Music
BBC SSO
City Hall, Glasgow
Michael Tumelty
Five Stars
ONE day, but not now, I’ll tell you why I think Donald Runnicles is a supreme musical strategist. Put it this way for the moment: he’s scarcely away from his tenure as chief conductor of the BBC SSO when he’s back for a visit as conductor emeritus. In other words, he’s not long-enough away from his familiar post for his pulling power to have faded; and the result on Thursday? A near-capacity house for a classic Runnicles/SSO concert of Mozart and Mahler. And what’s so classic about early Mozart and Mahler in tandem?
Well, not much, really, until you consider several factors: Runnicles has been so successful in Scotland that his audience absolutely trusts him; and if he considers that an early miniature Mozart Symphony is worth playing, then we’ll damn well listen to what he has to say. And if he considers that soprano Carolyn Sampson is the ideal, naturalistic voice for Mozart arias, outstandingly the old warhorse, Exultate Jubilate, then we’ll jolly well listen to the unadorned beauty of Sampson’s lovely voice on that one, too. And that quality in her voice, the beauty of purity, made her the ideal vocal soloist for the final movement of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, in which this great conductor found, unveiled, and uncovered the wondrous honesty of the piece, from the open-hearted grain of its woodwind writing to the sheer vulnerability of its slow movement, where Mahler allows the emotions the exposure of nakedness; and that is a devastating quality of honesty which seemed to me to run in the bloodstream of Runnicles’ enthralling interpretation, superlatively performed by the SSO.
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