Notes on a musical journey

Arts Editor

Thursday 22 March 2012

It is remarkable, but not more than a coincidence, that the new season announced today by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra contains a high proportion of relatively less known repertoire from the last century.

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Keith Bruce previews the new season of performances at BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

The day after my colleagues observed the new regime has precipitated no revolution at the RSNO (Michael Tumelty) and that the SCO's programme contains less new music than this year's (Kate Molleson), the SSO unveils a season that celebrates Polish composers Lutoslawski, Szymanowski and some of their less well-know countrymen. It uses the notorious 1913 premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring as a cue to explore dance rhythms, delves into the challenges of the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg, winds up a cycle of the symphonies of Vaughan Williams and commences a celebration of Benjamin Britten's centenary in partnership with the SCO and the Scottish Ensemble. And it includes new or recent work by a cluster of Scottish and European composers as well as a premiere from artist-in- association Matthias Pintscher.

Is orchestra director Gavin Reid bragging about the boldness of this modern repertoire? Not until I point it out. "I suppose there is a lot of 20th-century music, but it wasn't a conscious decision. It is more to do with the themes that emerged as the season came together," he says.As the RSNO's new man Peter Oundjian observed at his launch event on Tuesday, that process can be complex. I suspect that must be even more so for the BBC Scottish, which not only has a remarkable team of men on the podium – chief conductor Donald Runnicles; his predecessor, now principal guest conductor Ilan Volkov; associate guest conductor Andrew Manze; and Pintscher – but the double demand of being both a concert-playing and a broadcasting band."We happily live in dual worlds," says Reid, confident of an "inquisitive audience" among radio listeners as well as concert-goers, but he talks firstly of the growing numbers taking their seats in Glasgow's City Halls. "We are seeing the audience developing, and showing it wants to go on an interesting journey with us. Finding the next station on the line is an interesting opportunity."In other words, he is confident the SSO's ticket-buyers are able to take a season that is not in thrall to the familiar warhorses of the Romantic and Classical repertoire.Not that they have been ignored. Just as pianist Denis Kozhukhin has won legions of fans with his Prokofiev concertos this season – and he returns next April to play Rachmaninov under Runnicles – Steven Osborne's journey through the Beethoven concertos is bound to attract loyal devotees. Other pianists in the season include Olli Mustonen playing Bartok, Garrick Ohlsson and Angela Hewitt playing Chopin and Ingrid Fliter playing Ravel in a capricious Valentine's Day programme.Scotland's classical sweetheart Nicola Benedetti joins the SSO to play the work with which she won the BBC's Young Musician of the year, Szymanowski's First Violin Concerto, just a few months after she performs it under Gergiev with the LSO at the Edinburgh Festival. The event with which the season begins might also be said to have its roots in Edinburgh.The relationship between Runnicles and the SSO was forged at the festival, and among those memorable concerts was a performance of Wagner's Lohengrin in 2003. During the coming season, Runnicles will direct concerts of each of the three acts of Tristan and Isolde with a stellar cast of soloists with whom he has forged relationships in a career as an esteemed Wagnerian, including Swedish soprano Nina Stemme and English tenor Ian Storey. The first of the concerts, in Glasgow on Thursdays and at Edinburgh's Usher Hall the following Sunday, opens the season on September 27. In 2013 the chief conductor will also give us his Shostakovich Nine (alongside Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem) and Beethoven Five (with the Berg Violin Concerto and the Blue Danube)."Ideas tend to fizz," says Reid, "and we have to be patient in putting them together. Each member of the conducting team brings different skills – there is no overlap between Ilan and Matthias when it comes to new music, for example."It is Pintscher that has the closing concert next May, in which his own new work is bracketed by dance pieces from Igor Stravinsky (marking the centenary of the Rite's stormy debut) and Johan Sebastian Bach. Volkov, meanwhile, has charge of the key concert in the Polish strand and will be working with the orchestra alongside the Hebrides Ensemble on that weekend of celebration of Second Viennese School. Also next spring he will be curating a mini festival, Tectonics, that will involve the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra and the music of John Cage, and another Hear and Now series concert will present the first retrospective of the orchestral music of New Yorker John Zorn. That same strand will see the orchestra playing Magnus Liindberg and Kaija Sariaaho, while Scottish composers in the coming season include Stuart MacRae, Alasdair Nicolson and John Maxwell Geddes.Before all that, and ahead of Act One of Tristan, the orchestra's concert on September 15 of the music of Max Steiner may prove another hot 20th-century ticket, because his soundtrack to Casablanca will accompany a screening of the film.And even before that, at the start of May, the current season concludes with a weekend of Maestro Runnicles, beginning at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in the company of some of the students and working through a Saturday afternoon of chamber music with the conductor at the piano, to Bruckner 7 on May 7. From there to a year hence is a bold and fascinating journey, however serendipitously it came about.Donald Runnicles and the BBC SSO play Schumann and Brahms – and a new work by Detlev Glanert – at Glasgow's City Halls tonight at 7.30pm.

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Notes on a musical journey

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