Music

BBC SSO

City Hall, Glasgow

Michael Tumelty

three stars

I TRUST not too many of the audience at Alpesh Chauhan’s concert with the BBC SSO yesterday afternoon spent (wasted) as much time as this listener did scouring the programme for internal connections. I was just trying to figure it out, guv’, honest, and getting nowhere fast. There might have been a connection between Mendelssohn’s Ruy Blas Overture and his Italian Symphony at the far end of the concert, I suppose; though the totally invigorating performance of the symphony by the SSO and its young conductor, who seems to have a marvellously unpretentious approach to his craft, blew away my notions in the open-air of the performance.

Britten might have been a safer bet with his long-since arrangement of a movement from Mahler’s Third Symphony, made in those faraway days before 1967 when Bernstein unleashed Mahler onto the wider world; and Britten’s arrangement of Mahler’s What the Wild Flowers Tell Me remains exquisitely beautiful in its own right. But the distance between that Benjamin Britten and the composer who dreamed up the exotic and expressive masterpiece Lachryme, for viola, especially in its arrangement for strings (minus violins) is in musical light years; even more so in the seductive performance yesterday by French violist Lise Berthaud, who seemed to stop time as John Dowland’s original melody drifted hauntingly from the surface of the music.

And, of course, anyone looking for interconnections was asking for trouble anyway. Why? Because they let Rossini into the room, with all the musical tricks that pack his hilarious overture, the Italian Girl in Algiers: you could see the wide grin spreading through the band.