Music
BBC SSO, City Hall, Glasgow
Michael Tumelty
three stars
EMERGING from the BBBC SSO's Afternoon Performance yesterday, I was asked by members of the audience how many stars I'd be giving what we'd just heard. The concert was two minutes finished, so I gave the question a body-swerve. 30 seconds later, at the lift, I said, without preamble: "three and a half". The half's invisible above, and I'll explain below.
Conductor for the day was Dutchman Otto Tausk, who did sterling work the other day with Hans Gal's Symphony. Yesterday was tougher. Mendelssohn's First (and very early) Symphony felt heavy-footed and weighed-down by its orchestration, though whether that was Tausk, or entirely Mendelssohn's doing, is hard to say.
But despite one or two nice touches, light touches of pizzicato, the main failing of the piece was its lack of inspired melody: little struck me as memorable. A more chamber orchestra-like touch from the conductor might have helped the delivery too.
Francesco Coll's Tapias for trombone and orchestra, receiving its UK premiere with SSO principal Simon Johnson as soloist, is an oddball piece with a tremendous racket that suggested to me, repeatedly, a busy, heaving urban landscape, including a foray into a hip-hop club. Johnson was the man outside, observing this teeming life; really a solitary figure, standing apart, blowing his noble, majestic long notes and solos, but not part of the crowd.
Otto Tausk's perfectly acceptable, if routine, Beethoven Seven in the second half was much like any other, until he went hyper-Presto in the coda of the Scherzo, booting the music into a finale that went off in turbo-charge and simply didn't stop. Brilliant stuff, at last: ergo the invisible half-star.
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