Festival Music

Mariinsky Orchestra & Royal Scottish National Orchestra

Usher Hall

Keith Bruce

four stars

THE comparison that everyone made was of student musicians performing "side-by-side" with professionals, with the RSNO coming off second best to maestro Valery Gergiev's own home ensemble from St Petersburg. Underlying that cynicism is perhaps a belief that the Russians have the greater interpretive experience of the conductor's idiosyncratic style – the toothpick baton and flutttering left hand – that still looks utterly opaque from the audience view.

Whatever he is doing, however, it does seem to produce the goods from an orchestra – in the second half here an enormous one, with nine horns and nine double basses, to play the Fourth Symphony of Shostakovich, a work that dates from the composer's disastrous 1936 (when his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was denounced in Pravda), and was not performed until 1961.

It is still not as often played as his later symphonies and less dramatic than some of those, but here was given a rich, full-blooded account with a gorgeous ensemble string sound achieved in just a few hours rehearsal. It would be interesting to know how the section principal roles were allocated, and notable that key RSNO players were in their usual places, the cellos led by Aleksei Kiseliov, Kath Bryan in charge of the flutes and Christopher Gough the horns. Duncan Swindells also had a prominent role on bass clarinet and played beautifully.

The first half had been a chance to hear the components of that string sound, with Olga Volkova leading by example the crisp, fast – and rather theatrical – playing on Prokofiev's Symphony No1, and the RSNO strings showing how good they can be at playing very quietly indeed on Britten's Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge.