Tag Archives: John Adams

RSNO & BBC SSO / Edusei

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

This wasn’t the first time the RSNO and BBC SSO had joined forces. Reproduced in the programme booklet for this latest collaborative tour de force was a poster dating from 1941 featuring a joint ‘orchestra of 98 performers” under the baton of Sir Adrian Boult. Wednesday’s concert, forming part of this week’s conference in Glasgow of the Association of British Orchestras, raised the bar to 101 players.

It was a supreme concert, with repertoire that wasn’t even around when Boult commanded his earlier wartime alliance. Shostakovich had begun his Violin Concerto No 1 later in the 1940s, but it never saw the light of day until 1955. John Adams’ pseudo-symphonic Harmonielehre – last heard in Scotland courtesy of the LSO under Simon Rattle in the 2019 Edinburgh International Festival – dates from the 1980s. The programme opened with the UK premiere of Samy Moussa’s Elysium, originally premiered last year by the Vienna Philharmonic in Barcelona’s Gaudi-designed Sagrada Família.

It was possible to sense something of the vast aura that premiere must have had in Barcelona’s magnificent, resonant cathedral, even in the relative dryness of the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, where German conductor Kevin John Edusei’s realisation of Moussa’s vision of the heavenly journey was a performance of elevating intensity.

It was also easy to understand why the original premiere coupled Elysium with a Bruckner Symphony. Edusei didn’t have that comparison to make on Wednesday, but he elicited from his massed players a shuddering, throbbing resonance that implied kinship with Bruckner’s chunky building blocks. It made for a breathtaking concert opener.

And it prepared the ground for Spanish violinist María Dueñas, who may cut a petite physical profile, but who set this densely-packed Shostakovich concerto savagely ablaze, from the gnarled potency of the opening movement and dance-fuelled swagger of the wicked Scherzo, to the sweeter sunrise moment that lifts the Passacaglia and the unrelenting irony of the finale.

If the uniqueness of the situation had already revealed a palpable excitement in the joint orchestral response – you wonder to what extent a sense of friendly competitiveness existed within – that was to erupt big time in John Adams’ mighty Harmonielehre. Like much of his music, it fuses together a minimalist chassis with a freer superstructure that is unafraid to express itself in post-Romantic terms.

Edusei’s rhythmic discipline ensured a performance that was grippingly taut, yet heightened by the sparkle and glitter of exuberant orchestral colourings. Adams wrote his three-movement work in response to a surreal dream in which an oil tanker in San Fransisco Bay suddenly upturned and shot into the sky like a rocket. Hearing it live was, indeed, like entering an unreal world, but the optimism expressed in this joyous performance said something very different to the unreal world we’ve all just been living through. 

Ken Walton

Available on BBC Sounds

BBC SSO / Cottis

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City Halls, Glasgow

Someone at the BBC SSO has taken action against the fiasco that was its recent livestream broadcast. Thursday evening’s concert under conductor Jessica Cottis was as much a feast for the eyes as the ears. Far greater creative thought went into marrying camera angles with sound cues implicit in a musical journey that stretched from hard core American minimalism to the traditional heartland of the German Romantic symphony.

Cottis was on the podium by default, due to Israel-based Ilan Volkov’s inability to travel. But she made it entirely her own show, exerting a relaxed and confident hold over an orchestra she knows well from her time as assistant to its previous principal conductor, Sir Donald Runnicles. 

And she brought a touch of theatre to the opening minutes, facing the rear of the City Halls where the distant brass and percussion, spread over a balcony normally inhabited by audience, struck up Joan Tower’s Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No 1 (the now 82-year-old Grammy-winning American composer wrote six of them), a quirky gender response to Aaron Copland’s more familiar Fanfare for the Common Man.

The main equivalence to Copland is the common thunderous drum opening, beyond which Tower veers off on a far less earthbound course. The textures dance, the climax is a whirlwind as ecstatic as (indeed reminiscent of) Janacek’s Sinfonietta, and the glockenspiel serves as a glittery addition of orchestral bling. This performance may have had its reticent moments, but ultimately it swelled big time and served its theatrical purpose.

Back on the main stage, the SSO strings engaged in John Adams’ Shaker Loops, which did invite the troubling question: is such raw, repetitive minimalism really what’s needed when the last thing we wish to be reminded of is the monotony of lockdown life? And this piece in particular, its persistently manic tremolando effects inspired by the frenzied rituals of the American Shaker sects, has an inbuilt tendency to set the nerves jangling. Which it did rather well. 

Yet Adams’ oscillating sound sculpture, while it starts like a rave in a beehive, is not all concentrated superheat. Yes, Cottis sourced the necessary electricity that drives the outermost movements, sometimes with pulverising persistence, always with trance-inducing focus. But she also embraced the rich mystical qualities of the second movement – Hymning Slews – its whistling harmonics, slithering motifs and altogether spookier soundscape representing a welcome respite.

In Schumann’s Second Symphony – a work remarkably positive and buoyant given the composer’s prevailing state of mind – the real thrill was to hear something approaching the full symphonic sound we’ve been missing since March. Cottis exercised a firm hand but with ample lightness of foot, so that the music’s essential solidity, while firmly rooted and warmly expressive in the weeping slow movement, had levity and sparkle conveyed through the SSO’s lithe, crisp playing, its clean textures and alert tempi.
www.bbc.co.uk/bbcsso
Ken Walton

Image: Jessica Cottis credit Kaupo Kikkas