Music
BBC SSO, City Hall, Glasgow
Michael Tumelty
five stars
I KNOW that in the BBC SSO's concert on Thursday night the programme was adhering to the orchestra's Shakespearean strand that is a theme of the season, this time in Shostakovich's 1970 soundtrack to the film King Lear. But there was another perspective to this fabulous concert: quite simply, it represented a display of three Russian masterpieces which are still awaiting full recognition. And if ever the SSO had a missionary conductor to bring that point into focus, it is Ilan Volkov.
He brought the full background to bear in these performances, which enlightened the meaning and context of the music. Shostakovich's King Lear soundtrack is incidental music; and incidental music is just incidental music, isn't it? No it jolly well isn't, not in these hands. This was a hugely dramatic performance suffused with everything Shostakovich had been through, right up to the early fifties, the death of Stalin, and the composer's Tenth Symphony, echoes of which laced the Lear music.
And have you ever heard anything more revealing and moving than the extraordinary Lullaby from Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death, in Edison Denisov's orchestration, and delivered profoundly by the stunning Mariinsky bass, Yuri Vorobiev, with Volkov and the SSO piercing hearts in their accompaniment to the infinitely tender "Bayushki" (Hushabye) as the opening number to one of the most original song sequences ever written? What a performance.
And all of this culminated in a great release of energy, melody, ravishing harmony and sumptuous orchestration as Volkov, unbuttoned, let Glazunov's stunningly-coloured Seasons out of the box, giving full flight to its memorable melodies and sumptuous orchestral effects. A glorious night.
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