SCO

SCO

City Hall, Glasgow

Michael Tumelty

AS EVER, there are many perspectives from which the SCO's tremendous concert with Robin Ticciati on Friday night might be appreciated. But the one that struck me particularly was the core consistency of playing from an SCO with more than a few unfamiliar faces in the ranks: the playing was never less than comprehensively homogeneous.

But more than that, it seemed to provide the glue that gave a programme which contained extraordinary variety from classical, ultra-Romantic and contemporary periods of music a special coherence: bluntly, everything on the programme seemed at ease with everything else; the whole thing was a lovely and touching entity.

Not even the harshest and most horridly graphic sounds from Toshio Hosokawa's riveting and deeply-moving Meditation on the helpless victims of the 2011 tsunami, whose ravages I will never forget, jarred with any other emotional aspects of the programme.

And has Karen Cargill, plumbing the endlessly rich depths of her lower register in Mahler's Songs on the Death of Children, ever sung with more depth and intensity of feeling? If ever there was an exemplification of dignity in grief, it was enshrined in her time-stopping performance. And has there been a more beautiful sound from the SCO than that achieved exquisitely in Mahler's ravishing Blumine?

And then, from the midst of all this heartbreak, anguish, loss and reflection, the fact that Ticciati and the SCO, at their classiest, released a cathartic energy in a dazzling performance of Haydn's London Symphony that was a life-force encapsulated in pure sound and drive, was a master-stroke in planning with the most serendipitous outcome. All these emotions, packed into a single great concert: what a night.