Music

BBC SSO, City Hall, Glasgow

Michael Tumelty

Four Stars

EVEN to committed and unrepentant Bruckner-phobes, there is something special about the composer's Fourth Symphony, the so-called Romantic; and I think I know what it is. It's more taut than others in its construction. It doesn't spread itself expansively and repetitively over 90 minutes or more. It says what it has to say in just over an hour. But it needs to be interpreted and performed in that way: it doesn't just happen. A determined, long-distance Brucknerian can make it seem infinitely more spacious, monumental and eternal.

But that was not the approach of conductor Mark Wigglesworth in his big-boned, majestic but rather urgent performance of the Fourth Symphony with the BBC SSO on Thursday night. At every turn, and in all of its dimensions, from its big structures to its progressive phrasing, from its repetitions, which had a rare cumulative effect, to its overall sense of momentum, which had an equally rare, continuous sense of purposeful forward movement, this interpretation was a vision and a performance of the Fourth that was symphonic to the core: it was as electric and as dramatic as Beethoven. It didn't feel like monolithic blocks of sound: it felt like sound in motion; it seethed in the sheer dynamic of its events, and it gripped from each of these to the next, building all the while, with the SSO performance blazing in detail, immediacy and intensity.

It was an unforgettable performance, preceded by a heart-stopping, equally memorable account of five of Mahler's Knaben Wunderhorn songs, delivered by mezzo Alice Coote with purity and opulence, poignancy and passion, though a little short on textual clarity.