BBC SSO / New
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