Music

BBC SSO, City Hall, Glasgow

Michael Tumelty

three stars

ULTIMATELY, I don't think conductor Matthias Pintscher's all-French programme with the BBC SSO on Thursday night came off. It was a good idea to show three of the many faces of French music in one programme, but it was let down by the lack of substance in one work, a worrying lack of spirit in another, and ended up as a melange, a pot pourri in which the three pieces failed to amount to more than the sum of their parts.

There is absolutely no question that the performance of the night belonged to the young Spanish pianist Javier Perianes, whose playing of Saint-Saens' Fifth Piano Concerto, The Egyptian, was a tour de force of flamboyance and fun, with a staggering technical display in music that, at points, veered between a Tin Pan Alley and a Hollywood yet-to-come. The audience, quite rightly, went nuts for the young lad, though eyebrows and questions were raised by some as to the actual musical substance in the work itself: a perennial issue with some of this composer's music, churned out with such apparent facility, and all rather eclipsed in the afterglow of Faure's Pelleas et Melisande Suite, a glowing example of Gallic refinement, sophistication and depth, lovingly-played by the SSO.

Disappointment of the night was the supreme French symphony, Berlioz's absolutely wonderful Symphonie Fantastique, where the cackling woodwinds in the Witches' Dance finally ignited the lunacy, though too late, because Pintscher had left Berlioz's toxic substances (and spirit) in the hotel room, resulting in a staid, sober, atmosphere-drained account of the masterpiece, until that moment where the woodwinds clearly said: "sod this for a party; where's my broomstick?"