Music
RSNO Primary Schools Concert
RSNO Centre, Glasgow
Michael Tumelty
three stars
THE presentation has changed, but the core remains. For decades, the RSNO has visited schools, taking music to kids. It was always the way to make an impact: hit them with the live stuff. In truth, sometimes it was awfully dry and matter-of-fact in its presentation. That’s been loosening up gradually over the last 30 years or so, but I don’t think I’ve witnessed such a potential for change as I did yesterday at my first RSNO primary schools concert in the new RSNO Centre, with Holly Mathieson conducting and hundreds of children engaged in that ancient but elusive art of being alert. All the old favourites were played, from Bernstein’s Mambo (participatory, of course) to Saint-Saens’ Aquarium, from Beethoven Five to the Hall of the Mountain King and Holst’s Mars, illustrated with an old photo of Holst as one of the orchestra’s trombone section.
The big differences yesterday lay in the use of the Centre’s auditorium, which is crackingly immediate in its responses, the energy and imaginative presentation by Bill Chandler, artistic director of these activities, in the addition of two new works to the roster, and the total and noisy engagement by the children in the digital Minecraft game, which had them whooping and hollering in the hunt for the bad guy, The Creeper, finally blasted, light sabres blazing, by John Williams’ Star Wars. The new music was brilliant, with Oliver Searle’s minimalist-y Sauchiehall appropriate to the tour of the Street, and Jay Capperauld’s Terrarium, a rock-face of a piece with an unexpectedly lush moment in the Lego-land that is Minecraft.
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