Tag Archives: Randall Goosby

RSNO / Sondergard

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Caird Hall, Dundee

In December of 2023, a very colourful RSNO programme began with Icarus, a concert piece extracted from the Symphony No 1, Chimera, by Lera Auerbach, which the composer was at the Glasgow performance to hear.

Some 18 months later, Music Director Thomas Sondergard has programmed the complete work and the surprise is that this was its UK Premiere, because it was first performed back in 2006 and turns out to be every bit as colourful as that single section suggested.

One of its many fascinating characteristics is the inclusion of a theremin in the orchestra, very much integrated into the sound of the strings, and played with startling precision by Charlie Draper, from a place at the back of the first violins. It is less a solo instrument than an additional texture, but there are plenty front desk solos sprinkled through the seven-movement work, and particularly from orchestra leader Maya Iwabuchi.

As that structure suggests, Chimera is not a conventional symphony, but it is of symphonic scale in its instrumentation and in the way its development is always engaging. Percussion, tuned and untuned, is crucial to the tonal palette, and so is the brass, with a lovely swell of sound from the trombones early on and a fine solo for muted trumpet. Although the piece sounds very much of the present era, it has no shortage of attractive tunes sprinkled through it, and if its musical narrative is not especially clear – as the composer’s own programme note almost concedes – the flow of ideas is very seductive.

This concert began with a more familiar work that is surely among Chimera’s antecedents – Debussy’s Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune. If it is a showpiece for an orchestra’s first flute, the RSNO’s Katherine Bryan resisted any temptation to overstate the opening bars, and Sondergard made sure every detail of the score was heard in a wonderfully atmospheric reading that the fine acoustic of Dundee’s big hall enhanced.

The featured soloist of the evening was the RSNO’s Artist-in-Residence this season, Randall Goosby, playing Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. Of the four main repertoire classical concertos for his instrument, a strong case could be made that it is even finer than those of Beethoven, Brahms and Bruch, and this measured, unflashy performance made that argument eloquently.

Goosby’s quiet first entry intimated that this was a collaboration and even his cadenzas were quite restrained, and not in a bad way. In fact it was the ensemble approach to the central slow movement that was the highlight, when the soloist seemed to be pushing the tempo and the RSNO trumpets and strings were in delicious conversation.

The violinist’s encore was some bluesy fiddle from the pen of Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, and even that was played without superfluous flamboyance.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Martin Shields

RSNO / Hahn

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

The young team were in charge at Scotland’s national orchestra, and it was an excellent advert for the RSNO’s recruitment policy. Both still in their late 20s, soloist Randall Goosby and Principal Guest Conductor Patrick Hahn made a fine partnership, and their programme, sourced from the other side of the Atlantic, made superb narrative sense. If the pair had any advice for the audience, it was: “Of course you know these tunes, but listen to the music.”

The evening culminated in Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony and as fresh a take on that old war horse as you might hope to hear, a long way from cobbled streets and Hovis bread. That second movement cor anglais melody was performed with a crisper rhythm, taken up by the front desk strings when they are passed the tune, and that brisk approach ran through the entire performance, from the very carefully-measured dynamics of the opening bars to the switching of focus between the different sections of the orchestra 40 minutes later.

It is perhaps debatable whether the young Austrian has yet imposed his personality on the RSNO, but his relaxed approach to the direction of the concert’s opening work suggests he already knows when that is unnecessary. With a jazz piano side to his own musical make-up, the Duke Ellington Orchestra’s singular take on Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker music suited what we know of Hahn. This was a recent orchestration of Ellington and Strayhorn’s arrangement of 65 years ago, by Jeff Tyzik, who made his European conducting debut with the RSNO back in 2010.

Tyzik’s arrangement is for concert orchestra, the strings giving the suite a symphonic character, requiring fewer jazz soloists. These were past and present stalwarts of the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra: drummer Alyn Cosker and bassist Calum Gourlay as the rhythm section and soloists Ryan Quigley, on trumpet, and Martin Kershaw, doubling alto and tenor saxophones.

Kershaw shone especially brightly, but the orchestra’s own winds and brass were also on swinging form. What might have been an odd hybrid was a resounding success on its own terms.

Violinist Randall Goosby is the RSNO’s Artist in Residence this season and his approach to the Barber Violin Concerto chimed perfectly with the conductor’s to the entire concert, leaving no room for the sort of sentimentality the material can sometimes encourage.

Goosby was in his element in the more challenging sections of the outer movements, and his interpretation gave the piece animated propulsion towards the virtuosic finale.

He followed it with an encore that was equally taxing. Its composer, Coleridge Perkinson, is every bit as fascinating as his young advocate suggested, and he also ignored musical boundaries in a fashion very similar to this programme.

Keith Bruce

RSNO / Bringuier

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Here was Tchaikovsky that even Pierre Boulez – famously antipathetic to the works of the Russian composer – might have had time for. And the music was in the hands of another French conductor, Lionel Bringuier.

Bringuier stepped in at short notice last week to replace Norwegian Tabita Berglund for the RSNO’s scheduled programme, with American rising star Randall Goosby playing Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, followed by the Sixth – and last – Symphony, the “Pathetique”. This is music that it is too easy to wallow in, but the shared approach of Bringuier and Goosby, working together for the first time, was always crisp and precise, whether that was in the dynamic shifts in the opening movement of the symphony or in the impressively fast and clear solo line of the concerto’s “vivacissimo” Finale.

Goosby, just 27 and still completing his studies at Juilliard, is an astonishing player, with a clarity of tone and technical ability that impresses from the start. Perhaps his first movement cadenza was easier to admire than to warm to, but the distance from the emotional excesses players can bring to the work was always refreshing, as was his constant engagement with the orchestra and attention to Bringuier’s direction.

That meant the concerto was of a piece with the symphony, giving the audience – although there were more empty seats than might have been expected for this programme – an opportunity to assess the acoustic effect of the recent refurbishment of the hall. Not only are the new seats more comfortable, it does seem that there is better projection of the sound from the stage, although some of that impression may well be down to the approach of these musicians in particular.

The third movement of the Pathetique is Tchaikovsky at his very best, and every note was immaculately realised in this interpretation, as was the transition to the sombre last movement which so often tricks unwary listeners into premature applause. Its low register sonority also sounded enhanced by the venue’s makeover.

We will probably never know what Berglund would have made of her 20th century countryman David Monrad Johansen’s Pan, which opened the concert, but Bringuier deserves plaudits for sticking with the advertised programme. Although it becomes dramatic enough, and – as anyone might have guessed from the title – featured fine solo playing from principal flute Katherine Bryan, it is an unremarkable work, far outshone by the music that followed.

Keith Bruce