VoxCarnyx

City Halls, Glasgow

On the eve of its departure to perform in South Korea, the BBC SSO was on top form on Thursday under its chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth. And what a programme: perfectly proportioned in the way its opening half explored the ephemeral world of Harrison Birtwistle and South Korean composer Donghoon Shin, before filling the second half with the heroic irrepressibility of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony.

Birtwistle’s Night’s Black Bird is both sinister and beautiful, featuring some of his most eloquent orchestral writing. Written 20 years ago, it’s the product of unfinished business, the composer sensing that ideas he hadn’t found space for in The Shadow of Night, written three years earlier, deserved their place in the sun. The later work starts and finishes with much of the same material, but the inner journey is a whole different story.

It was exquisitely related in a performance sensitive to Birtwistle’s textural precision, inherent theatricality, and in this case a tender lyricism untypical of a composer better known perhaps for his more outrageous musical pugilism. Wigglesworth struck the perfect mood at the start, a morose unfolding of potent ideas – a kind of de profundis – from which arose the weird and increasingly persistent piccolo birdsong, a psychedelic frenzy of colour, and an inevitable shattering climax that instantly dissipated towards a distant tolling of bells.

That charged atmosphere was ideal for what came next, Donghoon Shin’s equally crystalline cello concerto Nachtergebung (Night Surrender). Based on the Expressionist poetry of Georg Trakl, Shin conjures up a sound world that is mysterious to the point of exotic. 

In a supreme and exquisite performance featuring fellow South Korean Jaemin Han, the cellist issued a lonely, meditative opening, gradually enveloped by a halo of emerging, unconventional orchestral effects. Successive sections – the more animated Trumpeten, the icy shards of Winterdämmerung and the frenetic excitement of Die Nacht – led eventually to the magical stillness of the closing Nachtergebung, the cello descending into nothingness. It was a performance that highlighted the virtuosity and imaginativeness of the scoring and its spellbinding charm, passing references to gamelan and jazz among its many evocative delights. 

Beethoven’s Eroica felt like the perfect foil, Wigglesworth and his orchestra clicking as they’ve rarely clicked before. Their collective synergy was utterly infectious, the opening chords like a vicious hammer from which a cocktail of thoughtful inflexion, thrills and creative thought flowed with unflinching perceptiveness and to blinding effect. Where the Marcia funebre offered unhurried but never laborious respite, the Scherzo crackled with jubilance and those ecstatic horns in the Trio. The Finale sustained a triumphant inevitability all the way to its power-driven conclusion. 

The detail was eye-opening and intoxicating, unearthing treasure among often-unsung inner voices, while Wigglesworth’s overall vision was masterful, notably void of his previous tendency – as in the Eroica he conducted at the Lammermuir Festival last year – to micromanage. He looked comfortably at ease, giving oodles of latitude to the SSO players, who responded with unmistakable initiative, self-determination and noticeable enjoyment.

Ken Walton

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