Music
BBC SSO
City Halls, Glasgow
Keith Bruce
four stars
SET to broadcast two months hence in BBC Radio 3's Saturday night Here and Now strand of contemporary music concerts, Saturday's programme revisited the "Scottish Inspirations" concept of showcasing works from or connected with the BBC SSO's home turf.
The big premiere of the evening was William Sweeney's Eolas nan Ribheid (The Wisdom of the Reeds) which he somewhat modestly subtitles a "concertino" for clarinet and orchestra when it turns out to be an ambitious concerto, albeit in a single movement, that seeks common ground between the classical repertoire for the instrument, the piping tradition of piobaireachd and Duke Ellington's master of the alto sax, Johnny Hodges. It also has a great deal to say about the register and range of the instrument with demanding - and surely rewarding - writing for the SSO's longstanding principal clarinet Yann Ghiro, and very colourful accompaniment from the strings.
It was preceded by the most familiar work of the programme, John McLeod's dramatic The Gokstad Ship, a celebration of an excavated Viking burial vessel that has been played by the SSO before and began life as a strings-workout for the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland. And it was followed by the Scottish Premiere of Glasgow-born Oliver Knussen's fifteen-minute Symphony No.3, also a one-movement work but with a more fraught genesis. It is compact only in its time-frame, huge in content and orchestration with harp, celeste, guitar and mandolin adding passages of "musical box" to the thematic material, reappearing like the shuffle function on an iPod, although long predating that technology.
Then exquisitely detailed playing required for that was very different from the muscular sweep Anna Clyne demands for her three-movement Beltane, of similar duration. With some self-conscious quotation - it opens with a straight lift from the first of Britten's Sea Interludes - its mix of the bombastic and slightly hippy adopted traditional music elements in a somewhat kitsch fashion at its close. Another first performance, fans of prog should listen out for it in February.
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