Tag Archives: Thomas Sondergard

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 / 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 / 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

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

RSNO / Sondergard

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Caird Hall, Dundee

In December of 2023, a very colourful RSNO programme began with Icarus, a concert piece extracted from the Symphony No 1, Chimera, by Lera Auerbach, which the composer was at the Glasgow performance to hear.

Some 18 months later, Music Director Thomas Sondergard has programmed the complete work and the surprise is that this was its UK Premiere, because it was first performed back in 2006 and turns out to be every bit as colourful as that single section suggested.

One of its many fascinating characteristics is the inclusion of a theremin in the orchestra, very much integrated into the sound of the strings, and played with startling precision by Charlie Draper, from a place at the back of the first violins. It is less a solo instrument than an additional texture, but there are plenty front desk solos sprinkled through the seven-movement work, and particularly from orchestra leader Maya Iwabuchi.

As that structure suggests, Chimera is not a conventional symphony, but it is of symphonic scale in its instrumentation and in the way its development is always engaging. Percussion, tuned and untuned, is crucial to the tonal palette, and so is the brass, with a lovely swell of sound from the trombones early on and a fine solo for muted trumpet. Although the piece sounds very much of the present era, it has no shortage of attractive tunes sprinkled through it, and if its musical narrative is not especially clear – as the composer’s own programme note almost concedes – the flow of ideas is very seductive.

This concert began with a more familiar work that is surely among Chimera’s antecedents – Debussy’s Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune. If it is a showpiece for an orchestra’s first flute, the RSNO’s Katherine Bryan resisted any temptation to overstate the opening bars, and Sondergard made sure every detail of the score was heard in a wonderfully atmospheric reading that the fine acoustic of Dundee’s big hall enhanced.

The featured soloist of the evening was the RSNO’s Artist-in-Residence this season, Randall Goosby, playing Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. Of the four main repertoire classical concertos for his instrument, a strong case could be made that it is even finer than those of Beethoven, Brahms and Bruch, and this measured, unflashy performance made that argument eloquently.

Goosby’s quiet first entry intimated that this was a collaboration and even his cadenzas were quite restrained, and not in a bad way. In fact it was the ensemble approach to the central slow movement that was the highlight, when the soloist seemed to be pushing the tempo and the RSNO trumpets and strings were in delicious conversation.

The violinist’s encore was some bluesy fiddle from the pen of Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, and even that was played without superfluous flamboyance.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Martin Shields

RSNO / Sondergard

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Guest-led by the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s concertmaster Igor Yuzefovich and with LSO first cello Tim Hugh leading that section, there were a good few unfamiliar faces onstage for the RSNO’s Mahler 9. Special mention should also go to the young woman guesting at principal horn, because Amadea Dalzeley-Gaist was, alongside first viola Tom Dunn, one of the star soloists of the night.

Those virtuoso solo turns, however, are not the main story of the last big work the composer completed. The Ninth attracts a good crowd for the sense of occasion that comes with making grand use of  the full forces of a symphony orchestra for at least an hour and a quarter, if taken at speed, and for the plangency of its finale, unresolved though it remains in every performance.

RSNO music director Thomas Sondergard’s Mahler 9 was neither especially brisk nor over-indulgent. That finale was very beautiful, and meticulously-paced, but not heart-breaking, and arguably that is quite correct. The sadness the composer had recently endured at the time of its composition, as well as his own failing health, are often heard in the music, but the ending remains enigmatic, if emphatically not expressing any triumphant victory over the grave.

There is a lot of music to hear before then in any case, and so many important details of the writing seemed freshly minted in this performance. It is a curiosity of the Ninth that the second violins often make the first statement of a theme, and in Sondergard’s interpretation it seemed particularly clear that the device enabled the firsts to make a striking impact when they joined in.

Equally important among the strings were the eight double basses; Nikita Naumov’s section were a terrific ensemble from early in the first movement to the work’s completion 80 minutes later.

The long relationship between the RSNO players and this conductor was always clear in Sondergard’s dynamic control of proceedings, and that was just as evident in the colourful shorter movements. The dance music of the second movement began in jolly fashion but there was a sense of ironic detachment as it moved into more complex material, and that led on to the very strange Rondo-Burleske with something more approaching logic than is often audible, even if the slower music that interrupts the third movement’s craziness is still the weirdest part of the whole work.

Those who hear in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony a depiction of a full life could certainly cite this reading as proof, birth evoked in its opening bars, unpredictability at its heart and the mystery of life’s ending in this world at its conclusion. Whatever the work’s narrative, Sondergard and the RSNO made its substantial length compelling and constantly fascinating listening.

Keith Bruce

RSNO / Sondergard

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

With newly-announced principal double bass Nikita Naumov – transferring from the SCO – in place, the RSNO was this weekend remembering the former leader of the BBC SSO, Laura Samuel, whose death from cancer at only 48 had been a loss to the whole Scottish musical community.

Conductor Thomas Sondergard and the players pulled out all the stops for the occasion, with a second half performance of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake music that built beautifully from the Act 1 waltz through the sequence of national dances to the final scene of Act 4, added to the more familiar 20th century version of the Suite.

The star turns were Adrian Wilson’s oboe, harpist Pippa Tunnell, and guest leader Ania Safonova, with the flutes and brass also making key contributions, but the whole orchestra was on fire and Sondergard built the music to a magnificent climax. Perhaps the sequence was slightly hampered by the audience applauding each section, but that would have happened at a performance of the ballet so it only reflected how effectively the dancers were being conjured.

The same audience response to the individual movements of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 1 could have impaired soloist Ethan Loch’s performance, but his grateful reaction took the edge off any misgivings. More serious was some slight confusion in stage management, primed to dim the lights for the blind pianist’s encore but jumping the gun before the third movement. Sondergard’s swift reaction to that was of a piece with his attentive approach to Loch’s playing throughout the concerto.

While most piano soloists start with a concerto’s printed score before committing works to memory, Loch’s learning by ear is a marvel, and the long first movement of the Beethoven, with its huge virtuosic closing cadenza, was a remarkable demonstration of that. A lightness of touch sometimes seemed lacking in his playing, and his generous addition of two self-composed encores was perhaps gilding the lily, but the device of playing the first of them in darkness was an effective way of sharing his world, and the light music brings to it, with a besotted audience.

The programme had opened with the 1898 Ballade by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s, also a precocious, if not always particular original, talent. The piece made a great opener, however, and the contrast between the large orchestra required for it and the Tchaikovsky with the much reduced ensemble for the Beethoven was eloquent demonstration of the RSNO’s range.

Keith Bruce

RSNO / Leonskaja

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

A couple of weeks ago Mahler’s gargantuan ‘Resurrection Symphony required the services of RSNO-Max, a performance contingent filling every available inch of the GRCH stage, choir balcony and off-stage areas, its tumultuous bodycount approaching 300. On Saturday a Classical-dominated programme required only RSNO-Lite, a job for at most around 50 of its musicians. 

The comparison is genuinely fascinating because it highlights an orchestra unfazed by differentiations in playing style, musical delivery and sound worlds appropriate respectively to 20th and 18th century repertoire. Saturday was like listening a completely different orchestra – compact, lithe and intimate in music that encompassed Haydn, French-African composer Chevalier de Saint-Georges and Beethoven. As music director Thomas Søndergård alluded to when addressing Glasgow’s capacity audience, the RSNO’s versatility is something to savour.

It’s a relatively new phenomenon, Søndergård having systematically introduced more Haydn to RSNO programming during his tenure, believing it to contain the “essential grammar” for orchestral development. That it has had effect was evident from the outset of Saint-Georges’  Overture from his opera L’amant anonyme, a performance as delicate as it was agile, its simple virility delivered with impeccable clarity and precision, and plentiful flashes of wit.

In his time – this opéra-comique, premiered in 1780, is the only one of six Saint-Georges operas to survive – the black Guadeloupe-born violinist-turned-composer was a noted figure in Paris. Thus the fortuitous link to the symphony by Haydn that followed, the first of his six Paris Symphonies, known as ‘The Bear’, also dating from the 1780s. Fuelled by the same stylistic sensitivities, Søndergård again drew the most exquisite sounds from his orchestra. 

This Haydn performance was a masterclass in orchestral balance, the strings confidently alive with a sheen of finesse, allowing so many piquant wind textures to shine through meaningfully and naturally. Where grace and poise dominated, there was still ample room for excitement and thrill, not least the drone-supported rustic ebullience of the Finale.

If this was all preparation for the second half’s Beethoven concerto featuring legendary pianist Elisabeth Leonskaja, it did its job splendidly. For here was a vision of the composer’s ‘Emperor” Piano Concerto, dictated by Leonskaja’s old-school reflective approach, that defied current norms. Paradoxically, it was her provocatively reserved rhetoric, her deliberate tempering of the dynamics or lingerings mid-phrase, that injected urgent fascination for the listener.

If any one moment summed this up, it was in the midst of the romping Finale, where Beethoven calms the music to a near standstill – a diminishing duet between piano and timpani – before reigniting it for the final sprint home. Time stood still in this quietly teasing dialogue between Leonskaja and timpanist Paul Philbert. Anticipation filled the air.

Nor was there a lack of warmth and generosity from a soloist whose interaction with the orchestra was as stimulating as it was prescriptive. Søndergård and his players simply expanded the artfulness of their first half performances, responding to Leonskaja’s sometimes questioning poeticism with the same thoughtfulness, eloquence and inspired characterisation. In short, this revelatory performance threw new light on an old favourite.

Ken Walton

RSNO: Mahler 2

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Thomas Søndergård began his Mahler cycle with the RSNO six years ago at the start of his musical directorship with the orchestra. To open his seventh season with the epic Second Symphony, the Resurrection, was not only to sustain the fascination of that project, but to take it to a new elevated level, assisted by an expanded RSNO complete with offstage band, an RSNO Chorus singing with impassioned confidence, especially the men, and two soloists well cast for their their transcendent roles in the closing movements.

Foremost in this compelling performance was Søndergård’s unwavering attention to detail. The very opening – its ominous death rattles offset by an unfolding translucence as gathering motives found their conversant voice – was awash with irresistible expectancy from which unfolded the volcanic drama of the extensive first movement. Feverish contrasts, precipitous climaxes, howls of despair and the ultimate resignation ensued, purposeful to the end. And there was so much more to come.

For the Andante moderato Søndergård engineered a more reflective tenderness, its leisurely  succulence nudged tellingly by wry interjections, turning to sinister irony in the scherzo-like third movement, only to be magically quelled by the ethereal purity of Urlicht. Here, once again, steely discipline from the orchestra translated into an exquisiteness to cushion the molten mezzo-soprano of Linda Watson. There was one unfortunate moment when her pitch wavered perilously, but not so much as to diminish the overarching magic.

Where death occupied the start of this symphony, light and hope erupted in the Finale. From the chorus Søndergård elicited a haunting motto voce optimism, powerfully homogenous, richly expressive as it opened up. When soprano Julie Roset emerged, climbing above the chorus, it was like a voice from another world. Where there was clamour, the added offstage onslaught provided a momentous thrill. The hymn-like brass were like a halo of religiosity; the final climax, with organ thundering, a towering and overwhelming catharsis. 

Not without justification, this capacity Glasgow audience leapt immediately to its feet.

Ken Walton

RSNO: Grande messe des morts

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

The puzzlement of Berlioz’s Grande messe des morts, written in the 1820s in honour of French military casualties, is the vivid paradox it presents between sight and sound. 

To see it performed, as RSNO audiences in Edinburgh and Glasgow did at the weekend under Thomas Søndergård’s baton, is to witness a visual feast of excess. The RSNO was effectively doubled in size, with students from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland scattered among its now gargantuan ranks. Spread above, alongside and behind the audience were the additional four brass bands effecting a captive sonic experience. Behind the orchestra, a rearguard of ten timpanists (like nodding dogs as they variously leant forward to tune their instruments), and in the choir stalls an RSNO chorus to complete the epic vision.

To hear if performed, however, is to recognise that Berlioz, with his inimitable revolutionary blue sky thinking, was not preoccupied with ear-splitting volume. Sure, there were moments on Saturday when the floor shuddered underfoot, for instance when those timpani struck fortissimo beats with fearsome unanimity, or where the multiple brass merged into one hair-raising phalanx of sound.  But for much of the time, as Mahler would later do, Berlioz finds extensive inner chamber-like possibilities, even within the chorus, that play mischief with the listener’s visual expectations.

So we find right at the start of the opening Introit a slow gathering of thought, a questioning development of a succinct unison motif, a sense of symphonic unravelling that begged, and received, a probing, reserved intensity in this performance. Even the Dies Irae – a slow burner that eventually erupts with the Tuba mirum – demanded much transparent subtlety from the chorus and orchestra. 

You could see on Søndergård’s face – he frequently turned round to signal to the furthest-away brass – the concentration required to hold this juggernaut together, and there were instances where this lacked his customary tidiness. Yet there was so much to savour within the bigger picture, from the wistful delicacy of Quid Sum Miser and gathering storm of the Rex Tremendae, through the seraphic haze of Quaerens Me and bucolic belligerence of the Lacrymosa, to the hearty male voice opening to the Hostias and heavenward lift of the Sanctus (featuring the brief, soulful appearance of tenor soloist Magnus Walker). 

Ultimately, and summed up in the hushed acceptance of the closing bars, this was a performance that emphasised the fragility of a Requiem setting in which Berlioz takes us to the brink of protean uncertainty. Challenging but fulfilling.

This close of season programme bore its own personal tribute, to dedicated RSNO supporter and benefactor Hedley G Wright. It also marked the retirement of long-serving trombonist Lance Green, whose final concert this was after 42 years with the orchestra.

Ken Walton 

RSNO / Søndergård

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Between them, the Mendelssohn siblings lived the aggregate equivalent of one lengthy life span: Felix shuffling off this mortal coil at the age of 38, his big sister Fanny in the same year, 1847, aged 41. Felix, as a man of his time, clearly got the better deal when it came to exposure as a composer, yet it’s often claimed that Fanny, had she been gifted a more even societal hand, would have been recognised as equal, if not better, in creative terms. It’s a moot point, though enough evidence of her talent exists to at least sustain the question.

One of these pieces is the Overture in C, her first orchestral work written as a married mother and therefore attributed to Fanny Hensel. A work of exceptional craftsmanship, neatly sculpted, engagingly tuneful and touched by a Weber-like sense of the theatrical, it was an energising springboard to a programme that would later end with one of her brother’s theatrically-inspired masterpieces. 

Music director Thomas Søndergård’s firm belief in it emerged instantly, a tropical warmth emanating from the strings, enhanced by a sweet, often playful interplay among the woodwind and brass, and a rhythmic energy that was excitedly crisp, precise and punchy. Moments passed where echoes of her brother’s lyrical virility took hold, and there were lengthy paragraphs where Beethoven’s ghost was the reference point, but there was never any denying the genuinely cohesive worth of this artful overture.

Saturday’s programme was also a showpiece for the RSNO Youth Chorus, currently flourishing under its director Patrick Barrett. They produced an absolute gem in the form of British-born composer James Burton’s The Lost Words, settings of poems from Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’ eponymous book mourning the loss in some dictionaries of certain childhood vocabulary: words like “Conker”, “Bluebell” and “Wren”. 

The vocal animation in Burton’s music, his sense of fun and pawky irony, is a perfect match for such young singers, who delivered its rhythmical jokes and stylistic variability – the whimsical word-play of Newt, the bluesy Bluebell, a wistful Willow and Disney-style Wren – with remarkably clear enunciation and accuracy. Though written five years ago, this was the first full performance of Burton’s orchestrated version, a luxuriously expanded illumination of songs that are so intrinsically characterful.

Returning to the Mendelssohn family, the concert ended with Felix’s atmospheric incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, featuring Scots actor Christine Steel as the lucid, unshowy narrator, the duetting charms of Carine Tinney (soprano) and Rosamond Thomas (mezzo-soprano) and once again the spritely voices of the Youth Chorus. 

Søndergård, like a veritable circus ringmaster, exerted immaculate control of his forces, the performance unfolding with impeccable timing, seamless tempi and generous sprinklings of musical fairy dust. Mendelssohn’s genius – his exquisitely detailed instrumental palette and the pertinent charm of the vocal writing – cast its exquisite spell.

Ken Walton 

RSNO / Sondergard

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Lovers of French music can enjoy a purple patch of programming in Scotland, with the SCO combining Berlioz with more local fare in an “Auld Alliance” concert with Karen Cargill this month and the Hebrides Ensemble using the same title for a programme doing a similar thing with Debussy and Ravel at May’s Perth Festival.

The RSNO were first out of the blocks, however, with their evening showcasing French composers, although it ended up being rather briefer than planned. In Perth and Edinburgh, featured soloist Catriona Morison had sung Chauson’s setting of Maurice Bouchor, Poeme de l’amour et de la mer, as advertised, but she was too unwell to do so on a third night.

By way of what would have been a not unpopular substitute, ticket holders were advised that first flute Katherine Bryan would now be the soloist for Francoise Borne’s arrangement of the hit tunes from Bizet’s opera, Carmen. During the afternoon rehearsals of that piece, however, the flautist was taken ill, leaving the orchestra without both half an hour of music and its principal flute for the Debussy and Ravel in the rest of the programme.

It says a great deal for the strength-in-depth of Scotland’s musical community, and the RSNO in particular, that the concert we heard seemed so little compromised. Shifting Ravel’s Une barque sur l’ocean – the only one of the Miroirs piano works the master orchestrator fully scored – to open the programme, the impromptu flute partnership of the promoted Jenny Farley and sight-reading last minute recruit Adam Richardson were called on to play the evening’s first bars of music and they never looked back.

That piece was always intended as an appetiser for the work that now had the second half of the concert to itself, Debussy’s La mer. One of the most popular works of symphonic impressionism, every detail of this performance, from Henry Clay’s cor anglais solo at its opening to the huge brass climax at the end, was superbly played. Conductor Thomas Sondergard’s handling of the architecture of the work was absolutely masterly, that enticing first movement ending in particularly robust pizzicato basses and the central Play of the waves maintaining the lightest touches so that the finale could build with a marvellously-paced unfolding power.

Before the interval, the work that had been planned for the start of the concert actually found a more advantageous slot. Melanie Bonis has a novelistic life story and her music is ripe for rediscovery. A student of Cesar Franck at the Paris Conservatoire, she wrote a series of celebrations of “Femmes de legend” for piano at the start of the 20th century and her orchestrations of three of them – Ophelia, Salome and Cleopatre – were only published this century and premiered by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Jessica Cottis in 2015.

The resulting suite sat very comfortably in the exacting company of Ravel and Debussy because Bonis was a highly accomplished orchestrator herself. If her picture of Hamlet’s doomed girlfriend was more pastoral than tragic, Salome emerged as a saucy minx and the Eastern flavour continued in the very colourful, and more substantial, tone poem Le Songe de Cleopatre. Concerns that International Women’s Day can seem tokenistic can be overlooked when the result is the discovery of little-known gems like these.

Keith Bruce

RSNO / Sondergard

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

There are few classical violinists whose arrival on the platform occasions the sort of popstar reception that greeted Ray Chen on Saturday evening. The Taiwanese-Australian appeared gratified but not much surprised.

With a reputation built via YouTube and social media, partnerships with Sony Electronics, games companies and fashion houses, a Decca recording deal and his own app that makes instrumental practice a community endeavour online, the RSNO’s guest soloist also has an impeccable coiffeur to match his international fame.

In January the orchestra tours Europe with him and a programme including the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, a virtuoso work played and recorded by Jascha Heifetz. Chen plays a Strad once owned by Heifetz and it was another work from the 20th century virtuoso’s 1950s fame on stage and in the studio, the Sibelius Violin Concerto, that he performed in this week’s concerts in the RSNO season.

Although the soloist’s first flashy cadenza comes half-way through the long opening movement, the main fireworks in the Sibelius come later, particularly in the devilish dance of the final movement. Chen, however, was chewing the scenery from the start as he stared down the fingerboard: his facial expressions and athletic eyebrows almost outdid his lightning-speed playing.

The 34-year-old has impressive technique, but his opening gambit was not really what Sibelius wrote in terms of dynamic and timbre. And when we arrived at the closing Allegro over 20 minutes later, Chen’s phrasing of the opening bars there might most kindly be described as idiosyncratic. The fast music always looked intense and exciting, but the best of Chen’s playing came in the slow second movement with a much lighter touch at the start and real delicacy in the final bars, all bolstered by a richness of tone from the RSNO strings.

Without the spotlight on their young guest-star, the orchestra had a superb evening. The opening work was the Scottish premiere of Finnish composer Lotta Wennakoski’s Om fotspar och ljus (Of Footprints and Light), a brilliantly orchestrated piece that is part of a series of commissions by the Helsinki Philharmonic. Its origins are an interesting slice of Finnish musical heritage, but heard on its own purely musical terms it was a fascinating ten minutes or so, demanding an array of operations from the percussion section and extended noise-generating techniques from strings and winds.

Swells of sound appeared from the orchestral sections in turn but it was the tiny details, on harp and in the basses and brass, that constantly caught the ear – and the closing bars from the front desk fiddles were quite magical.

Conductor Thomas Sondergard was as particular in the details of Dvorak’s Symphony No 6, which followed the interval. This is the work in which the composer first fully integrates Czech folk melodies into a sumptuously-orchestrated symphony, and it built his reputation across Europe. If it is sometimes overshadowed by the composer’s later works, Sondergard made an eloquent case for its equal status with a lightness of touch, a wide range of dynamic variation, and that meticulous attention to every nuance of the scoring. The rhythm of the Scherzo, a specific Slavonic dance meter, was a joyful delight and the Finale built to a spirited climax that was as fulfilling as it was pin-sharp and exactly as stipulated.

Keith Bruce

RSNO / Søndergård

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.

It’s a bold new RSNO season that kicks off with a Keats-inspired tone poem by a female composer born at the tail end of the Victorian era who most people today will not have heard of. Dorothy Howell lived from 1898 to 1980, impressed Sir Henry Wood, had her music premiered, aged 21, in his London Proms earning her the epithet of “English Strauss”, before concentrating more on teaching from her late 20s onwards.

Worth hearing? Absolutely! For in Lamia, Howell demonstrates a sweeping tidal wave of inspiration that transforms Keats’ narrative poem into a swirling musical fantasy, its influences ranging from Debussy and Richard Strauss to the prevailing Englishness of Elgar and inklings of Wagner, even with prophetic hints of modernist thought. 

Yet, as this romantically-charged RSNO performance under music director Thomas Søndergård illustrated, Howell’s imaginative orchestral colourings and solid grasp of structuring were both authoritative and visionary, laced with evocative pictorial detail. 

In a period where tokenism is in danger of throwing second rate music at us for its own sake, here was a truly deserving example of fruitful musical archeology. As with the rest of Saturday’s programme, Lamia will be heading to Salzburg next week where the RSNO is undertaking a 3-day concert residency. 

Also on that trip will be feisty French pianist Lisa de la Salle, whose performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 3 on Saturday explored a more vigorous option to this familiar work. Steely dynamism informed the pianist’s opening gambit, her assertive touch commanding and demanding, yet never once losing sight of the music’s lyrical essence. 

The slow movement, leisurely in the extreme, unfolded in long, languid phrases, though never without purpose, while the finale was a breathless and dazzling romp to the finish line. If the last few bars took Søndergård and the RSNO momentarily by surprise, they were otherwise magnificent in aligning with de la Salle’s vivid mindset.

A stirring concert ended with Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben, a work this conductor and the RSNO have successfully recorded together, and which certainly sounded like a trusty old friend. A journey in which the composer centrally casts himself as the hero was, as it should be, gloriously indulgent without slipping into self-mockery. Søndergård struck the perfect balance, the hero’s proud emergence, his exhortations of love, his adversaries and battles, and ultimately his repose and fulfilment expressed in a flood of emotional conflict. 

So this new season launched on a musical high; but why have the audience suddenly started bringing multiple food and drink into the auditorium? One group near me tucked into slices of cake. Behind, someone with ice in their plastic cup provided offstage percussion. Is it only a matter of time before the buckets of popcorn and fizzy drinks join in?

Ken Walton

RSNO / Sondergard

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall 

There are other works of epic scale to end a season on a high, but Verdi’s Requiem is one of a kind – and this performance made the very most of all its theatrical ingredients. Considering that there had been a last-minute change to 50% of its featured soloists – soprano Gabriela Scherer replacing an indisposed Emily Magee and Peter Auty in for Korean tenor David Junghoon Kim – that was a particular tribute to the front-stage line-up and to conductor Thomas Sondergard, always in masterful control of all those ingredients. 

That quartet of soloists, completed by rich-toned Georgian bass George Andguladze and mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnston, in magnificent voice and an authoritative stage presence, met the challenges of their solo spots with aplomb, but more crucially combined in duet, trio and quartet for some lovely, often unaccompanied, singing. This was a blend of voices that was not planned and can have had little rehearsal, but it worked. 

Behind them, the RSNO was on magnificent form for a score that allows so many sections to shine, notably Katherine Bryan’s flutes and David Hubbard’s bassoons among the winds, the trumpets on and off stage, and the trombones in the Sanctus. The muted first violins brought a lovely haunting quality to the Offertorio Quartet and percussionists Simon Lowden and John Poulter added precision mighty beats to the Requiem’s big hit, the repeated Dies irae. 

That chorus sounded immense, as well it might with 190 voices in the choir stalls. RSNO Chorus Director Stephen Doughty, completing his first season in charge of the choir, had drafted in additions from the East Lothian-based Garleton Singers, which he also directs, and some young voices from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. The result was a huge machine that never really had to move into overdrive to fill the hall with sound. 

Not that there was any use of cruise control either. This was a finely calibrated, if enormous, instrument, just as impressive when singing very quietly indeed, and Doughty and Sondergard deployed and split its sections very carefully to precisely measured effect. 

That sort of detail is what a performance of this work is all about, as Verdi separates the few moments when everyone on the platform is employed with all sorts of combinations of instrumental scoring and vocal colours. Of course, the text often sounds nothing at all like “Church Latin” because it is being sung in the manner of the opera house, but it is curious how a section like the Lacrymosa at the end of the Dies irae can sound simultaneously like a hymn as well as an entire dramatic scene. 

Being able to keep both those inspirations in mind as well as evident to the audience is the challenge of Verdi’s Requiem, and one that this vast cast of musicians all met to a gold standard. 

Keith Bruce 

Portrait of Jennifer Johnston by RT Dunphy

RSNO / Sondergard

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

With two weeks of the RSNO’s season to go – and Jorg Widmann’s way with Mozart and the RSNO Chorus taking on Verdi’s dramatic Requiem still to come – this “All-Star Gala” was nonetheless a pinnacle of the orchestra’s year, coming immediately after its European tour. The presence of a trio of popular names as soloists – violinist Nicola Benedetti, cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, and pianist Benjamin Grosvenor – guaranteed a packed auditorium, including many for whom it was probably an unusual way to spend a Saturday night.

For those who had bought their first concert ticket, Scotland’s national orchestra laid on a terrific value-for-money programme – as fine an advert for classical concert-going as any seasoned fan of the music might hope for.

The programme culminated in Brahms’ First Symphony, the conclusion of a cycle of the Brahms symphonies RSNO Music Director Thomas Sondergard has conducted since the beginning of the year. Coming after recent performances and recordings of the works by chamber orchestras, Sondergard has made the case for big Brahms, and the Symphony No1, which was so long coming in the composer’s life, is arguably the work most suited to this approach, with its large slow statements at the start of the first and final movements.

The weight of those passages was beautifully contrasted with moments like the dialogue between leader Maya Iwabuchi’s solo violin and the oboe of Adrian Wilson in the slow movement. He was a star of this immaculately-calibrated reading, with other wind principals, including flautist Katherine Bryan (marking her 20th birthday in the post) and guest first horn Olivia Gandee, also on top form.

The Beethoven-like ending to the symphony was an interesting counterpoint to the younger, lighter Beethoven to be heard before the interval. Although this clever programme made more use of them, those star soloists were primarily contracted to play his “Triple Concerto” for piano trio and orchestra, composed in 1804.

It is a delightful work, the breezy conversation between the front-line voices rather disguising the fact that Kanneh-Mason was playing the more virtuosic part, with Benedetti riding shotgun and Grosvenor’s piano in a supporting role. The work has a lovely structure, particularly in the way the Largo second movement speeds up to segue into the dance of the finale. With the RSNO strings on sparkling form, this was smile-inducing stuff, and there were plenty of grins on the platform – and of course there was an encore lollipop, Fritz Kreisler’s arrangement of the Londonderry Air.

The concert had begun with a showcase for the RSNO Youth Chorus, under its director Patrick Barrett, with each of the soloists providing accompaniment in turn. This was the real bonus treat for those new faces in the audience: three works composed in the past decade and performed by the coming generation, proving that “classical” music is in the peak of condition in the modern age.

The longest piece of the three was Russell Hepplewhite’s The Death of Robin Hood, a captivating narrative for young voices, setting a Eugene Field poem, with opportunities for solo voices as well as ensemble singing. It was performed with superb expression and clarity and followed on beautifully from a work the choir had learned for COP 26 in Glasgow, Errollyn Wallen’s specially-composed Inherit the World, with Grosvenor at the piano. It concluded the season’s valuable “Scotch Snaps” strand of performances of contemporary music.

The late addition to the concert brought together Benedetti and the Youth Chorus for American composer Caroline Shaw’s Its Motion Keeps. With the violinist supplying the work’s clever revision of early music continuo, this reworking of a 19th century shape-note hymn would be demanding fare for a professional choir of any age, but these young singers rose to its dynamic and tonal challenges with astonishing poise.

Keith Bruce

Picture, from Usher Hall performance, by Sally Jubb

SCO’s half-century and other seasons

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The Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s jubilee caps a promising orchestral programme for the year to come, writes Keith Bruce

In the run-up to its 50th anniversary, the SCO is understandably cock-a-hoop to be able to preface its new season announcement with the news that Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev has extended his contract with the orchestra to 2028.

As the young Russian’s reputation continues to grow globally, and his dizzying schedule takes him to the most prestigious concert halls and opera houses, he has clearly established an important mutually-supportive relationship with the Edinburgh-based ensemble. In the coming season that is as diverse as ever, opening with a seven date Scottish tour of Beethoven’s “Eroica” and a new work by the orchestra’s Associate Composer, Jay Capperauld.

Emelyanychev’s SCO season ends with Mendelssohn’s Elijah, which he, the orchestra and the SCO Chorus will perform in this summer’s newly-announced BBC Proms season.

The RSNO also kicks off with Beethoven, with Lise de la Salle the soloist for the Third Piano Concerto, when Music Director Thomas Sondergard also conducts Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben. Sondergard’s season ends with Berlioz’s Grande Messe and also features two concerts including piano concertos by Saint-Saens with the season’s Artist in Residence Simon Trpceski, and an evening of French music with Scots mezzo Catriona Morison the soloist.

At the BBC SSO, Chief Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth continues to make an individual mark, opening with a concert that includes his own Piano Concerto with Steven Osborne the soloist, alongside Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, with soprano Sally Matthews. He also focuses on Elgar, with the Symphony No 1 and Dai Miyata playing the Cello Concerto, and continues his exploration of Stravinsky’s ballet music with Orpheus and The Fairy’s Kiss, with Principal Guest Conductor Ilan Volkov adding Petrushka in January 2024.

Wigglesworth also conducts the Verdi Requiem next March as the SSO continues its association with the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, and there is much for lovers of choral music to enjoy elsewhere as well.

The RSNO Chorus is celebrating its 180th anniversary in style, including a “Come and Sing” Verdi Requiem in January and Jeanette Sorrell conducting the annual New Year Messiah following an end-of-November concert of Sir James MacMillan’s Christmas Oratorio, conducted by the composer. As well as that Berlioz Grande Messe, it also features in a John Wilson-conducted concert of Ireland, Elgar and Holst – and the RSNO Youth Chorus has an equally busy concert year.

The SCO Chorus can boast a MacMillan premiere with his Burns-setting Composed in August, and Capperauld gives them another first performance with his setting of Niall Campbell’s The Night Watch. It also sings Bach’s B Minor Mass, under conductor Richard Egarr, and Schubert’s Mass in A-flat.

Mezzo Karen Cargill joins the SSO and conductor Alpesh Chauhan for Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and is the soloist for a Scottish Chamber Orchestra programme celebrating the Auld Alliance with France. The SCO’s big birthday line-up of soloists also includes percussionist Colin Currie directing an evening of Steve Reich, Julia Wolfe and Arvo Part, Steven Osborne playing Ravel and Pekka Kuusisto returning for three concerts, one in partnership with Emelyanychev.

Violinist Nicola Benedetti, whose first programme as director of Edinburgh International Festival is unveiled on Monday, plays the Beethoven Violin Concerto with the SCO at the end of the year and gives the much-delayed Scottish premiere of Mark Simpson’s concerto written for her with the RSNO next March.

Full details of all the seasons at sco.org.uk, rsno.org.uk and bbc.co.uk/bbcsso

RSNO / Sondergard

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Perth Concert Hall

Where is the best place in Scotland to hear an all-Brahms concert by the national symphony orchestra? With Glasgow Royal Concert Hall out of commission, the intriguing choice for the RSNO’s “Festival of Brahms” was between the venerable vast Usher Hall in Edinburgh, the refurbished Glasgow City Halls, or the opening night of the run at Perth Concert Hall.

With the sort of attendance it deserves to see all the time, the newer venue turned out to be a sound choice. Although this was often full-fat Brahms, conductor Thomas Sondergard wringing some old-school emotional grandeur from the score of Symphonies 2 and 3, the acoustic of the house was never overwhelmed by the presence of 50 string players on the stage.

Rather, in fact, the physical relationship of the audience to the players seemed to play a part in the way Sondergard went about the job of making sure that every detail of Brahms music was heard – orchestral writing that was more radical than he is often credited – while still allowing Brahms-lovers to soak in the warm bath of his Romantic melodies.

The first movement of the Second Symphony, which was played after the interval, is one of the finest sound-pictures of a pastoral idyll, and it was sumptuous here, Sondergard finding the occasional darkness in what is some of the composer’s brightest music. There was a slight raggedness at the start of the Adagio, which may be why first cello Betsy Taylor looked a little surprised when the conductor brought her section to its feet at the end, but they and all the strings were generally on their mettle across the whole evening, ready to dig in for those big sweeping moments, but never missing the precision the music requires.

Guest first horn Alexander Boukikov was also singled out for a bow, and deservedly so. His fine solo moments sat alongside excellent work from all five horn players, rhythmically as well as harmonically.

The Festival of Brahms began, of course, with the Academic Festival Overture, the composer’s acknowledgement of his Honorary Doctorate that has become one of his best-known works, and here serving as the template for Sondergard’s approach to balance, between the sections of the orchestra and finding both muscle and finesse. Although you would have to like Brahms a great deal to find out, it might have been interesting to hear how he modulated his forces in the very different environments of the other halls.

The conductor’s methodology was even more apparent in Symphony No 3, in the very deliberate pacing of the second movement, the dynamic gear shifts at the start of the finale and the work’s very measured finish. Chamber orchestras have perhaps made the running in Brahms symphony cycles in recent times, but Sondergard made the case for the composer remaining core repertoire for big bands.

Keith Bruce

RSNO / Søndergård

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

The only scheduled speaking from the stage on Friday night was at the start of the concert, when leader Maya Iwabuchi invited her former violin pupil and now featured young composer, Lisa Robertson, to introduce her premiering work, am fior-eun.

However, music director Thomas Søndergård could plainly not let the evening end without thanking the audience for turning out in such numbers and bringing such vocal enthusiasm. This was an Usher Hall filled to the rafters as the Edinburgh Festival would be delighted to see it, proving that the Celtic Connections festival at the other end of the M8 has no monopoly on January ticket sales.

If the music-lovers came out for the promise of Beethoven’s Emperor Piano Concerto and Brahms’ Fourth Symphony, they brought ears receptive enough to greet new music with cheers of appreciation.

Robertson’s piece may be briefer than the 19th century works that followed, but it is on no lesser scale. Selected from the harvest of the RSNO’s Composer Hub project, it glories in the opportunity to compose for a full orchestra with a score that swooped across the available talent onstage like the eagles near Robertson’s West Highland home that it depicts.

Here was music that not only realised every word of the composer’s eloquent statement of her intention, but was audibly made in collaboration with those now playing it, extended techniques from strings, winds and percussion included. That’s not to say that others will not want to play it – such a colourful depiction of the Scottish landscape is sure to find further performances – but that these musicians set the bar for those who follow them very high indeed.

It was also a perfect appetiser for what Søndergård and soloist Francesco Piemontesi had in store. In the way of current programme typography style shared by the RSNO and the BBC Scottish, there was an adjective on the cover of this weekend’s booklet: “Majestic”. It was no idle boast, because this was a concert that was all about making a big impression, as Lisa Robertson certainly had.

Piemontesi is a pianist who can tailor his performance to every occasion, and this was him giving it large. In collaboration with the conductor we heard Beethoven in all his majesty, and full of drama.

Did Søndergård overstate the transition into the Finale? Perhaps. But could he have asked the strings to push even more in the slow movement? Possibly also true. Certainly, there was no risk of the soloist being overwhelmed by the orchestra – Piemontesi was on fire from the first bar to the last.

The Brahms was just as epic, Søndergård drawing a clear distinction between how a full-sized symphony orchestra should play this music and more modest “period” interpretations, using bold fluctuations in tempo without sacrificing any precision. There may have been swifter Brahms symphonies, but few as rich.

Keith Bruce

RSNO / Sondergard

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

There was something very radical about Thomas Sondergard’s first War Requiem with the RSNO.

The ingredients and shape of Benjamin Britten’s perennial concert of remembrance, themselves a mirror of those that made the Edinburgh International Festival 15 years earlier, are so familiar – to many contemporary schoolchildren as well as those of 1962 – that the work seems to require concentration on the structure the composer created.

The RSNO’s music director, however, looked beyond that from the first bars of his War Requiem on Saturday evening.

Of course, all the building blocks were there: the orchestra’s chorus, now directed by Stephen Doughty, in the choir stalls, and the RSNO Junior Chorus, drilled by Patrick Barrett, invisible to most but very audible in the balcony; a packed platform with John Poulter’s percussion at the front of a chamber orchestra led by Maya Iwabuchi stage left, and Lena Zeliszewska the first violin of the bulk of the ensemble on Sondergard’s other side.

The conductor was also flanked by tenor Magnus Walker and baritone Benjamin Appl, while soprano Susanne Bernhard, as is now customary, was amongst the musicians and nearer her choral partners in the score.

That chorus, though, began its Requiem Aeternam almost at a whisper, and without standing. And when Walker, an on-the-day dep for the indisposed Stuart Jackson, intoned Wilfred Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth, it was entirely without tolling bells or rattling guns, but as a quiet cry of despair. The “pity of war” was no memory here – it was a lamentable presence in the hall.

If this was startling and disconcerting – this is not how Britten’s War Requiem is supposed to begin, surely? – it was also incontrovertibly true. We live at a time where war in Europe is no history lesson, but on our televisions daily, in a way that it was not when the composer’s work premiered.

Sondergard’s War Requiem played out in real time as an operatic soundtrack. It was as slow as I have ever heard it, and more integrated as a piece of through-composed music. Anyone without a libretto on their knee would have been pushed to identify all the switches from Latin liturgy to 20th century verse, and the contrasts between those elements, as sung by the choirs and soprano on the one hand and the male soloists on the other, and played by each of the teams of instrumentalists, were never a distracting part of the mechanism of the performance, where that is often the crucial engine of an interpretation.

Instead, from that disconcerting opening, where listeners familiar with the work might have struggled to find their path, the 90-minute score blossomed as a debate and dialogue between all those instrumental and vocal ingredients. If you share the faith expressed in the words of the “In paridisum” towards its end, there is comfort there, but the message that little has changed in our own age was stronger, and the final prayer for eternal rest for those who have fallen and will fall held Saturday’s audience in solemn silence at the work’s end.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Susanne Bernhard by Christine Schnieder

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