VoxCarnyx

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

It’s a rare Saturday night that sees a period instrument performance of Handel’s Water Music serve as programme buddy to a full-fat orchestral précis of Wagner’s complete Ring Cycle. Throw in a fascinating new piece by the Scots composer Neil Tòmas Smith, which combined the stylised delicacies of the Dunedin Consort (instruments and voices) with the voluptuous meatiness of the RSNO, and the unlikeliest of combinations was complete.

This was the final instalment of a three-year collaboration between these two accomplished outfits, and if it proved nothing else, it’s that niche-ism has its place in musical performance, but just as excitingly that crosscurrent programming – where ancient meets modern – can produce a synthesis made in heaven.

There was, nonetheless, a satisfying chronology to this concert. It opened with the freshest of intimacies, the diminutive Dunedin Consort filling Glasgow’s biggest symphonic hall with the Suite No 3 from Handel’s Water Music. Led by violinist Jane Gordon, it was a masterclass in nuance as it applies to Baroque performance practice. For besides the actual sound quality and crystalline contrapuntal precision, these players rendered the various dance movements with a choreographed physicality that echoed the litheness of Handel’s musical invention. 

The phrasing was as impeccable as it was exquisite, be it a high-speed Rigaudon or graceful Minuet. The tonal balance was bold but stylistically tempered – how lovely to witness the unforced mellifluousness of the recorders – and inventive too when, for instance, the violas made their presence solidly felt in the final Gigue. The perfect aperitif.

So to the premiere of Smith’s Hidden Polyphony, the RSNO now filling the stage around the Dunedin, joined also by the soprano Anna Dennis, a quartet of Dunedin singers (moving gradually around the upper circle gallery) and conductor Thomas Søndergård. 

It’s not the first piece combining modern and period performance to be featured in this artistic collaboration – previously programmed works by Jorg Widmann and Heiner Goebbels have explored their own solutions – but Hidden Polyphony justified its own proposition, which is “to shine a contemporary light” on a culture in 16th century Scotland that spawned a golden age of polyphonic composition, including the sacred music of Robert Carver.

Carver’s music – including his masterful O bone Jesu – finds its way into Smith’s 20-minute score, as does the illustrative poetry of William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas, and other interweaving musical fragments gleaned from ancient library sources. The overall impact, the juxtaposition of Smith’s modernist language with ghostly references to the earlier music, was both dramatic and enchanting. 

Søndergård directed a performance that highlighted the conflict – seething, tumultuous declamations and dazzling orchestral acrobatics, from which snippets of smooth polyphony emerged and disappeared like ghostly mirages. Anna Dennis’s soprano voice was a vivid sepulchral presence, snatching high-pitched notes from thin air with magical perfection. It was hard not to sense a leaning towards James MacMillan’s music in the volcanic intent of this score, and in its disconcertingly calm resolve, an a cappella Carver setting literally receding into the distance.

It was maybe a tough ask to expect Henk de Vlieger’s The Ring: An Orchestral Adventure – an ambitious distillation of Wagner’s four massive Ring operas stripped down to a one-hour potted symphonic summary – to fully capture the original’s full-on potency. And while this was a performance of plentiful merit, spirit and imagination, peppered with thrilling climactic peaks and solemn troughs, not to mention the awesome spectacle and indulgent wholesomeness of four harps and a phalanx of Wagner tubas, it was also a lingering reminder that the true power of Wagner’s totemic creation lies in the all-embracing completeness of its visual, vocal and orchestral dimensions. 

How I yearned for the seductive rhapsodising of the Rhine Maidens, some wailing Valkyries, an impassioned Siegfried, or a glowingly sacrificial Brünnhilde. Or, for that matter, a riot of Nibelung anvils numerous enough to sound more fearsome than china cups clinking at a genteel tea party. 

Ken Walton