Debut that promises much
BBC SSO & Jörg Widmann City Halls, Glasgow
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The BBC SSO has kept very quiet about it, but Thursday effectively marked clarinettist/composer/conductor Jörg Widmann’s debut as the orchestra’s new artist-in residence.
It shouldn’t be something to keep schtum about, given Widmann’s lively, outgoing and musically eccentric disposition. He demonstrated as much last season in a streamed concert with the RSNO. Could he replicate the dynamism which characterised that performance, especiallyinasimilarly-structured programme that opened with aclarinetconcerto,continued withoneofhisownpiecesand ended with a hefty German Romantic symphony?
I suspect he and the SSO will
eventually develop an exciting relationship. There were sufficient positive signs in this maiden programme, but there were also indications that complete synergy will take time.
Widmann’s directorial style is to do very little in performance, signalling important junctures, but effectively leaving the players to engage reactively by themselves. Leader Laura Samuel’s controlling influence was key here, ensuring their togetherness, no mean feat given Widmann’sidiosyncraticfieriness as a soloist. That was paramount in Weber’s First Clarinet Concerto, Widmann as frontline protagonist taking every opportunity to exaggerate its melodramatic restlessness, the band sounding a little anxious to begin with but eventuallyattuningtohisvibe. The best came in the exquisite Adagio,butwidmann’spreoccupationwithhisownroleleft too many untidy moments.
Clarinet discarded, he conducted his own Con brio, written as a companion piece to Beethoven’s Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, a wacky compression of key fragments of the two concealed within surreal wrapping. Then a robust and distinctive Schumann Second Symphony, plentiful interest within, marred only by undue fussiness and some misjudged instrumental balance.