Music
BBC SSO, City Hall, Glasgow
Michael Tumelty
five stars
NO holds barred: I have lost count of the number of concerts over decades which didn't amount to the sum of their parts. I cannot remember the last concert where the programme and performances actually exceeded the sum of their parts. Thursday night's BBC SSO performances of a mind-blowing programme had me clawing for a non-existent sixth star and superlatives beyond even my most hyperbolic expression.
Every element in the programme, in which Opera North's director, Richard Farnes, made his SSO debut, had me on the edge of my seat. Even Delius's The Walk to the Paradise Garden, something of a rarity in these parts, where we prefer Nordic blood, Finnish crags, and sharp horns on our helmets, had a lovely, watercolour hue to its beauty, and a flowing momentum that precluded comfy pastoralism, the source of my early Delian loathing.
And what on earth was that beast they let out of the cage in John Foulds' Dynamic Triptych, with the dazzling, powerhouse pianist Ashley Wass taming the effective piano concerto by the individualist Mr Foulds, with its first movement like a herd of Easter Island statues on the move, its machine-gun toccatas taking no prisoners, and its incredible, sinking string textures, a sound I've never heard before, inducing physical squeamishness. Who let Foulds out? Must visit his enclosure.
And then, the glory of glories, in a full-colour, wide-screen, majestic performance of Walton's Henry V: a Shakespeare Scenario, where all the forces: actor William Houston, the Glasgow Chamber Choir, St Mary's Choristers and the SSO at their mightiest, delivered the electrifying piece as though their lives depended on it. What a night.
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