Music

BBC SSO/Dausgaard

City Hall, Glasgow

Michael Tumelty

Four Stars

THURSDAY night’s BBC SSO concert was a critical event for the orchestra. It was the first official concert in Glasgow where the SSO’s new chief conductor, Dane Thomas Dausgaard, was on display with his own band. In advance of the evening, it felt momentous, however it might turn out. And my own feeling about Dausgaard was that I remained to be persuaded.

At the end of a long concert with two works and no interval, things, for me, had moved on. Dausgaard did a good job with Helen Grime’s splendid Catterline in Winter, the first of two Joan Eardley pictures, bringing the music vividly off the page, with the SSO projecting well the music’s restless dramatic undertow, as well as its surface earthiness, full of slippery contours: a very impressive piece, convincingly-delivered by the orchestra and its new boss. Part Two follows in December.

But the wide-screen performance of the night was Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony, given in a new edition with a proposed fourth movement finale created by a team of composers, musicologists and so on: the composer died before writing a finale, though he left bits and clues. I loved the performance of the first three movements. The band played massively and sonorously for their new skipper, while Dausgaard himself, though I find his style odd to watch, directed it like a proper symphony, full of forward movement, always pressing on and, bless his Danish socks, not letting the music assemble laboriously into one of those cathedrals in sound so beloved of Brucknerians. The new finale, I thought, was a failure; more of that another time.