Music

BBC SSO, City Hall, Glasgow

Michael Tumelty

three stars

UNQUESTIONABLY, the talk of the night on Thursday at the BBC SSO's concert with conductor Andrew Manze was the (probably) first professional performance of the First Symphony by Swedish composer Wilhelm Stehammar, first played in the UK just 30 years ago by the Dalkeith Symphony Orchestra conducted by (now) former headmaster Malcolm Porteous, who was at Thursday's concert.

That's a plethora of 'firsts' in one sentence, but that's the way it was. The symphony, (1902/03) a huge, four-movement epic, is unashamedly Romantic, massively-eclectic, suffused with influences and echoes from Brahms, Bruckner and Wagner, and drenched with seductively-golden French horn tones and flourishes, though perhaps lacking a single distinctive theme that would set it apart from its near-stablemates.

None the less, there is not a single objectionable feature in the music, richly-played by the SSO, though perhaps a more swashbuckling approach than Manze's might have ignited the piece more. Still, it was a thrill to hear, and, personally, I was delighted to be regaled in Candleriggs by Mr Porteous (now 79) about his adventures in securing a score of the rarity.

But it wasn't the only rarity of the night, with an enthralling account of Sibelius's Karelia Overture, infinitely less known than the familiar Suite, but a hugely-integrated and commanding piece in its own right, and Steven Osborne's performance of Beethoven's Second Piano Concerto, completing his cycle, poetic in its slow movement, unleashing the young composer's sparkling, crispy wit in the finale, and transforming the first movement cadenza by replacing the more densely-contrapuntal of Beethoven's passages with Osborne's own, consistently-thematic, and hugely-effective elements. Insights all round on Thursday night. That's what it's all about.