Music

BBC SSO, City Hall, Glasgow

Michael Tumelty

Five Stars

PROGRAMMING Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto requires a tricky balancing act: how do you set it up and precede it? And with what do you follow it? The concerto, effectively in four movements, not the usual three, is in many ways one of the Russian composer’s works where you can still sense him glancing over his shoulder, perhaps waiting for that knock at the door. And it is so unremittingly-intense, which could be felt all the way through Boris Brovtsyn’s drainingly-concentrated performance with the BBC SSO and conductor Vassily Sinaisky replacing an ill Alexander Vedernikov on Thursday night, that I don’t recall feeling such a hushed, expectant atmosphere. It felt that, in the crowded house, all of us were pinned to our seats.

And somehow, the amazing Brovtsyn, even when he let fly spectacularly in the finale, with an astounding display of unstoppably-virtuosic playing, ever let go of our our throats. And that level of wizardry, in performance and in the profundity of a composition that dwells in the depths yet, almost spiritually, rises way above the confines of its circumstances, is one of the miracles of music. You can contain the man; you can not contain the limits of his expression, his spirit, or his creative imagination.

The path to the unrelenting tension of of Shostakovich’s concerto was laid by Glinka’s Valse-fantasie, one of those pieces that defined Russian-ness in musical language. But after the Shostakovich, a straight-to-the-guts catharsis was required, and was provided by Sinaisky and the SSO in a gloriously-sonorous and rivetingly-detailed account of Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition: a quintessentially-Russian feast.