Music

BBC SSO

City Hall, Glasgow

Michael Tumelty

five stars

NO holds barred here, ladies and gentlemen. Five stars all round.The BBC SSO on Thursday night, playing as though there was no tomorrow, and this was their only chance to do it, produced a scorcher of a concert with conductor Michael Francis, a new name to me, but clearly a young man with his eye on the ball and his ear and mind on the score. He’ll be back, I’ll wager (possible management upheavals at the SSO allowing).

The start and end of the concert were both magical, with the four flutes for Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question positioned in the choir seats, Hedley Benson’s profoundly evocative trumpet solo up aloft, out of my sight, and the softest bed of string sound imaginable providing an onstage, gentle halo of chordal warmth; and then, at the other end of the night, the SSO laid on a red meat course with a gorgeously-juicy, on-the-bone account of Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances.

But in all honesty, the night ultimately belonged to Australian composer Brett Dean, whose trumpet concerto, Dramatis Personae, was an absolute sensation. Played astoundingly by soloist Hakan Hardenberger and the SSO, the hugely-entertaining piece, in the classic three-movement format, is a complete masterpiece of musical characterisation. It is an exemplar of how a contemporary idiom can be wholly communicative: wildly foot-tapping in its irresistible first movement, as solitary as the blues in its slow movement, and completely nuts in its wacky finale with a mad, hilarious march where Charlie Chaplin and Charles Ives rubbed shoulders and swapped grins. Great music, pellucid writing, cracking characterisation, fabulous, up-to-the-hilt playing and a complete entertainment.