Tag Archives: Berlioz

BBC SSO: Symphonie fantastique

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City Halls, Glasgow

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.

RSNO: Grande messe des morts

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

The puzzlement of Berlioz’s Grande messe des morts, written in the 1820s in honour of French military casualties, is the vivid paradox it presents between sight and sound. 

To see it performed, as RSNO audiences in Edinburgh and Glasgow did at the weekend under Thomas Søndergård’s baton, is to witness a visual feast of excess. The RSNO was effectively doubled in size, with students from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland scattered among its now gargantuan ranks. Spread above, alongside and behind the audience were the additional four brass bands effecting a captive sonic experience. Behind the orchestra, a rearguard of ten timpanists (like nodding dogs as they variously leant forward to tune their instruments), and in the choir stalls an RSNO chorus to complete the epic vision.

To hear if performed, however, is to recognise that Berlioz, with his inimitable revolutionary blue sky thinking, was not preoccupied with ear-splitting volume. Sure, there were moments on Saturday when the floor shuddered underfoot, for instance when those timpani struck fortissimo beats with fearsome unanimity, or where the multiple brass merged into one hair-raising phalanx of sound.  But for much of the time, as Mahler would later do, Berlioz finds extensive inner chamber-like possibilities, even within the chorus, that play mischief with the listener’s visual expectations.

So we find right at the start of the opening Introit a slow gathering of thought, a questioning development of a succinct unison motif, a sense of symphonic unravelling that begged, and received, a probing, reserved intensity in this performance. Even the Dies Irae – a slow burner that eventually erupts with the Tuba mirum – demanded much transparent subtlety from the chorus and orchestra. 

You could see on Søndergård’s face – he frequently turned round to signal to the furthest-away brass – the concentration required to hold this juggernaut together, and there were instances where this lacked his customary tidiness. Yet there was so much to savour within the bigger picture, from the wistful delicacy of Quid Sum Miser and gathering storm of the Rex Tremendae, through the seraphic haze of Quaerens Me and bucolic belligerence of the Lacrymosa, to the hearty male voice opening to the Hostias and heavenward lift of the Sanctus (featuring the brief, soulful appearance of tenor soloist Magnus Walker). 

Ultimately, and summed up in the hushed acceptance of the closing bars, this was a performance that emphasised the fragility of a Requiem setting in which Berlioz takes us to the brink of protean uncertainty. Challenging but fulfilling.

This close of season programme bore its own personal tribute, to dedicated RSNO supporter and benefactor Hedley G Wright. It also marked the retirement of long-serving trombonist Lance Green, whose final concert this was after 42 years with the orchestra.

Ken Walton