Music
BBC SSO/Manze, City Hall, Glasgow
Keith Bruce
four stars
The middle of three concerts exploring the music of obscure late 19th/early 20th century Swede Wilhelm Stenhammar was perhaps never likely to attract a huge audience, but the larger number of those listening on Radio 3 to the live broadcast caught the BBC Scottish playing some fascinating repertoire. The real treat was in the second half with a transcription of 150th anniversary composer Carl Nielsen's sixth and last symphony for "chamber orchestra". This arrangement, first played five years ago by the Athelas Sinfonietta of Copenhagen, is by Hans Abrahamsen, another of the Scandinavians being celebrated by the SSO this season and a pupil of Per Norgard. Scored for 18 players apparently, the SSO fielded 20, with tymps and percussion, piano and harmonium, string quintet, winds and brass. While in some ways the score was spare and essential, many of the players had passages of serious hard work: Abrahamsen was clearly not about to betray Neilsen and his full orchestral vision. The result was sometime virtuosic and sometimes comic, and quite different from but still true to the original. The titles of the second and third movements - Humoreske and Proposta seria (serious proposition) - raise questions about Neilsen's seriousness anyway, so the symphony is fair game.
The Strenhammer was chiefly to be enjoyed as showcase for the SSO's strings, guest-led by Lucy Gould and to which conductor Andrew Manze brought his own specialism. For all the celebration of the Mediterranean behind his Serenade in F of 1913, this string writing is more muscular and robust than that of his English contemporaries, even of it all goes a bit Elgar towards the end.
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