Review: RSNO Garry Fraser

Some might look on the programme for the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s opening concert of the season as adventurous.

Some might call it unappetising and unappealing. A “pot-boiler” might have attracted a bigger audience but I think the RSNO programme planners got it just right. Thursday night’s Caird Hall performance was as memorable a season opener as one could wish.

I wouldn’t go so far as saying it was my dream combination of composers – Richard Strauss, Berg and Mahler – but it wasn’t far off my dream combination of works: Strauss’s Don Juan; Berg’s Seven Early Songs; and Mahler’s first symphony.

I’ll start with the Mahler. This 1889 work broke the mould of symphonies in the sense that it was more of a programmatic tone poem, a narrative told with breathtaking music. The performance of the RSNO and conductor Thomas Sondergard was equally breathtaking as the music morphed from the atmospheric opening to fullblooded Mahlerian bravado. It can be pastoral, it can be passionate but more often than not it can be powerful.

This work might have been for many the evening’s main attraction.

Prior to that was a work that needed some introduction and a soloist who needed little or none. Mezzo soprano Karen Gargill is the epitome of the “local girl done good”, an Arbroath lass with a stellar international reputation. To have her on the bill singing songs by Berg was a sheer delight, and while the songs have a melancholy air to them, her delivery was one of luscious velvet, an interpretation brought over with the correct measure of passion and intensity.

If the symphony had a descriptive nature to its make-up, so did that of Don Juan. Story telling is symptomatic of Strauss’ tone poems, a rollicking ride through triumph to despair. There’s heroism in horn fanfares, there’s romance in solo violin passages and there’s emotion in Don Juan’s ultimate demise. It’s one of these works I never tire of hearing. But then I’ll never tire of hearing Ms Cargill or Mahler’s foray into the world of symphonic music either.