Tag Archives: Marta Gardolińska

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.

RSNO: Gardolińska / Dvorak 7

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

In her debut with the RSNO, Polish conductor Marta Gardolińska begins on home territory. She recalls, in her spoken introduction, the very folksongs her grandmother once sang to her, which Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski incorporates into his Little Suite (Mała Suita) for orchestra. 

As a starter then – indeed as the single indigenous work in a programme filed under the RSNO’s Polska Scotland tag – this delightful Lutoslawski gem from the 1950s finds the emergent conductor, orchestra and music wholly at one. It’s a fine induction for the earnestly fastidious Gardolińska, whose associateship in recent years with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra has not gone unnoticed.

She brings a springlike freshness to Lutoslawski’s occasionally skittish suite, drawing infinite mood and colour from his limitless manipulation of the folk material. Those delicate lyrical strands, variously offset by Stravinskian rhythmic warfare or belligerent or woozy hints of jazz, forever stay refreshed by the persistent polytonal harmonies that spread an even spiciness throughout and give this music its exotic transparency.

The contrasting heft of Dvorak’s Symphony No 7, much more elemental in concept to the instant popularity of the Eighth and Ninth, isn’t so initially comfortable in Gardolińska’s hands. There’s a cumbersome stolidity that weighs down the initial outward journey, which lacks the inevitability pushing onwards and upwards to that first gloriously resolute legato melody. Too much maestoso; not enough allegro, perhaps.

It’s not long, though, before the cogs begin to align, and by the close of the opening movement there’s a sense we’re going places, even if the subdued calm of the final bars crave greater amplitude.

Gardolińska’s leisurely amble through the slow movement recalls the folkish hues of the Lutoslawski, with shapely intertwined soloing from all corners of the orchestra. The scherzo sensibly plays itself, and in the finale, the ignited, inexorable passion is more the force of nature it should have been in the very opening bars.

It’s interesting to see the chemistry between Gardolińska and the RSNO grow as the symphony progresses, even though this is a recorded performance. That alone sends a message that she’ll be very welcome back. 

Ken Walton

Available to view at www.rsno.org.uk