SPLENDID stuff on Friday night, with vintage playing from the SCO and composer/conductor George Benjamin in a programme of gobsmacking music that excited the senses, set nerve endings jangling, undermined complacency and stilled the heart.
What more can you ask for? All life and emotion was there.
At the heart of the thing lay the performance of Benjamin Britten's Serenade for tenor, horn and strings, with John Mark Ainsley and SCO principal horn, Alec Frank-Gemmill. What can I say? If I had just two tenor voices to take to my desert island, they would be those of Ainsley and James Gilchrist (who will be singing at Perth Concert Hall tomorrow night). The performance of the Britten was heart-stopping, unfailing in its perception of mood and atmosphere; and, for all the times I have heard him in his SCO principal role, this was the first occasion where I really realised what a great player is Frank-Gemmill. Extraordinary: the haunting horn strands of the music have never been more-tellingly in safe hands.
The highlight for me, in a programme that opened with a punchy account of Birtwistle's notorious C.A.M.P. piece, and concluded with a fluidly unified, if occasionally unsettling, Mozart 40, was the dazzling performance of Martin Suckling's uncapitalised SCO commission, entitled storm, rose, tiger, an exhilarating essay in orchestral energy and colour, which, in its every needlepoint gesture, confirms the young Glaswegian as a major voices of his generation, an astounding orchestrator, and, with Sally Beamish, probably the most important figure in Scotland's music since James MacMillan erupted on to the scene almost 25 years ago.
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