A week ago I sat in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall puzzling over conductor Thomas Sondergard's curiously inside-out presentation of his programme of music by Richard Strauss, Beethoven and Bartok.
Bluntly, I thought the RSNO's Danish principal guest conductor got the programme the wrong way round. If you were there, you experienced it at first hand. But many were not, to the extent that the entire upstairs area of the auditorium was closed off, confining the audience to the stalls, a ploy to make the place look busier.
Part of the problem was that Sondergard changed the running order, which created a curiously dislocated effect in the continuity of the programme. The RSNO brochure had the concert starting with Beethoven's Fidelio Overture, then Richard Strauss's darkly elegiac Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings, then the interval, and finally the main course in Bartok's fabulous Concerto For Orchestra.
That was always the right way to do this programme. But at some point Sondergard shuffled the pack, plucked Metamorphosen out of its context to highlight it, opened with it, followed it with an interval, then opened the second half with Fidelio and followed that with the Bartok. Eh? No piece in the entire orchestral repertoire has ever less required an overture as antipasto than Bartok's big bruiser of an orchestral display case. Sondergard's switch-around was inappropriate and had a calamitous effect on the continuity and coherence of the evening. Was he concerned that the originally planned order would have necessitated furniture removal, and therefore a hiatus, as the decks were cleared after the Beethoven to reset the stage for Metamorphosen?
Look: two nights earlier, in the Usher Hall, the visiting NAC Orchestra of Canada faced a parallel scenario with their programme, where they opened with Vaughan Williams's Tallis Fantasia for strings only, then had to clear and reset the stage for the second item with the full orchestra. I timed it. It took precisely three minutes; and there was no hiatus. Sondergard's judgment with the RSNO programme last Saturday was questionable. It almost suggested indecisiveness; very unusual from this man.
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