessor in the post, Ilan Volkov, back on the podium. When Volkov called off for personal reasons, his replacement was Estonian Mihhail Gerts, taking over a challenging programme in its entirety.
At its heart was the UK premiere of Trurliade – Zone Zero (Relief méta-sonore), a half-hour concerto for solo percussion and orchestra by Austrian iconoclast Olga Neuwirth, with local hero Colin Currie the soloist. On either side of that, Prokofiev, his youthful Autumnal Sketch opening the programme and the highly personal, sombre Sixth Symphony filling the second half.
Gerts dealt superbly with that huge challenge. The concerto is as far from being solely in the hands of the soloist as is possible, frantically busy though Currie was. The percussion work in the orchestra was not just in the hands of a six-string section, but also the wind and string players in the use of extended techniques and toys and small instruments.
The conductor kept everything on track with a strict time baton and eloquent, precise left hand cueing, steering a path through a score that sometimes sounded chaotic but is brilliantly structured. The soloist’s initial rubbing and scraping of a hanging gong, crashing of cymbals and thumping of an oil drum was answered by brass interjections and hunting horn calls, those orchestral percussionists adding masses of extra colour.
With two paper copies of the score as well as a tablet computer, Currie dashed between three set-ups on the apron of the stage, and many more instruments – untuned and tuned – than it was possible to count. Yet it was quite possible to forget to watch him because of everything else that was going on in a huge orchestra, augmented with Wagner tubas, contrabass clarinet and tenor saxophone.
The music was constantly changing, sometimes racing away before doubling back on itself, sometimes incremental in pitch and time, throwing out fragments of unresolved melody. It is concerned with the contemporary relationship between humans and machines, both mechanical and systemic, but in a playful, cartoonish and fairground fashion. For all the fun in it, all the details are quite specific.
At its end comes a victory of sorts. After a snatch of “We Shall Overcome” on vibraphone, drum rolls from the back of the orchestra were answered by filigree decoration from the soloist, a voice boomed through a megaphone and Currie wielded an enormous mallet to thump a small cymbal.
Perhaps only a work as dark and ambiguous as Prokofiev 6 could follow that. With its ticking clock motif and clear concerns with the intimations of mortality that the composer had recently endured, it wasn’t the sort of thing Stalin wanted to hear and was banned in 1948. We don’t hear it much now either, but Gerts and the SSO gave a terrific account of the work.
The conductor was very alive to the changes of tempo in the first movement and took a very measured approach to the huge Wagnerian swoon of the Largo, keeping plenty in reserve for the pacey finale, its abrupt halt and deeply ambiguous ending.
Keith Bruce
This concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and is available to listen to for 30 days on BBC Sounds
Bulgarian-born Delyana Lazarova is to be the new principal guest conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra from September 2025. The former assistant to Sir Mark Elder at the Hallé Orchestra will succeed Ilan Volkov, who held that position from 2009 and is now creative partner. She will be joining an artistic team at the SSO led by chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth.
The SSO appointment is one of two principal guest conductorships Lazarova takes up this year. In December it was announced that she would assume a similar role from mid-2025 with the Utah Symphony Orchestra. To date she has collaborated with such leading orchestras as the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Orchestre National de France, BBC Symphony Orchestra and CBSO, and makes her debut this season with both the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Minnesota Orchestra.
Lazarova’s growing reputation in recent years followed on the back of several important competition successes, winning the Bruno Walter Conducting Scholarship at California’s Cabrillo Festival in 2017 and 2018, the 2019 NRTA International Conducting Competition in Tirana, and in 2020 the James Conlon Conducting Award at the Aspen Music Festival and Siemens Hallé International Conductors Competition.
In her SSO debut last March she hugely impressed audiences and critics alike. One review claimed that “Delyana Lazarova’s chemistry with the SSO, loaded with common purpose and a mission to excite and enchant, was exhilarating from the start”. Of that same performance of Stravinsky’s The Firebird, VoxCarnyx concluded that “Lazarova, one hopes, will be back before long.”
Commenting on her SSO appointment, Lazarova said: “I am deeply honoured and thrilled to join the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra team. From our very first rehearsal, I was impressed by the artistry and exceptional range of expression of the BBC SSO musicians, whose commitment and passion for the music captured my heart from the start.
“I eagerly look forward to this exciting journey together, as we explore a diverse repertoire – discovering hidden gems, as well as bringing fresh perspectives to some of the most beloved masterpieces. I cannot wait to reconnect with the wonderful members of the orchestra, hear their beautiful playing once again, and create inspiring music together.”
Welcoming Lazarova’s appointment, BBC SSO Dominic Parker said: “With a keen sense of storytelling in her programming and an impressive breadth of repertoire, audiences can look forward to an enriching and enjoyable musical journey with her on the BBC SSO podium.”
It’s over a decade since the BBC SSO’s memorable focus on the Vaughan Williams symphonies under Andrew Manze opened our ears to those that might not be so familiar as the Sea Symphony or Sinfonia Antartica. One bold, bumper London 2012 Proms programme ambitiously packaged together the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth, the first of these proving a revelation for many unfamiliar with its enigmatic harshness and perfunctory conclusion.
In the SSO’s first Thursday concert of 2025 the Fourth was revisited, this time under the orchestra’s current chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth, in this instance as the brusque conclusion to a journey through Mozart and Britten. That, in itself, offered a broader context for the work. Where Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C minor, K491 – the sole presentation in a short first half – elicited a ruminative Classicism tinged with Romantic pre-echoes, Britten’s Suite on English Folk Tunes ‘A Time There Was…’, a quintessential gem from his twilight years, proved a salty appetiser to the surface brutalism of the Vaughan Williams.
Wigglesworth’s own view of this 1930s’ symphony seemed both forceful and cautious. The compelling severity of the opening – spookily heralded by one of many mobile phone alerts going off among the audience in anticipation of Storm Eowyn – was instantly captivating, the SSO in virile form, responsive to the music’s unrelenting dissonance. Yet out of this deepening abyss emerged moments of unmatched beauty, rich veins of Vaughan Williams’ calm, even suggestions of autumnal mists conjured up by densely atmospheric lower-string textures.
In the Andante moderato, underpinned by its anxiously persistent walking bass, Wigglesworth gleaned an aching austerity, a Shostakovich-like leanness heightened by its powerful organic crescendos. The final two movements, linked in a manner similar to Beethoven’s Fifth, marked a potent return to the belligerence of the start, mischievously insurgent in the Scherzo and curtly ferocious in the barbarous Epilogue fugato. It wasn’t the tightest, most terrorising final vision of this symphony, but it had plenty to say, especially in terms of its softer undercurrents.
In relation to that, Britten’s 1974 Suite was an exquisite confection, throwing up folk melodies and tossing them aside with frivolous abandon and invention in the course of its five-movement journey. From the dream-like soundscape of The Bitter Withy (echoes of Britten’s own A Midsummer Night’s Dream) to the rustic vulgarity and warped harmonic logic of Hankin Booby and brusquely playful strings of Hunt the Squirrel, this was a gripping performance.
Wigglesworth played the dual role of soloist-director in the Mozart concerto, serving up a vision that certainly drew out the reflective dimension of the minor-key work, but never quite got to grips with its inner drive. Everything was tidy and precise but generally inconsequential, even in an ambitious first movement cadenza that veered towards Busoni and beyond. There was something a little too sleepy about the Larghetto, and where a sudden spark lit up the opening Finale theme, the ensuing variations fell short of matching that promise.
Ken Walton
This concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. The programme is repeated at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh on Sunday 26 January, which will also be recorded for future broadcast.
On the eve of its departure to perform in South Korea, the BBC SSO was on top form on Thursday under its chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth. And what a programme: perfectly proportioned in the way its opening half explored the ephemeral world of Harrison Birtwistle and South Korean composer Donghoon Shin, before filling the second half with the heroic irrepressibility of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony.
Birtwistle’s Night’s Black Bird is both sinister and beautiful, featuring some of his most eloquent orchestral writing. Written 20 years ago, it’s the product of unfinished business, the composer sensing that ideas he hadn’t found space for in The Shadow of Night, written three years earlier, deserved their place in the sun. The later work starts and finishes with much of the same material, but the inner journey is a whole different story.
It was exquisitely related in a performance sensitive to Birtwistle’s textural precision, inherent theatricality, and in this case a tender lyricism untypical of a composer better known perhaps for his more outrageous musical pugilism. Wigglesworth struck the perfect mood at the start, a morose unfolding of potent ideas – a kind of de profundis – from which arose the weird and increasingly persistent piccolo birdsong, a psychedelic frenzy of colour, and an inevitable shattering climax that instantly dissipated towards a distant tolling of bells.
That charged atmosphere was ideal for what came next, Donghoon Shin’s equally crystalline cello concerto Nachtergebung (Night Surrender). Based on the Expressionist poetry of Georg Trakl, Shin conjures up a sound world that is mysterious to the point of exotic.
In a supreme and exquisite performance featuring fellow South Korean Jaemin Han, the cellist issued a lonely, meditative opening, gradually enveloped by a halo of emerging, unconventional orchestral effects. Successive sections – the more animated Trumpeten, the icy shards of Winterdämmerung and the frenetic excitement of Die Nacht – led eventually to the magical stillness of the closing Nachtergebung, the cello descending into nothingness. It was a performance that highlighted the virtuosity and imaginativeness of the scoring and its spellbinding charm, passing references to gamelan and jazz among its many evocative delights.
Beethoven’s Eroica felt like the perfect foil, Wigglesworth and his orchestra clicking as they’ve rarely clicked before. Their collective synergy was utterly infectious, the opening chords like a vicious hammer from which a cocktail of thoughtful inflexion, thrills and creative thought flowed with unflinching perceptiveness and to blinding effect. Where the Marcia funebre offered unhurried but never laborious respite, the Scherzo crackled with jubilance and those ecstatic horns in the Trio. The Finale sustained a triumphant inevitability all the way to its power-driven conclusion.
The detail was eye-opening and intoxicating, unearthing treasure among often-unsung inner voices, while Wigglesworth’s overall vision was masterful, notably void of his previous tendency – as in the Eroica he conducted at the Lammermuir Festival last year – to micromanage. He looked comfortably at ease, giving oodles of latitude to the SSO players, who responded with unmistakable initiative, self-determination and noticeable enjoyment.
Ken Walton
This concert was recorded for future broadcast on Radio 3, after which it will be available for 30 days on BBC Sounds
The opening concert in this season’s Sunday matinee series by the BBC SSO was a colourful affair, showcasing the high drama of Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique and featuring the superb young Georgian pianist Giorgi Gigashvili in Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto. But there was a note of poignancy too, as chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth asked that we turn our thoughts to SSO leader Laura Samuel, who died last week after a lengthy illness.
If, as he said, instilling joy was a factor in Samuel’s influence on the orchestra, Berlioz’ Roman Carnival Overture seemed the perfect vehicle with which to express it. The cocktail of emotions that ferment in the opening bars – the wild explosion of brass, a swarming undercurrent of strings, and the sweetness of the cor anglais’ languid melody – was emotionally all-encompassing, soon to establish an unstoppable momentum in Wigglesworth’s sweeping, thrusting interpretation. At its height it was a saucy mix of petulance, obstinate mayhem and delirious rapture. The final chords, pugilistic and perfunctory, added an ultimate tone of defiance.
What followed was quite the opposite but every bit as arresting, thanks to Gigashvili’s supreme musicianship and immaculate keyboard skills in the Beethoven. His opening gambit said everything. It was firm but elegant, nimble yet gracious, and above all oozing character and allure, which the SSO responded to with equal elan. At the height of the opening movement the elaborate fugal cadenza seemed in perfect proportion to Gigashvili’s focused overview, every gesture full of meaning, informed by eloquent intent.
The lyrical essence of the slow movement was meltingly expressed by the pianist’s deep and expansive tone, unexpected delights emerging such as the often-overlooked delicate conversation between soloist and pizzicato basses. The finale was perfectly crafted, supple and articulate, peppered with well-crafted whimsy.
To end with, it was back to the wild, unorthodox world of Berlioz and the eccentric excesses of his Symphonie fantastique. Wigglesworth teased out the opening bars effectively, an expectant series of gasps and sighs, before steering the opening movement on its vigorous symphonic journey. The ensuing Ball had a neat fluidity to it, though not always fully capturing its expressive elasticity. Similarly, the timeless magic that opens the Scene in the Country needed less hand-holding, but soon gave way to far more relaxed shaping and texturing, and a March to the Scaffold and Witches’ Sabbath guaranteed to terrify.
This time next week, the SSO will be on tour in South Korea headlining one of the BBC’s offshore mini-Proms series, including a condensed Last Night of the Proms. If it performs there with the same panache it displayed on Sunday, the Koreans are in for a treat.
Ken Walton
This concert was recorded for later broadcast on BBC Radio 3, after which it will be available on BBC Sounds for 30 days.
Of all Prokofiev’s Piano Concertos, No 2 is perhaps the most tantalising. You wonder what was going on in the Russian compeer’s mind choosing to confront the original 1913 St Petersburg audience with such unrelenting truculence. It filled – or rather its 1923 revision filled – the concerto slot in Thursday’s BBC SSO programme. In the young Israeli-born pianist Tom Borrow, a recent BBC Young Generation artist, it found a willing and thought-provoking champion.
Borrow’s matter-of-fact deportment was challenging in itself, a rather haunting rigidness that may have looked visibly cold and detached, but proved the perfect stimulant to a work that dares its protagonist to cower in the face of the music’s unswerving attrition. In a redoubtable display of virtuosic finger work, intuitive curiosity and refreshing originality, he presented this work with enigmatic delinquency. Smoky mystery, ballistic bullishness, sharp-scented lyricism, even some cartoon-like parody informed Borrow’s persuasive, fundamentally pugnacious performance.
Let’s not forget the part played by the BBC SSO, ever alert to the worldly reliability of conductor Sir Mark Elder. Their interplay with the pianist was both invigorating and incisive, adding lustre to the concerto’s feverish highs and luminosity to its dreamier reflective moments.
It followed Sibelius’ Scènes historiques – Suite No 2, written in 1912 as a sequel to the Finnish composer’s original 1899 Suite, bearing the same nationalistic (anti-Russian) fervour, and containing everything good there is to enjoy in Sibelius. Elder established at once his elder statesmanship eliciting the mercurial detail of the opening movement, The Chase, with a mix of penetrating focus and generous freedom. After its seething restlessness, The Love Song drew us into a timeless reverie, a mood of idyllic repose before the rustic side-stepping capers and ultimate rosy glow of At the Drawbridge.
It also provided a kaleidoscopic showcase for the orchestra’s inner finesse, the same cornucopia of solo instrumental interactions, including the prominent centrally-positioned harp, that were later to light up the final work in the programme, a sequence of specially selected extracts from Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Sleeping Beauty.
That closing work was the icing on the cake, and the perfect foil to the Prokofiev. Lush, spacious, action-packed and ravishing, we heard the familiar (even some in the audience could be seen quietly conducting the famous Waltz) and the not-so familiar, packaged warmly as one symphonic suite, and textured to perfection, under Elder’s holistic influence. Fine solos from leader Kanako Ito, lead cellist Rudi de Groote, flautist Matthew Higham and, of course, harpist Helen Thomson were among the charmed highlights.
Ken Walton
This concert, broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, is available via BBC Sounds for 30 days
In the not-so-distant past, when Robert Schumann’s music was less often performed, the idea that his Second Symphony could emerge as comfort food at the end of a long programme would have seemed strange, yet that was almost what happened here.
That is not to say that there was anything amiss with Ryan Wiggleworth’s reading of the work. On the contrary, this Schumann 2 was the closing highlight of a lengthy programme that ranged over almost two centuries of music with the meat in the middle of the sandwich some chewy tasty stuff. Whether the bill of fare made sense as a concert menu is another question altogether.
That filling featured the guest soloist, tenor Mark Padmore, and there are precious few singers capable of serving it as effectively as he did. Arguably that includes the one for whom both works were written, Peter Pears, whose voice is not to every taste.
Padmore’s instrument is much easier to warm to and perhaps more technically secure. He dealt with the daunting intervals in the music of Benjamin Britten’s Nocturne of 1958, setting well-known English poets likely found in an anthology of verse, with deceptive ease. The vocal line is always challenging and, perversely, some of the most likeable music is given to the singer’s duet partners in the wind ensemble, although it is no less virtuosic.
After the interval, Padmore returned to sing the work’s close kin, Lutoslawski’s Paroles tissées, commissioned by Britten for Pears to sing at the 1965 Aldeburgh Festival. It calls for fewer strings, with and harp and piano in the partnership roles, and is a fascinating piece, both for the choice of Jean-Francois Chabrun’s contemporary French poetry and the way the Polish composer treats the language as an element of the music.
Its “Troisieme Tapisserie” fills a parallel role to Britten’s pivotal use of a section of Wordsworth’s Prelude in Nocturne, as Padmore’s declamatory delivery made explicitly clear, and this was a revealing opportunity to listen to both works together.
Something similar was obviously the idea behind bracketing those performances between symphonies by Mozart and Schumann that share the key of C Major and catch the composers at a period of transition. It was a perilous one for Schumann, his consciousness of his frail mental state balanced by palpable (if sadly misplaced) optimism about the future.
Wigglesworth, conducting without a score, was at his most relaxed in what turned out to be a terrific account of the symphony. The second movement Scherzo sparkled, the trap of wallowing in the slow movement – which cannot really stand being treated like Barber’s Adagio or Mahler’s Adagietto – was evaded, and there was a real grandeur about the finale.
Mozart’s 34th Symphony, written in Salzburg, post-Paris and pre-Vienna, opened the concert and fared less well. While it is a return to scale after the intimacy of its Haydn-like predecessor, this performance lacked a lightness of touch. It might have been preferable, in fact, to hear it with just the 14 violins the orchestra reduced to for the Britten that followed. The central slow movement seemed like an interruption to the work’s train of thought, and although both outer movements are marked “Allegro vivace”, a real sense of dramatic liveliness only appeared in the finale.
Keith Bruce
Concert repeated at Perth Concert Hall tonight. This performance was broadcast on Radio 3 and is available on BBC Sounds.
Helen Grime’s skill as a song writer has been well aired in 2024. In March with the SCO her settings of Philip Larkin, Sandra Cisneros and Jane Hirshfiled, under the collective title It will be spring soon, explored the notion of joy. In her latest song cycle, Folk, commissioned and premiered last week by the BBC SSO in its season opener with charismatic soprano Claire Booth as soloist, the subject matter was alluringly sinister.
With texts rooted in Manx folklore, adapted for the composer by Zoe Gilbert from her eponymous novel, Folk invites exactly the kind of hyperbolic performance that Booth invested in it – outwardly quixotic, inwardly dark, seductive qualities instantly triggered by the incendiary clarion call that introduced the opening Prick Song. Its folksy playfulness gave way to the crystalline virtuosity of Fishskin, Hareskin, Booth’s electrifying versatility matched by the captivating sparkle that conductor Ryan Wigglesworth elicited from a pliant, invigorating SSO.
Water Bull Bride proved the most excitable, at time most brutal, of the four songs, its quick-fire narrative inspiring the fullest theatrical showmanship by Booth before ceding to the final song, Long Have I Lain Beside the Water, a telling lament overlaid by a persistent brass motto not dissimilar to the one that opens Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.
If that was in fact Grime’s intention, it was to be be tested after the interval in that very symphony, the connection strikingly articulated in Mark O’Keeffe’s declamatory trumpet solo. Where Wigglesworth had demonstrated alertness and illuminating exactitude in the songs, however, he was less convincing in his nurturing of this Mahler.
The opening two movements struggled to establish their onward purpose, critical gear changes prone to awkwardness and uncertainty, the conductor’s attention centred more on overzealous management than directorial overview. Even when the Scherzo took flight, inspired by increased fickleness of spirit and magically countered by the luxurious spirituality of the pivotal Adagietto, there was still a lingering sense of containment that threatened to stifle the Finale, albeit swept aside by the emergent power of its liberating climax. Too often, such crowning moments were sadly neutered by a clunking framework.
Claire Booth talks to Keith Bruce about the Helen Grime premiere she is giving with the BBC SSO this week and her brace of recordings to mark Schoenberg 150.
Predictably, the BBC SSO is selling its season-opener under the baton of Chief Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth (Thursday at Glasgow City Halls, repeated Friday at Aberdeen Music Hall) on the second half’s performance of Mahler 5 with its cheery Death in Venice Adagietto, one of classical music’s cross-over bankables.
Before audiences indulge in that familiar wallow, however, there is a rather special first half: the world premiere of a substantial new work by Helen Grime, a composer with family roots in North East Scotland and significant friendship with both the conductor and the soloist, soprano Claire Booth. It is entitled Folk, and is a four-song orchestral cycle inspired by Zoe Gilbert’s award-winning novel, and, more obliquely, the mentoring of the late composer and conductor Oliver Knussen.
“It doesn’t say ‘commissioned by Claire Booth’ on the score but the idea came from me,” the singer explains.
“Helen and I were both very close to Oliver Knussen, as was Ryan Wigglesworth. Oli was so generous in promoting other people’s work, when he died I was conscious to try and build something in the group of musicians that he has encouraged. It felt so right to try to put something together with Helen.
“I adored Zoe Gilbert’s book Folk, which is sort of a UK version of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, with a community of characters that are both real and slightly non-human. In Zoe’s novel some of the characters have come from the sea, or have wings for arms, but they are rooted in this northern community. As soon as I read it I thought I’d love to see it brought to musical life.
“I approached Helen with the book and said I’d love us to do an orchestral piece based on it. She loved the book as well, so Zoe, Helen, her publisher and I had meetings about how we might do it and who we might collaborate with. Given Helen’s own Scottish heritage and with Ryan at the BBC Scottish it felt like the right group – and it may go to Aldeburgh next year where both Ryan and I have strong affiliations.
“The strength of the commission is not only the music but also that we are all invested in it. Although he worked very hard on his own music, what Oli Knussen loved was to curate a concert of other composers’ work. Ryan and I met him at the same time and we became friendly through that. The composers that Oli enabled included both Helen and Ryan, and we are a group of like-minded souls who look at music in the same way.”
Composer Helen Grime (portrait by Benjamin Ealovega)
The outsider was quickly brought into the fold.
“Zoe was tasked with creating a libretto from her book. There were conversations about which of the characters would create an overview of the world she created. We decided on four of the stories and Zoe distilled their essence into a first person narrative.
“The first song is a right-of-passage for the boys in the community and it is a vibrant earthy start, and then there are three female characters who have their stories. It is not poetry, but is led by the drama. That’s great for a performer, because while it is lovely to put over esoteric poetry, it is always nice to come at a work from a dramatic perspective.”
Although much distanced in years and style, there is a parallel with the concert piece that has occupied much of Booth’s attention in 2024, Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, in structure and the forces onstage.
“The Grime is a substantial work of four songs of about the same duration, but it is very different from the Strauss and definitely won’t be Helen’s four last songs! It is also a large-scale work and that’s the joy – there are more similarities than differences, I think.
“There is a breadth of repertoire that informs everything I do: they might seem contrary but to combine singing the Four Last Songs with Britten or with this new work is what music-making is all about.
“The wonderful thing about doing the Strauss is that it is such a perfect reminder of the importance of singing well. It is a great challenge to the singer, and I’m thrilled that my voice has developed to the point where I can approach that piece and know I can give a strong account of it. Far from it feeling like an insurmountable Everest, it is so beautifully written that it allows you to really sing these huge sweeping melismatic lines.”
The other composer that has commanded the soprano’s attention this year is Arnold Schoenberg.
“Schoenberg 150th birthday has been an opportunity to highlight his work but I’ve sung Schoenberg almost as much as I’ve sung Birtwistle. He’s one of the composers that have accompanied me throughout my career and particularly his Pierrot Lunaire, which was why I was delighted to work on that and bring something out this year.
“I think I’m the first British artist to record it since Jane Manning’s very special recording in the 1980s and if I can do one tenth of what she did in terms of advocation of new music I’ll be delighted.
“I’ve done many performances of Pierrot Lunaire in my time, starting with working with Pierre Boulez and including working with Jane, so I feel confident in what I bring to the work.
“People rightly say there are different ways of approaching it, but there are notes on the page and there are performers who don’t sing them. We wouldn’t think of doing that with other repertoire – there should be an ease and a fluidity to Sprechgesang, but it is not ‘free’. Schoenberg complained that he never heard an accurate performance, so it mattered to him.
“The vocal line is absolutely part of the instrumental sound-world. The chord and harmonic structures have to be accurate. Then you can have all the fun you want with the characterisation, as you might do with a role like the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro.
“Ensemble 360 and I were working together towards a live show and we cohered immediately so decided to get more out it, contextualising the piece with other composers’ responses to that Pierrot figure. Instead of presenting it with another work of Second Viennese School brilliance, our disc comes with a smorgasbord of Schumann, Amy Beach, Thea Musgrave, Kowalski and Debussy.
Her other Schoenberg project continued her partnership with pianist Christopher Glynn.
“The lieder disc that I’ve done with Chris Glynn is the fourth in a series of retrospectives of composers whose vocal music is probably not the most important part of their output. We started with Percy Grainger, then Edvard Grieg, pairing his piano music with the songs, then Modest Mussorgsky, whose operas seem male-focused but whose songs often have female protagonists.
“Schoenberg would have been an obvious next step, even had it not been his anniversary. We don’t really know his lieder, and audiences and promoters alike can dismiss Schoenberg as solely somebody who wrote in a complex atonal style that they have decided is ‘difficult’.
“I believe audiences wouldn’t think it difficult because of all the other stuff we now listen to, and our disc has dirty cabaret songs, religion-inspired stuff, folk songs and highbrow art songs. The guy had such breadth, purely in his vocal writing, and there was so much we didn’t have space and time to include.
“When you think how much of the film and pop music we know could not have been written without having an understanding of atonality, there are too many promoters that don’t give audiences the opportunity to hear Schoenberg’s music. I hope this will encourage young singers to learn his songs.”
All of which has perhaps meant that Booth has been seen less on the opera stage than some of her fans might like. She was an acclaimed Rosina in the first revival of Scottish Opera’s Tom Allen-directed Barber of Seville in 2011 and has sung both soprano roles in the well-travelled Harry Fehr staging of Handel’s Orlando, first seen at the Glasgow’s Theatre Royal earlier the same year.
“Some artists spend their entire career in the opera house, and that has never been my life. I can’t complain that I’ve spent less time on the opera stage in the last few years when the three-operas-a-year that other singers will do is not for me. I wouldn’t have the breadth of projects I enjoy if I had worked in that way.
“I am so excited about collaborating on my own projects that sometimes taking a large portion of time to do an opera can be hard to make work. I haven’t taken an active step back, it’s just the way my career has gone.
“I’d love to do Shostakovich and more Janacek, and a few more Handel roles. It’s characters that attract me, like Lady Macbeth of Mstensk, and Jenufa is my desert island choice, but I’m not sure anyone is going to cast me in that so I’ll just sing it in the bathroom.”
Claire Booth sings Helen Grimes with the BBC SSO on Thursday in Glasgow and Friday in Aberdeen. Expressionist Music, with pianist Christopher Glynn, is on Orchid Classics and Portraits of Pierrot, with Ensemble 360, is on Onyx Classics.
Taken at face value, the strap-line Nicola Benedetti has given to her second year’s programme – Rituals That Unite Us – would seem to suggest a familiarity to her offerings quite contrary to the aspirations of an exciting and inspiring International Festival.
Fortunately, there will be few among those who filled the Usher Hall on its opening weekend who knew much of what they listened to, at least in the form we heard it.
Although the historically-informed performance movement has ensured that we can now enjoy Bach’s St Matthew Passion in something close to the version heard in Leipzig in Easter 1727, it may not have come down to us at all without the input of Felix Mendelssohn a century later. In revisiting Mendelssohn’s arrangement, performed by the BBC SSO under Ryan Wigglesworth, Edinburgh Festival Chorus and the RSNO Youth Chorus and a star cast of soloists, the Festival uncovered a fascinating work.
A victim of nothing more than changing fashions, Mendelssohn’s version achieves an enormous amount on its own terms. The balance between his more substantial orchestration – including four flutes, alongside the clarinets which were yet to be invented in Bach’s day – and the large choral forces, makes a great deal of musical sense. The soloists mostly dealt well with that, only mezzo Sarah Connolly occasionally sounding a little under-powered.
The later composer scores much for a smaller chamber orchestra within the ranks in any case, while the continuo for the recitatives benefits hugely from the involvement of a handful of string players. Even the forte-piano, which sounded plain weird at the start, became an acceptable part of the mix as the work went on. And it doesn’t go on quite as much, the fewer chorales working more like punctuating interludes, and the unfolding narrative altogether more integrated.
Ed Lyon and Neal Davies were a nicely contrasting pair as Evangelist and Jesus, and tenor Laurence Kilsby took his Part 1 aria especially well, with the accompaniment of oboe and a string quintet before the choir and fuller orchestration giving it a special character. Soprano Elizabeth Watts, on top form throughout, also benefitted from the Mendelssohn arrangements, although some did seem a little too “chocolate box”.
Osvaldo Golijov’s La Pasión según San Marcos was a commission for the celebrations of the 250th anniversary of J S Bach’s death at the Millennium, and the choir which debuted and has championed it, Schola Cantorum de Venezuela, were joined by soloists also closely associated with the work. Significantly, the bulk of the vocal forces was supplied by the National Youth Choir of Scotland, beyond much debate the only “local” chorus capable of performing it with such style.
All under the authoritative baton of Joana Carneiro, the instrumentalists were strings and brass from the RSNO, guest-led by Ania Safanova with the crucial addition of jazz trumpeter Ryan Quigley, alongside Latin American percussion, guitar, piano, accordion and bass, with two male dancers also part of the eclectic mix, culminating in an explicit representation of the crucifixion.
The movement that is integral to the score extends to the choir, and NYCoS dealt with those demands as effortlessly as the visiting choristers, “off the book” for the most mobile sections.
Goilijov’s sound-world is dizzyingly expansive, but everyone onstage took its twists and turns in their stride. The ritual of this Pasión constantly challenges expectations, the darkest moments of the story often set to the most rhythmic music, and the most lyrical writing – often for female singers Luciana Souza and Sophia Burgos – sitting alongside more abstract, extended vocal sonic techniques. The composer’s musical references are just as wide, taking in Handel (Messiah’s Behold and See, from Lamentations) as well as Bach and concluding with Kaddish from his own Jewish faith.
Cantorum de Venezuela shares their diverse repetoire from sacred hymns to Latin American pop culture at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh.
On Monday there was an opportunity to hear Schola Cantorum de Venezuela in their own right, at the Queen’s Hall under the direction of Maria Guinand and Luimar Arismendi. In assembling the programme, Guinand may well have defined that “Rituals” festival strap-line better than anyone, following a contemporary Christian music first half with an even more startling sequence after the interval, mostly of Latin American music but with Canadian R Murray Schafer’s Magic Songs – five of his slyly political “Chants” – at its heart.
Part of Venezuela’s globally-influential El Sistema music education initiative, Schola Cantorum sound and perform in a style all their own. James MacMillan’s slightly over-familiar O Radiant Dawn was one of their more easy-listening offerings, but it had an original visceral edge, while the two approaches to The Lamentations of Jeremiah that bracketed it – by Ginastera and Grau – showed the range of abilities among the 17 singers: stratospheric sopranos and sonorous basses, then slides, yelps and claps.
The lighter fare of the second half, also interspersed with trickier stuff, was often very funny indeed – but once again there can have been vanishingly few among the EIF’s faithful morning recital audience who had heard a single note of it before.
