Music

BBC SSO

City Halls, Glasgow

Keith Bruce, four stars

ONLY during May’s Tectonics weekend of new music does the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s programme inhabit the City Halls more fully than was the case on Sunday afternoon. The second of chief conductor Thomas Dausgaard’s Composer Roots concerts featuring the music of Carl Nielsen, of his native Denmark, was a packed three hours of music, with Royal Conservatoire of Scotland students playing the composer’s chamber music in the Recital Room during the intervals and the Danish String Quartet performing his G Minor Quartet No.1 on stage as a post-concert “coda”.

The bigger stuff – and Nielsen does big music with powerful climaxes as boldly as any composer of his time – saw the orchestra joined by virtuoso Norwegian soloist Henning Kraggerud for the Violin Concerto and singers Denise Beck and Benjamin Appl for the wordless vocal contribution to the second movement of his Symphony No.3, the “Sinfonia espansiva”.

In a less busy concert, some Bach would have been the ideal precursor to the concerto, as that influence is immediately apparent in the solo part, which is full-on from the start with very spare, always fascinating, accompaniment from different sections of the orchestra, in changing combinations. Nielsen’s approach to orchestration is quite distinctive, at once harking back to earlier models but still sounding very modern.

That is equally true of the symphony, with its glorious carnivalesque section in the first movement, that pastoral second movement closer to the picturesque style of some of his Scandinavian contemporaries, and the route of the journey to the finale full of changes of gear, handbrake turns and emergencies stops, as well as those big impacts.

It was a very different Nielsen, however, to which we had been introduced in the concert’s superb opening section, which teamed the orchestra – mostly just the strings – with the Danish String Quartet in folk band mode, pianist Julia Lynch and soprano Denise Beck. The arrangement of his songs and traditional melodies was a glorious half-hour sequence with both the violin, viola and cello playing and Beck’s beautifully richly-toned singing – warm yet absolutely precise – a complete delight.