Tag Archives: BBC SSO

BBC SSO / Aldeburgh Festival

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Snape Maltings Concert Hall, Suffolk

While some festivals around the UK have modelled themselves on the Aldeburgh Festival – marriages of off-the-beaten-track location, top-level programming and the kudos of having a major composer as its central icon – none can quite match the idyllic campus-style infrastructure of this 75-year-old Suffolk event, founded by the late Benjamin Britten and now part of a wider musical initiative – performance, coaching and research – that extends throughout the year. 

Last week the 800-seater concert hall at the heart of the swiftly remodelled Snape Maltings complex played host to the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, signing off for its summer holidays with two magnificent programmes under chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth. 

Getting there wasn’t all plain sailing. A cancelled Avanti Glasgow-to-London train left a majorly extended orchestra jostling for seats on a later service, consequently missing their planned Ipswich connection and having to purchase new tickets as a result. Not that it showed the following evening in a challenging opening programme of music by Judith Weir, Britten and Mahler.

Not even in the second half, when the alarming announcement was made that second oboist Mary James had suffered a serious accident – catching her fingers in a heavy metal door during the interval and requiring hospital treatment – and that between them principal oboist Alexandra Hilton and cor anglais player James Horan would “cover the missing notes” in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, which they did with astonishing skill. 

Indeed, the Mahler turned out to be the highpoint of the evening, Wigglesworth considerably more relaxed with his orchestra than in recent months, stepping back from the fray to allow plentiful breathing space in a piece that lives by its spontaneous gestures, teasing hiatuses and poetic flavourings. 

Between the playful charm of the opening movement and easeful bliss of the finale, the scherzo bristled with folk-like devilment (guest leader Roberto Ruisi’s tantalising violin solos) while the adagio’s ultimate transcendence becalmed its anguished undercurrents. Soprano Elizabeth Watts’ emergence in the final movement possessed that magical childlike fusion of fear and innocence. Most of all, there was penetrating clarity throughout this performance, the SSO sensitive to the subtleties and hitting the climaxes with sparkling elan.

We could have done with more of that in Judith Weir’s Forest, which she describes as “a modern tone poem” characterised by ever-shifting moods and colours. While the former were explicit in Wigglesworth’s free-flowing vision, there was something indistinct about the textural detail, even in this hall’s crystalline acoustics, a clear sense that keener shading between instrumental colourings might have sharpened the presentation. Was the simple Brittenesque opening not an obvious clue?

There were frustrating tendencies, too, in soloist Daniel Pioro’s account of Britten’s pre-World War II Violin Concerto. The positivity in his performance was for the most part stimulating, particularly in the blustery Scherzo, but where Pioro’s playing strayed into more roughshod territory the true spirit of the piece – even its underlying whiffs of foreboding – seemed to evaporate. 

Thursday’s second SSO concert was altogether more consistent, featuring two brilliantly contrasted works: Unsuk Chin’s electrifying concerto followed by the towering grandeur of Bruckner’s Symphony No 7.

Central to the Chin was soloist Alban Gerhardt, whose performance was a triumph of the seemingly impossible. This went way beyond mere virtuosity. Gerhardt’s gymnastic fingering, his precision tuning even where the South Korean composer prescribes notes off the diatonic grid, the sheer explosive depth of his tone production, all contributed to a mesmerising display of exceptional musicianship. 

Even when he burst a string mid-concerto there was no let-up. Gerhardt snatched SSO principal cello Rudi de Groote’s cello, setting off a chain reaction of instrument exchanges among the section before the orchestra picked up again from where it left off. Far from killing the enjoyment, this moment of danger simply raised the entertainment stakes in a performance excitable for its organic inevitability, charismatic delivery and breathtaking showmanship.

The Bruckner proved the perfect foil, a symphony that Wigglesworth and his orchestra performed several weeks ago in Scotland, but which here, in the lively Snape acoustics, seemed so much riper, more purposefully driven, more wholesome and convincing in its reasoning. The strings possessed a ravishing fullness, the wind and brass equal in richness. 

It was forceful without the bombast, a feast of meaty colours and powerful emotion, a monstrous but stimulating edifice. Stepping out into the Suffolk countryside in the dimming midsummer light, with the River Alde meandering through the swaying reed beds, offered a welcome relaxant. A magical place.

Ken Walton

Both concerts were broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and are now available on BBC Sounds

BBC SSO / Wigglesworth

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City Halls, Glasgow

Who knows how Sibelius and Bruckner would have got on had they met in a pub? Both had issues, the former addicted to drink and riven with a sense of isolation and loneliness, the latter plagued by bouts of neurosis, depression and fears of persecution. Not a conversation you’d wish to gatecrash maybe.

Yet put their music together, as the BBC SSO did for their main season finale, and the lure is irresistible, especially when the Bruckner symphony is his epic Seventh, a passionate feast of devotion (partly to the dying Wagner), and the Sibelius is the iconic Finn’s darkness-defying Violin Concerto for which the soloist was the South Korean virtuoso Bomsori. This wasn’t the most fulfilling version of this concerto – mostly down to a frustratingly diluted orchestral wash administered under chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth – but where Bomsori seized the initiative, her passion and verve cast lingering clouds aside.

So it lived for its most liberated highlights: an opening movement teasingly vibrant either end, but losing some momentum en route where Wigglesworth’s orchestral messaging seemed to delay each motivating downbeat by the smallest fraction; a slow movement that took time to come alive and capture its aching core; and a Finale, where Bomsori and the SSO most consistently found common aim, making the stormy journey to its exhaustive cadence well worth the ride.

Wigglesworth’s fortunes were better met in the Bruckner, which he rolled out with disciplined consistency and a keen sense of how to extract that evolutionary inexorability driving the composer’s granite-like structure without ignoring the lava-like fluidity of the inner orchestral detail.  

Having struck gold with its arresting signature melody, the tone was set for a performance destined to captivate. Beyond the self-contained brawn of the opening movement, the Adagio sounded its doleful elegy, characterised by the SSO’s pungent phalanx of Wagner tubas. Spirits were lifted sky high with the vying exuberance and gentler pastoralism of the Scherzo, while the Finale, with its poignant cyclic references, powered a fine performance to its resolute conclusion. 

Ken Walton

BBC SSO / Sanderling

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City Halls, Glasgow

It is more common, fortunately, that a concert whose immediate charms are not obvious on paper turns out to have a rich subtext and surprising programmatic connections, whether or not they were intended at the event’s conception. Regrettably the opposite turned out to be the case with Thursday’s season concert by the BBC Scottish, which will be repeated at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall on Sunday afternoon.

What seemed a hit programme started well enough, with a stirring account of Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, Michael Sanderling conducting the SSO brass, horns and percussion through the disciplined explosion of the music the composer later incorporated into his Third Symphony. Rich-toned and precise here, it is irresistible as a punchy stand-alone and as fine a concert-opener as one might wish to hear, but also a difficult act to follow.

That task fell to Ethan Loch, BBC Young Musician finalist in 2022 and a now a student at Glasgow’s Royal Conservatoire. Blind from birth, Loch’s ambitions embrace composition and improvisation – both of which would be demonstrated in his encores – but his recital piece here was Chopin’s Piano Concerto No 2. Composed before his first numbered concerto, when Chopin was still (just) in his teens, it is a young man’s work, the solo part a virtuoso showpiece and the orchestral writing often thought wanting experience.

Those strengths and deficiencies need not be apparent – the recent RSNO recording with Benjamin Grosvenor under the baton of Elim Cham makes an eloquent argument for both concertos – but they were here. Sanderling gave the 20-year-old pianist the best platform by keeping the orchestra on a tight rein, but Loch’s playing, while accurate and technically secure, was often a little heavy-handed. When the left hand was steadier, in the central Larghetto especially, the increasingly elaborate right hand was more expressive, but the finale lacked the dancing sprightliness it really requires.

For all its melodic riches, there was something slightly lumpen about Sanderling’s account of Dvorak’s New World symphony as well. The SSO strings sounded thicker than usual and the conductor’s tempi seemed very deliberate. There was some fine playing from the winds – Stella McCracken’s oboe and Yann Ghiro’s clarinet in particular – but the fanfare at the start of the last movement failed to give that final theme quite the propulsion it required.

Having said all that, there were clearly many in the very full house who shared few of those reservations, and the box-office appeal of the programme will doubtless work its magic for ticket sales in Edinburgh too.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Michael Sanderling by Marco Borggreve

BBC SSO / Wigglesworth

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City Halls, Glasgow

Although it was surely the presence of pianist Stephen Hough as soloist on Rachmaninov’s perennially popular Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, alongside an invitation to subscribers to hear about the coming season, that attracted a such good house to the Candleriggs on Thursday evening, the rare performance of Stravinsky’s 1928 The Fairy’s Kiss that took up the second half of the concert was a particular delight.

A stellar example of the contrary character of the composer, the drama  of this Hans Christian Andersen-derived score might be a deal more subtle than Stravinsky’s earlier ballet music, but it is there nonetheless. Unusually for him, it does seem a little prolix, but the orchestration is as full of interest over its entire 45 minutes, and there was some especially fine playing here, particularly from the SSO winds.

Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth was clearly concerned with the arc of the whole suite, the four scenes having a quasi-symphonic structure, but there were one or two moments where the tempi wavered uncertainly. Stravinsky drew on songs and piano works by Tchaikovsky for his musical material and the work references his predecessor’s own distinctive orchestrations, but the final result, and particularly the dying fall of the last bars makes its own unique impression.

The programme had opened with a contemporary interpretation of the same writer in Hans Abrahamsen’s Three Fairy-Tale Pictures from ‘The Snow Queen’. Wigglesworth’s affiliation with the orchestra’s current Composer-in-Association produced a performance that made the most of the huge orchestra required, with singular ingredients like the four flutes all doubling on piccolos. There was something distinctly MacMillan-esque about the build-up of the work, and especially the use of brass and percussion – and Sir James was in the audience to hear it.

Characteristically, Stephen Hough brought a very thoughtful approach to the fireworks of Rachmaninov’s Paganini variations, and Wigglesworth – himself a pianist of course – was very much his ally in that. Here was an account of the work that lost none of its Romantic intensity but where as much space and attention was given to the less virtuosic music. There was marvellous cohesion in the variations of tempo and a wonderfully meaty mid-range sound from the orchestra.

It was the fine detail of the soloist’s playing that really sealed the deal, though, culminating in what was surely the least showbiz despatching of the witty final bars possible.

Keith Bruce

Tippett: New Year

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City Halls, Glasgow

It would be premature, in truth ill-informed, to assess the BBC SSO’s concert-style revival of Michael Tippett’s final opera, New Year, as creating a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. For how many of us have actually witnessed this bizarre work in its fully-staged totality? Completed by the ailing septuagenarian Tippett in the late 1980s, it was only ever subject to one staged production, by Peter Hall, with performances in Houston Texas in 1989, transferring to Glyndebourne, then in a modified form by Glyndebourne Touring Opera. Since then, nothing.

What Saturday’s semi-staging by Victoria Newlyn offered was just one facet of the whole – the musical score – predicated on the fact that NMC, as partners to the event, were usefully recording it to create the first commercial recording of New Year. It will be available, rather conveniently, “early in the new year”.

The issue arising from this sharp-edged Glasgow performance, in which the SSO under Martyn Brabbins were joined by a dedicated cast and the BBC Singers, was not so much what we did hear, as what we didn’t see. 

It’s a plot you need regular help with: a tale of two worlds colliding, the urban banality of “Somewhere and Today” and the utopian “Nowhere and Tomorrow” somewhere in space, constructed by Tippett in naively futuristic Wellsian terms. The literal interaction between the two sets of beings – an earthly trio rescued from dysfunction by an otherworldly trio of spaceship travellers – is puzzling enough, but not to witness the actual physicality of the substantial, presumably pivotal, dance scenes leaves the full visual impact of Tippett’s fantasy concept incomplete.

As for the music, this has to rank, if not quite the rantings of an elderly esoteric composer, as an impatiently wild and cathartic compositional exorcism. There’s no limit to the juxtapositional chaos of clashing styles – moments of gorgeous post-pastoral Englishness thrown to the wind by the intervention of crunching 20th century dissonance; the lugubrious twang of an electric guitar enlivened by the onslaught of rap and reggae; the electronic datedness – Blake’s 7-style – of the space ship sound effects; even a stirring Ne’erday chorus of Auld Lang Syne shredded by scintillatingly combatant counterpoints. 

What Brabbins did so successfully was to masterfully harness such fragmentations, making energetic sense of it in the same way a good Bernstein Mass performance makes sense of its stylistic incongruences. He was abetted fully by a trusty cast. Alan Oke – a one-time regular with Scottish Opera in the 1980s – commanded a stentorian central presence as the Presenter; soprano Rhian Lois sang powerfully and alluringly as the chief protagonist Jo Ann, Ross Ramgobin somewhat gauche as her Afro-Caribbean foster brother Donny. Foster mother Susan Bickley bore a stirringly stoical countenance.

The white suited time-travellers offered a potent contrast – Roland Wood typically imposing as computer wizard Merlin; Robert Murray lustrously impassioned as space pilot Pelegrin; with their boss Rachel Nicholls’ radiant soprano powering through, exhilaratingly so. The BBC Singers contributed animated rearguard support. 

For all its crazy merits though, including the nostalgic aura of what is essentially mood music and sound effects of the time, this experience constantly felt as if it were one dimension short. If New Year is already a silk purse, we need full theatrical proof. Anyone keen to test that might be tempted by Keith Warner’s new production for Birmingham Opera Company opening this July. The conductor is another SSO regular, Alpesh Chauhan. 

Ken Walton

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

BBC SSO / Lazarova

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City Halls, Glasgow

It’s hard to tell exactly what attracted such a large audience to this afternoon concert by the BBC SSO, but even if it was purely a matter of chance none will have gone away unsatisfied. 

It could, of course, have been for Sean Shibe, the cool Scots-born guitarist, who complimented a recently-composed concerto for his instrument with the more famous one of Jaoquín Rodrigo, the Concierto de Aranjuez. Or it may have been the sunny coupled attractions of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol and Stravinsky’s suite The Firebird.

More surprisingly, perhaps, it might have been for Bulgarian-born conductor Delyana Lazarova, who is not yet so familiar a name here, but who certainly made a significant impact on the SSO players – eagerly responsive to her invigorating lead – and on an audience, cheering noisily in the wake of dynamic, warm-hearted performances.

Rimsky-Korsakov’s exuberant Spanish portrait provided a glittering opener, the Mediterranean ecstasy of the juicy tuttis charmingly offset by prominent solo writing, not least for violin, breezily executed by SSO leader Kanako Ito, and clarinet, Adam Lee bewitching us with beguiling virtuosity. Especially exciting was the visible, energised synergy between Lazarova and the orchestra.

In the first of the two concerto appearances, Shibe fronted a new chamber orchestra version of Turia by the Spanish trombonist-turned composer Franciso Coll. By his own admission, Coll “sees” his music in pictorial terms. “Sometimes I don’t know if I’m composing or painting, because I don’t see much difference,” he has said. The visual stimulus here is a dried-out riverbed in his native Valencia, now transformed into a verdant sea of flora and fountains. 

From its wistful opening – spectral brushstrokes on guitar finding firmer footing as the orchestra’s rhythmic presence increases – a sequence of five movements capture successive musical images. Awe and mystery give way to frenetic concision, before the scene turns eerie once again. A sonorous calm envelops the penultimate movement, blown aside by the dizzy rapture of the finale. Shibe’s absorbing performance was lustrous yet breathtakingly precise.

Then, after the interval, he returned for that most famous of guitar concertos by Rodrigo, its swashbuckling opening chords signalling the radiance that was to follow. The opening movement sparkled with joie de vivre. The central Adagio, assisted by James Horan’s exotic cor anglais solo, introduced an elusive sensuality before the incisive brevity of the finale, in which Shibe’s sizzling virtuosity – strangely emphasised by a markedly stoical countenance – was spiritedly amplified by Lazarova’s sharp-witted superintendence.

She, alone, moulded the conclusive tour de force that was Stravinsky’s The Firebird, a narrative of extremes countering the fickle magic of the Firebird’s opening dance with the Russian succulence of the Round Dance, the demonic heat of the Infernal Dance with the fetching elegance of the Berceuse, and finally the purposeful triumph of a hymn-like apotheosis. Lazarova, one hopes, will be back before long.

Ken Walton 

Recorded for future broadcast by BBC Radio 3, after which it will be available for 30 days on BBC Sounds.

BBC SSO: Verdi Requiem

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City Halls, Glasgow

I’ve no idea what Thursday’s live broadcast performance of Verdi’s Requiem by the BBC SSO and Edinburgh Festival Chorus sounded like over the airwaves – though it’s easy enough to find out by dialling it up on BBC Sounds – but in the flesh, in the limited acoustical sound box that is Glasgow City Halls, and untamed by production tricks, it veered close on its mightiest occasions to deafening. That won’t be the case on Sunday, when the same performers under SSO chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth repeat this showpiece work in the spaciousness of Edinburgh’s Usher Hall.

That said, reservations lay not entirely with bricks and mortar. What Wigglesworth gave us on Thursday evening was a Verdi Requiem rich in golden moments, at times particularly thought-provoking, but which was otherwise erratic in its piecing together of what is essentially fluent impassioned opera dressed in sacred concert hall formality. 

The very opening was full of theatrical promise – the slow, considered cello motif faintly whispered, embracing a brooding, mysterious tone from which the opening Introit and Kyrie looked set to rise and fall with mountainous persuasion before the ensuing Dies Irae, with its savage drums, venomous energy and protracted drama. 

The full-bodied Festival Chorus, trained by its director James Grossmith, was instantly impressive, wholesome and confident, wide ranging in its expressive power, diction crystal clear. Enter, too, the solo vocal quartet, notable initially for the piercing operatic tenor of Antonio Poli, to which soprano Miah Persson, mezzo soprano Alice Coote and bass William Thomas added both their corporate heft and, where it mattered, intuitive sparks of individuality. The SSO responded dutifully with supportive playing and matching sumptuousness, despite the brass being actively encouraged to overwhelm the chorus. 

All this gave Wigglesworth scope to add his own thoughts – glimpses of often ignored orchestral detail he felt needed emphasis, though some were more awkwardly manufactured than naturally emergent; weighted tempi that, when judiciously applied, magically drew breath. What we didn’t always get was a sense of complete organic synergy – the SSO left ever so slightly behind the beat at times – or sufficient seamless vision to give the piece its macro-visceral grip.

The later, shorter movements produced the same peppering of delights: the soloists revelling in the transformational piety of the Offertory; an ecstatic choral Hosanna to round off the Sanctus and Benedictus (despite its exquisitely busy violin countermelody – the icing on the cake – being barely audible); the spiritual awe and intensity of the Lux Aeterna, including a dynamic floor show from the double basses whose synchronous, animated pizzicato resembled an archery display; and then the Libera Me, its gorgeous a cappella “Requiem Aeternam”, Persson soaring ethereally above, like a precious preparatory moment before the work’s exhaustive, final plea for deliverance. 

If this was a performance that occasionally seemed one rehearsal short of complete readiness, Sunday afternoon’s repeat at the Usher Hall should redeem that. And there. of course, the brass can let off steam without causing any offence.

Ken Walton

BBC SSO / New

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City Halls, Glasgow

On the eve of International Women’s Day, here was a celebration of female artists, as well as a showcase for New Zealand (home of conductor and soloist) and of youth – the soloist and programme’s living composer both being in their 20s.

For those who could not be there in person, the concert was filmed for future screening on BBC4 as well as being broadcast live on Radio 3. That meant attention was paid to the lighting, with a back projection that vaguely suggested art nouveau roses, all of which mostly added to the occasion rather than being in any way distracting.

The opening orchestral collage by American composer Sarah Gibson, warp & weft, matched that floral image well. It is a celebration of domestic creativity, inspired by the artist Mirian Schapiro and full of original colours in the way it combines the instruments. With orchestral pianist Lynda Cochrane playing a treated Steinway, her hands inside the instrument as well as flying around the keyboard, principal percussionist Dave Lyons was also kept very busy. The opening tuneful flute line, underscored by the bass winds, was followed by equally prominent roles for clarinet and oboe, and the SSO strings needed to come up with a big rich sound to match all this activity – which they did.

That set the pattern for the rest of the evening, with conductor Gemma New encouraging some big screen welly from the strings for the vistas of Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto. It might be best to draw a veil over the initial shortcomings of the concert lighting on soloist Geneva Lewis, because that’s what it did to her face. Lewis is a tall young woman, and clearly that had been missed in the lighting design, although she was bathed in a lovely rosy glow. The 26-year-old is not a demonstrative player, but showed herself assertive enough as the piece unfolded, through the slow movement dialogues with the wind principals and especially in her crisp performance of the very fast finale.

New and Lewis observed distinct and deliberate pauses between the movements of the concerto and the conductor continued that practice after the interval in Brahms’ Symphony No 4. This was big-boned Brahms, but not missing any dynamic subtlety, and distinguished by the warmth of the SSO’s string sound in the City Hall when it is on its best form. Utterly different from the way the Scottish Chamber Orchestra played the same work in the same hall under Robin Ticciati, it was a magnificent success on its own terms.

New is a marvellously lucid conductor, fond of big gestures and quite balletic on the podium, but the most memorable moments of this interpretation were when she was almost still: in the questioning opening of the slow second movement and for the initial statement of the chords that will be the basis of the variations in the finale. Every work in this concert had a dramatic finish, but the tension created within the last movement of the Brahms reached a particularly cathartic climax in its coda.

Keith Bruce

BBC SSO / Chauhan

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City Halls, Glasgow

At least the errant mobile phone momentarily delaying the opening of Bruckner’s Symphony No 9 in D minor was in the right key. If audible to those listening at home to the live Radio 3 broadcast, be assured this belligerent and persistent D was not part of the some newly discovered revision of the symphony by a composer prone to such second thoughts. That, of course, could never be in this case here, as he died before completing this final symphony.

As it happened, Thursday’s conductor Alpesh Chauhan was quick-thinking. He not only waited for the ring tone to cease, but had the presence of mind to segue perfectly into the trenchant solemnity of Bruckner’s opening movement, effectively creating art out of an accident. (The last time I witnessed something like this was with the same orchestra in a Mahler Symphony, where the lonesome final note on double basses was matched uncannily by a passing plane, the inevitable Doppler effect unfortunately turning fortuitousness into farce.)

That aside, this was a Bruckner bicentenary performance by the BBC SSO that made its own luck. Chauhan weighed in with bullish bravado, which ensured the symphony’s mountainous peaks towered magnificently over the expansive landscape. At the other end of the spectrum he stood back from the fray, tempting the strings in particular to voice their own verdant response to the lower-lying pastures. But the middle ground was messy, imperfections of tempo change, attack and intonation (especially the woodwind), that emphasised the potential pitfalls of Bruckner interpretation, and the need for an unstoppable sense of trajectory to counter the composer’s block-like mentality.

To his credit, Chauhan’s Scherzo was a particular delight, its puckish Trio sounding like Prokofiev before his time. Either side, the extant outer movements acted as solid bookends, as cathartic as they were despairing. The hushed conclusion had question mark written all over it. Had he lived, where would Bruckner have taken us next?

Chauhan had already taken us to Italy and Russia, opening with two Puccini Intermezzi from his operas Madama Butterfly and Manon Lescaut before charting unfamiliar Tchaikovsky territory in his symphonic fantasy Fatum (Fate), a work the composer chose to destroy after its second performance, but which was reconstructed after his death. Thankfully so, for it is particular interesting, its heraldic power-driven unisons and punctuating ballistic chords not unlike a Puccini opera opening. We heard a volatile work, heated and febrile, if swithering ambivalently between operatic and symphonic ambitions. 

No such question with the Puccini, though aspects of Chauhan’s performances seemed emotionally constrained in this concert hall context. The Madama Butterfly Intermezzo opened magnificently, its heaving expectant anacrusis giving way to swooning lyrical enchantment and exotic colours, the players adding whistling to emulate the twittering birds. Principal cellist Rudi de Groote’s molten solo, in particular, set in motion a moody Manon Lescaut extract, even if later tutti moments seemed tempered by ragged entries. Nor, to be honest, did this performance absolutely capture the all-pervading resonance and glow Puccini’s music ought to inspire.

Ken Walton

This concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, and is available for a further 30 days on BBC Sounds. The SSO performs Bruckner 9 again at The Glasshouse (formerly The Sage), Gateshead, on Sunday 3 March

BBC SSO / Berglund

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City Halls, Glasgow

Previous attempts by Norwegian conductor Tabita Berglund to debut with the BBC SSO were scuppered due to Covid-related issues. Last week in Glasgow and Perth, however, things finally came together and the rising star and former cellist directed a substantial crowd-pulling programme of Dvorak and Tchaikovsky, prefaced by a short opener by the mildly eccentric 20th century composer Geirr Tveitt as a kind of musical visiting card from their shared homeland.

Also from Norway was cellist Truls Mørk featuring as soloist in Dvorak’s Cello Concerto. For some reason, what should have been a significant highpoint in the programme never quite got off the ground. There was a cloud of disquiet pervading this performance, slow to assert itself, unsettled in tempi, with suspicions of panic in terms of aligning the orchestra with Mørk’s sometimes wayward intentions. Berglund seemed slow to anticipate, resulting in misfired coordination, and too often allowed the brass overwhelming free rein. Even where Mørk spun his signature magic, an air of tension hovered menacingly.

Best to discard that as a momentary glitch, for what surrounded the concerto revealed Berglund to be someone in full command of her thoughts and her ability to engage with the players. Tveitt’s gorgeous orchestral realisation of the Norwegian Hardanger folk tune Vélkomne med æra (a song to welcome guests at harvest time) cast an instant spell, its tranquil impressionism and rippling colours evoking a fireside warmth. Berglund caressed its gentle contours and fluid textures, drawing pulsating heat from the sumptuous SSO strings and reduced woodwind. 

She ended with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 5, presenting this symphonic warhorse as if the wrapping had been removed for the first time. It was remarkable for its lucidity, particularly the main thrust of the opening movement which was refreshingly light-footed but still robust in its message. The third movement Valse unfolded with effortless glee, and the finale never once succumbed to thick-set overindulgence. Here, the brass redeemed themselves with well-tempered precision. Only the slow movement lacked in melodic character, though effectively acknowledging the febrile mood shifts at its centre. 

The Dvorak aside, this was an impressive SSO debut for Berglund. There’s an honesty in her musicality – already witnessed in an earlier appearance with the RSNO – that points to an promising future. And going by the unending cheers that greeted her in Glasgow on Thursday, she already has a raucous Scottish fan club. They’ll want her back!

Ken Walton

Thursday’s Glasgow concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and is available for 30 days on BBC Sounds.

BBC SSO / Morlot

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Eden Court, Inverness

It’s been four years since the BBC SSO last visited Inverness, but its audience has not lost interest. A well-packed Eden Court Theatre greeted the SSO’s return on Friday, and a programme that on paper might have seemed a random assemblage of Puccini, Tchaikovsky, Panufnik and Rachmaninov, but which in practice proved engaging, colourful and purposeful.

Much of that was down to a conductor who wasn’t meant to be there in the first place. As a last-minute replacement for the indisposed Valentina Peleggi, Ludovic Morlot – currently music director of the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra, and latterly of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra – struck a rapport with the SSO that was so natural and flowing you’d have thought they were meant for each other.

There was glowing tenderness in a little-known Puccini opener, his Preludio sinfonica, written while a student in 1882, which angles towards the emotional heat of La Boheme but with a cooler  countenance that Morlot coaxed out clearly and calmly. Even with the mild challenge of the dryish Eden Court acoustics, there was a simmering sumptuousness, particularly from the strings, in a performance that smoothly negotiated its shifting contours.

It was the perfect appetiser, too, for Tchaikovsky’s Dante-inspired symphonic fantasia Francesca da Rimini, on one hand the hell-raiser you’d expect from a depiction of Dante’s second circle of hell, on the other an impassioned love story. Morlot captured that equivocation, its wild, impatient frustrations of a stormy background allayed by the sensuous allure of the lovers. Here, the acoustics suffocated to some extent the amplified glow this music breathes, though not so much as to quash its tempestuous exhilaration.

The songs of Alma Mahler, wife of Gustav, with their rare beauty and poetic depth, have only recently come to prominence through recordings. Roxanna Panufnik has recast three of them – Hymne, Ansturm and Hymne an die Nacht – as re-imaginations for orchestra. Or, as she calls them in quasi-Mendelssohn terms, Alma’s Songs Without Words. 

She doesn’t hold back, applying harsher layers of sound to climactic points than you might expect, given the golden sumptuousness of Alma’s expressive style, but Panufnik does offer so much in the way of imaginative colour – from hazy atmospherics to busily entwined melodic tapestries – that there is an unceasing sense of genuine discovery. Morlot took that in hand and moulded a sequence that was both thrilling and reflective.

It might seem unusual to finish a programme with Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2, but few will have regretted having pianist Boris Giltburg’s towering performance as the memory to carry home. His wasn’t a typical account, more a heightened personal viewpoint that set out to challenge the accepted rhetoric of this popular warhorse. It was clear from Morlot’s intense concentration that he, too, was prepared for the unexpected. Such a duelling sense of danger added significantly to the theatre of the performance.

Giltburg’s playing was bold and gestural, radiant flourishes accented by a tendency to play provocatively with the tempi, though never to the point of disruption. Inner textural gems were projected unexpectedly, adding that element of surprise and delight, which the SSO responded to with equal suppleness and sparkle. Inevitably, Giltburg responded to the cheering audience reaction with an encore, and again – in Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C sharp minor – showed that he only does things his own way. 

Ken Walton

Thursday’s Glasgow performance of the same programme is available to listen to on BBC Sounds

BBC SSO / Wigglesworth

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City Halls, Glasgow

As chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth’s programmes with the BBC SSO go, this was one of his most conservative offerings. Yet even with such loveable mainstream workhorses as Elgar and Brahms at its core, he threw in a fascinating new BBC commission – “An acre ringing, still” by Australian-born composer Lisa Illean – for good measure. As a substantial concert opener it provided food for thought – intrinsically beautiful but uniquely challenging, to some extent discomforting.

Scored for chamber orchestra, 11-piece “consort” and pre-recorded electronics, it’s a work defined by expressive containment, an ephemeral sound world played at minimal volume, with even its climaxes teasingly frustrated. Lasting around 20 minutes, that’s a powerful proposition, and this performance elicited the most magical, imaginative colourings, amplified paradoxically by their quiet intensity. That the electronic dimension was so subtly embedded within the textures as to be barely perceptible is a positive observation.

As for any discomfort, you could sense an acute tension within the audience, unused to such dogged musical hypersensitivity. The tiniest crinkle of a programme brochure, the practised tiptoeing of an usher, the squeak of a seat, even in this case the wagging tail of a guide dog seemed like a heightened sonic distraction. In a sense, we were asked to play our part, which was perversely exciting.

There was mild perversity, too, in the approach of Japanese soloist Dai Miyata to Elgar’s Cello Concerto, inasmuch as his was a highly personalised interpretation, generously poetic, but too often wildly poetic.

It was mildly unnerving in the opening minutes, where Elgar sets up his stall with gathering thoughts, but which needs a binding momentum to make directional sense. Miyata’s over-egging, and an initially lagged response from Wigglesworth, brought to mind Wilfred Owen’s “cursing through sludge”. Once free of that, the journey ahead was surer of foot. 

The best moments emerged in the sublime tranquility of the Adagio, its timeless opening theme, and in the closing moments of the finale, where – despite a sense that Wigglesworth was following rather than anticipating events, notably in the offbeat chords – a triumphant oneness and tempered resolve took hold.

Brahms’ Third Symphony was what you might term a “pipe and slippers” affair, fireside Brahms that seemed content to follow time-honoured interpretational traditions rather than chance anything more thought-provoking. Wigglesworth and the SSO gave a solid performance: casually-paced, heftily textured, sweeping but emotionally reserved in the outer movements, while recognising the lighter hues of the Andante and the gracious lyrical warmth of the gorgeous Allegretto. A fuller string sound would have better matched the substantiveness of the wind and brass, but for those who like their Brahms safe and reliable, this will have done the trick.

Ken Walton

This concert was recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3, when it will be made available on BBC Sounds for 30 days. A repeat performance takes place tonight (Friday 2 Feb) in Aberdeen Music Hall

BBC SSO / Volkov

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City Halls, Glasgow

HE may be long dead, and in his career as pragmatic as any composer in pursuit of a bawbee, but Igor Stravinsky was the most challenging and abrasive voice in Thursday evening’s concert reuniting the BBC Scottish with Principal Conductor Ilan Volkov for the first time in 2024.

Stravinsky’s Petrushka was the work in the second half and this was a glorious account of it, with marvellous playing all over the platform. It was the SSO strings that made the startling initial impression: muscular playing that was pin-sharp. That example was swiftly followed by their colleagues, either individually – Lynda Cochrane at the piano – or collectively in the brass and percussion departments.

Sitting between the Firebird and the Rite of Spring, the musical drama of Petrushka may be subtler but it is no less colourful storytelling and Volkov and the SSO ensured the narrative unfolded in all its kaleidoscopic splendour. Yann Ghiro’s clarinet section in particular were on stellar form.

This was the more compact 1947 revision of Petrushka and it was preceded at the start of the concert by the less often heard Four Etudes in the 1952 version of a score that also started life many decades earlier. The third of them, the more contemplative Cantique, is perhaps the most compelling section but the rhythms of the other pieces are all vintage Stravinsky and, although they began as piano works, eloquent studies in orchestration.

We were in a very different world for the rest of the programme, but not, perhaps surprisingly, a more rarified one. Composers Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton, veterans of Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra and a performing duo themselves, were both present to hear their works and acknowledge the applause, and Volkov dedicated the concert to their associate and contemporary John White, who died on January 4.

Skempton’s Piano Concerto, from 2015, references Stravinsky as well as Morton Feldman, but is altogether more Broadway than that would suggest. Soloist Joanna MacGregor revelled in the bluesy serialism of the central movement and the climax of the work which is a jazzy, brassy march. For a contemporary piece, it proved surprisingly easy listening, and perhaps rather slight in the context of the programme. Even more melodic and pretty was MacGregor’s encore, Skempton’s dedication to Cardew, Well, Well Cornelius.

There was nothing especially “difficult” about the newest work of the evening either. Parsons’ LEVELS for Orchestra was also a BBC Commission and appears to have had to wait a few years for this world premiere. The composer draws a distinction between “chords” and the stratified aggregation of notes in his work, but I doubt that matters much to many listeners. Whether we were hearing the contrasting timbre of the orchestral sections in sustained harmony or sequential notes, the piece was – like the Stravinsky Etudes – an exercise in hearing the make-up of an orchestra. Whether Parsons says anything new on that subject is a matter of opinion.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Joanna MacGregor

BBC SSO / Brabbins

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City Halls, Glasgow

This evening was already set to be the busiest of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s season when ill-health removed Sir Mark Elder from the podium on the final day of rehearsals. By sheer good fortune, the orchestra’s popular former associate principal conductor Martyn Brabbins was in Glasgow and able to take on the adventurous programme. I cannot recall hearing a last-minute substitute conductor winning such a warm reception from the audience.

That the concert, pairing Shostakovich’s two piano concertos with Debussy’s three orchestral Images, was such a spectacular success says much for Brabbins, but also for the SSO players and the two star soloists, Italian Federico Colli and trumpeter Matilda Lloyd, paired with the pianist for the unique vision that is the first of the those concertos to conclude the evening.

The conductor was immediately into the swing of things – from his hips specifically – for Debussy’s Iberia, actually the second of the published Images, although the first he wrote. From its opening rhythms, tambourine and castanets, to the Galician folk fiddle and reeds of the third movement, it’s as Spanish as anyone might want, with plenty for first trumpet Mark O’Keeffe to do as well. The most interesting playing of the composer’s hugely colourful scoring came in the fragrant middle section, with principle oboe Stella McCracken’s solo over lovely ensemble violas and cellos, and leader Kanako Ito’s unison line with guest first flute Tom Hancox.

Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No 2 has one of those themes in the opening movement that many people know even if they could not identify its origin, but few will have heard it played in the highly percussive style Colli brought to it. His performance was completely captivating, through a more leisurely Romantic slow movement to the more familiarly frantic Shostakovich of the finale. It may be a fairly conventional work from the iconoclastic Russian, but Colli, who was very attentive to his fellow players on the platform and in close communication with the conductor, make it a very memorable one.

Debussy’s Images were not composed as a suite, and this programme’s deployment of them was very useful, numbers 1 and 3 opening the second half. They are perhaps more obviously the Debussy of L’apres-midi d’un faune or Jeux. The first of them, Gigues, uses a tune, The Keel Row, that has its origin in North-East England, even if that’s not where the composer heard it. Again requiring a large orchestra, the concluding Rondes de Printemps was a real showcase for the 20 players in the wind section.

Shostakovich’s Concerto No 1, composed over twenty years before No 2, is a remarkable work, subtitled “for piano, trumpet and strings” and no less colourful for being compact. Brabbins kept the energy level high in brisk transitions through the four movements, although the pace slackens for the muted trumpet solo in the slower middle section before the work becomes a Keystone Cops chase to the end, famously inspired by the composer’s side-hustle as a silent movie accompanist as a student. Colli and Lloyd made an ideal partnership for the job.

With performance and live Radio 3 broadcast salvaged in style, the casualty of Sir Mark Elder’s indisposition was the projected recording of the Stravinsky concertos for Chandos this weekend. That postponement could have an economic impact somewhere down the line, as it may well have been underwriting the substantial forces required for the Debussy.

This concert is available to listen to on BBC Sounds for 30 days.

Keith Bruce

BBC SSO / Wigglesworth

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City Halls, Glasgow

It took Elgar until he was 50 to complete his First Symphony, the upside of which being its emotional maturity, technical mastery and a self-confidence through which the composer’s fingerprint dictates every level of its being. It was the major work in Thursday’s BBC SSO programme, a meaty challenge for its principal conductor Ryan Wigglesworth, and an epic, ear-catching conclusion to an evening that had hitherto blown hot and cold.

That’s not to say there was anything objectionable in soloist Martin James Bartlett’s performance of Mozart’s D minor Piano Concerto, K466. Indeed, the 2014 BBC Young Musician winner was entirely consistent in his ultra-poetic delivery, an approach that underlined Mozart’s uncommon journey (for a concerto) into minor key realms, and allowed the pianist to challenge the orchestra’s escape attempts with visibly calming gestures and return to containment.

What his playing did require as a counter measure was steelier, more incisive finger work. For all its lyrical pleasantries it fell short in genuine sparkle. In turn the ghosts lurking within Mozart’s score struggled to surface other than benevolently, and little details, like Bartlett’s uneven ornamentation, transmitted low-voltage results. Where he did apply physical energy – those fiery cadenzas by Hummel (first movement) and Beethoven (finale) – the temperature briefly soared. 

Bartlett’s encore, on the other hand, was absolutely sublime, a meltingly poised performance of Schumann’s “Of Foreign Lands and Peoples” from Kinderszenen. 

Wigglesworth opened with a work he himself has championed, Jonathan Woolgar’s Canzoni et ricercari. Originally scored for 12 string players and premiered in Gloucester Cathedral in 2021, Wigglesworth suggested the composer create a version for enlarged string orchestra. Here it was, beefed up to full onstage and smaller offstage strings, and a performance all the more teasing for its theatrical surprise.

We were told the offstage strings were “hidden”, but not exactly where, so when they did release a screaming counter-offensive from behind us, the impact was nerve-tingling. The ensuing dialogue proved invigorating, the more extensive discourse on stage – a striking interplay of melancholic density and exhilarating frenzy – provoking varying degrees of bullish retort in return. The performance was wholesome, animated, if partly rough around the edges. 

Full-blooded consistency in the Elgar gave this concert a lift beyond the ordinary. Wigglesworth was impressively composed throughout, establishing grounded, timeless authority in the opening slow march, and navigating the shifting contours and moods of the lengthy first movement with clean, meaningful discipline. Similarly, the frenzy of the second movement Allegro giving way uninterrupted to the glowing inner warmth of the Adagio was as heavenly as the composer intended. The finale, with its affirmative thematic retrospection, was a conclusive triumph.

No small thanks to a impassioned SSO for this, nor to such exquisite solo snippets as the self-assured consistency of leader Kanako Ito. There was scope, perhaps, for Wigglesworth to apply a more airborne, expansive sweep, a stepping back to embrace the biggest picture, yet there was more than enough in this performance to take away and savour long after the event.

Ken Walton

The programme is repeated on Sunday at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh at 3pm.
Thursday’s performance was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and is available on BBC Sounds for 30 days

BBC SSO / Chauhan

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City Halls, Glasgow

This hefty BBC SSO coupling of Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler was not for the faint-hearted. Few will have left the City Halls on Thursday without feeling they’d been squeezed through the emotional wringer. On their own, Strauss’ Symphonic Fantasy based on his opera Die Frau one Schatten and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde are exhaustive enough as examples of post-Romantic, Austro-German intensity. Together, the danger was they might be one fix too many.

That wasn’t the case. Alpesh Chauhan – until recently the assistant conductor of the SSO – seemed ever-alert to the possibility, assured in his gestures and generously poetic in his phrase-shaping, but with a modicum of reserve and judicious application of self-indulgence. For us, that meant little discomfort and an ample double-helping of gratification.

There were some obvious issues – tenor Brenden Gunnell’s intrepid efforts to be heard over the orchestral clamour dominating the opening Mahler song (he was just short of screaming at one point, to little effect), and a general feeling that not everything had been done to fine-tune the expressive dove-tailing of the sinuous orchestral textures. But besides that, the delivery was impressive.

Strauss’ Symphonic Fantasy proved fascinating for the ground it occupies away from the opera that spawned it. Never conceived as a string of greatest hits – which don’t really exist in Strauss’ more organically creative mind – the impression is one of symphonic distillation. Recognisable themes provide the essential impetus for a powerful, self-contained, cathartic stream of consciousness. 

Foremost in this performance was its thrusting inevitability, wave upon wave of tidal surge punctuated by moments of idyllic calm (the early slow, smoking crescendo by the strings) or the thwack of menacing chords. Chauhan gauged the mood swings well, from Debussy-like mirages to irreverent playfulness. It was wild and heated, tempered by a cool head.

The Mahler, once its balance was better calibrated, was exquisite and every bit as compelling, Gunnell’s soaring tenor complemented by the golden-grained mezzo of Karen Cargill. There was pastoral frivolity from Gunnell in his songs, the scherzo-like “Youth” and a captivating laissez-faire in “The Drunkard in Spring”. Cargill revelled in her more reflective selection, the wistful ruminations of “The Lonely One In Autumn” and the shifting images of “Beauty” with its rapturous climactic interlude. 

But it was in the heart-stopping “Farewell”, meltingly sung by Cargill, that the full impact hit home.  Beyond the filigree instrumental delicacies of the earlier songs, and Mahler’s confection of impressions, from chattering chinoiserie and bird-like menageries to swarthy folk scenes, it was in this final timeless transcendence that magic happened. At its impassioned peak Cargill’s low register was a scorching presence. In the final fade out, pierced by a chiming celeste, we were left only with a chilling, seemingly eternal, silence. 

Ken Walton

BBC SSO / Brabbins / McPhee

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Paisley Abbey

By sheer coincidence, a concert scheduled to celebrate George McPhee’s 60th year as organist and director of music at Paisley Abbey, also happened to fall on his 86th birthday. The former achievement, in this age of lesser commitment to life-long jobs, is admirable enough, the latter all the more remarkable, given the alertness of McPhee’s starring role on Friday with the BBC SSO and an assortment of choirs – a home game for the much respected octogenarian who has not lost his devilish wit. 

After a  tear-inducing organ and orchestra encore arrangement (by SSO violinist Alastair Savage) of Auld Lang Syne, McPhee was coaxed into saying a few valedictory words. They were characteristically pithy, and anything but valedictory. “Despite the title of the last piece, I’m not leaving,” he snapped with immaculate comic timing. 

It was a full house, or church, that honoured this gratifyingly warm celebration. The opening half centred on church-related music, some of it radiating pomp and circumstance, some of it spiritually intimate, but all of it joyous and respectful.

For that, the SSO and conductor Martyn Brabbins were joined by three cathedral choirs – McPhee’s own Paisley Abbey choristers, and the Edinburgh choirs of St Giles’ (where he was once assistant organist) and St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedrals. At one end of the spectrum was the gushing rhythmical verve and dramatic opulence of Walton’s Coronation Te Deum, the majestic sumptuousness of Parry’s I Was Glad, and the florid ecstasy of Gabrielli’s Jubilate Deo a 8; at the other, the melting a cappella piety of William Byrd’s O nata lux, conducted by St Giles’ organist and master of the music, Michael Harris.

Before all that, however, a piece from Hollywood musical royalty, Scots-born film composer Patrick Doyle’s King Charles III Coronation March, first heard at last May’s Westminster Abbey coronation service. The relevance? Doyle, who attended on Friday, learnt his harmony and counterpoint under McPhee at the former RSAMD. His piece bore the hallmarks of his cinematic skills: simple, to-the-point, with the innate ability to send shivers up the spine.

If McPhee played a relatively supportive musical role in the first half, his true moment in the sun arrived after the interval in Saint-Saëns’ Organ Symphony. And how better to appreciate this charismatically French work than with an organ installed originally by the celebrated 19th century Parisienne builder Cavaillé-Coll? Still present, even in its modernised manifestation, are both a fruitiness of tone and a snarling richness from the reeds, which provided oodles of poetic subtlety and fiery retorts in a performance further enhanced by the expansive acoustics.

Brabbins played a cool game, strategically undemonstrative, and by doing so harnessed a biting clarity that might easily have been lost in a more thrusting, impatient approach. The Adagio that closes the opening movement, underpinned by the organ’s gentle cushioning, was a luscious oasis of calm amid the surrounding drama. 

The final movement played its part in cementing the evening’s raison d’être, the cumulative impact of organ and orchestra doing tumultuously what the Doyle had done in miniature, raising the hairs on the back of the neck and, through the catharsis of its sheer volume, and the audience’s obvious affection for the Abbey’s longstanding incumbent, inciting a spontaneous standing ovation. 

Ken Walton

This concert was recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio Scotland

BBC SSO: Conquest of the Useless

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City Halls, Glasgow 

It started with a blood-curdling chord that shattered the expectant silence. This was the opening of David Fennessy’s epic Conquest of the Useless, a dynamic 70-minute concert trilogy inspired by both Werner Herzog’s eccentric 1982 film Fitzcarraldo, and the process by which it was filmed as seen through American filmmaker Les Blank’s vivid documentary Burden of Dreams.

That the chord reeked of Verdi was no accident. Fitzcarraldo, played in the film by the volatile Klaus Kinski, is an opera-crazed obsessive (based on the real-life Irishman Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald) driven to construct an opera house in the Peruvian jungle, in the course of which he decides to haul a 320-ton steamship overland from one Amazonian river system to another. Caruso was his hero, whose recorded voice – singing bits of Rigoletto – feeds like a ghostly cipher through Fennessy’s opulent score.

Yet, as this first UK performance of the complete trilogy firmly demonstrated, Conquest of the Useless bears its own distinctive hallmark. Fennessy was fortunate to have the BBC SSO under Jack Sheen as the prime protagonists in delivering a work powered by individual thought and further animated by electronics (Fennessy on guitars along with computer performer Peter Dowling), Scots actor Brian Ferguson and mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnston. Caruso, himself, was symbolically represented by an old gramophone sited high in the choir stalls, spotlit, like a sacred altar.

Uppermost in Saturday’s performance was the driving intensity with which Fennessy expresses his fascination for Herzog’s iconic film in purely musical terms. The Verdi quotes – and others such as the poignant Bach chorale, Es ist genug, used by Alban Berg in his Violin Concerto – conjure up a deep-seated nostalgia, interwoven with the Glasgow-based composer’s edgy modernity to enshrine Fitzcarraldo’s unshakable obsessiveness.

Fennessy has lived with the creation of this music for much of the last decade. The Prologue dates back to 2013, performed then also by the SSO. In the context now of the two ensuing works – Caruso and “Gold is the sweat of the sun, silver are the tears of the moon” – its organic function is cemented. Sheen allowed the natural conflict between its Verdian pungency and exotic jungle shimmer (a sonic forest of guiros) to generate its own febrile electricity, harnessed by a magnificent slow-moving glissando that seemed to take forever to ascend from its subterranean origin.

It was the perfect set up for Caruso, nor was it long before another monumental crescendo paved the way for Fennessy’s evocative electric guitar, emerging as the voice of free expression, sometimes boldly improvisatory, sometimes intensely reflective. 

It was in the final work, however, that we encountered the most persuasively visionary and dramatic music. A perambulating Brian Ferguson (using a stepladder to cross between balcony and stage level) recited words from Herzog’s diaries, some of them frustratingly overwhelmed by volcanic orchestral surges. Enter, too, Jennifer Johnston, whose translucent vocal purity added a magical, if transient, angelic descant. For in the end, it is the inventiveness of Fennessy’s orchestral writing – unrestrained by stylistic dogma – that seals the deal. 

This kaleidoscopic summation, an unfettered Amazonian soundtrack, bears out the composer’s stated belief that the orchestra in Conquest of the Useless is “the embodiment of what could be the true central character of this whole trilogy – the jungle itself.”

Going by the screening of Les Blank’s documentary which, together with an ensuing panel discussion, prefaced this energising performance, Herzog may well have come to the same conclusion.

Ken Walton

BBC SSO / Wigglesworth

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City Halls, Glasgow

It’s a brave BBC SSO that puts on a programme unlikely to fill seats when the corporation is openly pleading poverty. Yet that’s what it did on Thursday. Besides a quick Beethoven overture, the menu before us was a Mark-Anthony Turnage concerto, an Unsuk Chin novelty piece and a Stravinsky ballet score notable for its steely restraint – an intriguing and challenging concoction, entirely palatable but highly dependant on the persuasiveness of its delivery.

Under chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth, it was not without charm. Beethoven’s overture Leonore No 2, one of the composer’s multiple attempts to furnish his opera Fidelio with a suitable overture, is perhaps his most thrilling – a bombastic rhetoric within a sea of prophetic expansiveness, pregnant silences exaggerated for effect and a glimpse of the future through music anticipating the naturalism of the later Romantics and the obsessiveness of Berlioz or Bruckner. 

The most liberating moment in this performance was the time-stopping offstage solo trumpet, casting a momentary magic spell before the skirmish of the home straight. To that point Wigglesworth’s reading mostly attuned to the music’s impetuosity, even if periodically unnerved by a kind of clipped, scurrying, theatricality.

In the phlegmatic neoclassicism of Stravinsky’s Orpheus, he sourced bewitchment in many of its fluid scenes: the melancholic nostalgia of Orpheus’ Bachian Air de Dance, the muted chorale-like eeriness of the final Apotheosis. The narrative dimension was moodily enticing, neatly tempered, but just short of finding that necessary sheen, the detailed intensity, to offset Stravinsky’s emotional containment

Turnage’s Your Rockaby for soprano saxophone and orchestra, is a Samuel Beckett-inspired concerto written in the early 1990s and shortly afterwards given its Scottish premiere in Glasgow’s Tramway by the SSO, It was performed here by its original soloist, Martin Robertson.

There was no escaping the unctuous queasiness of the jazz idiom that commonly defines Turnage’s music – a seediness lurking throughout, those angry harmonies, sneering glissandi and a busy background percussion combining to create a kaleidoscopic whirlwind. Sometimes gorgeously sleazy, sometimes with ecstatically pungency, Robertson played the protagonist with charismatic obstinacy.

Opening the second half, Unsuk Chin’s Subito con forza provided a flip side to the opening Beethoven. Written in 2020 for the latter’s 250th anniversary year, the source material is recognisable – sporadic snatches of Beethoven, each subjected to instant obliteration, as if Chin is firing incendiaries at the originals, releasing instant showers of musical shrapnel. The point was well made in a straightforward, resolute performance. 

Ken Walton

BBC SSO / Volkov

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City Halls, Glasgow

There’s something about the “idée fixe” – a theme or motif composers weave and manipulate throughout a work to both unify and characterise their creations – that gets under your skin. It is a powerfully defining device that Berlioz, most of all, applied with obsessive emotional pungency to such Romantic epics as his Symphonie fantastique. But, just as in the psychological definition, it can be an irritating fixation. Whether or not it was her intention, and I suspect it was, Cassandra Miller plays that card to its extreme in her Duet for Cello and Orchestra.

That possibly wasn’t the reason conductor Ilan Volkov pitted these works against each other in Thursday’s thought-provoking BBC SSO programme, but it was hard not to be minded retrospectively of Miller’s, to some extent, cynical extremism in the later unfolding of Berlioz’s musical angst.

This was a return visit by the SSO, Volkov and soloist Charles Curtis to Miller’s concerto, which they premiered at the 2015 Tectonics Glasgow festival. Miller describes it as a homage to Sicilian opera composer Vincenzo Bellini, and to be sure, its progressively intensified orchestral episodes emulate the syrupy, ecstatic ripeness of southern Italian folk music, in this case based on the actual Sardinian folk song, Trallallera. 

These glitzy repetitive sunbursts, dominated by a bullish and brazen SSO trumpet section, seemed intent on goading the intransigence of Curtis’ belligerent cello performance – for the most part an unceasing repetition of two oscillating notes – into action. It took most of the 30-minute duration for that to have the desired effect, like a release from an inescapable hypnotic nightmare, the cellist responding with a brief and final catharsis of stratospheric harmonics before abruptly signing off with a throwaway glissando. 

Volkov’s cool insistence, and the SSO’s charismatic response, captured the obstinacy of Millar’s quirky mindset. (For those taken by it, and with a propensity to travel, the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester is presenting a day-long focus on Miller’s chamber and orchestral music on 19 October.)  

On its own, this concerto performance would have left us in a mild state of anxiety, but Berlioz’s effusive musical depiction, the Symphonie fantastique, of his infatuation for the actress Harriet Smithson – he subtitled it “Episode in the Life of an Artist” – provided a coruscating antidote. 

Once again, it was the tangible chemistry Volkov enjoys with an orchestra he has been associated with for the past 20 years that guaranteed the rollercoaster thrill. Every vivid scene, every emotional deviation in the fantastical journey, was heightened by a natural, visceral synergy, which the conductor inspired with an empowering economy of gestures.

The entire band swayed physically as one, negotiating the hazy uncertainty of the opening Daydreams, the whirling delirium of the Ball scene, the pastorale sentimentality of the Adagio, and the combined bombast and finality of the March to the Scaffold and Witches’ Sabbath, with unfettered inevitability. This was a masterclass in disciplined passion, where less was very much more, where by keeping the eye on the ball – the centrifugal persistence of the idée fixe – this volcanic music ultimately took care of itself.

Ken Walton 

Repeated tonight (Fri 29 Sep) in Aberdeen Music Hall. Thursday’s live broadcast from Glasgow available on BBC Sounds for 30 days.

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