Music

BBC SSO

Glasgow Cathedral

Keith Bruce

four stars

IN UNDER a month, Glasgow Cathedral’s own festival brings a week of varied music, film and visual art into the city’s historic place of worship, and on Thursday evening conductor Thomas Dausgaard showed just how wonderful the venue can be.

Broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 – and even for the fortunate members of the capacity audience a “catch-up” listen is essential – it began in the Cathedral’s Choir at the Eastern end of the building, for Haydn’s Symphony No 99 and four songs by Richard Strauss with soprano Rowan Pierce. Dausgaard’s crisp approach to the Haydn in the first movement revealed the acoustic to be much more adaptable than you might guess, as it also gave a fullness to the strings in the following slow movement, a chamber-sized SSO on very fine form.

Pierce has already endeared herself to Scottish audiences with a series of last-minute-substitute appearances on the concert platform, a singer with a remarkable instrument for her petite frame. Reading from a score perhaps inhibited her full range of expression here, and her German diction was not always as clear as one might hope, but her selection of material was hugely demanding, particularly the setting of Clemens Brentano’s Amor.

For the main event of the evening, audience and hugely expanded orchestra flitted to the larger space of the Nave for Rued Langgaard’s Music of the Spheres, making the fullest use of the resonance of the building, musicians on all four sides of the conductor’s podium. Derided in his native Denmark when it was composed at the end of the First World War, it has since found champions during the heady days of 1968, and the in the persons of Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti and more recently Dausgaard himself, who conducted a BBC Proms performance in 2010.

Unarguably years ahead of its time, it perhaps most obviously prefigures Minimalism in its use of repeated short phrases, arpeggiating percussion, and shimmering strings, as well as the entry of a vocal chorus from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland singing the sol-fa notes of the scale. But the composer is really a law entirely unto himself, and this work, in which nothing ever resolves, was a unique sonic experience, given a singular performance here.