Music
SCO
City Hall, Glasgow
Michael Tumelty
three stars
I SUPPOSE the bald truth about concert programming is this. You can take all the risks you like. You can programme the unfamiliar; you can programme the new or the recent. You can champion music that is neglected. You can programme music unjustly forgotten. Or you can programme music that is simply unknown. The price you have to pay is that even your most devoted audience might vote with its feet and not turn up.
And that, bluntly, is what happened to the SCO on Friday night when only 180 punters turned out for their concert with Oliver Knussen conducting. That’s possibly the smallest SCO audience I’ve seen in 30 years. Does it matter? Well, that’s a question for the players and the new SCO chief executive, Gavin Reid. Most of the few of us who did turn out will probably agree it was an enthralling event, while Knussen, a somewhat ungainly figure, though crisp and economic in his direction, was very much in charge of a programme that opened with Henze’s First Symphony, a forgotten piece, though one with considerable merits, not least the nervy, itchy, dance-like qualities of its finale.
That was followed by a bewitching account of Martin Suckling’s Six Speechless Songs, an SCO 40th anniversary commission with ravishing orchestration and a final, gently-rocking movement that had me entranced. Then the extraordinary principal violist Jane Atkins broke hearts and moved mountains in her performance of Britten’s little-played Lachrymae, while Knussen opened eyes and minds in a bracing account of Mendelssohn’s First Symphony. Ever heard it live? Me neither, I think. We have now. Pity we’re the only 180 who have.
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