Music

BBC SSO

City Halls, Glasgow

Keith Bruce, three stars

PARTICULARLY after hearing two very precisely thematically-focused concerts by the Scottish Ensemble and Dunedin Consort, it seemed that the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s season-opener had set itself rather too many boxes to tick. But as one of those was the latest of conductor Thomas Dausgaard’s “composer roots” series – here dealing with Leonard Bernstein – it is not unfair to make that comparison.

Bernstein’s Songfest, performed with a quality sextet of singers, occupied the second half, its fanfare-like opening anticipated by Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, which began the evening with rather less muscle than the work really requires.

That difficulty was a niggle, however, beside those that beset the performance of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, during which pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin and the conductor seemed an ocean apart.

There was no faulting the soloist, although his positioning, well into the body of the hall, seemed to make the Steinway sound especially reverberant, but Dausgaard’s languid tempo, from Yann Ghiro’s clarinet glissando onwards, served neither Gershwin nor Bernstein well.

Those well-known works bracketed the European premiere of Brio by Augusta Read Thomas, premiered by the Des Moines Symphony Orchestra in Iowa earlier this year, and an intriguing intricate work of pizzicato strings, percussion, harp, celeste, and brass punctuation whose precise cross-rhythms really seemed much more the sphere of the SSO’s Principal Guest Conductor Ilan Volkov than Dausgaard.

The Bernstein is a problematic work in itself, its “eclecticism” just as arguably a bit of a guddle of styles. Once again the soloists saved the day however, with soprano Tracy Cantin and mezzos Kelley O’Connor and Michele Losier generally having the best of the music and Paul Appleby, Nmon Ford and Musa Mgqungwana the tenor, baritone and bass.

If the composer had pursued the direction he finds in the setting of Langston Hughes’s I, Too, Sing America at the heart of the suite, he might have produced a contemporary classic. As it stands, and as Dausgaard directed it, its impeccable choice of wordsmiths is not really matched by the work of the composer.