ANTON Bruckner famously worried over his Symphony No 4 for many years – Sir Simon Rattle recently claimed to have found more than a dozen different versions of the work. By way of comparison, Ryan Wigglesworth reworking a piece originally commissioned by the Halle and the Bergen Phil – who gave the premiere six months before he became Chief Conductor of the BBC SSO – may just be coincidental, but there were other points of parallel.
As Bruckner symphonies are lengthy, so Wigglesworth’s Magnificat is longer than many a composer’s setting of Mary’s prayer; Sir James MacMillan’s is only a little over a third as long. At half an hour, Wigglesworth’s is a big concert piece on its own and it was programmed here as the filling in a Bruckner sandwich, preceded by and flowing from his Ave Maria, with the symphony following the interval.
This Magnificat breaks the Latin text down into five movements, which allows for a lot of exploration of texture in the orchestration but perhaps serves the totality of the poetry less well. There is, nonetheless, some lovely word-setting, both for the soprano soloist – the composer’s wife Sophie Bevan, to whom the work is dedicated – and a small chorus, the BBC Singers.
The single word of the title was thoroughly explored at the start, gently at first by Bevan before being taken up by the choir. It was in the second movement, Et exsultavit, that the soloist was able to show off her operatic power and range, while in the third she was partnered with the eleven men of the choir. The full choral ensemble had to wait until the finale and the rhythmic Sicut locutus est for its best ensemble showpiece.
Does the work lack the coherence of brevity? Perhaps. There are times when Wigglesworth’s exploration of the capabilities of his large orchestral forces seems a little “Young People’s Guide”, but there are some wonderfully original uses of combinations of instruments and textures. Musically, if not lyrically, the structure of the piece is very beguiling even if its emotional heart is not revealed until the tutti of the last section.
Bevan sang at both the Bergen Phil premiere with conductor Ed Gardner and the Halle’s first performance in Manchester three years ago, with her husband conducting, where he teamed it with Mahler, whose approach to Bruckner 4 was to cut it. Wigglesworth’s context here seemed especially apposite though, and his direction of the Bruckner symphony as good as it gets, for a symphony that is the composer’s most accessible but slightly looked down upon by serious devotees. That “Romantic” label probably doesn’t help.
To my ears the SSO strings (across all sections) and brass were the conductor’s best allies on the night. Although principal horn Chris Gough was obviously awarded the first solo bow at the curtain-call, it had not been his finest hour. The composer’s replacement Scherzo is probably his most recognisable music to many ears, and it was crisply rendered in this performance, and the Beethovian echoes in the recapitulations of the Finale were unmistakeable. The handling of the diminuendo before the third (or fourth) last climax by Wigglesworth and the SSO strings was world class.
The concert was recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on June 11 and will be available for 30 days thereafter on BBC Sounds.
If few complain that Beethoven wrote only one opera, Debussy’s singular contribution to the canon is a frustration. Pelleas et Melisande may be a musical masterpiece, but by way of comparison it would have been good if the composer had completed his planned As You Like It and written some music for a robust heroine like Rosalind and a confirmed cynic like Jacques.
As it is, his adaptation of Maurice Maeterlinck’s symbolist play is unique, and not only in the composer’s own catalogue. Its tale of a mysterious princess who has lost her memory as well as her crown, and is drawn into the dysfunctional family of another court by the older, greying Golaud to become the obsession of his handsome younger brother is set to a wondrous orchestral score and asks the principal singers (and the audience) to do without the arias and ensembles that are the tasty morsels of opera heritage. Debussy was following in the footsteps of Richard Wagner, specifically Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal, but forging his own individual path.
Like Scottish Opera’s Tristan earlier in the month, there is a lot to be said for a concert performance that in this case sidesteps all the symbolic water features, towers and dungeons in the story and lets the score do its work. That said, the luxury cast of singers here would grace any staged production stylishly. Bass Alasdair Miles sang the role of Arkel in David McVicar’s beautiful Scottish Opera production in 2017, Huw Montague Rendall has been acclaimed as “the Pelleas of his generation” and Sophie Bevan, who has sung Melisande in Dresden, gave a nicely nuanced reading here of what is a tricky amorphous role.
It also is not an especially showy part for a soprano. Karen Cargill, as Genevieve, had the more ear-catching music of Act 1 although Melisande’s music does perk up once she has Pelleas to sing with. Montague Rendall, who alone sang from memory, has the ideal voice for the role, which straddles tenor and baritone range, while David Stout, who sang Golaud, is a baritone of richer lower strength, exactly as his music requires. His first entry in Act 1 was immediately commanding, and he brought a fine acting game to the performance as well.
The smaller roles – Richard Morrison’s Shepherd and Doctor and young soprano Beth Stirling in the (short) trouser role of Yniold – were no less well sung, and Stirling made a memorable young lad, even if the inclusion of her superfluous Act 4 scene, which is almost always cut from staged productions, made the second half seem very long indeed.
That decision of conductor Ryan Wigglesworth was understandable – a concert performance might as well include every note in the score – but it did make this an epic Pelleas, finishing fully three and a quarter hours after it began (including the interval). The extended demise of Melisande at the end of Act 5 seemed very long indeed, exquisitely written though it is.
For all of that time, Wigglesworth’s direction was exemplary, attentive to all the details and with excellent balance, including the off-stage elements of brass, percussion and a chorus of the RCS Chamber Choir, prepared by Andrew Nunn. There was terrific playing from all the wind soloists, the harps of Helen Thomson and Sharon Griffiths, and Chris Gough’s horn section.
The BBC SSO strings were, however, the real stars of the evening, and for much of the time Wigglesworth seemed relaxed enough to enjoy their playing as much as the audience did. Brooding and intense when that was called for, and spicy in the more sensuous music, from the first violins to the basses, each section had memorable ensemble moments, and many of them.
Keith Bruce
The performance is repeated at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall on Sunday from 3pm and was recorded for future broadcast on Radio 3, after which it will be available for 30 days on BBC Sounds.
Cross-connections played a part in making sense of Thursday’s matinee programme by the BBC SSO under its chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth. Take Shakespeare for a start. Thea Musgrave’s brief concert piece, Aurora, extracts its titular inspiration from a mention in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, while Elgar’s symphonic study Falstaff hones in on that eponymous rogue’s mixed fortunes in the Henry plays. Mention of A Midsummer Night’s Dream reminds us of Benjamin Britten, whose substantial Cello Symphony and Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra closed both concert halves respectively. Thus a tenuous tangled web was woven.
In the end, though, it was the conflicting essence of the programme’s components that created a sense of unity-in-diversity, a journey of incongruous stop-offs. That said, there was more than a whiff of Brittenesque imagery in Musgrave’s Aurora – a hugely self-contented work written in 1999 by the Scots-born composer, now two years short of her 100th birthday, for the awakening minds of Los Angeles’ Colburn School of Performing Arts students – that gave it context as an appetiser to Britten’s Cello Symphony.
This was the softer, less clinically acerbic side to Musgrave, a ravishing viola solo (movingly introduced by principal violist Andrew Berridge) giving rise to an enchanting reverie that also featured prominent solos by leader Emma Steele and lead cellist Rudi de Groote. The full ensemble caressed the music, its rise and fall exquisitely measured, its single-note ending profound in its simplicity. Once or twice the detailed textures seemed to slacken in purpose, but only momentarily.
It was therefore an easy step from that scene-setter to Britten’s 1963 masterpiece, the substantial Cello Symphony written originally for Rostropovich and performed here by German cellist Alban Gerhardt. This orchestra and soloist were no strangers to the concerto, having collaborated in a recording under Andrew Manze in this very hall back in 2013.
Self-assured authority made its presence felt instantly, Gerhardt responding to the amorphous lower strings with growing belligerence, the intensity escalating before the opening movement’s exhaustive final breath. The ensuing Scherzo released a frenzy of nervy hyperactivity before the dark entanglements of the Adagio, the complex introversion of Gerhardt’s cadenza (partly in fiery combination with Gordon Rigby’s timpani), and a finale touching on the burlesque and resolving in splendour and resolve. Wigglesworth captained a mostly impressive SSO display.
Elgar’s Falstaff rarely sees the light of day, which seems perplexing in a performance that so effectively captured the multi-faceted persona of the enigmatic hero, yet at the same time reflected Elgar’s insistence that “Falstaff is the name, but Shakespeare – the whole of human life – is the theme”. For there is a universal spirit to this music that is forever Elgar – a complexity of pompous themes, chattering humour and aching sentimentality – and that is what Wigglesworth and an expansive SSO observed.
From arrogance to debauchery, drunkenness to practical jokiness, sentimentalist to banished fool, the musical outcome was riveting. The SSO responded with tingling virtuosity, from gushing warmth and heraldic grandeur to febrile vivacity. As such, though possibly by accident, it was the perfect preparation for the more clinical orchestral dissection of Britten’s Young Person’s Guide. In what was veering towards an overlong concert, the masterful succinctness and sheer dexterity of Britten’s musical ingenuity secured a refreshing finale. And, unlike the Elgar, one that ended on a high note.
Ken Walton
This concert was recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in Concert, after which it will be available via BBC Sounds for 30 days
Ninety years is quite an achievement for any orchestra, so you’d expect there to be quite a song and dance about it as a matter of celebration. In the event – which was a “birthday concert” at its City Halls home, broadcast live on Radio 3 – the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth played it relatively cool.
Nothing provocatively challenging; nothing blatantly celebratory (not even an impromptu chorus of “Happy Birthday”); nothing emblematically Scottish; more a regular BBC SSO concert boosted by the presence of eminent pianist Sir Stephen Hough in Grieg’s popular concerto (thank you Messrs Morecambe, Wise and “Mr Preview”), and a rare performance of Sir Michael Tippett’s wartime masterpiece A Child of Our Time, featuring the topnotch voices of the National Youth Choir of Scotland (NYCoS).
True, Radio 3 had despatched its fast-talking No 1 Scots presenter Tom Service to emcee the event, offering as some helpful context the fact that Tippett had actually conducted his oratorio with this very orchestra in the 1960s, though of course “not necessarily these players!”. And there was, let it be said, a new work commissioned as an opener to the occasion, Bacchanale by Ayanna Witter-Johnson.
To evoke the spirit required, London-born Witter-Johnson turned to her Jamaican ancestry for inspiration, notably the exuberance of the Caribbean carnival. Bacchanale burst explosively into life, an orgy of rhythmic intoxication, ecstatic trumpeting, belligerent ostinati, sensuous string tropes and ample side helpings of percussion. The problem is it quickly ran out of ideas, everything piled into the initial outburst beyond which it had little new to say – a bit like a party popper. Or, as one astute observer within earshot put it, “a piece of a thousand endings”.
It did eventually end, signalling the way for Hough and a take on Grieg’s Concerto that reflected this pianist’s very personalised intellectualism. That’s a good thing, in the sense that he established a tantalising atmosphere of anticipation. Melodies that most of us could whistle in our sleep were often reshaped with just a hint of unexpected hiatus or recalibrated emphases.
There was enormous power in Hough’s delivery, fiercely rhetorical in the opening movement, ravishingly shaped and intoned in the Adagio, approaching giddy (if occasionally splashy) heights in the Finale. Hough’s idiosyncrasies and forceful personality presented an interpretational challenge for Wigglesworth and the SSO, who did well to read the majority of intentions. Explaining that his choice of encore was governed by the need to avoid a broken piano string, Hough transferred his thoughts elegantly to Chopin’s E flat Nocturne.
If anything epitomised the underlying solemnity of Thursday evening it was A Child of Our Time. Inspired by the 1938 assassination in Paris of a German Embassy worker by a stateless young Jewish refugee and the resultant escalation of pre-war Jewish persecution, Tippett’s harrowing secular oratorio recasts it as a profoundly universal parable framed within a sequence of African American spirituals. How could the words, “we cannot have them in our Empire – they shall not work nor draw a dole”, not resonate chillingly today? Or Tippett’s emotive treatment of the interwoven spirituals fail to convey the rich seam of humanity entrenched in the music?
Wigglesworth gelled his forces well, helped enormously by NYCoS’ flawless, articulate solidarity. Immaculate intonation, glowing expressiveness and thrilling homogeneity belied their youth, adding a spiritual glow to a busily efficient orchestral canvas and solo vocal quartet whose animated storytelling proved a central fascination, not least the ravishing mezzo voice of Beth Taylor, John Findon’s euphoric tenor and Ashley Riches’ proficient bass. Where Pumeza Matshikiza’s soprano was a potent enough force, her diction let her down, occasionally her intonation.
And that was it, a substantial programme that in so many ways could just have been a typical night at the SSO. Maybe that’s exactly what we were celebrating.
Ken Walton
(Photo by Martin Shields)
This concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and is now available for 30 days via BBC Sounds. It was also filmed for future broadcast on Inside Classical, available after broadcast on BBC iPlayer
At this year’s Edinburgh Festival, Head of Music Nik Zekulin was making no secret of his exasperation with the inability of audiences to switch off their mobile devices for the duration of a concert, Ryan Wang’s Chopin recital at the Queen’s Hall being only the most spectacularly disrupted.
Before the opening concert of the BBC SSO’s 90th anniversary season, R3 presenter Gillian Moore made the usual plea for audience members to ensure their phones were silenced for the live broadcast, but Chief Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth was forced to halt the last movement of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No 3 and recap a few bars when a ringtone persisted beyond endurance.
It was, perhaps, small consolation, but the efficiency with which the interruption was dealt spoke eloquently of the focus of players and conductor on the music. The impression that remains is of a sparkling and detailed account of the work with Wigglesworth steering its many changes of tone and direction with great style.
Without being quite as flamboyant, the symphony shares a lot of DNA with the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini that preceded it, the starring role of the piano instead shared across the orchestra. The SSO, with six guests in key positions, including leader Clio Gould, was full-sized for the first time in the evening and the big percussion section, five horns and brass all made their presence felt in the climax of a superb season-opening programme.
It had begun with the Scottish premiere of Wigglesworth’s for Laura, after Bach, his musical memorial to the orchestra’s former leader Laura Samuel, who died at the end of 2024. First unveiled at the end of July in the Royal Albert Hall, it is a work for string orchestra that the composer has spun from the Gigue in Bach’s Partita No 3, which Samuel recorded during her final illness. It is a captivating tribute, more celebratory than elegiac and should find a lasting place in the repertoire for its fascinating way with the source material.
The concert’s guest soloist was young violinist Daniel Lozakovich whom the orchestra first met in South Korea during its Proms tour there at the end of last year. He followed Schumann’s Violin Concerto with an encore of the Sarabande from Bach’s Partita No 2 in what was a particularly apt and lovely way to end the first half.
That addition spoke of Lozakovich’s keen musical intelligence, which had already been very evident from his performance of the concerto. Few violinists of his age and experience know this work as well as he clearly does and he and Wigglesworth shaped this performance to make the best case for it. The balance between soloist and orchestra was as perfect as one might hope, the slow movement a narrative of beguiling beauty from its opening dialogue with first cello Rudi De Groote, and the remarkably upbeat finale defying its tricky reputation.
Long-term followers of the BBC SSO would have recognised in its final season programme of Beethoven, Sibelius and a contemporary concerto a concert that played to its strengths. It’s around 30 years since the orchestra’s heroic and revelatory Beethoven and Sibelius symphonic cycles under Osmo Vänskä, and you can still sense the legacy of that in the SSO’s palpable self-motivation. Similarly, even the most demanding of modern repertoire is easy meat to a band that, only a few weeks ago, sailed painlessly through the uncompromising trials of its own Tectonics Festival.
So nothing in Thursday’s live broadcast concert for BBC Radio 3 presented the slightest discomfort. Beethoven’s Haydn-inspired First Symphony bore a zestful shared familiarity, contrasting later with the same composer’s belligerent, lesser-known ‘Namensfeier’ Overture. The tactile subtleties of Hans Abrahamsen’s 2019 Horn Concerto, with the Berlin Philharmonic’s principal horn Stefan Dohr as dedicatee and soloist, were voiced in this Scottish premiere performance with haunting, subliminal delicacy. Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony more or less played itself.
It was when chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth’s own particular strengths struck common currency with his orchestra that the most satisfying moments occurred. He’s clearly in tune with the music of Abrahamsen, championing the Dane as the SSO’s composer-in-residence, and in this performance responded to the tantalising haziness of its sound world with nuggets of textural detail that illuminated the soloist’s patiently emerging eloquence.
From the amorphous intangibility of the opening bars – as puzzlingly indistinct as any Morse soundtrack – through a maze of motivic manipulation tinged with spectral hues and darkening shadows towards a quickening pulse and more glistening optimism, Wigglesworth shaped the work’s slow-winding progress with perceptive definition. Crowning that, Dohr’s horn playing was exceptional, a gradual quest towards the rhapsodic, the mild distortion of the instrument’s natural harmonics peppering the solo line with moments of discomforting allure.
In the Beethoven and Sibelius, Wigglesworth did what was necessary, which was generally to play safe. There was nothing wrong with Beethoven’s First Symphony, save to say it was predictable, which slightly sold us short on the slow teasers that open the first and final movements. But there was a joyous inner spirit to the performance that compensated, and some scintillating interplay within the wind section.
The Beethoven Overture – a work the composer seemed to lose interest in in the course of its composition – proved an unexpected delight. If anything measured up to the common vision of the composer as a tetchy intolerant individual, this did. The curtness of its motivic dialogue, the glorious grinding irritation of its dissonances, were fully embraced by this feisty performance. There was even a sense that this piece is not in fact without flaws, which lent it a certain spoof quality, assuming it’s indeed possible for a composer to do so with his own work.
Seriousness lies at the heart of Sibelius’ Fifth, albeit warmed by the journey it traces towards the horns’ swirling climactic “Swan Hymn” in the final movement. What this performance didn’t fully grasp was the minutiae, the details required to give a buzz, to animate what otherwise become neutered textures. Wigglesworth seemed content to leave these largely unattended, offering a bland landscape in its wake. There was enough colourful initiative from the SSO itself to maintain interest, and the overall framework of the symphony was proportionately satisfying. But Sibelius is much more than that, as SSO audiences of old know well.
Ken Walton
This concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and is available on BBC Sounds for 30 days
There are moments in the life of a music critic when a concert is thrust into the musical stratosphere by a performance that is literally out of this world. These are precious occasions, few and far between, and it happened on Thursday when the RCS-trained mezzo soprano Beth Taylor unleashed her first subliminal utterances as the Angel in Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius.
Up to that point, this account by the BBC SSO and joint singing forces of the Huddersfield Choral Society and RCS Chamber Choir in a voluminous Paisley Abbey had paced itself steadfastly under chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth, who treaded positively but carefully in likely reaction to the building’s tricky geography.
For it was a major challenge asking the distantly-placed choirs to successfully penetrate the foreground welter of a full symphony orchestra. Details were inevitably lost, but there was a stalwart precision in a delivery that gave this Gerontius enough spiritual fruitiness and physical space to satisfy its religious theatricality.
The demons and troubled souls expressed within the high-minded Catholicism of Cardinal Newman’s text may have lacked absolute full-blooded venom or visceral pain at times, but there was plentiful sincerity of purpose, Wigglesworth’s unhurried deliberations urging genuinely liquid sonorities from the SSO and a tidy sense of the music’s operatic scope.
Much of that was down to a well-matched solo team. As Gerontius – the sinning soul whose final journey takes him before his God before finding eventual peace through redemption – tenor Brenden Patrick Gunnell was a towering protagonist. His eye-contact with the audience – he sang predominantly off the book – was as compelling as the calculated vocal engineering and nuanced phrasing that together ensured such a commanding portrayal. Neal Davies’ profound and penetrating bass performance as Priest and Angel of the Agony offered an powerful foil.
Crowning all this, however, was Beth Taylor’s mesmerising performance as the Angel. Here was a voice that instantly transfixed, reverberating with voluminous magnitude in its gravelly lower reaches, effortlessly thrilling at its soaring climactic heights, served by crystal clear annunciation and unceasingly intuitive musicianship. A former grand finalist in the 2023 Cardiff Singer of the World, she’s undoubtedly a name to watch.
So much to enjoy in a Gerontius that was only marginally constrained by the challenges of the venue. That’s unlikely to be the case in Sunday’s Edinburgh Usher Hall repeat. Worth catching if you can.
Ken Walton
This programme is repeated at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh on Sunday 2 March at 3pm, which will be recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3. Full information at www.bbc.co.uk/bbcsso.
It’s over a decade since the BBC SSO’s memorable focus on the Vaughan Williams symphonies under Andrew Manze opened our ears to those that might not be so familiar as the Sea Symphony or Sinfonia Antartica. One bold, bumper London 2012 Proms programme ambitiously packaged together the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth, the first of these proving a revelation for many unfamiliar with its enigmatic harshness and perfunctory conclusion.
In the SSO’s first Thursday concert of 2025 the Fourth was revisited, this time under the orchestra’s current chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth, in this instance as the brusque conclusion to a journey through Mozart and Britten. That, in itself, offered a broader context for the work. Where Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C minor, K491 – the sole presentation in a short first half – elicited a ruminative Classicism tinged with Romantic pre-echoes, Britten’s Suite on English Folk Tunes ‘A Time There Was…’, a quintessential gem from his twilight years, proved a salty appetiser to the surface brutalism of the Vaughan Williams.
Wigglesworth’s own view of this 1930s’ symphony seemed both forceful and cautious. The compelling severity of the opening – spookily heralded by one of many mobile phone alerts going off among the audience in anticipation of Storm Eowyn – was instantly captivating, the SSO in virile form, responsive to the music’s unrelenting dissonance. Yet out of this deepening abyss emerged moments of unmatched beauty, rich veins of Vaughan Williams’ calm, even suggestions of autumnal mists conjured up by densely atmospheric lower-string textures.
In the Andante moderato, underpinned by its anxiously persistent walking bass, Wigglesworth gleaned an aching austerity, a Shostakovich-like leanness heightened by its powerful organic crescendos. The final two movements, linked in a manner similar to Beethoven’s Fifth, marked a potent return to the belligerence of the start, mischievously insurgent in the Scherzo and curtly ferocious in the barbarous Epilogue fugato. It wasn’t the tightest, most terrorising final vision of this symphony, but it had plenty to say, especially in terms of its softer undercurrents.
In relation to that, Britten’s 1974 Suite was an exquisite confection, throwing up folk melodies and tossing them aside with frivolous abandon and invention in the course of its five-movement journey. From the dream-like soundscape of The Bitter Withy (echoes of Britten’s own A Midsummer Night’s Dream) to the rustic vulgarity and warped harmonic logic of Hankin Booby and brusquely playful strings of Hunt the Squirrel, this was a gripping performance.
Wigglesworth played the dual role of soloist-director in the Mozart concerto, serving up a vision that certainly drew out the reflective dimension of the minor-key work, but never quite got to grips with its inner drive. Everything was tidy and precise but generally inconsequential, even in an ambitious first movement cadenza that veered towards Busoni and beyond. There was something a little too sleepy about the Larghetto, and where a sudden spark lit up the opening Finale theme, the ensuing variations fell short of matching that promise.
Ken Walton
This concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. The programme is repeated at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh on Sunday 26 January, which will also be recorded for future broadcast.
On the eve of its departure to perform in South Korea, the BBC SSO was on top form on Thursday under its chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth. And what a programme: perfectly proportioned in the way its opening half explored the ephemeral world of Harrison Birtwistle and South Korean composer Donghoon Shin, before filling the second half with the heroic irrepressibility of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony.
Birtwistle’s Night’s Black Bird is both sinister and beautiful, featuring some of his most eloquent orchestral writing. Written 20 years ago, it’s the product of unfinished business, the composer sensing that ideas he hadn’t found space for in The Shadow of Night, written three years earlier, deserved their place in the sun. The later work starts and finishes with much of the same material, but the inner journey is a whole different story.
It was exquisitely related in a performance sensitive to Birtwistle’s textural precision, inherent theatricality, and in this case a tender lyricism untypical of a composer better known perhaps for his more outrageous musical pugilism. Wigglesworth struck the perfect mood at the start, a morose unfolding of potent ideas – a kind of de profundis – from which arose the weird and increasingly persistent piccolo birdsong, a psychedelic frenzy of colour, and an inevitable shattering climax that instantly dissipated towards a distant tolling of bells.
That charged atmosphere was ideal for what came next, Donghoon Shin’s equally crystalline cello concerto Nachtergebung (Night Surrender). Based on the Expressionist poetry of Georg Trakl, Shin conjures up a sound world that is mysterious to the point of exotic.
In a supreme and exquisite performance featuring fellow South Korean Jaemin Han, the cellist issued a lonely, meditative opening, gradually enveloped by a halo of emerging, unconventional orchestral effects. Successive sections – the more animated Trumpeten, the icy shards of Winterdämmerung and the frenetic excitement of Die Nacht – led eventually to the magical stillness of the closing Nachtergebung, the cello descending into nothingness. It was a performance that highlighted the virtuosity and imaginativeness of the scoring and its spellbinding charm, passing references to gamelan and jazz among its many evocative delights.
Beethoven’s Eroica felt like the perfect foil, Wigglesworth and his orchestra clicking as they’ve rarely clicked before. Their collective synergy was utterly infectious, the opening chords like a vicious hammer from which a cocktail of thoughtful inflexion, thrills and creative thought flowed with unflinching perceptiveness and to blinding effect. Where the Marcia funebre offered unhurried but never laborious respite, the Scherzo crackled with jubilance and those ecstatic horns in the Trio. The Finale sustained a triumphant inevitability all the way to its power-driven conclusion.
The detail was eye-opening and intoxicating, unearthing treasure among often-unsung inner voices, while Wigglesworth’s overall vision was masterful, notably void of his previous tendency – as in the Eroica he conducted at the Lammermuir Festival last year – to micromanage. He looked comfortably at ease, giving oodles of latitude to the SSO players, who responded with unmistakable initiative, self-determination and noticeable enjoyment.
Ken Walton
This concert was recorded for future broadcast on Radio 3, after which it will be available for 30 days on BBC Sounds
The opening concert in this season’s Sunday matinee series by the BBC SSO was a colourful affair, showcasing the high drama of Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique and featuring the superb young Georgian pianist Giorgi Gigashvili in Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto. But there was a note of poignancy too, as chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth asked that we turn our thoughts to SSO leader Laura Samuel, who died last week after a lengthy illness.
If, as he said, instilling joy was a factor in Samuel’s influence on the orchestra, Berlioz’ Roman Carnival Overture seemed the perfect vehicle with which to express it. The cocktail of emotions that ferment in the opening bars – the wild explosion of brass, a swarming undercurrent of strings, and the sweetness of the cor anglais’ languid melody – was emotionally all-encompassing, soon to establish an unstoppable momentum in Wigglesworth’s sweeping, thrusting interpretation. At its height it was a saucy mix of petulance, obstinate mayhem and delirious rapture. The final chords, pugilistic and perfunctory, added an ultimate tone of defiance.
What followed was quite the opposite but every bit as arresting, thanks to Gigashvili’s supreme musicianship and immaculate keyboard skills in the Beethoven. His opening gambit said everything. It was firm but elegant, nimble yet gracious, and above all oozing character and allure, which the SSO responded to with equal elan. At the height of the opening movement the elaborate fugal cadenza seemed in perfect proportion to Gigashvili’s focused overview, every gesture full of meaning, informed by eloquent intent.
The lyrical essence of the slow movement was meltingly expressed by the pianist’s deep and expansive tone, unexpected delights emerging such as the often-overlooked delicate conversation between soloist and pizzicato basses. The finale was perfectly crafted, supple and articulate, peppered with well-crafted whimsy.
To end with, it was back to the wild, unorthodox world of Berlioz and the eccentric excesses of his Symphonie fantastique. Wigglesworth teased out the opening bars effectively, an expectant series of gasps and sighs, before steering the opening movement on its vigorous symphonic journey. The ensuing Ball had a neat fluidity to it, though not always fully capturing its expressive elasticity. Similarly, the timeless magic that opens the Scene in the Country needed less hand-holding, but soon gave way to far more relaxed shaping and texturing, and a March to the Scaffold and Witches’ Sabbath guaranteed to terrify.
This time next week, the SSO will be on tour in South Korea headlining one of the BBC’s offshore mini-Proms series, including a condensed Last Night of the Proms. If it performs there with the same panache it displayed on Sunday, the Koreans are in for a treat.
Ken Walton
This concert was recorded for later broadcast on BBC Radio 3, after which it will be available on BBC Sounds for 30 days.
In the not-so-distant past, when Robert Schumann’s music was less often performed, the idea that his Second Symphony could emerge as comfort food at the end of a long programme would have seemed strange, yet that was almost what happened here.
That is not to say that there was anything amiss with Ryan Wiggleworth’s reading of the work. On the contrary, this Schumann 2 was the closing highlight of a lengthy programme that ranged over almost two centuries of music with the meat in the middle of the sandwich some chewy tasty stuff. Whether the bill of fare made sense as a concert menu is another question altogether.
That filling featured the guest soloist, tenor Mark Padmore, and there are precious few singers capable of serving it as effectively as he did. Arguably that includes the one for whom both works were written, Peter Pears, whose voice is not to every taste.
Padmore’s instrument is much easier to warm to and perhaps more technically secure. He dealt with the daunting intervals in the music of Benjamin Britten’s Nocturne of 1958, setting well-known English poets likely found in an anthology of verse, with deceptive ease. The vocal line is always challenging and, perversely, some of the most likeable music is given to the singer’s duet partners in the wind ensemble, although it is no less virtuosic.
After the interval, Padmore returned to sing the work’s close kin, Lutoslawski’s Paroles tissées, commissioned by Britten for Pears to sing at the 1965 Aldeburgh Festival. It calls for fewer strings, with and harp and piano in the partnership roles, and is a fascinating piece, both for the choice of Jean-Francois Chabrun’s contemporary French poetry and the way the Polish composer treats the language as an element of the music.
Its “Troisieme Tapisserie” fills a parallel role to Britten’s pivotal use of a section of Wordsworth’s Prelude in Nocturne, as Padmore’s declamatory delivery made explicitly clear, and this was a revealing opportunity to listen to both works together.
Something similar was obviously the idea behind bracketing those performances between symphonies by Mozart and Schumann that share the key of C Major and catch the composers at a period of transition. It was a perilous one for Schumann, his consciousness of his frail mental state balanced by palpable (if sadly misplaced) optimism about the future.
Wigglesworth, conducting without a score, was at his most relaxed in what turned out to be a terrific account of the symphony. The second movement Scherzo sparkled, the trap of wallowing in the slow movement – which cannot really stand being treated like Barber’s Adagio or Mahler’s Adagietto – was evaded, and there was a real grandeur about the finale.
Mozart’s 34th Symphony, written in Salzburg, post-Paris and pre-Vienna, opened the concert and fared less well. While it is a return to scale after the intimacy of its Haydn-like predecessor, this performance lacked a lightness of touch. It might have been preferable, in fact, to hear it with just the 14 violins the orchestra reduced to for the Britten that followed. The central slow movement seemed like an interruption to the work’s train of thought, and although both outer movements are marked “Allegro vivace”, a real sense of dramatic liveliness only appeared in the finale.
Keith Bruce
Concert repeated at Perth Concert Hall tonight. This performance was broadcast on Radio 3 and is available on BBC Sounds.
Claire Booth talks to Keith Bruce about the Helen Grime premiere she is giving with the BBC SSO this week and her brace of recordings to mark Schoenberg 150.
Predictably, the BBC SSO is selling its season-opener under the baton of Chief Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth (Thursday at Glasgow City Halls, repeated Friday at Aberdeen Music Hall) on the second half’s performance of Mahler 5 with its cheery Death in Venice Adagietto, one of classical music’s cross-over bankables.
Before audiences indulge in that familiar wallow, however, there is a rather special first half: the world premiere of a substantial new work by Helen Grime, a composer with family roots in North East Scotland and significant friendship with both the conductor and the soloist, soprano Claire Booth. It is entitled Folk, and is a four-song orchestral cycle inspired by Zoe Gilbert’s award-winning novel, and, more obliquely, the mentoring of the late composer and conductor Oliver Knussen.
“It doesn’t say ‘commissioned by Claire Booth’ on the score but the idea came from me,” the singer explains.
“Helen and I were both very close to Oliver Knussen, as was Ryan Wigglesworth. Oli was so generous in promoting other people’s work, when he died I was conscious to try and build something in the group of musicians that he has encouraged. It felt so right to try to put something together with Helen.
“I adored Zoe Gilbert’s book Folk, which is sort of a UK version of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, with a community of characters that are both real and slightly non-human. In Zoe’s novel some of the characters have come from the sea, or have wings for arms, but they are rooted in this northern community. As soon as I read it I thought I’d love to see it brought to musical life.
“I approached Helen with the book and said I’d love us to do an orchestral piece based on it. She loved the book as well, so Zoe, Helen, her publisher and I had meetings about how we might do it and who we might collaborate with. Given Helen’s own Scottish heritage and with Ryan at the BBC Scottish it felt like the right group – and it may go to Aldeburgh next year where both Ryan and I have strong affiliations.
“The strength of the commission is not only the music but also that we are all invested in it. Although he worked very hard on his own music, what Oli Knussen loved was to curate a concert of other composers’ work. Ryan and I met him at the same time and we became friendly through that. The composers that Oli enabled included both Helen and Ryan, and we are a group of like-minded souls who look at music in the same way.”
Composer Helen Grime (portrait by Benjamin Ealovega)
The outsider was quickly brought into the fold.
“Zoe was tasked with creating a libretto from her book. There were conversations about which of the characters would create an overview of the world she created. We decided on four of the stories and Zoe distilled their essence into a first person narrative.
“The first song is a right-of-passage for the boys in the community and it is a vibrant earthy start, and then there are three female characters who have their stories. It is not poetry, but is led by the drama. That’s great for a performer, because while it is lovely to put over esoteric poetry, it is always nice to come at a work from a dramatic perspective.”
Although much distanced in years and style, there is a parallel with the concert piece that has occupied much of Booth’s attention in 2024, Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, in structure and the forces onstage.
“The Grime is a substantial work of four songs of about the same duration, but it is very different from the Strauss and definitely won’t be Helen’s four last songs! It is also a large-scale work and that’s the joy – there are more similarities than differences, I think.
“There is a breadth of repertoire that informs everything I do: they might seem contrary but to combine singing the Four Last Songs with Britten or with this new work is what music-making is all about.
“The wonderful thing about doing the Strauss is that it is such a perfect reminder of the importance of singing well. It is a great challenge to the singer, and I’m thrilled that my voice has developed to the point where I can approach that piece and know I can give a strong account of it. Far from it feeling like an insurmountable Everest, it is so beautifully written that it allows you to really sing these huge sweeping melismatic lines.”
The other composer that has commanded the soprano’s attention this year is Arnold Schoenberg.
“Schoenberg 150th birthday has been an opportunity to highlight his work but I’ve sung Schoenberg almost as much as I’ve sung Birtwistle. He’s one of the composers that have accompanied me throughout my career and particularly his Pierrot Lunaire, which was why I was delighted to work on that and bring something out this year.
“I think I’m the first British artist to record it since Jane Manning’s very special recording in the 1980s and if I can do one tenth of what she did in terms of advocation of new music I’ll be delighted.
“I’ve done many performances of Pierrot Lunaire in my time, starting with working with Pierre Boulez and including working with Jane, so I feel confident in what I bring to the work.
“People rightly say there are different ways of approaching it, but there are notes on the page and there are performers who don’t sing them. We wouldn’t think of doing that with other repertoire – there should be an ease and a fluidity to Sprechgesang, but it is not ‘free’. Schoenberg complained that he never heard an accurate performance, so it mattered to him.
“The vocal line is absolutely part of the instrumental sound-world. The chord and harmonic structures have to be accurate. Then you can have all the fun you want with the characterisation, as you might do with a role like the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro.
“Ensemble 360 and I were working together towards a live show and we cohered immediately so decided to get more out it, contextualising the piece with other composers’ responses to that Pierrot figure. Instead of presenting it with another work of Second Viennese School brilliance, our disc comes with a smorgasbord of Schumann, Amy Beach, Thea Musgrave, Kowalski and Debussy.
Her other Schoenberg project continued her partnership with pianist Christopher Glynn.
“The lieder disc that I’ve done with Chris Glynn is the fourth in a series of retrospectives of composers whose vocal music is probably not the most important part of their output. We started with Percy Grainger, then Edvard Grieg, pairing his piano music with the songs, then Modest Mussorgsky, whose operas seem male-focused but whose songs often have female protagonists.
“Schoenberg would have been an obvious next step, even had it not been his anniversary. We don’t really know his lieder, and audiences and promoters alike can dismiss Schoenberg as solely somebody who wrote in a complex atonal style that they have decided is ‘difficult’.
“I believe audiences wouldn’t think it difficult because of all the other stuff we now listen to, and our disc has dirty cabaret songs, religion-inspired stuff, folk songs and highbrow art songs. The guy had such breadth, purely in his vocal writing, and there was so much we didn’t have space and time to include.
“When you think how much of the film and pop music we know could not have been written without having an understanding of atonality, there are too many promoters that don’t give audiences the opportunity to hear Schoenberg’s music. I hope this will encourage young singers to learn his songs.”
All of which has perhaps meant that Booth has been seen less on the opera stage than some of her fans might like. She was an acclaimed Rosina in the first revival of Scottish Opera’s Tom Allen-directed Barber of Seville in 2011 and has sung both soprano roles in the well-travelled Harry Fehr staging of Handel’s Orlando, first seen at the Glasgow’s Theatre Royal earlier the same year.
“Some artists spend their entire career in the opera house, and that has never been my life. I can’t complain that I’ve spent less time on the opera stage in the last few years when the three-operas-a-year that other singers will do is not for me. I wouldn’t have the breadth of projects I enjoy if I had worked in that way.
“I am so excited about collaborating on my own projects that sometimes taking a large portion of time to do an opera can be hard to make work. I haven’t taken an active step back, it’s just the way my career has gone.
“I’d love to do Shostakovich and more Janacek, and a few more Handel roles. It’s characters that attract me, like Lady Macbeth of Mstensk, and Jenufa is my desert island choice, but I’m not sure anyone is going to cast me in that so I’ll just sing it in the bathroom.”
Claire Booth sings Helen Grimes with the BBC SSO on Thursday in Glasgow and Friday in Aberdeen. Expressionist Music, with pianist Christopher Glynn, is on Orchid Classics and Portraits of Pierrot, with Ensemble 360, is on Onyx Classics.
Taken at face value, the strap-line Nicola Benedetti has given to her second year’s programme – Rituals That Unite Us – would seem to suggest a familiarity to her offerings quite contrary to the aspirations of an exciting and inspiring International Festival.
Fortunately, there will be few among those who filled the Usher Hall on its opening weekend who knew much of what they listened to, at least in the form we heard it.
Although the historically-informed performance movement has ensured that we can now enjoy Bach’s St Matthew Passion in something close to the version heard in Leipzig in Easter 1727, it may not have come down to us at all without the input of Felix Mendelssohn a century later. In revisiting Mendelssohn’s arrangement, performed by the BBC SSO under Ryan Wigglesworth, Edinburgh Festival Chorus and the RSNO Youth Chorus and a star cast of soloists, the Festival uncovered a fascinating work.
A victim of nothing more than changing fashions, Mendelssohn’s version achieves an enormous amount on its own terms. The balance between his more substantial orchestration – including four flutes, alongside the clarinets which were yet to be invented in Bach’s day – and the large choral forces, makes a great deal of musical sense. The soloists mostly dealt well with that, only mezzo Sarah Connolly occasionally sounding a little under-powered.
The later composer scores much for a smaller chamber orchestra within the ranks in any case, while the continuo for the recitatives benefits hugely from the involvement of a handful of string players. Even the forte-piano, which sounded plain weird at the start, became an acceptable part of the mix as the work went on. And it doesn’t go on quite as much, the fewer chorales working more like punctuating interludes, and the unfolding narrative altogether more integrated.
Ed Lyon and Neal Davies were a nicely contrasting pair as Evangelist and Jesus, and tenor Laurence Kilsby took his Part 1 aria especially well, with the accompaniment of oboe and a string quintet before the choir and fuller orchestration giving it a special character. Soprano Elizabeth Watts, on top form throughout, also benefitted from the Mendelssohn arrangements, although some did seem a little too “chocolate box”.
Osvaldo Golijov’s La Pasión según San Marcos was a commission for the celebrations of the 250th anniversary of J S Bach’s death at the Millennium, and the choir which debuted and has championed it, Schola Cantorum de Venezuela, were joined by soloists also closely associated with the work. Significantly, the bulk of the vocal forces was supplied by the National Youth Choir of Scotland, beyond much debate the only “local” chorus capable of performing it with such style.
All under the authoritative baton of Joana Carneiro, the instrumentalists were strings and brass from the RSNO, guest-led by Ania Safanova with the crucial addition of jazz trumpeter Ryan Quigley, alongside Latin American percussion, guitar, piano, accordion and bass, with two male dancers also part of the eclectic mix, culminating in an explicit representation of the crucifixion.
The movement that is integral to the score extends to the choir, and NYCoS dealt with those demands as effortlessly as the visiting choristers, “off the book” for the most mobile sections.
Goilijov’s sound-world is dizzyingly expansive, but everyone onstage took its twists and turns in their stride. The ritual of this Pasión constantly challenges expectations, the darkest moments of the story often set to the most rhythmic music, and the most lyrical writing – often for female singers Luciana Souza and Sophia Burgos – sitting alongside more abstract, extended vocal sonic techniques. The composer’s musical references are just as wide, taking in Handel (Messiah’s Behold and See, from Lamentations) as well as Bach and concluding with Kaddish from his own Jewish faith.
Cantorum de Venezuela shares their diverse repetoire from sacred hymns to Latin American pop culture at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh.
On Monday there was an opportunity to hear Schola Cantorum de Venezuela in their own right, at the Queen’s Hall under the direction of Maria Guinand and Luimar Arismendi. In assembling the programme, Guinand may well have defined that “Rituals” festival strap-line better than anyone, following a contemporary Christian music first half with an even more startling sequence after the interval, mostly of Latin American music but with Canadian R Murray Schafer’s Magic Songs – five of his slyly political “Chants” – at its heart.
Part of Venezuela’s globally-influential El Sistema music education initiative, Schola Cantorum sound and perform in a style all their own. James MacMillan’s slightly over-familiar O Radiant Dawn was one of their more easy-listening offerings, but it had an original visceral edge, while the two approaches to The Lamentations of Jeremiah that bracketed it – by Ginastera and Grau – showed the range of abilities among the 17 singers: stratospheric sopranos and sonorous basses, then slides, yelps and claps.
The lighter fare of the second half, also interspersed with trickier stuff, was often very funny indeed – but once again there can have been vanishingly few among the EIF’s faithful morning recital audience who had heard a single note of it before.
While some festivals around the UK have modelled themselves on the Aldeburgh Festival – marriages of off-the-beaten-track location, top-level programming and the kudos of having a major composer as its central icon – none can quite match the idyllic campus-style infrastructure of this 75-year-old Suffolk event, founded by the late Benjamin Britten and now part of a wider musical initiative – performance, coaching and research – that extends throughout the year.
Last week the 800-seater concert hall at the heart of the swiftly remodelled Snape Maltings complex played host to the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, signing off for its summer holidays with two magnificent programmes under chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth.
Getting there wasn’t all plain sailing. A cancelled Avanti Glasgow-to-London train left a majorly extended orchestra jostling for seats on a later service, consequently missing their planned Ipswich connection and having to purchase new tickets as a result. Not that it showed the following evening in a challenging opening programme of music by Judith Weir, Britten and Mahler.
Not even in the second half, when the alarming announcement was made that second oboist Mary James had suffered a serious accident – catching her fingers in a heavy metal door during the interval and requiring hospital treatment – and that between them principal oboist Alexandra Hilton and cor anglais player James Horan would “cover the missing notes” in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, which they did with astonishing skill.
Indeed, the Mahler turned out to be the highpoint of the evening, Wigglesworth considerably more relaxed with his orchestra than in recent months, stepping back from the fray to allow plentiful breathing space in a piece that lives by its spontaneous gestures, teasing hiatuses and poetic flavourings.
Between the playful charm of the opening movement and easeful bliss of the finale, the scherzo bristled with folk-like devilment (guest leader Roberto Ruisi’s tantalising violin solos) while the adagio’s ultimate transcendence becalmed its anguished undercurrents. Soprano Elizabeth Watts’ emergence in the final movement possessed that magical childlike fusion of fear and innocence. Most of all, there was penetrating clarity throughout this performance, the SSO sensitive to the subtleties and hitting the climaxes with sparkling elan.
We could have done with more of that in Judith Weir’s Forest, which she describes as “a modern tone poem” characterised by ever-shifting moods and colours. While the former were explicit in Wigglesworth’s free-flowing vision, there was something indistinct about the textural detail, even in this hall’s crystalline acoustics, a clear sense that keener shading between instrumental colourings might have sharpened the presentation. Was the simple Brittenesque opening not an obvious clue?
There were frustrating tendencies, too, in soloist Daniel Pioro’s account of Britten’s pre-World War II Violin Concerto. The positivity in his performance was for the most part stimulating, particularly in the blustery Scherzo, but where Pioro’s playing strayed into more roughshod territory the true spirit of the piece – even its underlying whiffs of foreboding – seemed to evaporate.
Thursday’s second SSO concert was altogether more consistent, featuring two brilliantly contrasted works: Unsuk Chin’s electrifying concerto followed by the towering grandeur of Bruckner’s Symphony No 7.
Central to the Chin was soloist Alban Gerhardt, whose performance was a triumph of the seemingly impossible. This went way beyond mere virtuosity. Gerhardt’s gymnastic fingering, his precision tuning even where the South Korean composer prescribes notes off the diatonic grid, the sheer explosive depth of his tone production, all contributed to a mesmerising display of exceptional musicianship.
Even when he burst a string mid-concerto there was no let-up. Gerhardt snatched SSO principal cello Rudi de Groote’s cello, setting off a chain reaction of instrument exchanges among the section before the orchestra picked up again from where it left off. Far from killing the enjoyment, this moment of danger simply raised the entertainment stakes in a performance excitable for its organic inevitability, charismatic delivery and breathtaking showmanship.
The Bruckner proved the perfect foil, a symphony that Wigglesworth and his orchestra performed several weeks ago in Scotland, but which here, in the lively Snape acoustics, seemed so much riper, more purposefully driven, more wholesome and convincing in its reasoning. The strings possessed a ravishing fullness, the wind and brass equal in richness.
It was forceful without the bombast, a feast of meaty colours and powerful emotion, a monstrous but stimulating edifice. Stepping out into the Suffolk countryside in the dimming midsummer light, with the River Alde meandering through the swaying reed beds, offered a welcome relaxant. A magical place.
Ken Walton
Both concerts were broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and are now available on BBC Sounds
Who knows how Sibelius and Bruckner would have got on had they met in a pub? Both had issues, the former addicted to drink and riven with a sense of isolation and loneliness, the latter plagued by bouts of neurosis, depression and fears of persecution. Not a conversation you’d wish to gatecrash maybe.
Yet put their music together, as the BBC SSO did for their main season finale, and the lure is irresistible, especially when the Bruckner symphony is his epic Seventh, a passionate feast of devotion (partly to the dying Wagner), and the Sibelius is the iconic Finn’s darkness-defying Violin Concerto for which the soloist was the South Korean virtuoso Bomsori. This wasn’t the most fulfilling version of this concerto – mostly down to a frustratingly diluted orchestral wash administered under chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth – but where Bomsori seized the initiative, her passion and verve cast lingering clouds aside.
So it lived for its most liberated highlights: an opening movement teasingly vibrant either end, but losing some momentum en route where Wigglesworth’s orchestral messaging seemed to delay each motivating downbeat by the smallest fraction; a slow movement that took time to come alive and capture its aching core; and a Finale, where Bomsori and the SSO most consistently found common aim, making the stormy journey to its exhaustive cadence well worth the ride.
Wigglesworth’s fortunes were better met in the Bruckner, which he rolled out with disciplined consistency and a keen sense of how to extract that evolutionary inexorability driving the composer’s granite-like structure without ignoring the lava-like fluidity of the inner orchestral detail.
Having struck gold with its arresting signature melody, the tone was set for a performance destined to captivate. Beyond the self-contained brawn of the opening movement, the Adagio sounded its doleful elegy, characterised by the SSO’s pungent phalanx of Wagner tubas. Spirits were lifted sky high with the vying exuberance and gentler pastoralism of the Scherzo, while the Finale, with its poignant cyclic references, powered a fine performance to its resolute conclusion.
Although it was surely the presence of pianist Stephen Hough as soloist on Rachmaninov’s perennially popular Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, alongside an invitation to subscribers to hear about the coming season, that attracted a such good house to the Candleriggs on Thursday evening, the rare performance of Stravinsky’s 1928 The Fairy’s Kiss that took up the second half of the concert was a particular delight.
A stellar example of the contrary character of the composer, the drama of this Hans Christian Andersen-derived score might be a deal more subtle than Stravinsky’s earlier ballet music, but it is there nonetheless. Unusually for him, it does seem a little prolix, but the orchestration is as full of interest over its entire 45 minutes, and there was some especially fine playing here, particularly from the SSO winds.
Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth was clearly concerned with the arc of the whole suite, the four scenes having a quasi-symphonic structure, but there were one or two moments where the tempi wavered uncertainly. Stravinsky drew on songs and piano works by Tchaikovsky for his musical material and the work references his predecessor’s own distinctive orchestrations, but the final result, and particularly the dying fall of the last bars makes its own unique impression.
The programme had opened with a contemporary interpretation of the same writer in Hans Abrahamsen’s Three Fairy-Tale Pictures from ‘The Snow Queen’. Wigglesworth’s affiliation with the orchestra’s current Composer-in-Association produced a performance that made the most of the huge orchestra required, with singular ingredients like the four flutes all doubling on piccolos. There was something distinctly MacMillan-esque about the build-up of the work, and especially the use of brass and percussion – and Sir James was in the audience to hear it.
Characteristically, Stephen Hough brought a very thoughtful approach to the fireworks of Rachmaninov’s Paganini variations, and Wigglesworth – himself a pianist of course – was very much his ally in that. Here was an account of the work that lost none of its Romantic intensity but where as much space and attention was given to the less virtuosic music. There was marvellous cohesion in the variations of tempo and a wonderfully meaty mid-range sound from the orchestra.
It was the fine detail of the soloist’s playing that really sealed the deal, though, culminating in what was surely the least showbiz despatching of the witty final bars possible.
I’ve no idea what Thursday’s live broadcast performance of Verdi’s Requiem by the BBC SSO and Edinburgh Festival Chorus sounded like over the airwaves – though it’s easy enough to find out by dialling it up on BBC Sounds – but in the flesh, in the limited acoustical sound box that is Glasgow City Halls, and untamed by production tricks, it veered close on its mightiest occasions to deafening. That won’t be the case on Sunday, when the same performers under SSO chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth repeat this showpiece work in the spaciousness of Edinburgh’s Usher Hall.
That said, reservations lay not entirely with bricks and mortar. What Wigglesworth gave us on Thursday evening was a Verdi Requiem rich in golden moments, at times particularly thought-provoking, but which was otherwise erratic in its piecing together of what is essentially fluent impassioned opera dressed in sacred concert hall formality.
The very opening was full of theatrical promise – the slow, considered cello motif faintly whispered, embracing a brooding, mysterious tone from which the opening Introit and Kyrie looked set to rise and fall with mountainous persuasion before the ensuing Dies Irae, with its savage drums, venomous energy and protracted drama.
The full-bodied Festival Chorus, trained by its director James Grossmith, was instantly impressive, wholesome and confident, wide ranging in its expressive power, diction crystal clear. Enter, too, the solo vocal quartet, notable initially for the piercing operatic tenor of Antonio Poli, to which soprano Miah Persson, mezzo soprano Alice Coote and bass William Thomas added both their corporate heft and, where it mattered, intuitive sparks of individuality. The SSO responded dutifully with supportive playing and matching sumptuousness, despite the brass being actively encouraged to overwhelm the chorus.
All this gave Wigglesworth scope to add his own thoughts – glimpses of often ignored orchestral detail he felt needed emphasis, though some were more awkwardly manufactured than naturally emergent; weighted tempi that, when judiciously applied, magically drew breath. What we didn’t always get was a sense of complete organic synergy – the SSO left ever so slightly behind the beat at times – or sufficient seamless vision to give the piece its macro-visceral grip.
The later, shorter movements produced the same peppering of delights: the soloists revelling in the transformational piety of the Offertory; an ecstatic choral Hosanna to round off the Sanctus and Benedictus (despite its exquisitely busy violin countermelody – the icing on the cake – being barely audible); the spiritual awe and intensity of the Lux Aeterna, including a dynamic floor show from the double basses whose synchronous, animated pizzicato resembled an archery display; and then the Libera Me, its gorgeous a cappella “Requiem Aeternam”, Persson soaring ethereally above, like a precious preparatory moment before the work’s exhaustive, final plea for deliverance.
If this was a performance that occasionally seemed one rehearsal short of complete readiness, Sunday afternoon’s repeat at the Usher Hall should redeem that. And there. of course, the brass can let off steam without causing any offence.
As chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth’s programmes with the BBC SSO go, this was one of his most conservative offerings. Yet even with such loveable mainstream workhorses as Elgar and Brahms at its core, he threw in a fascinating new BBC commission – “An acre ringing, still” by Australian-born composer Lisa Illean – for good measure. As a substantial concert opener it provided food for thought – intrinsically beautiful but uniquely challenging, to some extent discomforting.
Scored for chamber orchestra, 11-piece “consort” and pre-recorded electronics, it’s a work defined by expressive containment, an ephemeral sound world played at minimal volume, with even its climaxes teasingly frustrated. Lasting around 20 minutes, that’s a powerful proposition, and this performance elicited the most magical, imaginative colourings, amplified paradoxically by their quiet intensity. That the electronic dimension was so subtly embedded within the textures as to be barely perceptible is a positive observation.
As for any discomfort, you could sense an acute tension within the audience, unused to such dogged musical hypersensitivity. The tiniest crinkle of a programme brochure, the practised tiptoeing of an usher, the squeak of a seat, even in this case the wagging tail of a guide dog seemed like a heightened sonic distraction. In a sense, we were asked to play our part, which was perversely exciting.
There was mild perversity, too, in the approach of Japanese soloist Dai Miyata to Elgar’s Cello Concerto, inasmuch as his was a highly personalised interpretation, generously poetic, but too often wildly poetic.
It was mildly unnerving in the opening minutes, where Elgar sets up his stall with gathering thoughts, but which needs a binding momentum to make directional sense. Miyata’s over-egging, and an initially lagged response from Wigglesworth, brought to mind Wilfred Owen’s “cursing through sludge”. Once free of that, the journey ahead was surer of foot.
The best moments emerged in the sublime tranquility of the Adagio, its timeless opening theme, and in the closing moments of the finale, where – despite a sense that Wigglesworth was following rather than anticipating events, notably in the offbeat chords – a triumphant oneness and tempered resolve took hold.
Brahms’ Third Symphony was what you might term a “pipe and slippers” affair, fireside Brahms that seemed content to follow time-honoured interpretational traditions rather than chance anything more thought-provoking. Wigglesworth and the SSO gave a solid performance: casually-paced, heftily textured, sweeping but emotionally reserved in the outer movements, while recognising the lighter hues of the Andante and the gracious lyrical warmth of the gorgeous Allegretto. A fuller string sound would have better matched the substantiveness of the wind and brass, but for those who like their Brahms safe and reliable, this will have done the trick.
Ken Walton
This concert was recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3, when it will be made available on BBC Sounds for 30 days. A repeat performance takes place tonight (Friday 2 Feb) in Aberdeen Music Hall
It took Elgar until he was 50 to complete his First Symphony, the upside of which being its emotional maturity, technical mastery and a self-confidence through which the composer’s fingerprint dictates every level of its being. It was the major work in Thursday’s BBC SSO programme, a meaty challenge for its principal conductor Ryan Wigglesworth, and an epic, ear-catching conclusion to an evening that had hitherto blown hot and cold.
That’s not to say there was anything objectionable in soloist Martin James Bartlett’s performance of Mozart’s D minor Piano Concerto, K466. Indeed, the 2014 BBC Young Musician winner was entirely consistent in his ultra-poetic delivery, an approach that underlined Mozart’s uncommon journey (for a concerto) into minor key realms, and allowed the pianist to challenge the orchestra’s escape attempts with visibly calming gestures and return to containment.
What his playing did require as a counter measure was steelier, more incisive finger work. For all its lyrical pleasantries it fell short in genuine sparkle. In turn the ghosts lurking within Mozart’s score struggled to surface other than benevolently, and little details, like Bartlett’s uneven ornamentation, transmitted low-voltage results. Where he did apply physical energy – those fiery cadenzas by Hummel (first movement) and Beethoven (finale) – the temperature briefly soared.
Bartlett’s encore, on the other hand, was absolutely sublime, a meltingly poised performance of Schumann’s “Of Foreign Lands and Peoples” from Kinderszenen.
Wigglesworth opened with a work he himself has championed, Jonathan Woolgar’s Canzoni et ricercari. Originally scored for 12 string players and premiered in Gloucester Cathedral in 2021, Wigglesworth suggested the composer create a version for enlarged string orchestra. Here it was, beefed up to full onstage and smaller offstage strings, and a performance all the more teasing for its theatrical surprise.
We were told the offstage strings were “hidden”, but not exactly where, so when they did release a screaming counter-offensive from behind us, the impact was nerve-tingling. The ensuing dialogue proved invigorating, the more extensive discourse on stage – a striking interplay of melancholic density and exhilarating frenzy – provoking varying degrees of bullish retort in return. The performance was wholesome, animated, if partly rough around the edges.
Full-blooded consistency in the Elgar gave this concert a lift beyond the ordinary. Wigglesworth was impressively composed throughout, establishing grounded, timeless authority in the opening slow march, and navigating the shifting contours and moods of the lengthy first movement with clean, meaningful discipline. Similarly, the frenzy of the second movement Allegro giving way uninterrupted to the glowing inner warmth of the Adagio was as heavenly as the composer intended. The finale, with its affirmative thematic retrospection, was a conclusive triumph.
No small thanks to a impassioned SSO for this, nor to such exquisite solo snippets as the self-assured consistency of leader Kanako Ito. There was scope, perhaps, for Wigglesworth to apply a more airborne, expansive sweep, a stepping back to embrace the biggest picture, yet there was more than enough in this performance to take away and savour long after the event.
Ken Walton
The programme is repeated on Sunday at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh at 3pm. Thursday’s performance was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and is available on BBC Sounds for 30 days
It’s a brave BBC SSO that puts on a programme unlikely to fill seats when the corporation is openly pleading poverty. Yet that’s what it did on Thursday. Besides a quick Beethoven overture, the menu before us was a Mark-Anthony Turnage concerto, an Unsuk Chin novelty piece and a Stravinsky ballet score notable for its steely restraint – an intriguing and challenging concoction, entirely palatable but highly dependant on the persuasiveness of its delivery.
Under chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth, it was not without charm. Beethoven’s overture Leonore No 2, one of the composer’s multiple attempts to furnish his opera Fidelio with a suitable overture, is perhaps his most thrilling – a bombastic rhetoric within a sea of prophetic expansiveness, pregnant silences exaggerated for effect and a glimpse of the future through music anticipating the naturalism of the later Romantics and the obsessiveness of Berlioz or Bruckner.
The most liberating moment in this performance was the time-stopping offstage solo trumpet, casting a momentary magic spell before the skirmish of the home straight. To that point Wigglesworth’s reading mostly attuned to the music’s impetuosity, even if periodically unnerved by a kind of clipped, scurrying, theatricality.
In the phlegmatic neoclassicism of Stravinsky’s Orpheus, he sourced bewitchment in many of its fluid scenes: the melancholic nostalgia of Orpheus’ Bachian Air de Dance, the muted chorale-like eeriness of the final Apotheosis. The narrative dimension was moodily enticing, neatly tempered, but just short of finding that necessary sheen, the detailed intensity, to offset Stravinsky’s emotional containment
Turnage’s Your Rockaby for soprano saxophone and orchestra, is a Samuel Beckett-inspired concerto written in the early 1990s and shortly afterwards given its Scottish premiere in Glasgow’s Tramway by the SSO, It was performed here by its original soloist, Martin Robertson.
There was no escaping the unctuous queasiness of the jazz idiom that commonly defines Turnage’s music – a seediness lurking throughout, those angry harmonies, sneering glissandi and a busy background percussion combining to create a kaleidoscopic whirlwind. Sometimes gorgeously sleazy, sometimes with ecstatically pungency, Robertson played the protagonist with charismatic obstinacy.
Opening the second half, Unsuk Chin’s Subito con forza provided a flip side to the opening Beethoven. Written in 2020 for the latter’s 250th anniversary year, the source material is recognisable – sporadic snatches of Beethoven, each subjected to instant obliteration, as if Chin is firing incendiaries at the originals, releasing instant showers of musical shrapnel. The point was well made in a straightforward, resolute performance.
