BBC SSO, Glasgow City Hall Star rating: ***
Though their punning title sounded like a command, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra's triptych of concerts, the last based entirely on new or recent music by Scottish-based composers, did attract conspicuously relaxed, good-sized, good-natured Glasgow audiences. Each programme promisingly did something different. Classical music as a live event, with repartee between platform and audience, and cheerful presenters getting in the way of the performances, was the general theme. Clapping between movements, far from being frowned upon, was positively encouraged. Admission was free.
The first concert, aimed at family listening, set the tone. The choice of music, one short popular classic after another, looked nothing if not random, with Mendelssohn's Hebrides leading to Haydn's Trumpet Concerto, Handel's Water Music, Berlioz's Beatrice and Benedict overture and Britten's Young Person's Guide. The presenter of this programme, challenging our herd instinct, asked if anyone was attending a concert for the first time. A few people cautiously raised their hands, though not all of them were still in their seats after the interval. As an intermezzo, an actor planted in the audience rose to his feet at the question: "Is there a conductor in the house?" and in a genial evocation of last year's Maestro competition on TV went through the motions of conducting the march from William Tell, winning cheers for doing so.
But the rest of the concert, it must be said, did not rise that much higher. Though Tecwyn Evans conducted briskly - it was good to hear the air from the Water Music so fleetly played, at period instrument tempo, instead of with the old Karajan-style sleepiness - this was not an evening of supercharged Venezuelan velocity. The Haydn, even with the the orchestra's expert principal trumpeter Mark O'Keeffe as soloist, did not quite justify its inclusion and seemed hardly the best work with which to pay tribute to the composer's bicentenary. The Berlioz, though more than welcome, sounded insufficiently needle-sharp. The Britten fell apart at the start of the closing fugue.
The second programme, identified as The Maestro's Choice, formed part of the orchestra's adieu to Ilan Volkov as chief conductor, though he will return next season as principal guest conductor. Here, in a fierce, fast, hard-edged account of Ravel's La Valse, the temperature really rose, and the bassoon part in the same composer's Alborada del Gracioso, with its whimsical central serenade, was vividly characterised.
Though spun out with two intervals, this was a captivating concert, with the RSNO's Stephane Deneve a visible presence in the audience. A keen, articulate account of Tchaikovsky's String Serenade served as starter, followed by the neo-baroque grotesquerie of Stravinsky's Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments (plus drums and double basses) featuring Steven Osborne as soloist. The foggy, mock-funereal opening, the hauntingly songlike slow movement (with its Stravinskian foretaste of Ravel's piano concerto) and its sudden concluding piano acrobatics in the finale, were all riveting features of the performance.
Finally, on Saturday, came The New Celts, with Volkov again on the podium to conduct short or not-quite-so-short works by Martin Suckling, James Clapperton, David Fennessy and David Horne, each of whom answered - not always very communicatively - the questions with which they were plied by a further presenter. Nor, in spite of their flair for a catchy title, did all these composers consistently deliver equally catchy music. But Horne's rumbustious Submergence, at the end of an evening that seemed longer than it really was, gathered the rest of the programme into a sophisticated closing showpiece, a sort of 21st-century Berlioz overture with a cor anglais (apt instrument) part that came and went through chinks in the texture.
Suckling's Breathe, a jeu d'esprit about a slumbering cat and a slumbering composer, was a small, not unattractive tone picture. Clapperton's Songs and Dances of Death formed a tribute to Mussorgsky's work of the same title, its lugubriously wriggling wind timbres finally spawning a direct quote from the Russian original. Fennessy's This Is How It Feels, subtitled Another Bolero, turned out to be a sort of crescendo for orchestra, its slow, relentlessly pulsating rhythm, at one point startlingly interrupted, being indeed reminiscent of another bolero. Sounding initially like a door creaking in a draught, Fennessy's study in gradual build-up was not unimpressive and Volkov knew how to make something out of it. But this, on the whole, was a concert that tended to drift from incident to incident and never quite added up to a satisfactory whole.
