Orchestra, octet and singers produce a pair of crackers
BBC SSO
City Hall, Glasgow
Michael Tumelty
WHAT a cracker of a Hear and Now programme of contemporary classical music the BBC SSO produced on Saturday night. I didn’t like it all: you didn’t have to. But my goodness the smallish but noisily appreciative audience left no doubt of their engagement in and appreciation of this sonic and musical spectacular, which fielded wit, outrageous humour, unremitting concentration and ripe German intellectualism among its many characteristics. This was the BBC SSO at its best, doing what it does like no other band, and with the totally clued-up, idiomatic maestro Matthias Pintscher wearing his biggest-ever grin at the end, knowing that he had done the business, with panache, and that his band, with swashbuckling and unfailing command, had delivered the goods.
While it was a brilliant idea to open with Wagner’s Parsifal Prelude and lead without pause into Figuera’s Secret Desolation, which used (audibly) Wagner’s material as a connecting point, somehow that connection, despite the aching beauty of Figuera’s string lines, got dislocated and felt a little lost. There was absolutely nothing vague or disconnected in the dazzling performance by flautist Matteo Cesari of Sciarrino’s amazing flute concerto, Libro notturno, which, on top of the stellar flute playing by the soloist, was hilariously characterised by the SSO’s lower strings, sounding for all the world like the Hecklers from the Muppets arguing rudely over whose turn it was to burp.
In the second half, American Jay Schwartz’s Music for Orchestra IV was a classic example of controlled, long-range dynamic rise and fall (perhaps too long) while Helmut Lachenmann’s Tableau was an equally-classic, if less-engaging, example of German intellectualism on display. A good night, overall.
Stravinsky Sings
RCS, Glasgow
Michael Tumelty
OH come on, let’s not stint on a star. Friday’s lunchtime concert, the first of 2016 in the Royal Conservatoire, was a cracker for me in that it featured, by chance, three of my favourite Stravinsky pieces: the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, the woodwind Octet and the composer’s Mass, with the outer works in the programme conducted by Tim Dean, head of opera in the RCS, and the glorious Octet conducted by young Andrey Rubtsov, an assistant to Donald Runnicles.
I’m not exactly sure why Dean entitled his programme Stravinsky Sings, as there was only one vocal work on the programme, and the Mass is short.
But then again, when I immersed myself in these three wind/brass works as a youngster, I used to describe them as being from what I called “Stravinsky’s black and white period”, and I don’t have the faintest idea why I called it that; so no hair-splitting.
Suffice to say the performances were terrific, and really expressive (Stravinsky would hate that word) of what the music was “about”.
The opening yelps of the Symphonies were electrifying, the students played up to the hilt, and Dean’s intelligent structuring of the piece was lucid in its acuity.
The eight players in the Octet, with Andrey Rubtsov in discreet but perceptive control, did a frankly fabulous job on the music, characterising it wonderfully, with all of its humour, hell-for-leather pacing and near-outrageous cartoon capers.
In the Mass, with the RCS Voices splendidly-sonorous yet intimate in the Stevenson Hall, Tim Dean and the singers captured beautifully the thrilling duality between the ancient and the modern rituals that so colour the music.