Music

RSNO                                                                                        

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Michael Tumelty

Four Stars

WELL folks, here’s a sentence I’d never thought I’d write. It’s taken 26 years for the music of Jimi Hendrix to reach Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, but on Saturday night it made it, in the form of a wacky, crazy encore played by Italian cellist Giovanni Sollima, which had the feet tapping and the audience clapping along, and it wasn’t the Radetzky March! In truth, I’ve no idea what it was (not Purple Haze). Nobody in the band seemed to know, other than it was an improvisation on a Hendrix theme. Whatever, Sollima slid, plucked, powered and whacked his way through the performance, even getting a note, I was informed, out of the cello spike; an amazing feat from a musician described by players as “wonderfully barmy”.

Sollima had opened the programme with one of his own compositions, which featured him in a gorgeous, rapturous duet with RSNO principal cellist Aleksei Kiseliov, before performing Dvorak’s Cello Concerto, with conductor Thomas Sondergard finally getting a shot of the orchestra. Sollima’s rhapsodic playing was a bit free-form, but he made the piece sing with his impassioned, heartfelt and soulful playing. And I suspect from comments overheard that the audience loved his thesaurus of emotive facial contortions.

The second half was a corker: a superbly-gauged performance of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony with Sondergard bang-on in his timings: of the build in the first movement, of the dig, grit and drive of the second, of the heart-stopping concentration of the slow movement, and of the blazing power and drive of the finale. His control over the close was teeth-grinding in its intensity.