RSNO/Oundjian, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
Michael Tumelty
Four stars
I DO not have one single criticism about the RSNO's concert on Saturday night with music director Peter Oundjian. The repertoire was rock-solid, with Berlioz's Roman Carnival Overture a classic opener in a performance which fully realised that the immense excitement in this piece lies not only in the flashy, volcanic later scenes and brass blasts, but also in the canonic build-up of tension in that great, long melody, which really piled up the pressure in this performance, making the second-half eruption of fireworks both logical and cathartic.
And what a debut RSNO performance from Taiwanese-Australian violinist Ray Chen, who found not just the Mediterranean colours, flavours and rhythms in Lalo's Symphonie espagnole, but the meat, bite and drive that make it a real concert piece: what a dazzling, mature musician he is. I'd like to hear him play Brahms' Concerto, particularly as he stood on stage on Saturday night playing one of the violins (a Strad, of course) that had once belonged to Joseph Joachim, champion of Schumann and Brahms, and the greatest violinist of his era. Whose music, I wondered, has been played on this instrument in front of us by the hands of that man Joachim, dead now for 108 years? That of Brahms himself?
I couldn't get the spectre of Joachim out of my head: it gave a profound sense of connection with, and relevance to, the golden, powerful and thrilling performance of Brahms' Second Symphony by Oundjian and the RSNO, in rich form for the second half. Suddenly, the distant past and the long-dead seemed close, and present, in that hall on Saturday.
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