Tag Archives: Bomsori

BBC SSO / Wigglesworth / Bomsori

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City Halls, Glasgow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ken Walton

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

BBC SSO / Wigglesworth

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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 / Gardolínska

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City Halls, Glasgow

It’s just over two years since Polish conductor Marta Gardolínska made her impressive debut with the the RSNO. It wasn’t an ideal first appearance, given that lingering Covid restrictions had required that to be an online stream. Here at VoxCarnyx, though, we felt she definitely brought a “springlike freshness” to Lutosławski’s music. We hoped she’d be back in Scotland live sometime soon.

Well, here she was, this time with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and once more conducting some Lutosławski with all the natural affinity you’d expect from a Polish compatriot. This was a meatier example of Lutosławski, his gritty 1950s Concerto for Orchestra, a work characterised by its East European bite, loaded folk melodies, pugnacious rhythms and searing passion.

Gardolínska harnessed all of that impressively. The curt motivic engineering of the opening bars, the pulsing timpani persisting like a obdurate child, rich clarion blasts from the brass leading to a climax as ferocious as Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, soon calmed to reveal a rosier vision as the Intrada drew to a quieter close.

The central Capriccio shaped its own narrative destiny, a cascading menagerie of perpetual motion, through which the piano and xylophone fired razor-sharp shards of colour (one glancing motif from the xylophone hinting strongly of a quote from Britten’s A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra) before a heavier mood took hold courtesy of the brass. The Finale, a magnificently inventive Passacaglia originating from the murky depths of the double basses, ultimately engulfed by a chorale-like peroration not unlike that in the Intermezzo of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, provided a thrilling conclusion.

This wasn’t the only work in Thursday’s afternoon concert to showcase the orchestra’s constituent virtuosity, in particular the front desk strings. It had already been plentifully displayed in Gażyna Bacewicz’s 1948 Concerto for String Orchestra, more concentrated in scale than the Lutosławski, and sourcing its own exuberance in a style more rooted in neoclassicism. This performance had mischief, pathos, melting eloquence and outright joy, and a level of precision and attack to fully sustain its enjoyment.

Completing the Polish package was Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No 1, but with the extraordinary South Korean soloist Bomsori. Gardolínska again elicited an appealing response from the SSO, in the concerto’s toy box opening, its rhapsodic surges and sumptuous textures. 

As for Bomsori, what seemed initially like a rigid, unmoving first few bars proved to be a theatrical ruse. For what followed was a triumph of enchantment, the violinist’s increasing physical intensity echoing a musical journey that grew from teasing excitement to rapturous rhapsodic heights, only to dissolve whimsically with the orchestra into a final throwaway pizzicato. 

Ken Walton

This concert was recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3, when it will be available for 30 days on BBC Sounds.