Tag Archives: RSNO

RSNO: West Side Story

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Even with its enforced content change, this RSNO all-American programme had a certain completeness about it. There was the razzmatazz of hard-hitting Broadway in Leonard Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story; the freshly-minted quintessential wonderment of the pioneering landscape poignantly captured by Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring Suite; the fruity African American cultural injection expressed by William Grant Still in his bluesy Symphony No 1; and the heart-tugging indulgence of the Hollywood soundtrack channelled through the melting lyricism of John Williams.

The RSNO even fielded its in-house American-born Associate Artist, conductor Kellen Gray, whose cool, malleable presence drew performances that powerfully reflected the universality of the music. 

He opened with Copland’s picturesque suite, whose sensory journey took us from the timeless prairie images of the opening, through the toe-tapping vitality of folk-styled dances and the uplifting momentum of the Shaker tune variations, to the work’s final repose as the opening stillness returned. Gray’s simple, coaxing direction allowed the narrative to flow with effortless ease and effect.

The plan had been to follow that with Florence Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement, but due to injury the scheduled soloist, Jeneba Kanneh-Mason, had to call off. This produced the aforementioned Hollywood moment, a rescue performance by RSNO leader Maya Iwabuchi of Williams’ Three Pieces from Schindler’s List.

There’s no doubting the spellbinding expressiveness of the main theme – famously played in the original soundtrack by Itzhak Perlman – which Iwabuchi captured with touching simplicity. It’s the most memorable element of this concert confection, which continued with the gutsier Polish ghetto music (Jewish Town) and finally Remembrances, with its ultimate references back to the eclipsing main theme. 

Still’s Symphony, the “Afro-American”, opened the second half: unashamedly light in spirit, revealing the composers mastery of vernacular styles, yet skilfully weaving these influences into a genuinely concrete classical structure. 

The scene-setting cor anglais solo, invoking the soulfulness of the negro spiritual, soon gave way to a big band-style blues, the Adagio – “Sorrow” –  expanding on the earlier spiritual references. The short scherzo, which allegedly provided Gershwin with the model for his famous I Got Rhythm motif, served up the symphony’s most dazzling moments, before a finale – “Aspiration” – packed with seriousness and determination.

Gray’s vision of the West Side Story Dances was electrifying, not so much in the explosive sense, more to do with the combination of daringness and precision he elicited from the orchestra. Hip-swinging solos, mind-blowing percussion, searing brass playing and red hot swathes of string sound played their part in raising the roof, and reminding us how ferociously dramatic, how uplifting, at times movingly serene, this masterpiece of 20th century American music theatre really is.

Ken Walton 

(Photo: Benavente)

RSNO / Hahn

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

The RSNO ends October with Shostakovich’s massive Seventh Symphony, the wartime ‘Leningrad’, and it began the month with the same composer’s Fifth, an ambiguous expression of the composer’s more personal battles.

Both works are presented in thoughtful contexts, the Fifth packaged with Schnittke’s Viola Concerto, from Soviet Russia half a century later and played by the master of the instrument Lawrence Power, preceded by Bach as reimagined at the end of the Second World War.

The popular arrangements of Leopold Stokowski, a British conductor who found huge fame in the USA, have long fallen from fashion in the face of global enthusiasm for historically-informed authenticity, so it was intriguing that the RSNO’s Principal Guest Conductor Patrick Hahn chose to begin his first concert of the new season with one of them.

Stokowski’s orchestration of the sacred song Komm, susser Tod could scarcely be further from today’s period instrument approach to the composer but worked beautifully here on its own terms, as an opening gambit by the RSNO strings, who would go on to have a sensational night, with the brass and winds joining in muted fashion. Far from saccharin, it made a real impact as a powerful opener.

After which the focus was on the lower strings of the orchestra, because Alfred Schnittke’s 1986 Viola Concerto dispenses with the violins altogether and asks for as many basses as there are cellos and violas, as well as piano, harpsichord and celesta and two sets of tubular bells.

Regardless of this singular sound-world, the focus is firmly on the soloist much of the time, and Power was predictably authoritative in his role, even as he was attentive to the ensemble, and especially Felix Tanner and the violas immediately behind him.

Schnittke’s music may be to some extent a technical exercise on a theme based on the letters of the name of the work’s dedicatee, Yuri Bashmet, but it is appreciable without knowing that for its dramatic explosions, skewed waltz and other vaguely familiar samples of music. While there is obvious drama in the soloist’s cadenzas, at other times it can be difficult to pinpoint the exact source of some theatrical sounds in what ends as a slightly disturbing listen.

Many have come to the same conclusion about the ambiguous triumphalism of the finale of Shostakovich Five, the composer’s famous response to Stalin’s criticism. Hahn let the music do its work there, having prepared the way perfectly. There was no sense of foreboding in the beautiful string playing of the opening movement, or indeed the more plangent third, although intimations of unrest from piano and brass were never far away.

The RSNO players revealed their own deep understanding of the piece in a superb collective performance with individual moments of excellence from leader Maya Iwabuchi, first horn Amadea Dazeley-Gaist, principal flute Katherine Bryan and harpist Pippa Tunnell, among many.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Clara Cowen

RSNO: Søndergård / Malofeev

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

For the planners of this RSNO season opener, which paired Rachmaninov’s Fourth Piano Concerto and Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, how fortuitous might it have been for history’s sake had the latter composer once conducted the former as soloist in that very same concerto? 

Death got in the way, Mahler well gone by the time Rachmaninov penned his original version of the work in 1926, never mind its revised manifestation of 1941. For the record, Mahler did – in 1910 – conduct Rachmaninov as pianist/composer, in the more popular Third Piano Concerto at New York’s Carnegie Hall. By all accounts it was quite a show.

As was Saturday’s, given the spectacle of the vastly extended player numbers required for the Mahler symphony and the cornucopia of percussion additives, from shimmering cowbells to the gargantuan, cartoon-like mallet that signals the “blows of fate”. It was just a pity, due to hall’s difficulties in adding the regular stage extensions, that the orchestra was seated at ground level, limiting sight lines. Thankfully the sound quality was not affected.

That was certainly true of Russian pianist Alexander Malofeev, making his RSNO debut with a combination of electrifying virtuosity and sweeping poeticism. Where this concerto shoots off in directions that seem exploratory for Rachmaninov – harmonies that stretch tonality to the brink, melodies that wink at modernism, textures of uncharacteristic leanness – Romantic Russian blood still courses through its veins. Malofeev’s performance was as clean as it was powerful, effortlessly fiery and flamboyant in the outer movements, enchanting in the central Largo, supported crisply by conductor Thomas Søndergård and the orchestra.

The same calculated precision informed Søndergård’s vision of the Mahler, which bore a vivid transparency from the outset: neatly calibrated mood swings and tempo changes, and a perceived wish to let the often tortuous drama emerge unforced. Where that excelled was its focus on the intricacies, those jarring twists and turns that seem initially to challenge logic, yet somehow fall into place in the wider context. 

Such structured discipline lent the long opening movement a sense of gravitational solidity, scintillatingly precise, if a little understated emotionally. There was a sense, too, in the Scherzo that more could have been made of its side-stepping eccentricities, its parodic grotesquerie. The Andante moderato, though, was spellbinding, an oasis of relative calm amid the surrounding sea of brutal torment. The finale, devastatingly conclusive both in its apocalyptic climaxes and ultimate descent into nothingness, was a veritable tour de force.

It was a long evening, but one that set a high bar for the season ahead. It also provided a public opportunity, right at the start, for the chief executive of the Royal Philharmonic Society, James Murphy, to present RSNO chairman Gregor Stewart with the prestigious RPS Ensemble Award, won earlier his year by the RSNO for the extent, versatility and ambition of its creative operation. 

“Here is an orchestra firing on all cylinders, everything a 21st century orchestra should be,” Murphy announced, adding that the RSNO are the first symphony orchestra to win this award since 2014.

(Photo: Martin Shields)

Ken Walton

EIF: All Rise / Passion of Mary Magdalene

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Usher Hall/Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

It is hard to imagine any previous director of the Edinburgh Festival getting away with Nicola Benedetti’s wholly admirable teacher-like approach to silencing the menace of mobile phones in the concert hall. On the opening day of EIF 2026 she twice instructed audiences to check that their devices were switched off and then paused to watch while everyone did. Audibly, the tactic worked.

The Festival’s slogan for this campaign is “Tune out the outside world” and it also spoke, with interesting ambiguity, to the music on offer that first day.

Tansy Davies composed her Passion of Mary Magdalene because she “felt it was time to listen to the voices not only left out, but taken out, of the Passion narrative.” As well as a the titular follower of Christ, sung by Anna Dennis, that included the wife of Pontius Pilate, a step-out role for mezzo Sarah Anne Champion, one of a vocal ensemble of seven behind the soloists.

Christus was sung by baritone Marcus Farnsworth, in a forceful characterisation that was very much of a piece with the work’s radical intentions. Commissioned by the Dunedin Consort with the Festival and London’s Barbican, this 80-minute work can creditably take its place alongside Sir James MacMillan’s 21st century additions to the genre Johann Sebastian Bach pioneered.

As well the singers, the Dunedin’s John Butt directed an instrumental ensemble of 15 – early instruments and gut strings, and the crucial addition of an electric guitar which added percussion effects as well as more recognisable sounds, but always at discreet volume.

With harpsichord and bass lute completing the rhythm section, the strings were often used individually as foils to the singers – notably John Crockatt’s viola partnering Farnsworth – and a five-piece wind section of bassoon, oboes and flutes-doubling -recorders added powerful colours to the score.

Davies makes huge demands of the singers, and it was not only Dennis – predictably unperturbed by the huge leaps of pitch in Mary Magdalene’s part – who produced the goods. Stratospheric soprano Ana Beard Fernandez was superb in the work’s first section, and a crucial element of the score from its opening to the end was the trio ensemble of the three women, completed by alto Rosie Parker.

The four male voices – countertenor Tom Lilburn, bass Christopher Webb and tenors Ed Woodhouse and Thomas Kelly – more often featured singly or in duet and again there was no weak link among them.

The work is filled with memorable moments; the first utterance of this Jesus is “Shut Up!” and his Palm Sunday arrival in Jerusalem comes with the clearest of sound-pictures of the donkey’s gait and braying. Much of the text is recognisable from scripture, but Davies also uses sources that didn’t make the final cut of the Bible to produce a very thought-provoking narrative from the female perspective. The teasing carnality of the institution of the Sacrament of Communion at the Last Supper, which sits at the centre of her work, may be its most controversial moment, and Dennis produced her very finest singing to make sure every nuance was revealed.

What is unarguable about this new piece, even if Davies’s music is not to everyone’s taste (although it was enthusiastically acclaimed here), is that the composer has structured her work perfectly. In seven clear sections over three distinct parts, the story-telling could not be clearer or the words and music more precisely matched.

That is not true of the first orchestral work by jazz trumpeter – and husband of Benedetti – Wynton Marsalis, which was revived as the Opening Concert in the Usher Hall and the title of which, All Rise, adopted as the label for the entire EIF 2026 programme.

Marsalis was commissioned to write his “Symphony No 1” by Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic, who premiered it in December 1999, and it has been recorded by the Los Angeles Phil and Esa Pekka Salonen, but opportunities to hear the vast 12-movement work (also in three sections in this performance) are not common.

That is most easily explained by the vast forces under the baton of conductor James Gaffigan, who is also on the podium for Marsalis’s more recent Concert for Orchestra, which receives its UK premiere from the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Proms this week.

The trumpeter was onstage as a member of the Jazz at Lincoln Centre Orchestra, which he is in the final year of four decades of leading. Around those 16 top-rank jazz players sat the RSNO, with a vast array of percussion at the back between the instrumentalists and the Edinburgh Festival Chorus joined by the soulful specialists of the Jason Max Ferdinand Singers.

At full strength, more than 200 musicians made a great gospel noise, and that blues-derived music is at the core of the work, incorporating the text of some of the Lord’s Prayer in what is often – but not always – a devotional work.

If Davies’s Passion is challenging to a conventional view of Christianity, Marsalis seems to want to place faith in the context of personal development and community cohesion in All Rise. Others may have heard it differently, and that may well be the work’s strength as well as its problem.

Perhaps, in his upcoming retirement from band-leading, Marsalis might rework parts of All Rise as orchestral suites or choral pieces that may win more performances, because many sections would certainly stand alone and the Ellington-esque Expressbrown Local (the 10th movement) was an ideal trailer for the JLCO’s concert of the Duke’s music in the same hall three days later.

Like the earlier Queen’s Hall concert, however, All Rise was full of moments that will live in the mind for many years. The soloing of the jazzers – including one from Marsalis himself – was matched by that of the RSNO front desks, even if those were not improvised, while the Festival Chorus had as much soul as the chamber choir, even if it provided the startling soloists.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Anna Dennis with Dunedin Consort by Matt Beech; Conductor James Gaffigan by Andrew Perry

RSNO / Hahn: Ode to Joy

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

What better way to whet the appetite for next season than to sign off with a blistering finale to the current one. If that was in the minds of the RSNO players on Saturday – and it certainly sounded like it – then hopes should be high for drawing in the crowds in future. And what a crowd it was. Hardly an empty seat remained in the 2000-capacity Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, the offshoot to that being the sizzling atmosphere beforehand in the foyers and bars. Atmosphere is everything.

The concert itself was a classy affair, slickly presented, in which the picturesque theatre of Mendelssohn, sophisticated couthiness of MacMillan and epic universality of Beethoven were warmly personalised at the start by deserved recognition of RSNO violinist Nigel Mason, playing in his last concert after a record 47 years with the orchestra. 

In one of the most erudite and entertaining concert introductions I’ve heard from the RSNO, principal oboist Adrian Wilson – besides linking the infinite mathematical permutations of a pack of playing cards to the spontaneous uniqueness of the concert experience – reflected on Nigel’s amiability, dedication and professionalism. A genuinely appreciative reaction from the capacity audience, and a later surprise encore (“O my luve is like a red, red rose”) sung to him by mezzo soprano Karen Cargill, said everything and more.

As for the main programme, this was also an evening that cemented the real worth of principal guest conductor Patrick Hahn. From the moment he set the Mendelssohn in motion you could sense an intoxicating combination of composure and insight. He coaxed delicious textures, filigree detail and the music’s heated swells with judicious calm, yet by force of character coloured its unpredictable waters with persuasive, exhilarating drama.

He was equally attuned to the gossamer delicacies of James MacMillan’s Three Scottish Songs, a compilation setting of words by William Soutar which the composer packaged and arranged for chamber orchestra in 2022. Featuring the strings, harp and percussion, alongside soloist Karen Cargill, the focus is very much on the latter. Cargill captured the melodies’ alluring simplicity, counterpointed by a beguiling, feathery confection of string textures, which Hahn honed to perfection. The mastery of the writing lies in its minimal precision: the naked intimacy of Scots Song (the Tryst melody that has recurred as a cipher throughout MacMillan’s canon); the growing tensions and horror of Ballad and The Children. Against the prevailing quiet, MacMillan’s use of percussion proved economic but alarming.

The climax of the evening was Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and a performance that fully recognised its sublime magnitude and rhetoric. Singing from memory, the RSNO Chorus projected magnificently in the finale’s choral setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy. Every line was distinct, every expressive manoeuvre homogeneously convincing, coupled with orchestral playing that rooted out every detailed nuance, and a thrilling vocal quartet (Eleanor Dennis, Karen Cargill, Joshua Ellicott and Andrew Hamilton) capable of holding its own against the massed forces. 

Hahn’s no-nonsense practicality was once again the defining element in reaching that point. His journey from the self-contained potency of the opening movement, through the irrepressible sparkle of the Scherzo and languishing lyricism of the Adagio was one of incessant discovery, superbly controlled yet motivated by penetrating emotional instinct. Beyond that, the crowing impact of that final sing was inevitable.

Ken Walton

(Picture of Patrick Hahn in rehearsal by RSNO/Clara Cowen)

RSNO / Hahn

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Although it was not excessively long, there was a lot – perhaps a little too much – in Saturday’s penultimate RSNO season concert. On the podium was Principal Guest Conductor Patrick Hahn, appointed to the orchestra two years ago, whose programmes are always characterful.

This one began with most of the stage in darkness for a movement entitled God-Music from George Crumb’s Black Angels, his anti-Vietnam War composition best known in the recording by the Kronos Quartet. With the orchestra’s percussion section in a pool of light, the evening’s soloist, cellist Kian Soltani was spotlit above them in the choir stalls for the three minutes of his aria accompagnata.

It led directly into the big opening chord of Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem, a statement of opposition to the Second World War which failed to please its commissioners but has become a concert hall favourite as the first of the composer’s few orchestral works without a soloist.

That matching of two complementary works was repeated after the interval by Hahn with Wagner’s Prelude to Act 1 of Tristan und Isolde preceding Alexander Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy, the composer’s slightly unhinged expression of extra-marital lust.

Immediately before the interval sat the work on the ticket, Elgar’s Cello Concerto, for which Soltani had been booked to make his RSNO debut. The first cello in Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra a decade ago, Soltani now has a global career as an orchestral soloist and chamber musician and his powerful yet precise performance of this most familiar of works made some passages leap into focus with startling clarity, although there may have been listeners looking for more obvious emotion in his playing.

The Adagio third movement was fulsome, and the cellist’s capacity for delicacy was nowhere clearer than in his encore of Reza Vali’s The Girl from Shiraz.

Hahn’s programming decisions around the work, while fascinating, did raise some questions about the way the music was used. If it is hard to say whether Crumb would have approved of the repurposing of his colourful way with wine glasses as a precursor to the Britten, but it seems likely that Wagner would have been less than pleased to be the hors d’oeuvre to the excesses of Scriabin.

It certainly seemed that the full passion of the RSNO strings was reserved for the closing piece, with all its echoes of Wagner and Strauss and leader Maya Iwabuchi adding perfectly measured soloing. In the Prelude to Tristan, on the other hand, the section leaders often seemed to be working hard to encourage their players to up their game. Perhaps there was an element of post-tour fatigue, given that the orchestra is newly returned from dates in China.

That said, the climaxes of the Poem of Ecstasy were epic and joyous, and Hahn paced his idiosyncratic evening with great skill, never over-directing his musicians but across all the details and urging them to full expression when it really mattered.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Kian Soltani in rehearsal by Clara Cowen/RSNO

RSNO / Karabits

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

UKRANIAN conductor Kirill Karabits opened his first concerts in Scotland for some years with a work that paralleled the Stravinsky classic that ended it. The classic was The Firebird, the Diaghilev-commissioned ballet music that established the composer, based on a Russian folk-tale.

Karabits has championed the work of Azerbaijan’s Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, who celebrates her 79th birthday in ten days’ time and is a leading musical voice in her homeland. Her Nagillar, premiered at the Lucerne Festival in 2002, is a musical telling of a magical adventure story from the 1001 Nights which requires an orchestra of similar size to The Firebird and also begins on the string basses, whose ensemble performance was one of the highlights of the night.

Stravinsky’s narrative is much longer and more spacious, with room for wind and brass soloists to show off their individual virtuosity, and Karabits made sure that the most propulsive music, which the composer would develop even more in The Rite of Spring, was driven and exciting.

Nagillar is just as intense and much more compact, the magic carpet of its orchestral riches keeping the tale flying from the big opening chord through to a subtler conclusion, with the strings and harp to the fore. Karabits’ enthusiasm for the piece is well-founded and it is a chunky programme-opener that the RSNO should keep in its library.

Fine though both these works were, it was Elgar’s Violin Concerto and soloist Nicola Benedetti that ensured the concert was a sell-out. Like The Firebird it also dates from 1910, but it is a peculiarity of its history since 1932, when a very young Yehudi Menuhun was the soloist, that its duration in performance is still a talking point.

Last year Christian Tetzlaff released a recording with conductor John Storgards that was as brisk as Elgar originally intended, and very different from one by Vilde Frang and Robin Ticciati from the previous year. Twenty years previously, Nigel Kennedy was also respectful of the more deliberate interpretation of Menuhin, as was – perhaps less surprisingly – Benedetti in her 2020 recording.

Karabits and she maintained that same approach live, although her playing made light of the enormous technical demands in both the first and third movements. They are the most captivating of the piece – especially the finale – and the Andante slow movement, while lyrical enough, lacks a big Elgar tune to make the whole work as popular as some of his other music.

For all its intricacies, however, the concerto does have a compelling arc to its shape, which both soloist and conductor communicated perfectly, with the RSNO responding superbly. The playing of the strings before, during and after the virtuosic third movement cadenza was instinctively complementary, and the reception unarguably as much for the music as for the star soloist.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Sally Jubb

RSNO Appoints New Music Director

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The Royal Scottish National Orchestra has announced the appointment of its first ever female Music Director. 

Lithuanian-born conductor Giedrė Šlekytė, 37, who debuted with the RSNO only last December in a critically-acclaimed performance of Mahler’s First Symphony, takes up her new position at the start of the 2027-28 Season. She will meanwhile assume the role of Music Director Designate with immediate effect. 

Šlekytė succeeds Thomas Søndergård, whose successful 18-year partnership with the RSNO – leading to his appointment as Principal Guest Conductor in 2012, then as Music Director from 2018 – will nonetheless continue through his new role as Music Director Emeritus. During the 2027-28 Season Søndergård will return to lead four concert programmes.

Based in Austria, Šlekytė has enjoyed a growing reputation in the fields of both symphonic repertoire and opera. Besides guesting with such major orchestras as the Vienna Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Dallas Symphony Orchestra and Staatskapelle Berlin, she served as Principal Conductor of the Staadtheater Klagenfurt from 2016-18, and later as Principal Guest Conductor of the Bruckner Orchestra Linz from 2022-25.

In the opera world, Šlekytė has conducted productions at some of the most prestigious opera houses, including the Wiener Staatsoper, London’s Royal Opera House and the Staatsoper Berlin. She returns to Deutsche Oper Berlin to conduct a new production of Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer later this year, before undertaking Beethoven’s Leonore with MusikTheater an der Wien in early 2027.

Although still relatively unknown to Scottish audiences, Šlekytė made a powerful impression in her only appearance thus far with the RSNO, when she conducted Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto alongside her very distinctive Mahler One. 

VoxCarnyx’s review of the performance noted that “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.” It spoke too of “the clarity Šlekytė brought to this [Mahler] performance, her no-nonsense baton technique and instinctive pacing.” 

Announcing Šlekytė’s appointment, RSNO Chief Executive Alistair Mackie said: “There are weeks in rehearsals when something shifts. A buzz starts, momentum builds. You can feel it coming from the musicians themselves. And when it does happen, our audiences can feel it too. That’s what happened with Giedrė.

“When she joined us last year, her musical ideas and the way she works with players spoke for themselves. Giedrė gives the orchestra room to breathe and to play. The connection – musical, cultural and personal – was there from the start. She is the right person to carry forward what Thomas has built. The foundation he created is a strong one: an orchestra that knows itself, plays with confidence, and is ready for what comes next.”

Šlekytė inherits an orchestra that, under Søndergård and in increasingly straitened fiscal times for arts companies, has enjoyed international success through major tours of the USA, Europe and (later this month) China, while at home demonstrating remarkable versatility in the range of work it has undertaken, from major focuses on Richard Strauss and Mahler to high-profile film track recordings undertaken at the RSNO’s state-of-the-art recording facilities in Scotland’s Studio. 

Recognising the opportunities that affords, Šlekytė said: “It is a great joy and honour to be appointed as Music Director of the RSNO starting with the 2027:28 Season. I got to know the RSNO as an orchestra of musical excellence but also curiosity, versatility, open-mindedness and great energy. 

“Lots of exciting concert programmes and recordings are in the planning, and I can’t wait to join the RSNO family, grow together and inspire the audiences in Scotland and beyond.”

(Photo credit: Simon Pauly)

RSNO / Wilson / Hough

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

There’s a stimulating book by the former Glasgow University music professor Hugh Macdonald called Music in 1853 – The Biography of a Year,  fascinating for the fact it applies “biography” in the lateral rather than vertical sense. Turning the axis of history on its side we perceive a vivid snapshot of music history, alerting us to an enriching concurrence of divergent musical voices, in 1853’s case primarily Brahms, Berlioz, Wagner and Liszt.

The works featured in this RSNO programme over the weekend were by no means products of a single year. But in bringing together Ravel’s saucy La valse (completed 1920), Rachmaninov’s truculent Piano Concerto No 1 (finalised 1919) and Vaughan Williams’ moodily colourful A London Symphony (original completion 1913, revised 1933) conductor John Wilson treated us to a panoply of roughly coexisting, yet divergent, styles. All three composers were born in the 1870s, lived through a turbulent period where the hegemony of Austro-German Romanticism faced challenges from new tonal frameworks and nationalist trends, each addressing the dilemma in their own way.

Ravel, of course, had French blood coursing through his veins, so the idea of celebrating a popular dance style (in this case the Viennese waltz tradition of Johann Strauss) must have been music to his Gallic ears. As Wilson’s rather enigmatic interpretation accentuated, Ravel’s approach was one of exaggerated fantasy, swirling irony and plentiful decadence. 

What made it interesting was the extent to which this performance aimed to realign emphases within the scoring. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. While attempting to increase the muffled mystery of the opening, important lines were lost, as if emanating from a subterranean echo chamber. Once it found its feet, though, and aside from encouraging bombastic explosions from bass drum and timpani, Wilson secured levels of woozy intoxication that seemed closer to the meaning of the notes.

We seldom hear Rachmaninov’s First Piano Concerto, but as soloist Sir Stephen Hough’s rhetorically intense performance verified, it deserves a worthier place among the composer’s more popular concertos. With Rachmaninov the Romantic spirit is fulsomely preserved, which Hough and the RSNO immediately captured in the feisty opening bars. 

As in his recent Scottish appearances – in December he gave Grieg’s famous concerto a highly-personalised going-over in the BBC SSO’s 90th Anniversary Concert – Hough loaded this performance with biting characterisation, instinctively-shaped melodic phrasing, and thunderously precise energy. There was even whimsicality in the central Andante, countering beautifully its initial mysterious charm. Rabid flippancy in the exuberant final movement added to its showpiece brilliance, but not without reflection that coloured the inevitable big tunes, or Hough’s occasional delving into the music’s fiery demons. Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat, as an encore, served its calming purpose.

Wilson seemed most naturally at home in Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No 2, its narrative of a now bygone London town – from the solemn tolling of Big Ben to winsome flower sellers and bustling streets – wrapped in the composer’s familiar modal nostalgia. Its misted opening, Wilson demanding the softest of pianissimos, set in motion a performance of searing cinematic flow and expansive vision. 

The awakening surge of the ensuing Allegro; the folksy resilience of the slow movement and its soulful, valedictory viola solo (movingly articulated by section principal Tom Dunn); the jaunty Scherzo; and the harsher reality, though ultimately distant reflection, expressed in the Finale; all found effusive voice and fluid context. As with the opening, the final bass notes were a magical whisper that evaporated timelessly into the ether. A spellbinding moment.

Ken Walton 

(Photo credit: RSNO/Clara Cowen)

RSNO / Sondergard / Loch

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

One of the most inventive creations during the Covid pandemic was VOPERA’s online production of Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortileges with players from the London Phil and a cast that included Karen Cargill as ‘Maman’ (review: VOPERA: L’enfant et les sortileges | VoxCarnyx).

In fact the RSNO gave the work’s Scottish premiere in 1975, 50 years after its first performance in Monte Carlo, and a further half a century later, the orchestra teamed up with the current crop of talent at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland to present a staging that not only had the perfect context in the orchestra’s season programme, but also used Glasgow’s concert hall impressively well.

To accommodate the performance behind and above them, the orchestra platform had been extended into the front few rows of the stalls, and the effect on the sound was revelatory from the first work in the concert’s first half.

That was Paul Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a wonderful piece of orchestration that didn’t need the Disney connection from Fantasia to be a well-chosen partner for the Ravel. With its brilliant use of contrabassoon and a series of other solo instrumental turns, it was ideal aural preparation for the cleverness  of Ravel’s magical story.

Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which followed, was probably the main attraction for many ticket-buyers, especially as it was played by Ethan Loch, whose performance was being filmed for an upcoming documentary. Soloist and conductor Thomas Sondergard – together with first clarinet Timothy Orpen – served up a perfect Rhapsody, utterly true to its genre-spanning intentions.

However much the pianist was actually improvising his interpretation, it was distinctive and individual, and the pace never let up. Loch’s flamboyant encore of a cadenza from his own piano concerto was less to my taste, but virtuosic.

The collective endeavour behind the 45-minute opera after the interval was nothing short of magnificent. From the choir stalls, the RSNO Youth Chorus made immaculately-drilled contributions, while the RCS Chamber Choir, prepared by Andrew Nunn, sang from stage left of the central playing area. Many of them were costumed for their step-out roles alongside the soloists cast by the Conservatoire’s Head of Vocal Performance and Opera, Jane Irwin.

Mezzo Anna Stephany, as the child, was the sole professional singer, but you’d hardly have known that from the performances of the students. Singling out any individuals would be invidious because this was a terrific collective effort, and as much staging as the piece requires. Ailsa Munro’s costumes and props were witty and apposite, and the direction of Roxana Cole, well-known from her work in challenging venues with Scottish Opera, made remarkably effective use of the limited space, with RSNO first flute Katherine Bryan enthusiastically part of the young company as the instrumental voice of the Princess.

The visible “pit band” in front of them was full of such inspired solo turns, and the skills of this cohort at the Conservatoire, both as soloists and in ensemble were uniformly impressive. If there were a lot of elements for Sondergard to keep working as a team, he appeared to be having the best time doing so.

Keith Bruce

Picture of rehearsal of L’enfant et les sortileges by Hope Connachan-Holmes

RSNO / Poska

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Estonian conductor Kristiina Poska, once a regular visitor with the SCO and now a guest conductor with the RSNO, has a distinctive style as well as immaculate tailoring on the podium. She uses a baton in her left hand but just as often her rigorous time-keeping is indicated with her right: Poska may be ambidextrous, but she is never ambiguous.

The RSNO gave her an interesting challenge in the middle of her latest programme – the world premiere of Elena Langer’s The Lives of Birds, the latest of a sequence of works the orchestra has championed by the Russian-born British composer.

The concert began, however, on more familiar turf for the conductor with Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten by her compatriot Arvo Part. It is an emblematic work from the Estonian composer, instrumental but rooted in early choral music and the sound of bells.

A single tolling bell signals the dense writing of the canon for strings, and – in partnership with RSNO leader Maya Iwabuchi – Poska had the RSNO players produce an intensity of sound from the first bars that was perfect for the piece. A work of elegant simplicity, it packed a punch in this performance.

Fortunately perhaps, a brief explanation of her new work from Elena Langer separated the Part from her new piece. Like Jonathan Dove, Langer brings a fondness for the comedic to her composition, and The Lives of Birds, which imparts human characteristics to her avian subjects, is no exception.

These birds are stalked by their vision of the Grim Reaper, a white cat, and their brief existence is concerned with territorial mastery and preening in the mirror, as well, of course, as singing.

The soloist was soprano Anna Dennis, like librettist Glyn Maxwell a regular associate of the composer, and a singer whose ability to master a difficult modern score and perform its huge demands of pitch and range with something approaching effortless ease is very well known.

Dennis sang to her usual high standard, her enunciation of Maxwell’s excellent text conversationally precise, and her imparting of distinct personalities to Ashleaf, Moss and Robin Red the best the work could want.

The music itself is far from light, and as well as the work of the singer, the ingredients for the orchestra are sumptuous, filled with bird calls in the percussion as well as the winds, depictions of the landscape and the ticking of that threatening clock measuring the cycle of life.

If the narrative of those works was never obscure, that of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony has been worried over since its composition. Not by Poska and the RSNO in this performance however – what they gave us was a celebration of the score as superbly orchestrated music.

The Fourth is full of brilliantly simple ideas given the fullest possible expression, from the “fateful” minor-key fanfare with which it begins, through the lovely melodious Andantino slow movement to the demanding pizzicato Scherzo and the gloriously expressive finale.

Poska shaped that musical story superbly, and the players added the details of solo exuberance and ensemble cohesion to what was a thrilling performance.

Keith Bruce

Rehearsal picture by Clara Cowen

RSNO / Widmann / Eberle

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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