Music

RSNO

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Keith Bruce

four stars

AS chief conductor designate of the Rotterdam Phil, young Israeli conductor Lahav Shani is obviously far from being an unknown quantity, but the 27-year-old's debut with the RSNO nonetheless continued Scotland's recent run of introductions to a new generation of talent.

It is also fair to guess that he would not be familiar with the Concerto for Oboe and Strings by Ralph Vaughan Williams, another of this season's showcases for the orchestra's principals, Adrian Wilson following flautist Kath Bryan to the front of the stage. The parallel did not end there, as her appropriation of The Lark Ascending for her instrument found an obvious echo in the first movement of this wartime piece, which has lovely lyrical long phrases as well as fiendishly fast passages. Especially notable was the dialogue between soloist and cellos immediately before the final folk-like melody.

Shani had begun the evening with a bracing Carnival Overture by Dvorak, leader Maya Iwabuchi in the spotlight and a fine balance between the strings and bold brass in a precision account of Bohemian colour. But anyone expecting fireworks in the conductor's reading of Beethoven's Third Symphony in the second half of the concert would have been disappointed. This was a very measured Eroica that followed naturally on from the concerto in its chamber approach, but which Shani knows intimately enough to have no need of the score.

Emphatic but never over-stated, he dictated a pace than seemed rathern more leisurely than is fashionable, his body-language dictating an initial sense of containment that later produced moments of breath-holding intensity, but was never as explosive as some might want and was all the more fascinating for it.