Music

RSNO

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Keith Bruce

five stars

ON paper, it looked an evening not without its challenges. Only a little over an hour's music was listed in the programme, and a quarter of that was the unknown quantity of a new single-movement concerto from young composer Martin Suckling. And an orchestra with a guest leader in the Badke Quartet's Charlotte Scott, was to be directed by Norwegian conductor Arild Remmereit, a late replacement for music director Peter Oundjian.

In fact, you would guess that an invitation to him to return is already on its way, heartfelt thanks from the concert's soloist Katherine Bryan matched by the acclaim of the audience, for what was remarkable concert, with the new work sitting comfortably among a programme of popular favourites, but not always as they are most familiar. The night was a showcase for the orchestra's principle flute whose own arrangement of The Lark Ascending seems such an obvious recasting now, even if the solo voice does not emerge from the musical material in quite the way Vaughan Williams intended.

There is a similar approach evident in Suckling's The White Road, with the virtuosic solo flute part set very much against the vastness of the orchestral landscape, the use of percussion the chief distinction in the range of tonal colours and suggesting an altogether more urban sound world.

Bryan encored with another theft from the violin repertoire in the Meditation from Thais by Masssenet, before donning her third frock of the evening to take her place in the winds and a prominent role in Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe Suites, which Remmereit conducted without a score. He was alternately understated and animated, the swell of the brass section was perfectly judged, and a surprising – but absolutely apt – orchestral encore of Elgar's Nimrod rounded off a concert that could only be judged a triumph.