Tag Archives: RSNO

RSNO / Widmann / Eberle

Posted on by

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

If any single memory is destined to linger from this RSNO programme it will surely be Jörg Widmann’s extraordinary cadenzas for Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. To say the composer/conductor has gone full tonto in his mission to subvert the stylistic equilibrium of such a substantial Classical masterpiece is no exaggeration. 

Nor is that necessarily a criticism, given that for every listener addled by Widmann’s dissonant anarchy, manic deviation, eccentric theatre and unharnessed prolixity, there were undoubtedly others intoxicated by the sheer bravado of his off-the-wall confections, not least the time-travelling transitions that bridge Beethoven’s 18th century to Widmann’s 21st.

Widmann wrote the cadenzas during Covid for the German violinist Veronika Eberle, who subsequently performed and recorded her novel version of the concerto with Simon Rattle and the LSO. She was, once again, the protagonist on Saturday, this time with Widmann on the podium and an RSNO eager to champion such a mind-bending curiosity. 

It began as Beethoven intended, the opening timpani strokes presenting an enticing challenge for an orchestra whose strings were pared down to classical proportions, thus enabling the woodwind to explore infinite subtleties. Eberle’s playing was similarly clean, an unaffected precision that lent lyrical purity and finesse to the musical discourse. So far so good.

Yet even in these moments there was a sense that she and Widmann were not always on the same wavelength. Whereas Eberle seemed intent on pushing the momentum onwards, Widmann favoured a more mannered approach, holding tempi back and creating repetitive hiatuses through his tendency to overextend silences. The habit became irksome and led to audible uncertainties in attack. The ultimate outcome was one of the longest Beethoven Violin Concerto performances I’ve heard in a long time.

The extensive cadenzas didn’t help. Sure, they were entertaining as well as radical. That of the opening movement – the soloist joined by timpani and double bass – hurtled us into a world of weird pizzicatos, crepuscular ponticellos, violent incursions, even stabs at jazz, before winding ingeniously back to Beethoven. In the slow movement Eberle left us gasping with a moment of fantasy that soared to unimaginable heights before connecting tortuously, but magically, with the finale. For the final movement cadenza, Widmann went for bust with an explosion of pastiche and parody that had the soloists foot-stamping, bassist Nikita Naumov now in full jazz mode. All good fun, but a sense that Beethoven was being taken for a ride, at times going AWOL.

In light of all that, an encore might have proved too much had it not been such a snappy, pizzicato caprice for which Eberle enlisted the expert duo partnership of RSNO leader Maya Iwabuchi.

The second half opened with one of Widmann’s own short works, Con brio. It also revelled in Beethoven connections, using the latter’s themes to create something between a skit and a serious attempt, as the composer himself puts it, “to combine tradition with innovation”. The same musical psychedelia as the earlier cadenzas applied – a sea of cacophonous explosions, rapid cartoonesque mania, amorphous clusters and hard-edged quotes – yet this time with a self-contained purpose.

The programme ended with Mendelssohn’s Reformation Symphony, interesting in the sense that Widmann heavily inflicted his own personality on its tempi, shadings and rhetoric. Where that offered rare insights into the innermost details of the scoring – the contrapuntal writing was strikingly revealing – the momentum of the performance was frequently stalled by overindulgence. As with the Beethoven concerto, this was more about Widmann than Mendelssohn.

Ken Walton

(Picture credit: RSNO/Clara Cohen)

RSNO / Sondergard

Posted on by

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

It would be foolish to ignore an obvious reason why Brahms’ Double Concerto for Violin and Cello is less often heard – it necessitates the paying of two quality soloists rather than just one. Yet there is something in the genesis of the work, the last orchestral piece the composer wrote, which also explains its comparative lack of success.

When the violinist for whom Brahms composed his immediately successful and perennially popular violin concerto, Joseph Joachim, suspected his wife of an affair, the composer’s sympathies lay with the woman, and a letter he wrote expressing them was cited in the divorce court. Unsurprisingly, that led to a rift between virtuoso and composer, which, three years later, the Double Concerto sought to heal, involving the cellist in Joachim’s quartet as a sort-of intermediary.

Perhaps that whole background could be painted as the story of the work’s first and most fascinating movement which begins with an orchestral statement, features long solo passages for cello and violin before the two join forces and become partners with the whole ensemble, but it is probably fruitless to pursue such an analogy.

What is true is that there is a lot of fascinating music for the soloists to play from the very start of the work, and it helps if they know one another’s style well. For this performance, the RSNO and conductor Thomas Sondergard had the American First Violin of the Berlin Philharmonic, Noah Bendix-Balgley and his Principal Cello colleague Bruno Delepelaire, an A-team by any standards.

They were superb, too, and – as orchestral musicians – supremely sensitive to their relationship with the players around them. It is possible that this was as fine a performance of the work as you are likely to hear, and the intricacies of that opening movement were the most fascinating part. Later it becomes a little more like the Brahms everyone knows and the RSNO horns and woodwind were on top form for the richly harmonic Andante, while the dotted rhythms and changes of pace in the folk-flavoured finale are the most obvious nod to the earlier violin concerto.

What is also true, however, is that there is no big tune in the whole work to compare with those in earlier Brahms concerti and symphonies, and that is surely a more compelling reason why it was poorly received in Cologne in 1887 and struggles to find a place in the repertoire today.

In this concert it was the first-half prelude to Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, and that was an exemplar of the fine, disciplined work that the RSNO and Sondergard do together.

Played not especially fast – although there are certainly longer Tchaik Fives available – there was a pace and energy about the performance that only helped communicate the restless ambiguity of the work. Although he wrote a lot of prettier music, the Fifth is where the composer works his material most thoroughly, and if Sondergard’s reading perhaps lacked a little warmth, the wonderful craftsmanship of the music could not have been clearer.

There is great music for clarinet, notably at the start with the low strings and in the counter melody in the slow movement. Principal horn Amadea Dazeley-Gaist was superb as the main soloist there, and her whole section was magnificent throughout.

There were no weak links on stage, however, the full might of the orchestra’s strings in absolutely top ensemble form and the brass as disciplined as the RSNO brass now always is.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Noah Bendix-Balgley by Nikolaj Lund

RSNO: Šlekytė / Radulović

Posted on by

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Fashion statement or character statement? It was all that and much more with Serbian violinist Nemanja Radulović, whose Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with the RSNO on Saturday blew all popular conceptions of the work to the wall. 

Firstly, the visual statement. A collective intake of breath from the packed audience greeted Radulović’s flamboyant stage entrance: his flowing waist-length hair topped with high ball, while below an embroidered mini tail coat his capacious trousers and chubby platform shoes shouted circus clown. In this sense ironically. It all seemed part of a cunning deception.

For there’s something of the Shakespearean fool in Radulović. It’s a role he plays with masterful guile, disarming his audience with apparent nonchalance, a baiting perma-grin and a look in his eyes that says “you’ll never believe what I’m going to do next”. What he does do at all times is convey a musical message that, for all its eccentricities, is profound, challenging, truthful and virtuosically handled.

So this Tchaikovsky was full of surprises, not just for us, but surely also for the RSNO and its debuting guest conductor Giedrė Šlekytė, whose receptive alignment with the violinist proved as breathtaking as the unorthodox manner of Radulović’s free-spirited interpretation. He unfolded a narrative that openly questioned convention, holding back his opening solo gambit teasingly, unafraid to re-characterise tempi, playfully turning on his heels to goad the orchestra with a teasing turn of phrase or two. 

Such was his conviction, the whole thing made complete, if unexpected, sense. The opening movement proved a kaleidoscopic voyage of discovery, the heightened characterisation of its constituent themes intensifying the impact of its conclusion. Beyond the laid-back calm of the slow movement, the daredevil rapidity of the Finale shot the temperature off the scale. This was showmanship and sincerity in absolute harmony.

No question, an encore was required. Radulović beckoned RSNO leader Igor Yuzefovich to join him in a deliciously understated Shostakovich duet, the perfect complement to that mesmerising Tchaikovsky.

Where Šlekytė had exerted an impressive command over the orchestra in the concerto, she had the field to herself for Mahler’s First Symphony and took full advantage. With its eerie dawn opening, ensuing myriad allusions to nature, be it trilling birds or placid landscapes, and the distant hunting horns and embryonic fanfares, the first movement revealed quizzically its ominous ambiguities. That was shaken off by the the virile swagger of the second movement, mawkishly shrill but never schmalzy. 

The clarity Šlekytė brought to this performance, her no-nonsense baton technique and instinctive pacing, was particularly effective in giving the third movement funeral march an uncommon lightness of touch that was uplifting to witness. Yes, there was a lingering grief in its midst, but not a languishing one. Then the Finale, like a giant machine coming slowly to life, and when it did unleashing reminders of the previous struggles before resolving with ecstatic triumph.

Ken Walton 

RSNO / Sondergard

Posted on by

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Clara Schumann’s piano pieces and Lieder may be much more regularly heard now, but her choral work is still a novelty, perhaps because there is so little of it. The story behind her uninspiringly-named Three Mixed Choruses is a good one, however.

Settings of the poetry of Emanuel Geibel, they date from the Dresden years of the Schumanns, when Robert was in full creative flow and directing a community chorus he had established. His wife wrote and rehearsed them in secret and they were unveiled as a birthday present for her husband.

The a cappella trio sound like they might, perhaps, have been performed by a choir in the music competition that masks the escape of the Von Trapps at the climax of The Sound of Music, and the RSNO Chorus gave a fine account of them under the baton of chorus director Stephen Doughty.

Geibel’s verse may not be of the first rank, but the music is varied, melodious and exploits the full range of the voices. The choir’s sopranos seemed a little hesitant in the opening Ave Maria but the basses were impressive and the middle range voices rich and rounded. On the more upbeat, marching Onward, the top notes rang much clearer and the ensemble sound on Gondola Song – the most instantly likeable of the three – was relaxed and warm.

The chorus remained on the stage platform, behind the orchestra, for Mozart’s Great Mass in C Minor, and that integration with the instrumentalists undoubtedly helped a work that cannot help but seem a little piecemeal, despite the best efforts of those who completed it – and of conductor Thomas Sondergard.

The big choir set pieces, like the opening of the Credo and the Sanctus, are the most predictable parts of the score, and the brief chorale finale of the Benedictus that follows the soloist’s quartet (including the only use of baritone Andreas Landin and just the second of tenor Edgardo Rocha) is almost ridiculously short. There are more interesting sections for the choir to get their teeth into in the Gloria and those were where the singers really shone.

The two sopranos, Brenda Rae and Katie Coventry, had the best of it, though – and Rae in particular, a late replacement for the indisposed Mojca Erdmann, made a strong impression.

The choir had also stayed in their places for the other work in the programme, Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto with the orchestra’s Principal Trumpet, Christopher Hart, the soloist.

It is a testament to the ambition of both Joseph Haydn and the virtuoso for whom he wrote the work, Anton Weidinger, that a composition written to take advantage of what turned out to be a transitional phase in the development of the instrument remains a mainstay of the repertoire of the valve trumpet of today – and the third movement one of Haydn’s best known pieces.

With his colleagues a chamber-orchestra-sized RSNO, Hart’s familiar burnished tone was especially suited to the song-like central slow movement and his crisp articulation of the faster music as accomplished as this audience knows to expect.

Their acclaim was rewarded with a very lovely encore arrangement of Debussy’s Prelude The Girl With the Flaxen Hair, in which Hart’s solo trumpet was backed by just the front desk strings.

Keith Bruce

RSNO / Hahn / Dupree

Posted on by

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Most listeners have no problem liking George Gershwin and Sergei Rachmaninov – the headline composers here – but self-proclaimed “Bad Boy of Music” George Antheil still has the ability to divide opinion a century after the deliberate provocation of his Ballet Mecanique.

The judgement of history on his “Glandbook for a Questing Male” article for Esquire magazine is likely to be harsh, but his music, for all its cut-and-paste chaos, remains diverting and fun. In this hugely entertaining RSNO concert it also set the tone for the first half at least.

The orchestra’s Principal Guest Conductor Patrick Hahn was the piano soloist for Antheil’s A Jazz Symphony, composed in 1925, partly as a response to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and played here in the revised, rather more concise but  equally mis-named, 1955 revision.

It was great to hear Hahn displaying his pianistic chops on the challenging score, and the RSNO matched him – doubtless counting like mad – as the score sampled everything from Dixieland to big band to cabaret versions of the jazz idiom, careering wildly across them all at break-neck speed with many abrupt switches of pace and tempo.

On  the podium, and keeping the crazy vehicle on track, was German musician Frank Dupree who then – amidst much appropriate pantomime – became the piano soloist for his own arrangement of Gershwin’s own response to Rhapsody in Blue, his Piano Concerto in F, which premiered in New York in 1925.

Dupree’s “jazz trio” version is perhaps contradictory to the original’s symphonic ambitions, but works extraordinarily well on its own terms. Dupree was rarely heard on his own, with most of the solo piano part accompanied by the double bass of Jakob Krupp and the drums and cymbals of Obi Jenne, culminating in an extended last movement cadenza that incorporated a nod to Rhapsody in Blue itself.

In this orchestral democracy there was great support from the RSNO players too, with muted horn, three clarinets and especially first trumpet Chris Hart all on fine jazzy form. The encore – which we would surely have heard even if the audience reception had been more muted – was a rollicking take on Duke Ellington’s Caravan with Hahn, Dupree and his rhythm section joined by the entire percussion section, displaying amusingly diverse degrees of enthusiasm.

After the interval Hahn returned to the podium to direct an interpretation of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No 3, from 1935/6, that was significantly less a throwback to Romanticism than might have been anticipated. Its three movements each contain a reference to the piano-featuring Rhapsody that preceded it (the one on a Theme of Paganini) as if it too was making a more serious statement after the flash of its predecessor.

Those rhythmic signatures were especially clear in Hahn’s reading, as were the orchestration debts that the score owes to earlier 20th century music, especially Debussy. The RSNO strings, under leader Igor Yuzefovich, delivered top-drawer playing, and the work emerged as every bit the equal of the much more frequently played Second Symphony.

Keith Bruce

Recorded by BBC Radio 3 for broadcast and available  for 30 days thereafter on BBC Sounds.

RSNO / Shelley

Posted on by

Perth Concert Hall

AN RSNO concert programme of recent vintage ticks a lot of boxes and make its appeal to the widest of audiences. This one began with the participation of young musicians from the Sistema Scotland Big Noise projects in Stirling’s Raploch and Fallin, playing music from the hugely popular video game Plants vs Zombies.

Composer Laura Shigihara is a big name in this world and her catchy Grasswalk is typical of her talent. It is enormous fun music that you instantly think you already know, and as it happened some of the Big Noise players were also already known to the RSNO musicians they were playing alongside in every section of the orchestra. As the RSNO’s new studio in Glasgow has been making music for games as well as for films, this is a relationship and repertoire ripe for further exploration.

The remainder of the concert, guest conducted by Alexander Shelley (son of pianist and conductor Howard Shelley) focused on the big screen. Composer James Newton Howard, now in his mid-70s, has had a hugely successful movie score career since 1990’s Pretty Woman, notably on the films of M Night Shyamalan and Disney animations – and before that he played keyboards and arranged strings for Elton John amongst others.

His Violin Concerto No 2 was written for fine Canadian violinist James Ehnes and co-commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, who gave the world premiere in June, and the RSNO; this was its first UK performance.

Ehnes was required to demonstrate some fast fingering at the start, his hemidemisemiquavers swiftly echoed by the orchestral strings, but the piece does not give him a lot of virtuosic music to play until a cadenza near the end. It is in classic concerto form, with a slow central movement that featured the wind section and a theatrical climax in the finale, and the conductor underlined that by taking pauses between the movements, although the programme note suggested a continuous performance.

In Washington it had been presented alongside film music by Korngold, Copland, Rota and Bernstein and the RSNO went down a similar route with a programme that included the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth (Death in Venice) and Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings (Platoon), both works now more inescapably funereal than the composers intended. Shelley’s versions failed to save them from being shorn of context, uncertain of tempo and never really as moving as they want to be.

The title piece of the concert, Also sprach Zarathustra, was another story altogether. Here it was clear that the conductor had no need of a score because it was all in his head, and every detail of Richard Strauss’s marvellous orchestration was meticulously cued.

The RSNO responded with its best playing, from the rock’n’roll approach of guest timpanist Adrian Bending of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the precision of Percussion Principal Simon Lowden and his colleagues to orchestra leader Maya Iwabuchi on stellar form with her solos, partnered by Pippa Tunnell’s harp.

With four flutes (terrific in the seventh section, Der Genesende), four clarinets, four trumpets and seven horns, maximum strings, and Lynda Cochrane and Michael Bawtree on piano, celeste and organ, this over half an hour of big music, of which only the first two minutes (as heard in 2001: A Space Odyssey) is often heard.

The Viennese waltz then tolling bell and pizzicato strings that bring the work to an end are every bit as ominous as that doomy fanfare beginning. Whether or not it presents a Nietzschean narrative, it is terrific music.

Keith Bruce

Picture of James Ehnes and Alexander Shelley in rehearsal by Clare Cowen/RSNO

RSNO / Sondergard

Posted on by

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

It could be a fanciful notion, but the briefest work in the RSNO’s diverse programme may have held the key to it. Mendelssohn’s Overture to Son and Stranger is obscure because the music-theatre work it prefaces was never intended for more than domestic purposes, to amuse family and friends.

The overture is a bright, lively six minutes for a small orchestra, instantly identifiable as the work of the composer, which prefaced Thomas Sondergard’s fine reading of Beethoven’s Symphony No 7 and followed a first half that had a distinct family feel.

It began with the first performance of a bespoke work for the RSNO Changed Voices, a choir of young men who have recently left behind the world of trebles and altos, which is celebrating its 20th birthday this year, although none of its current members will be of that vintage just yet.

For what also became a retiral present for its director since 2009, Frikki Walker, composer Cheryl Frances-Hoad and librettist Kate Wakeling collaborated with the young singers on You Have to be Realistic About a Perfect Day, its poetry derived from conversations in February, then set by the composer.

If the music was compelling, and followed a very readable arc from teenage angst to an energetic, colourful optimistic conclusion, its sumptuous orchestration also contrived to stay well out of the way of the young voices, which yet lack power. It was a singularly successful commission.

If any of that cohort of singers pursue a career in music, they may well learn the two famous numbers among Vaughan Williams’ setting of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Songs of Travel: opener The Vagabond and Whither Must I Wander?. On Saturday they were performed, alongside the other seven, by Swedish baritone Andreas Landin.

He was making his debut with the orchestra (and returns at the end of the month as one of the quartet of soloists for Mozart’s Great Mass in C) but knows Glasgow well, as he is the husband of Thomas Sondergard, now in his eighth season as RSNO Music Director, with six as Principal Guest Conductor before that.

Landin’s career is chiefly on the Scandinavian opera stage, where he is Don Giovanni soon, but he did not over-dramatise the Vaughan Williams songs, their orchestration by Roy Douglas as well as the composer but very much of a piece.

Heard in full, those familiar late Victorian party-pieces are balanced in the cycle by the more wistful Youth and Love and elegiac In Dreams and it was on those that the soloist’s voice, and especially his full-toned upper register, shone.

Sondergard’s Beethoven Seven was the final triumph of this eclectic evening, the main feature after a diverting supporting programme. With the orchestra’s core staff players in their places and no extras, this was a lean and vigorous RSNO, playing swift, clean, dynamic Beethoven. Sondergard took a brief pause before the Presto third movement, but otherwise it was a non-stop rendition of what is the composer’s most ebullient symphony. Those repeated swells of sound were always sharp-edged and the variations in tempi and volume flowed with eloquent precision.

Keith Bruce

RSNO / Niemann / Philbert

Posted on by

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

The orchestral backroom boys, so to speak, got a prominent showing with the RSNO this weekend. Mainly the percussion, but also – in Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, the programme finale – the wider rearguard ranks of woodwind and brass. That all seemed fortuitously appropriate especially as the evening’s concerto slot, a brand new timpani showpiece by Matthew Rooke – featuring RSNO principal Paul Philbert as soloist and making his last RSNO appearance before taking up a new post in Canada – was the centrepiece. 

It was anyone’s guess how Rooke, a charismatic Oxford-born composer of Scottish and Gabonese descent whose thoughts and music constantly reflect those divergent inborn influences, would approach such a rare challenge. There are timpani concertos out there – a thunderous, rhythmically-charged and visibly entertaining one for two timpanists by Philip Glass for one. Equally there are clues to the instrument’s solo potential in such bombastic outbursts as feature in symphonies by the likes of Berlioz and Nielsen. To some extent this was an extension of the latter, Rooke opting to position his soloist on a raised platform rear-stage, but visibly attached to his exotically-equipped percussion colleagues. Philbert, besides his undoubted technical skill, is nonetheless a dynamic showman, so all eyes and ears were fixed on him for the work’s Glasgow unveiling. 

The three-movement piece, called Tamboo-Bamboo (a multi-pitched Afro-Caribbean instrument borne out of slavery’s censorial extremes), proved to be a riot of celebration and atmosphere, its opening movement driven by an almost virulent blues energy, tinged with melancholy but fired by powerful rhythmic resilience. Already the restlessness of Rooke’s musical language felt all-consuming, an eclectic menagerie touching on everything from jazz to classical rock, at its height making fleeting feisty allusions to the giddiest extremes of John Barry’s 007 soundtracks. 

Philbert’s performance – which began with simple hand claps – was dizzying to watch, whether requiring him to rotate 360 degrees to cover speedy logistics, or sourcing infinitesimal sound effects such as the surreal zoological sound world of the central Nocturne. The final Masquerade went full carnival, wild and loose-limbed, only for its intoxicating climax to be tamed by introspective reflection. 

David Niemann’s alert direction was all the more remarkable for the fact he was replacing an indisposed Anthony Parnther – we were told the German conductor had interrupted his honeymoon to be in Scotland. But the real focus of this particular performance was on the indomitable Philbert, whose show-stopping execution proved a thoroughly memorable farewell to a highly-visible and distinguished seven years tenure with the RSNO.

Panufnik’s Third Symphony, Sinfonia Sacra, written in 1964 by the exiled Polish composer to commemorate a millennium of Christianity in his native country, summoned up its own distinctive champions from within the orchestra, the initial three Visions effecting a profound sense of religious theatre. 

From the first of these – a clarion-like flourish featuring four trumpeters spread across the choir gallery – the atmosphere switched dramatically to a luscious blanket of strings introducing the mystical Vision II, the third announced by a barrage of percussion. Niemann extracted animated precision from the orchestra, especially in the more extended final Hymn where Panufnik’s musical inspiration – the ancient Polish anthem Bogurodzica – surfaced in full amid the gathering conflict and resolution.  

While Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the Eroica, might have seemed in comparison like a reassuring old friend, Niemann had other plans. As regular Eroicas go, this one was of the brisk variety, the opening hurtling off the starting blocks like a hungry whippet. But it was also super-clean and full of unexpected surprises, Niemann directing us to elements within the score that often go unnoticed, especially from the woodwind. If some of it smacked of interpretational experimentation, it was also curiously exciting. Above all, and despite some evenness across the upper string sections, Niemann’s palpable motivation bore exhilarating results.

Ken Walton

SCO / Emelyanychev & RSNO / Sondergard

Posted on by

Usher Hall, Edinburgh / Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra entitled the opening of its new season From Darkness to Light and that idea was just as audible in the concerts that began the seasons of both the BBC SSO and the RSNO.

At Glasgow City Halls the previous week, it was undoubtedly behind the celebratory strings of Ryan Wigglesworth’s tribute to the SSO’s former leader Laura Samuel, and applied just as well to the trajectory of Schumann’s Violin Concerto, as performed by Daniel Lozakovich.

In the SCO programme it clearly worked for both the opening and closing works. The famous fate motif that opens Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was predictably not laboured by Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev in a pacy and detailed interpretation of the work, following on from a much-lauded BBC Proms performance. It was in the transition from the Scherzo to the finale that the sense of emerging into brightness was most obvious, but this was a far-from-simplistic reading of the symphony with refreshing changes of power and tone in the slow movement as well as in the unfolding of its conclusion.

The concert had begun with Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen in a compact and intense version that was truly “chamber” music, with some excellent solo playing from the string front desks and carefully controlled ensemble that always kept a little in reserve. It was a performance that is well worth listening out for when the BBC recording is broadcast.

So too, it hardly needs saying, is the orchestra’s playing of Veni, Veni Emmanuel with soloist Colin Currie, even if the trajectory of the piece arguably defies the Darkness-to-Light equation. Currie must have given a fair proportion of the remarkable number of performances MacMillan’s early percussion concerto has enjoyed since the SCO premiered it with Evelyn Glennie at the 1992 Proms.

It is still one of the most thrilling works in the composer’s now extensive catalogue, and it was good to be reminded that the brasher music is more than balanced with much gentler, melodic, and equally virtuosic, music. The closing bars, when the soloist moved to tubular bells at the back of the stage and the whole orchestra adding tinkling percussion was movingly evocative of the Ascension, so perhaps the SCO’s concert title did work here as well.

‘From darkness to light’ is only one interpretation of the complexity of Mahler’s Symphony No.7, the major work of the RSNO’s season-opener as Music Director Thomas Sondergard continued his commitment to a full cycle of the composer’s symphonies. It’s a valid one, nonetheless, and the conductor certainly suggested as much in his dynamic marshalling of the large orchestra through its long structure. The two Nachtmusik movements emerged especially well, the horn calls in the former, and the sequence of solos – violin, guitar, mandolin and oboe among them – in the latter beautifully calibrated.

There is much operatic about the work’s conclusion, and Sondergard was in his element with the theatrical changes of pace leading up to the dramatic bells that also punctuate this work’s ending.

In a great run of concert openers, the RSNO began its season with Oliver Knussen’s terrific miniature, Flourish with Fireworks, which has long transcended its specific commission by the LSO at the end of the 1980s to become an emblem of the composer’s infectious enthusiasm.

The concerto that followed was Ravel’s in G Major with Francesco Piemontesi the perfect partnership soloist, embracing his dialogues with orchestra members and as eloquent in the lush Romanticism of the central Adagio as in the more 20th century jazzy rhythms of the contrasting outer movements.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Martin Shields

EIF: The Veil of the Temple

Posted on by

Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Composer John Tavener considered the eight-hour choral epic The Veil of the Temple to be his supreme achievement, presumably for more than just its epic duration. Its second ever complete performance ended with the full forces of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, Monteverdi Choir, and National Youth Choir of Scotland on the Usher Hall platform and lower reaches of the choir stalls chanting the Sanskrit mantra of Peace, “Om Shanti”.

The conductor who had magnificently held the entire performance together, Sofi Jeannin, even allowed herself to join in and let her energetic arms rest.

Backstage stories suggest that the journey to that moment was not always peaceful and Jeannin’s achievement even more impressive than it appeared from an audience perspective, and it is to be hoped that the conductor, who directed the Dunedin Consort’s St Matthew Passion in Easter 2024, now becomes part of team EIF, an ad-hoc company evident in the line-up for this event.

As well as its own chorus, the Festival’s sole staff musicians – excepting current director Nicola Benedetti – and celebrating their 60th birthday this year, that team always features the young singers of NYCOS, who have shown themselves capable of rising to any challenge the EIF throws their way.

We should also include Puerto Rican soprano Sophia Burgos, also an essential ingredient of last year’s opening concert La Pasion segun San Marcos, and here the promenading soprano whose arias, in tandem with the duduk of Hovhannes Margaryan, began each section of the work.

The transformation of the Usher Hall into a believable religious sanctuary rather than a concert hall was the work of Thomas Guthrie, singer and violin player as well as a director, and a crucial front-line member of the Alehouse Sessions band that gave a memorable “beanbag” concert at EIF 2024.

The most striking element of Guthrie’s staging was a stepped altar in the midst of those stalls beanbags, which bore candles indicating the progress through the eight “cycles” of the composition and on and around which the Monteverdi Choir and its step-out soloists performed. Beyond that, however, Guthrie placed singers just about anywhere they might feasibly go so that solo voices and choirs popped up amongst every section of the audience and sounded hauntingly off-stage from the foyer spaces – as well as sometimes entirely filling those choir stalls.

Whether his efforts, and Tavener’s music, translated into a spiritual experience rather than a durational one, is perhaps debatable. As the structure of the work revealed itself – those cycles revisiting the same material in incrementally changing ways as the forces involved built and the pitch rose, a tone at time – its predictability was not always a blessing. And although some of the choral music was sumptuous, the deliberate mono-tonal simplicity of much of the solo parts was a challenge.

In fairness, it was one to which the Monteverdi soloists rose bravely and effectively. Soprano Theano Papadaki and tenor Hugo Hymas delivered the work’s repeating sequence of beatitudes with passion, and bass-baritone Florian Stortz was superb with the Passion-tide Gospel utterances of Christ. A trio of resonant basses – Tristan Hambleton, Richard Weigold and Rob Macdonald – were as mobile in their solo appearances as Burgos.

Special mention should also go to the tenor soloist from the Festival Chorus, David Lee, who featured in the only section, Cycle 4, which did not include the Monteverdi Choir.

Like him, the player of the Usher Hall organ, David Goodenough, was unidentified in the programme. His drone note was the first sound of the afternoon, and for much of the performance that was all that he was required to do, but the full might of the instrument was heard at the end, when brass, horns and timpani from the RSNO also came into play. For the most part, the orchestra’s principal percussionist Simon Lowden and his section colleagues added the crucial spare instrumental ingredients, alongside specialists on Tibetan temple horn and Indian harmonium.

There was scarcely a note of these sonic details that the conductor did not precisely cue, but even more impressive was the attention Jeannin gave to the three choirs, no matter where they were singing from. The balance she achieved – in which it was still possible to appreciate their individual strengths – was truly remarkable.

It would have been asking too much for the choral performance to be flawless, but it was never less than excellent. This edition of the Monteverdi Choir, now directed by Jonathan Sells, sounded more admirable for the character of the individual voices within it than its ensemble sound, but its own Usher Hall concert may prove a better guide to that. Under the direction of James Grossmith, the Edinburgh Festival Chorus sings in a very precise and measured way and its quietest moments here were the most impressive.

There is a great deal of demanding rhythmic complexity in the vocal score of The Veil of the Temple, as well as a lot of music at the very top of the soprano range. In both these areas, it was the young singers of the National Youth Choir that delivered the goods beyond all reasonable expectation of their experience. Prepared by NYCOS founder Christopher Bell and directed by Mark Evans, this year’s cohort have already matched the huge contribution their predecessors have made to recent Festival programmes, with more opportunities to hear them in Festival and Fringe to come.

Keith Bruce

Pictures: Sofi Jeannin by Patrick Allen; Florian Stortz by Andrew Perry

RSNO / Søndergård’s Shostakovich

Posted on by

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

It’s over a quarter of a century since the RSNO undertook its ambitious cycle of Shostakovich’s symphonies under its then Russian music director Alexander Lazarev, Go back to 1962 and you find an earlier generation SNO performing the UK premiere of the composer’s Festive Overture in the presence of the composer himself at that year’s Edinburgh Festival. Add to that the more recent Shostakovich connection with current music director Thomas Søndergård, whose famously impromptu RSNO debut in 2009, replacing the advertised conductor to direct the Eleventh Symphony, led to his immediate initial appointment to the orchestra as principal guest conductor.

If Saturday’s all-Shostakovich season finale programme under Søndergård owed anything to that subliminal legacy – the culminating showpiece was once again the Eleventh Symphony – it was the depth of understanding and self-belief expressed in three powerful, compelling performances. 

As principal oboist Adrian Wilson pressed home in his wise, witty and original introduction to the concert (he even engaged the help of the brass section), Shostakovich effectively lived two lives, one as a seemingly obedient slave to Stalinist diktats, the other as an artist seeking an outlet for his genuine feelings, expressed in such a way as to baffle the censor. 

All three works on Saturday dated from after Stalin’s death, but still the ghostly claustrophobia of Soviet oppression could be heard to varying degrees. Even the seemingly ebullient 1954 Festive Overture, a riotous cocktail of influences from glittering Glinka to Elgarian pomp that offered an explosive start to the evening, its patriotic joie de vivre masking the composers re-use of motivic material from the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk that so infuriated Stalin in the 1930s. This was an utterly joyous performance, despite some initial mishits by the horns. 

All was perfectly in place then for an abrupt mood swing towards the Cello Concerto No 2, a more shadowy work in which the poised musicality and expressive physicality of soloist Daniel Müller-Schott was  a mesmerising combination. From its unaccompanied opening, achingly languid, a compelling discourse between soloist and orchestra slowly evolved, teasingly in the opening Largo, impetuously sardonic in the central Allegretto, its hottest intensity saved for a Finale whose eventual recourse to the concerto’s opening solitude was, in Müller-Schott’s hands, a movingly visual expression of inner triumph – or was it submission?

If some cheering up was called for, that came hard and fast in Müller-Schott’s Bach encore, a sprightly but muscularly nuanced Gigue from the Baroque composer’s third Cello Suite.

Where the concert’s first half coupling had highlighted two distinct manifestations of Shostakovich, the Symphony No 11 (“The Year 1905”) gave us a second half oozing completeness, not least in its quasi-cinematic musical depiction of the failed St Petersburg uprising of 1905. 

Søndergård’s reading, and the dramatic intensity of the RSNO’s response, was truly visceral, firstly in capturing the ominous stillness of the Palace Square at dawn, never once dragging its feet, but expansive enough to exude a mounting sense of aching anticipation. Thick-textured strings permeated this lengthy scene-setter like a ghostly mist before unleashing the gathering vision of the event itself, then in the third movement, In Memoriam, a chilling counterpoint of double bass ostinato leaving the overlaid revolutionary song hauntingly bereft of its innermost spirit. The Finale, “The Tocsin”, was a total knock-out, rampant and defiant, momentarily reflective before the fearsome terseness of the giant church bells.

If ever an end-of-season programme was designed to say “come back for more”, this was it.

Ken Walton

(Photo: Clara Cowen)

RSNO / Sondergard

Posted on by

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 & Dunedin / Søndergård

Posted on by

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

It’s a rare Saturday night that sees a period instrument performance of Handel’s Water Music serve as programme buddy to a full-fat orchestral précis of Wagner’s complete Ring Cycle. Throw in a fascinating new piece by the Scots composer Neil Tòmas Smith, which combined the stylised delicacies of the Dunedin Consort (instruments and voices) with the voluptuous meatiness of the RSNO, and the unlikeliest of combinations was complete.

This was the final instalment of a three-year collaboration between these two accomplished outfits, and if it proved nothing else, it’s that niche-ism has its place in musical performance, but just as excitingly that crosscurrent programming – where ancient meets modern – can produce a synthesis made in heaven.

There was, nonetheless, a satisfying chronology to this concert. It opened with the freshest of intimacies, the diminutive Dunedin Consort filling Glasgow’s biggest symphonic hall with the Suite No 3 from Handel’s Water Music. Led by violinist Jane Gordon, it was a masterclass in nuance as it applies to Baroque performance practice. For besides the actual sound quality and crystalline contrapuntal precision, these players rendered the various dance movements with a choreographed physicality that echoed the litheness of Handel’s musical invention. 

The phrasing was as impeccable as it was exquisite, be it a high-speed Rigaudon or graceful Minuet. The tonal balance was bold but stylistically tempered – how lovely to witness the unforced mellifluousness of the recorders – and inventive too when, for instance, the violas made their presence solidly felt in the final Gigue. The perfect aperitif.

So to the premiere of Smith’s Hidden Polyphony, the RSNO now filling the stage around the Dunedin, joined also by the soprano Anna Dennis, a quartet of Dunedin singers (moving gradually around the upper circle gallery) and conductor Thomas Søndergård. 

It’s not the first piece combining modern and period performance to be featured in this artistic collaboration – previously programmed works by Jorg Widmann and Heiner Goebbels have explored their own solutions – but Hidden Polyphony justified its own proposition, which is “to shine a contemporary light” on a culture in 16th century Scotland that spawned a golden age of polyphonic composition, including the sacred music of Robert Carver.

Carver’s music – including his masterful O bone Jesu – finds its way into Smith’s 20-minute score, as does the illustrative poetry of William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas, and other interweaving musical fragments gleaned from ancient library sources. The overall impact, the juxtaposition of Smith’s modernist language with ghostly references to the earlier music, was both dramatic and enchanting. 

Søndergård directed a performance that highlighted the conflict – seething, tumultuous declamations and dazzling orchestral acrobatics, from which snippets of smooth polyphony emerged and disappeared like ghostly mirages. Anna Dennis’s soprano voice was a vivid sepulchral presence, snatching high-pitched notes from thin air with magical perfection. It was hard not to sense a leaning towards James MacMillan’s music in the volcanic intent of this score, and in its disconcertingly calm resolve, an a cappella Carver setting literally receding into the distance.

It was maybe a tough ask to expect Henk de Vlieger’s The Ring: An Orchestral Adventure – an ambitious distillation of Wagner’s four massive Ring operas stripped down to a one-hour potted symphonic summary – to fully capture the original’s full-on potency. And while this was a performance of plentiful merit, spirit and imagination, peppered with thrilling climactic peaks and solemn troughs, not to mention the awesome spectacle and indulgent wholesomeness of four harps and a phalanx of Wagner tubas, it was also a lingering reminder that the true power of Wagner’s totemic creation lies in the all-embracing completeness of its visual, vocal and orchestral dimensions. 

How I yearned for the seductive rhapsodising of the Rhine Maidens, some wailing Valkyries, an impassioned Siegfried, or a glowingly sacrificial Brünnhilde. Or, for that matter, a riot of Nibelung anvils numerous enough to sound more fearsome than china cups clinking at a genteel tea party. 

Ken Walton

RSNO / Okisawa

Posted on by

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

The RSNO had had a somewhat chaotic week, which included chief executive Alistair Mackie deputising in the trumpet section for Thursday’s Aberdeen Music Hall concert, and other last minute changes to the line-up present on stage for Saturday’s Glasgow one making the printed programme a most unreliable document.

Guest conductor Nodoka Okisawa was already in charge of a complicated programme that mixed new music with popular classics in a way that seemed designed to work together, but were as often polar opposites.

Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Festival Overture opened the first half and Stokowski’s arrangement of Debussy’s Clair de Lune the second, and perhaps if they’d been elsewhere the conductor may have relaxed into them more. As it was, they were well-played but seemed to lack heart. Even the big string swell that is the climax of the Tchaikovsky was far from emotional, and the fact that Stokowski’s orchestration failed to make the final cut of Disney’s Fantasia did not seem as absurd as usual.

The work at the heart of the programme, a new Trumpet Concerto: night-sky-blue from Helen Grime, was also not especially easy to love. It was, of course, immaculately played by the global star for whom it was written, Hakan Hardenberger, but it remains in the mind for a lot of things it is not.

The work is not especially virtuosic for the soloist, and although it employs the mute that made Miles Davis distinctive, it was not at all jazzy. Those sections, at the start and the finish, were the warmest points of dialogue with the orchestra, however. In the middle of Grime’s scheme, the soloist’s reference to Baroque examples of the trumpet concerto genre – and perhaps to the instrument’s brass band heritage as well – seemed more at odds with the accompaniment.

It was also never particularly easy to align the concerto with its declared inspiration of the experience of being in a scented night garden, but that may only be a personal impression.

The works that completed the evening related more obviously to their titles. Takemitsu’s How Slow the Wind sat very well, following the Debussy, whose music influenced the Japanese composer, and itself a declared influence on Helen Grime. It was also quite beautifully played, by the strings in particular in an RSNO reduced to chamber orchestra size.

Back to symphonic strength for Rachmaninov’s Isle of the Dead, they were on fine form for that work as well, but as with the Tchaikovsky, Okisawa seemed to be guiding a somewhat restrained performance of the work. Its inspiration in a mono-chrome reproduction of a popular painting is well known, and the composer’s “colouring-in” with distinctive musical textures was again meticulously-rendered. The strange tensions in the piece seemed less threatening than they should be, however, even if the statement of the composer’s favourite plainchant theme could not have been more resonant.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Clara Cowen

RSNO/Hahn

Posted on by

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

With the addition of four minutes of music at its start, RSNO Principal Guest Conductor Patrick Hahn made a concert of the apparently tricky task of combining the RSNO Chorus’s performance of Mozart’s Requiem with the Berg Violin Concerto the orchestra had been recording with soloist Carolin Widmann during the week.

Widmann’s Berg will appear with the Britten Violin Concerto it undoubtedly influenced, and if her performance of it on Saturday is a guide, that will be a disc worth looking out for. In the second of its two movements her technical virtuosity shone, while the first established as fine a demonstration of partnership with a conductor and orchestra as you might hope to hear. The composer’s adaptation of the structures of serialism to his own purpose are part of what distinguishes the 1936 work, but it was the meticulous attention to the work’s own structure that really impressed here.

It was composed as a memorial to the 18-year-old daughter of Walter Gropius, Manon, and the other works in the programme also remembered women who died very young, the Mozart Requiem commissioned by Count Franz Walsegg-Stuppach as a memorial for his wife, who died on Valentine’s Day, 1791, aged just 20.

Mozart’s progress on the commission was interrupted by the first performances of his penultimate opera, La clemenza di Tito, and work on The Magic Flute, and the operatic flavour of the Requiem was given its best expression in the ensemble work of the soloists – soprano Mhairi Lawson, mezzo Hanna Hipp, tenor Jamie MacDougall and baritone Laurent Naouri (replacing the advertised Daniel Okulitch).

In parallel, the full might of the RSNO Chorus was given full attention by Hahn, and there was occasionally a suspicion that his tempi were a shade faster than they might have liked. This was a brisk Requiem, and not an especially affecting one, but it was full of colour, particularly from the orchestra, with a pair of basset horns present as scored, and the trombone section on top form.

Those four minutes of music that knitted the two masterworks together came right at the beginning of the programme. Beethoven’s Elegischer Gesang was written in memory of the wife of the composer’s friend and supporter Baron Johann Baptiste Pasqualati, who died in childbirth at 24. The choral miniature is a late rarity in the composer’s catalogue and Hahn used it to preface the Berg, into which it segued without a pause.

Even if the the men of the RSNO Chorus were less assured in its opening bars than they would be later for the Mozart, it was a highly effective idea. The dynamic ideas Beethoven rehearses in this compact gem clearly found fuller expression in the finale of the Ninth Symphony.

Keith Bruce

Picture from Katie Kean/RSNO

Dunedin: St Matthew Passion

Posted on by

RSNO Centre, Glasgow

Through a quirk of bad 18th century business acumen and the consequent cessation of dedicated provision, the people of Leipzig, in Bach’s day, were effectively starved of opera. Or were they? Saturday’s slick, riveting, often animated performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion by the Dunedin Consort presented a strong case for the argument that what was missing from the opera house in the mercantile Thuringian city’s musical life was more than made up for by an inherently theatrical church music tradition.

Of course, it could never have been so obviously demonstrative. They were Lutherans after all. The theatricality was channelled through the music: in the Matthew Passion’s case a vivid dramatisation of the Easter story “pictorialised” by the visual interplay of double chorus, double orchestra and dramatis personae from within, and a sequence of fast-flowing narrative, choral commentary, rapt show-stopping arias and those reassuringly familiar (to German churchgoers) Chorales, knitted together as dynamic story-telling.

It’s been a mark of John Butt’s pugnacious directorship of the internationally acclaimed Dunedin Consort that such historically-informed performances as this – fully-mastered period instrument playing, a down-scaled concentration on the vocal contingent (one-to-a-part), smart but pliable tempi – say so much that is powerful, refreshing and revelatory about works many of us grew up with in less-informed times.  

If a hint of caution tempered the opening chorus, the fact it quickly dissipated suggested a necessary acclimatisation to the needle-sharp acoustics of the RSNO’s New Auditorium. Thereafter a thoroughly streamlined affair ensued, not just by the aforementioned forces, but including too, in key choruses, a clarion-like treble phalanx of the RSNO Youth Choir. This particular performance – the other two over the weekend were in Edinburgh and Perth – formed part of the Dunedin’s programming partnership with the RSNO.

At floor level, the stereophonic symmetry of the adult choruses and orchestras was an invigorating sight as well as sound, its rigid geometry offset by the itinerant to-ing and fro-ing of the eight singers as they exercised their dual roles as soloists and ripieno. It was that sense of role-playing, where spotlit action gave rise to third-party reaction, that fuelled our constant fascination as observers. 

From tenor Hugo Hymas’ heroic omnipresence as the narrating Evangelist (not to mention the stamina required for his additional arias) and Ashley Riches’ magisterial Christus, to the multifarious contributions of countertenor James Hall (wretchedly wholesome in his opening aria), the lyrical fluidity of Frederick Long’s bass-baritone, and Joanne Lunn’s rapturous soprano among others, the switches from homogenous chorus members to personalised characters were seamlessly achieved. 

Similarly, obbligato instrumentalists rising from their seats to partner solo arias did so with a stage presence that matched their virtuosity. Foremost were leader Huw Daniel’s heart-stopping solo violin (from memory) in Erbarme dich, the snaking oboe da caccias of Alexandra Bellamy and Oonagh Lee, and Jonathan Manson’s nimble expressiveness on viola da gamba.

With such instinctive expertise to hand, Butt’s role – besides his active contribution to the organ continuo – may have seemed essentially gestural at times, but that would be to downplay the vital response and emotional intensity he elicited from his top-notch team. It may not be opera, but close your eyes and this St Matthew Passion was a theatre of the imagination.

Ken Walton

RSNO / Heyward & Gillam

Posted on by

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Soprano saxophonist Jess Gillam invariably presents herself in striking primary colours – Saturday’s electric red trouser suit was a typically dazzling sartorial statement set against the workaday black of the RSNO – but when it comes to the music, the Cumbrian live-wire embraces every hue and its attendant emotions.

She had the perfect vehicle for that in Anna Clyne’s mercurial concerto Glasslands, written for Gillam in 2023 (after the performer’s success with their earlier collaboration, the rascally Snake and Ladder), premiered in Detroit that year, and now receiving its Scottish premiere. Where the work itself is a restless torrent of demonstrative contradictions, Clyne drawing on her Irish descent  and its folklore to explore the wild ritualism of the wailing Banshee, Gillam brought it vividly to life in an extraordinarily animated, virtuoso performance.

There’s no introduction, just a seismic eruption of screaming rhetoric that hits the listener like an electric shock. Gillam savoured the moment and its instant effect, issuing cascades of notes with shrill precision and bloodcurdling ferociousness, establishing a signature trope that was to persistently assert its structural significance throughout the 25-minute concerto.

Yet this is a piece that defies simplistic transparency, as Gillam proved in the theatricality of her delivery, ever the unpredictable protagonist pushing the orchestra, indeed the listener, in directions they never expected to go. 

The RSNO, in sharp form under Baltimore Symphony Orchestra conductor Jonathon Heyward, played with equal spontaneity and flamboyance. Where Gillam switched the mood, their response was immediate. The interplay was exceptional, sometimes as radiant amplification of the solo line, at other times engaged in frenetic dialogue, but just as easily offering enticing background comment, anything from belligerent slap bass to dreamy mysticism. 

From the high drama of the opening movement, through the released tension of a slow movement introduced by its gorgeously soulful saxophone-cello duo, to a jaunty finale (at times cartoon-like) counterbalanced by dense Philip Glass-like sonorities, Hayward’s prescriptive lead facilitated the big picture without sacrificing the excitement within.

Likewise Shostakovich’s daunting Eighth Symphony, a work written during the Second World War and ostensibly hewn out of wartime gloom (and more clandestinely a daunting comment on the oppressiveness of Stalinist Russia), fared well under Heyward’s unfussy pragmatism. He stuck to the letter of the score, eliciting grim determination from the opening Adagio, its gnawing, dogged anguish all the more telling as a result. 

The sneering irony of the Allegretto made its point with ample curtness; then the homeward sequence – the machine-like demonism of the Allegro non troppo with its cataclysmic climax, spilling into the desolation of the Largo (those eerie flutter-tongued flutes) before a bittersweet transformation to the symphony’s major key Finale, its quizzical extremes barely resolved by ultimate questioning. 

Ken Walton 

(Picture credit: Katie Kean)

RSNO Launches 2025-26 Season

Posted on by

The RSNO 2025-26 Season Launch on Tuesday at the “New Auditorium” at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall? It looked more like the studio recording of an old-style Parkinson Show. 

On a rear platform soft seats awaited the RSNO’s cheery “mein host”, chief executive Alistair Mackie, and a line up of player guests. In place of Parky’s Harry Stoneham Five, an RSNO string nonet acted as the luminous backing to solo spots by showcased colleagues. A comic double act by smooth-talking principal trumpet Chris Hart and loopy sidekick, principal double bassist Nikita Naumov, broadened the showbiz vibe. Choreographed lighting and interwoven video clips projected a slick tech dimension. 

If presentation counted for anything, the assembled “studio audience” – “our payback to you, our supporters”, announced RSNO chairman Gregor Stewart – were amply rewarded.

In essence, this was a clever shop window exercise, reflecting a key area of activity the RSNO has turned to in its hour of need – the lucrative recording of film, television and video games soundtracks that has helped them allay the serious funding pressures all arts companies are currently facing – and the development of state-of-the-art studio facilities within its Glasgow Royal Concert Hall home. “Over the past year we’ve undertaken 37 such projects,” Mackie informed us, among them the soundtrack to Tom Cruise’s next Mission Impossible movie.

In line with that, previous seasons have seen a significant uptick in the inclusion of live film screenings – RSNO at the Movies – as part of the main concert portfolio. 2025-26 goes big screen in Glasgow and Edinburgh with Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Ghostbusters, Home Alone, How to Train Your Dragon and Gladiator. Add to that a couple of Pops concerts – a joint cross-cultural extravaganza by composer Rushi Zanjan’s Orchestral Qawwali with the RSNO and RSNO Chorus (Glasgow only), and Richard Kaufman conducting The Music of John Williams – and the broadest of tastes are well-catered for.

So much for the razzmatazz; what about the symphonic meat and veg? Central to the season’s 17 Classical Concerts is what music director Thomas Søndergård described, in a prerecorded message, as a theme exploring how music “Feels Like Home”. He cited Bruckner’s Symphony No 8 as one, how it “holds a place in my heart as the last concert I performed in [as a timpanist] during my studies”. 

In his six appearances with the orchestra during 2025-26, he’ll open the season with Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, later appearances bringing us Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, Mozart’s Great Mass in C minor and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth. In the same programme as the Bruckner, he’ll be joined by the astonishing horn soloist Felix Klieser – born without hands, but plays using his feet – in Richard Strauss’ Horn Concerto No 1. A link-up with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland sees RCS soloists perform in Ravel’s mini-opera L’enfant et les sortilèges, and the fine young Scots pianist Ethan Loch venting his inner jazz in Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

This will also be a year in which principal guest conductor Patrick Hahn makes his mark with the orchestra, not least in a Season Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and in Elgar’s Cello Concerto with soloist Kian Soltani. More intriguingly he stars as pianist/conductor in a jazz/classical interchange playing solo in George Antheil’s 1955 A Jazz Symphony before moving to the podium for Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F (spotlighting pianist Frank Dupree and his jazz trio) and Rachmaninov’s nostalgic Third Symphony.

Among the season’s newer conducting faces is featured artist Anthony Parnther, music director of the San Bernardino Symphony Orchestra, whose broad-based experience across the film medium, family concerts and the championing of underrepresented voices is reflected in a trio of October programmes that ranges from an all-action Family Concert – Fright at the Museum – to the world premiere of Matthew Rooke’s Tamboo-Bamboo Concerto for Timpani and Orchestra with charismatic RSNO timpanist Paul Philbert in the solo spot.

Philbert isn’t the only orchestral principal stepping into the limelight. Chris Hart performs Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto in November, while Nikita Naumov’s plays Koussevitzky’s Double Bass Concerto in one of the three RSNO Comes to Play concerts presented by Gillian Moore that sees the orchestra perform in wider community venues.

“We’re celebrating the sights and sounds of home,” Mackie reaffirms, which includes appearances by Nicola Benedetti (Elgar’s Violin Concerto) and mezzo soprano Karen Cargill (Beethoven’s Ninth and James MacMillan’s Three Scottish Songs). A Glasgow Sunday afternoon Chamber Series highlights RSNO and guest musicians, including an arrangement for string trio of Bach’s Goldberg Variations (trailed in part at Tuesday’s launch event), and the world premiere of Ethan Loch’s Fantasy of the Sea, performed by the composer with ballet dancer Antonia Cramb.

Other main season highlights include pianist Sir Stephen Hough, returning with conductor John Wilson to perform Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 1, soprano Anna Dennis who premieres a new work by Elena Langer with Estonian conductor Kristiina Poska, Lithuanian Giedrė Šlekytė conducting Mahler’s First Symphony and teaming up with Serbian soloist Nemenja Radulović for Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, and the impeccable James Ehnes as soloist in the UK premiere of James Newton Howard’s Violin Concerto No 2.

Full information on the RSNO’s 2025-26 Season is available at www.rsno.org.uk

RSNO / Slorach: Uprising

Posted on by

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

The presence of an RSNO Chorus stalwart alongside the young people in the drum troupe that is the voice of protest in Jonathan Dove’s new concert opera summed up what was special about this performance.

Under the baton of Ellie Slorach, and with the orchestra dressed down from their usual concert uniform, this was Scotland’s National Orchestra in best community-engagement mode. The Scottish premiere of Uprising, a new score by Dove with a libretto by April de Angelis, showed that the precise combination of form and function is not only the concern of designers of physical objects.

The opera is a story of climate activism, and one young woman’s scorned protest being taken up by her class-mates at school before adults join her against the authorities. It is an essential part of the work’s design that it involved the RSNO Youth Chorus and the untrained singers of the RSNO Chorus Academy. That Brenda Williamson, with over 50 years’ experience in the choir, should choose to make her contribution by leaving the alto section to hit a floor tom-tom instead of singing was entirely in the spirit of the occasion.

Dove’s music begins with an evocation of dawn, or creation, and proceeds through a week of eventful days that is clearly intended to recall the first book of Genesis, except that this is a fight against the destruction of the world.

Similarly, Lola Green is obviously supposed to remind us of Greta Thunberg, but deliberately cast as closer to home. In fact Thunberg will make a cameo appearance in the voice of a Youth Chorus member, when Lola’s one-woman protest at her school finds echoes around the world in an effective portrayal of social media’s beneficial role.

From the beginning, the eclectic score is full of obvious reminders of other operatic works. Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel is there in the dynamic of Lola’s family with her ambitious mother (Madeleine Shaw), more persuadable and domestic dad (Marcus Farnsworth), and eye-rolling phone-focused sister (Julieth Lozano Rolong). Britten’s Peter Grimes might be glimpsed in Lola’s outsider status, and the mystical world of Wagner’s Ring is often not far away.

The composer’s use of musical motif is certainly unmissable. Edwin Kaye’s swaggering but shallow Mayor was partnered by John Whitener’s tuba and Rhys Batt’s Doctor, summoned to “treat” Lola for her pessimistic obsession, by a sinister ensemble of winds.

The principals were terrific, particularly Ffion Edwards’s Lola, Shaw and Farnsworth, but just as important was the quality of the work from individual amateur singers in step-out roles, both from the Youth Chorus and the adult community cohort. Director Sinead O’Neill had done wonders to make the show happen, using such large numbers in such limited space, and there was never any lack of clarity in the storytelling, even when the narrative moved into a more magical reality in the second half and the threatened trees are given their own musical voice.

Perhaps the work seems a little unsure how to resolve itself, and dithers a little in the decision, but the choruses have some of their best music as it comes to an ending of understandably qualified optimism.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Katie Kean – Ffion Edwards and Julieth Lozano Rolong with RSNO and RSNO Youth Chorus

RSNO / Hoving

Posted on by

Perth Concert Hall

As readers of VoxCarnyx know, the first Scottish performances of Anna Clyne’s cello concerto DANCE are not being given this weekend, as the RSNO attests. They were heard almost exactly two years ago at the Govan Music Festival, when Bartholomew LaFollette was the soloist with the Glasgow Barons under conductor Paul MacAlinden.

That spurious claim aside, the programme the RSNO built around its first performance of the work was delightful, and its liveliness was substantially down to the fresh faces on stage.

In this context, Clyne, whose work has found plenty of champions in Scotland, was the veteran. The soloist and conductor, Senja Rummukainen and Emilia Hoving, are both Finns born in 1994, and between them they shaped the fascinating five movement piece with assurance.

Inspired by five lines of verse by 13th century mystic Rumi, it begins at the top of the cello’s range, echoed by flute and bowed percussion, before the rest of the winds come in with counterpoint. The ethereal opening is followed by a much more emphatic second movement when maintaining a balance between soloist and orchestra is more of a challenge, and then a central section concentrating on the familiar capabilities of the instrument in a concerto context – and features a lovely brief clarinet solo.

The fourth movement begins with a statement of ground bass from the soloist, taken up by the basses, and then develops as a stately canon, with crucial roles for gong and brass. The sweeping melody of the finale is shared around democratically, as are the solo duties, with orchestra leader Maya Iwabuchi having a few bars in the spotlight.

It is a partnership piece, and although Rummukainen had plenty to do, it was also good to hear her solo in her encore of Theme and Variations for Solo Cello by Jean Sibelius.

The programme was more of a showcase for her countrywoman, and Emilia Hoving is certainly a young conductor to watch. She steered Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales with a light touch, dancing on the podium through the suite of short waltzes that transcend their piano origins in the composer’s brilliant orchestration. This is modernism doing what it does best, throwing out lots of ideas rather than worrying the essence out of a few.

After the interval, Hoving’s way with Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances was even more dynamic. There is a no-nonsense clarity about her conducting style and in her hands this was the gloomy Russian at his colourful best. The hesitant waltz of the second dance was especially good, its swing a nod to the composer’s American exile as much as the cinemascope expressiveness of the movements on either side.

The wildcard that Hoving was dealt for the Perth performance (the rest of the programme repeated in Edinburgh and Glasgow) was the presence of a cohort from Big Noise Raploch, the original Stirling project of Sistema Scotland. Performing side-by-side with RSNO players, they opened the concert with a bespoke work from Lisa Robertson, a Scots composer of the same generation as the two Finnish women.

With some vocal effects and extended instrumental techniques, and rhythmic challenges as it develops, Change is Coming required performance concentration rather than individual virtuosity of the youngsters, and they proved more than equal to its demands. Hoving’s very clear baton kept the work’s complexities firmly on track.

Keith Bruce

Pictured: Senja Rummukainen

« Older Entries