RSNO / Sondergard
Usher Hall, Edinburgh
While it is probably unlikely to provoke a popular uprising on the streets of the second city of the empire when Glasgow first hears David Fennessy’s new composition The Riot Act in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall this evening, you would bet that it will go down a storm, judging by the reception in less revolutionary-minded Edinburgh on Friday night.
Fennessy’s composition, delayed by the pandemic but arguably immaculately timed now, takes its inspiration from the attempt to read that 18th century piece of legislation to the boisterous populace at the “Battle of George Square” in 1919. Commissioned by the RSNO, it came with the gift to any composer of the same huge size of orchestra required to perform Stravinsky’s orchestral concert revision of his ballet music The Rite of Spring, which had famously inspired a “riot” among the audience at its 1913 Paris premiere.
The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland based composer has taken that opportunity and added to it – his Russian predecessor’s score does not call for four field-sports whistles crying “foul” at the back of the orchestra or a declamatory tenor singing the text at the top of his range at full volume.
Mark Le Brocq, the singer with that brief but challenging job, was rightly cheered to the rafters in the Usher Hall at the end of the six-minute work, as was Fennessy, who packs an extraordinary amount into its brief span, with the percussion section also turned up to 11 and the whole orchestra required to sing at the work’s end. A great deal of mythology surrounds the story of the events in the centre of Glasgow 100 years ago, but it has never had a soundtrack as compelling as this one.
The premiere of the piece ended up preceding the work whose equally myth-garnished first performance provided its forces, in what was a brilliantly-constructed programme. The first half had opened with Stravinsky’s even briefer explosive Fireworks, a dazzling orchestral display from 1908 that clearly set the composer on the path, via The Firebird, to the Rite.
It was followed by Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto, played with panache, and some swagger, by Stefan Jackiw. The RSNO’s Thomas Sondergard and the American violinist will work together again on the work with the Cleveland Orchestra in November in concerts that pair it with Stravinsky’s Firebird.
The soloist had some recourse to an electronic version of the score here, but it hardly impeded his expressive interpretation of a virtuosic work, whose difficulty is the chief impediment to more performances. That it was predictable that Jackiw would play an encore, and that that would be music by Bach, did not make the pleasure of its inevitable arrival any less.
As for The Rite of Spring itself at the conclusion of the evening, that was the RSNO and Sondergard – who started his musical life as a percussionist – working at peak performance. The last time this hall heard the work was in August’s acclaimed Edinburgh Festival performance by Les Siecles under Francois Xavier-Roth. This was a different beast, more widescreen but fascinating for the way the conductor steered through its linear but episodic structure and the split-second timing of transitions from one section to the next. There were excellent solo turns too, of course from bassoonist David Hubbard in that exposed high-register opening, and also from Henry Clay on cor anglais and timpanist Paul Philbert.
Keith Bruce
Picture: Stefan Jackiw