Tag Archives: Ryan Bancroft

SCO / Bancroft

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City Halls, Glasgow

Eric Lu is not what you’d call the most exuberant of interpreters. The young American-born pianist, who rocketed to international fame as winner of the 2018 Leeds International Piano Competition at the age of only 20, is an artist who applies consideration before panache. We witnessed this two years ago when he played a cool Chopin with the BBC SSO. 

That’s not to say his Grieg Piano Concerto with the SCO on Friday lacked showmanship – after which, in any case, his flashy Chopin encore dispelled any doubts lingering in that direction. And where superlative bravado did surface in the Grieg it did so with mindful and inter-relational context. There was much poetic reflection where others settle for sustained urgency.

If this introduced a certain ambivalence to the performance, giving us becalmed episodes in the outer movements where Lu’s reluctance to push the music forward had a questionable tendency to counter its natural momentum, it also offered flecks of insight into the concerto’s inner charm. 

Under American conductor Ryan Bancroft (a one-time Leverhulme Conducting Fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) the SCO unveiled gems of orchestral detail that so often get lost in the wash. When, for instance, has the central Adagio ever sounded so timeless, the strings patiently teasing out the opening theme with subliminal warmth, over which Lu’s pianism emerged in a liberated (if not completely flawless) flow of self-expression. 

Where the opening movement bore faltering momentum, the Finale enjoyed a more convincing exuberance, its breezy rusticity imbued with a modicum of wistfulness that further stamped this performance with distinctiveness of its own. 

The overall programme theme was Nordic, a happy coincidence in the wake of last week’s Nordic Music Days festival. Before the Norwegian sounds of Grieg came Swedish composer Andrea Tarrodi’s Lucioles, a short work from 2011 that translates an evocative haiku describing a lake illuminated by fireflies by French writer François JJ Ribes into a vivid impressionistic soundscape. Swarms of orchestral density are shot through with darting flecks of solo instrumentation, which Bancroft engineered with delicate and shimmering precision. A pity about the unanswered mobile phone that antagonised and outlived the final stillness.

As SCO violinist Aisling O’Dea suggested in her thoughtful spoken introduction to the concert, there was a literal sense of journey implicit in this programme, where the final destination was Finland and Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony, famous for its radiant Swan Hymn and an ending that keeps you guessing as to which repeated chord is actually the last.

As with the Grieg, it took time to truly establish its persona. The impatient gathering of motives that mark the opening lacked bite and anticipation, leaving the first movement a little short of conviction. That changed instantly with the slow movement where Bancroft established a neat combination of edgy but delicate persistence, homing in on the Mahler influences that colour its wilder moments. The Finale delivered in literal terms but lacked that necessary coating of wonderment. The final chords, touched by a perceivable anxiety, echoed that matter-of-factness.

 Ken Walton

This programme is repeated in Aberdeen Music Hall on Sat 9 Nov.
Andrea Tarrodi’s Serenade in Seven Colours is available on the SCO’s Digital Series from 10 Nov – 10 Dec. See www.sco.org.uk for details.

SCO / Bancroft

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City Halls, Glasgow

Of the many quality ingredients in Friday evening’s SCO concert conducted by Ryan Bancroft, the droll introductory remarks of recent recruit as the orchestra’s first viola, Max Mandell, deserve their own recognition. Chosen to talk about the American music in the programme for his accent, he guessed, the Canadian’s disparaging description of contemporary Connecticut as a haven for dislikeable people will live long in the mind.

He was altogether more admiring of the music Charles Ives composed about the place a century ago, and the performance of Three Places in New England we heard justified his enthusiasm. The SCO strings were beautifully calibrated from the first bars of what was a wonderfully atmospheric reading of the work by Bancroft, the music sounding perfectly suited to these forces.

Through all the snatches of songs and tunes, changes in dynamics and direction, the cacophonous climax of Putnam’s Camp and the pastoral idyll, climax and coda of the closing section, the conductor found a superb musical flow that was always moving, in both senses of the word.

If such a continuous thread was less apparent in the world premiere that followed, that may simply be because Errollyn Wallen’s Dances for Orchestra is quite differently constructed. The work, an SCO co-commission with the Irish and Swedish Chamber Orchestras, is exactly what it says, and in its rich mix of melodies and rhythms, and occasional clashing discord, it sat well between Ives and Copland.

It is a big work that begins with a Latin feel, before morphing into a lopsided waltz led by the flutes. A funky pizzicato string figure opens the second section with the clarinet introducing a one-note samba on top. Later some hard rock riffage from the basses is decorated with a little jig from the winds before a stately pavane expands into cinematic scoring. Perhaps inevitably, the finale borrows from traditional Scots reels, replete with foot-stomping.

On first hearing, the piece seemed a bit of a jigsaw, but a highly entertaining one. The composer had specifically requested that Bancroft direct the premiere because of their shared history as students of dance, and the concert was appropriately completed by the full ballet score of Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring.

The young Californian conductor, who trained at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and is now Chief Conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic as well as Principal Conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, was by chance following Kristiina Poska’s precision reading of the Suite with the RSNO last week. The full score is twice as long and although it is never as dark as the titles of some of its episodes suggest (Fear in the Night, Day of Wrath), its range of colour and tempi means there is less danger of tending towards Hollywood, as Copland explicitly prohibited.

What Bancroft found again was a lovely narrative line, so that choreographer Martha Graham’s outline to the composer was always apparent. The tale came to a quite exquisite conclusion in the last bars of The Lord’s Day as flute, clarinet, strings and percussion exchanged phrases – producing a spontaneous standing ovation from a large number of those in the stalls of the City Hall.

Keith Bruce