Tag Archives: Ben Glassberg

SCO / Glassberg

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City Halls, Glasgow

Although the wide range of age in the audience and a DJ working in the foyer are not unusual at Scottish Chamber Orchestra Friday evening concerts, there was a fresh and unfamiliar feel to this one with saxophone star and broadcaster Jess Gillam the soloist.

The conductor on the podium was Ben Glassberg, last seen in the City Hall stepping in at short notice to deputise for Ryan Wigglesworth for a BBC SSO programme in the autumn that was very much of the chief conductor’s devising. The orchestra itself, although led by Stephanie Gonley, had just five principals in their places, and the many guests on the platform made sure that none of the regular faces were missed.

The programme began with a work of the SCO’s recent illustrious past. Sound and Fury was written for the orchestra early in the tenure of Anna Clyne as its Associate Composer and premiered with Pekka Kuusisto conducting. It is a wonderful piece that begins as a rethinking of early classical music – Haydn in particular – and contains some rich string writing, including a beguiling Eastern melody, and culminates in a taped reading of Macbeth’s last soliloquy in Shakespeare’s play.

That sounds an odd journey in print, but makes wonderful sonic sense as a musical score, and one clearly written for chamber orchestra forces.

The other two works without Gillam were for the 24 string players alone. George Walker’s Lyric for Strings has a genesis oddly adjacent to that of Samuel Barber’s better-known Adagio, as the two were students together. Walker’s work is also elegiac but more varied within a tighter time-span. It made a lovely interlude in the concert’s first half.

The second half began with Caroline Shaw’s Entr’acte, which also nods to Haydn (and Beethoven) and has become a very popular modern piece in its string ensemble version. With a lovely harmonics solo from Gonley and a guitar-like one from guest principal cello Caroline Dale, its pizzicato passages, ranging from robust to very quiet, present a particular ensemble challenge for this number of musicians – one to which Glassberg and this group rose with ease.

Entr’acte is a work in the repertoire of the Scottish Ensemble, and the central piece of Gillam’s trio of works was written for them in the mid-1990s when Dave Heath was a very busy composer-in-residence. The Celtic has since had a second life in a version for soprano sax rather than violin soloist, which suits the music very well, which is a sort of three-movement love-letter to Scotland.

The opening one, Ceilidh, clearly owes a debt to the most pictorial music of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, while the slow Lament for Collessie, which should be the proud boast of the Fife village where the Heath family made their home, featured an exquisite duet between Gillam and guest first viola Jessica Beeston. The boisterous finale, The Cooper of Clapham, links Fife with the London home of a craftsman maker of flutes (Heath’s own instrument) but also serves extraordinarily well as a celebration of the range of the soprano sax.

The other two pieces Gillam played were composed especially for her. She closed, save a party-piece encore of Pequena Czarda by Pedro Itturalde, with Rant!, written by her teacher John Harle, whose role as populariser of classical sax she has taken on with gusto. Following nicely on from the Heath, its uses folk melodies from her native Cumbria, and also, unmistakably, a chord sequence from The Beatles’ Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

The newest work in the programme was Dani Howard’s 2024 Saxophone Concerto, which closed the first half and proved to be another delightfully bespoke composition. With a central slow movement of defiantly unresolving ambience, its scoring cleverly emulated the sound of the larger members of the saxophone family, with a particular role for Maximiliano Martin and William Stafford, resonantly playing their clarinets in the low chalumeau register.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Christopher Bowen

BBC SSO / Glassberg

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City Halls, Glasgow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keith Bruce

Picture: Claire Booth