Tag Archives: Philippe Quint

RSNO / Akiki

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RSNO / Akiki

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

HAS there ever been a time since its hurried construction in Glasgow’s annus mirabilis, 1990, that Glasgow’s big hall was entirely without issues? Currently, performances by a full-sized symphony orchestra have to take place with the strings on the same level as the front rows of the stalls, because the platform extension that was previously used has been condemned as not fit for purpose.

Acoustically, that perhaps makes little difference in a venue that is far from perfect, but visually it is pretty hopeless for audience members seated downstairs, where the sound is generally better.

The orchestra that has its home there, the RSNO, can only grin and bear it until the problem is sorted. Or, as was the case with this programme, introduce a little performative flamboyance to make up for the deficiency.

Opening with Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man – a work that can surely claim a place in the top twenty most recognisable pieces of classical music –  seven trumpets, eight horns, five trombones and a tuba were lined-up across the choir stalls, high above their orchestral colleagues. The extras were members of the Smith Square Sinfonia (formerly the Southbank Sinfonia) an annually-convened ensemble of early career professionals from which Scotland’s national orchestra has recruited. This new partnership ran through the concert, and will continue next year while the Sinfonia’s London home is being refurbished.

It wasn’t a flawless performance of the short composition, but it packed plenty of punch and, as RSNO first clarinet Timothy Orpen explained while the brass and horns found their way down the stairs, it made an interesting companion piece to the work in the second half, Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony. One was a rallying cry for the USA’s involvement in the Second World War, the other a statement of the resistance of a city besieged by the Nazis.

It was also a nice dramatic start for conductor Bassem Akiki, a composer and opera specialist, recently appointed artistic director and principal conductor of the Poland Radio Orchestra in Warsaw, who had an evening of new challenges ahead. Born in Beirut, he could readily identify with the defiant message of Shostakovich Seven even if he had never conducted it before.

The RSNO was a good place to start with the work, as the orchestra has established form with the composer. It was not too fanciful to imagine that the long narrative arc of the work was already there in the players’ performance as well as in Akiki’s direction.

The step of the long march in the first movement, so simple and directly dictated by the side drum, comes to culmination with nine horns making the ultimate unison statement. With the brass arranged on either side of them, the parallels with the Copland were obvious regardless of the work’s much darker tone.

The third movement Adagio is only a little less long and the RSNO wind soloists were on their best form there, while the “Victory” finale – however nebulous the composer saw it – built incrementally to a glorious climax.

The conductor had also been dealt a UK premiere for his RSNO debut, the first Violin Concerto by Lera Auerbach. It dates from 2004, when it was played at LA’s Walt Disney Hall by Philippe Quint, and she has since written three further concertos for the instrument.

Quint recently recorded the piece with the RSNO in Glasgow, and he is becoming a familiar soloist, previously playing concertos by Korngold and Errollyn Wallen. With the orchestra having played Auerbach’s Chimera Symphony in May 2025, there was much re-acquaintance on stage.

That symphony memorably included a theremin amongst the violins, and the concerto asks for a musical saw, adding a not-dissimilar voice to the tonal palette. Although there was plenty of fast fingering for Quint to negotiate, the work is as much about a vast range of orchestral colours, with a haunted scherzo/waltz second movement and an equally dark repetitive third.

Russian-born but US-domiciled, Auerbach’s influences clearly come from both countries, but the theme that followed Quint’s cadenza in the finale was inescapably, and appropriately, indebted to Shostakovich.

Keith Bruce

RSNO / Carneiro

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

For artists who lead a solitary existence much of the time, composers can still make the news – and the RSNO had three of those in this programme. Stravinsky’s Petrushka came between the success of the Firebird and the controversy of the Rite, Errollyn Wallen found herself in the centre of the perennial Last Night hoo-hah when she was commissioned to arrange Jerusalem for the 2020 BBC Proms, and Esa-Pekka Salonen has just made the front pages by resigning from the musical directorship of the San Francisco Symphony after a row with the board over policy and budgets.

Perhaps we may now hear more of Salonen the composer, and this concert’s conductor, Joanna Carneiro, made an eloquent case for that with her vigorous direction of his Nyx, named for a mysterious dark figure in Greek mythology, and receiving its Scottish premiere. Opening with a horn quintet fanfare and featuring two extended clarinet solos, its other singular orchestral details included quartets of flutes and piccolos, some downright sleazy string writing, and prominent roles for pianist  and harp just as in the Stravinsky.

RSNO harpist Pippa Tunnell was also to the fore in the opening of Wallen’s violin concerto, rumbling strings preceding her partnership with tubular bells as soloist Philippe Quint made his first entrance with fluttering harmonics.

This was the UK premiere of a work co-commissioned by the RSNO and specifically composed for Quint, with details of his own musical life woven into it. He certainly had plenty virtuosic music to play, with few bars of respite, but it was often overshadowed by the quality of the orchestral writing in the earlier sections. Written in three distinct movements, it was the last of these that seemed the most satisfying, the soloist’s pizzicato line distinguishing him from the strings, and the brass and timpani setting up a grand chorale and a concluding sprightly dance.

If Petrushka is sometimes overshadowed by the other ballet music of Stravinsky’s early career, Carneiro and the RSNO brought their A-game to make the case for it. The conductor took a storybook approach, bringing in the soloists, of whom first flute Katherine Bryan was among the most prominent, as if ushering the characters to the front of the stage. The musicians responded in kind, relishing their moments in the spotlight, whether recurring or in crucial cameos from contrabassoon and cor anglais.

Keith Bruce

RSNO / Reif

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

The recent trend among orchestras to rediscover music by composers of African-American heritage, especially females, has unearthed some forgotten gems: not always, but assuredly so in the case of Julia Perry. Born in Kentucky in the 1920s, she died at the age of 55 in 1979, but in her curtailed lifetime studied at New York’s prestigious Julliard School and later with the go-to European teachers of the time, Nadia Boulanger and Luigi Dallapiccola. The RSNO opened last weekend’s programme with one of her 1950s’ works, A Short Piece for Orchestra.

It is, as it says on the tin, short, but within its seven-minute span it reveals a red-hot creative focus and intent, which this performance under German-born conductor Christian Reif vividly illustrated. Structured in five concise and continuous sections, it wasted no time in making its point, Perry’s stylistic language progressive and bold. Reif exerted incisive control on its initial explosiveness, a cascading torrent of aphoristic soundbites ripe for the picking, variously calming the mood (a delicious flute-led second section) or revelling in ecstatic adrenalin rushes along its journey.

As such, it functioned as the perfect springboard for Erich Korngold’s Violin Concerto in D, a sumptuous assimilation of the composer’s Hollywood epic film score style and influences derived from his native Vienna upbringing, echoes of Mahler and Strauss. If that demands a soloist of big personality, then American-born violinist Philippe Quint, making his RSNO debut, was a solid choice.

Visually, he was a commanding presence centre stage, with a physicality responsive to the music’s flamboyant cut and thrust. His tone was assertive and passionate, his agile facility at the topmost end of the fingerboard (there’s a lot of that!) bright and thrilling, and where Korngold luxuriates in golden lyricism, Quint’s realisation was gloriously rapt. Occasionally such all-consuming fervour distorted the perfection of the intonation, but it was a performance – along with his solo encore version of Charlie Chaplin’s famous melody Smile – that was both engaging and enthralling.

There wasn’t quite the same sustained intensity in Dvorak’s Seventh Symphony, which certainly had its triumphant moments, but which, under Reif’s busy direction, lacked sustained compulsion and the sharpest of responses from the orchestra. The opening two movements seemed weighted, sluggish even, made up for by a welcome zest in the Scherzo and ultimate flourish in the Finale. 

Ken Walton