Music

RSNO, RSNO Centre, Glasgow, Keith Bruce, four stars

THE end of the tenure of Peter Oundjian as music director will perhaps be remembered for the big stuff – the Mahler 9 this weekend and Britten’s War Requiem at the BBC Proms in September – but here was a chance to enjoy another side to the conductor and the orchestra in what was, perhaps strangely, his debut in the lunchtime concert series.

Three section principals stepped out from behind their front desks to be soloists in concertos by Haydn and Mozart with a reduced number of their colleagues making a baroque-era band. Guest-led by Jeanine Thorpe, who joined the front desk of the first violins for the recent tour, this was still a substantial band for Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto, with Chris Hart as soloist. 32 string players, pairs of flutes, horns, bassoons and trumpets and a busy timpanist is a large chamber orchestra and this one made a very rich sound, although the historically-informed approach we know from the regular visits of guest conductor Sir Roger Norrington clearly influenced the style of performance. Hart was particularly impressive on the lovely slow movement - Haydn at his melodious best, which the composer then tops in the finale with one of his best-loved tunes.

Shedding ten players for Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante, the sound was still a little full in the fine acoustic of the new auditorium in the opening movement, although a better balance between Maya Iwabuchi and Tom Dunn and their colleagues was achieved after the exquisite duet between violin and viola at its end. Composed on Mozart’s return to Salzburg in 1779 between two relatively minor symphonies of his huge catalogue, the work has an aching melancholy in its central slow movement, and the conversation between the two soloists may reflect the composer’s grief at the death of his mother or the loss of the soprano who supposedly broke his 23-year-old heart. The dancing figures of the finale – beautifully rendered here by Iwabuchi in particular – never quite shake off that undercurrent of sadness.