Music

BBC SSO

City Halls, Glasgow

Keith Bruce, four stars

IT is perhaps half a century since Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik – an informal chamber work usually upscaled for string ensemble – was a staple of the repertoire. In more recent years it has often been seen as a bit naff, but a brisk, crisp reading of it directed by SSO leader Laura Samuel not only revealed its melodic riches but also its kinship with the composer’s last symphony, the “Jupiter”, and particularly the third movement, which adds lovely work for the winds. The final movement, which contrives to look both backwards to the baroque and forward to Beethoven, was the most revealing part of the afternoon, however, from the sotto voce beginning an object lesson in conductor-less control of dynamics.

Between the Mozart came Benjamin Britten and his teacher Frank Bridge, the latter’s Three Idylls – string quartet writing arranged for larger forces by Paul Hindmarsh – including in the central movement “theme” on which Britten composed his Variations by way of a tribute. The stronger tunes – more complete as they stand perhaps – are in the Adagio and Allegro on either side of that, and the work’s kinship with the Mozart opener could not have been more apparent.

Britten’s Rimbaud settings, Les Illuminations, a pivotal work in his personal life as well as his catalogue, concluded that first half, with soprano Claire Booth – a singer often heard tackling the most challenging contemporary music – on fine form and violist Scott Dickinson and cellist Tom Rathbone also contributing to an immaculately balanced reading. Compared to Sarah Fox’s performance with the SCO under Andrew Manze earlier this year, it was Arthur Rimbaud who slightly lost out. Although often – as in Royaute – the narrative is all in the notes, elsewhere Booth was all vowels, leaving her precision musicality wanting a little more interaction with the text.