BBC SSO

BBC SSO

City Hall, Glasgow

Michael Tumelty

IF I ever suggest that Sibelius's Fifth Symphony is bullet-proof, remind me of the performance yesterday by the BBC SSO, conducted by Latvian Ainars Rubikis, making his debut with the SSO, a band that has this music in its DNA. I know he's doing it again tonight in Ayr, but did nobody tell Rubikis that Ayr is only an hour away?

He went through the symphony like an express train, which is pretty much the opposite of the way it should be. What happened to the gradual, irreversible growth of intensity through the symphony? Where was the seismic force as those horn themes, never once losing their grip on your throat, claw their way to the summit of the most shattering climax in the history of music?

All the activity in Rubikis's version was on the surface. There was nothing underneath. Texturing was cast aside. Did he do any forensic work with the band on structuring, so that everything feeds into one, unstoppable elemental force? The SSO played well, but it was thrown away; maybe in Ayr Rubikis will give it the space it desperately lacked yesterday.

I was immensely taken with cellist Leonard Elschenbroich's splendidly characterful playing of Nino Rota's Second Cello Concerto, a work that revels in its own plurality of styles, whether jauntily dancing about or plunging deep into soulful realms. It's a good piece, and one that brings a nice variety into a classical diet.

Peteris Vask's Credo, 25 minutes of beauty, would have been more effective at 10 minutes. He missed countless exit points, and a sense of the interminable became inevitable.