Music
RSNO
RSNO Centre, Glasgow
Michael Tumelty
three stars
WEDNESDAY’S RSNO lunchtime concert, part of its Symphony, Soup and a Sandwich series, presented in the auditorium of the RSNO Centre, was an absolute winner with the audience that thronged the place, filling it to capacity, which is 400 souls. That is interesting in itself, but what added to the inimitable buzz which accompanies a full house was the strand of informality filtering through the occasion.
It was presented by Lisa Rourke, a viola player in that section of the orchestra. She was playing, but simply got up with a microphone to chat to the crowd in an informal manner, and, equally conversationally, to conductor Ben Gernon, who was replacing the indisposed Jamie Phillips. And Gernon was also effective at the chat, whether about the programme or the prospect of Beethoven as a dinner guest.
Gernon was very good too in his description of Kurt Schwertsik’s Shrunken Symphony, a wee opener that was a microcosmic starter packing four movements and a thesaurus of classical styles and structures into its highly entertaining five minutes: a party-popper as well as a clever musical construction.
The intimacy and benign quality of the occasion generated a perfect ethos for the warm and beautifully-played account of Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll that followed, before Beethoven, also in a good mood, though with his usual unstoppable energy, joined the lunchtime event with his Eighth Symphony as the main course. In truth, and the acoustic of the new auditorium reveals only the truth, much of the symphony, in timings of entries and ensemble balance, could have been tighter; but who am I to ruin a good lunchtime?
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