Music

RSNO/Sondergard

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Keith Bruce

four stars

THE aim of these concerts by Scotland’s national orchestra - to bring its programme of outreach work into the main season - was a sound one. Many subscribers in Glasgow and Edinburgh will be unaware of the other side of the RSNO’s busy schedule that includes concerts for school pupils, work with young singers and encouraging the writing of new work through the Composers’ Hub.

In the end, however, this programme was trying to tick rather too many of those boxes all at once, selling some of them short, for all the quality of the performances and the music it contained.

That seemed particularly true for the RSNO Junior Chorus, marking its 40th anniversary with a new piece by Gary Carpenter, Ghost Songs, setting the verse of Marion Angus and Robert Louis Stevenson, beautifully written for the young voices and performed with exemplary precision in both the notes and the words. The orchestral writing, especially on the one anonymous poem, The Wee Wee Man, is also integral, which does raise the issue of how often a young choir will have the opportunity to perform it.

The other new work in the concert (and also deserving of a less crowded context) was Michael Cryne’s colourfully-orchestrated Open the Eastern Windows, a result of that Composers’ Hub and well equal to the challenge of following Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, which sees a master-orchestrator at play on an early music theme. If its exploration of the sections within the symphony orchestra was not so named, I fancy it would be more often heard.

Bringing bassist Margarida Castro to the front of the stage to play The Elephant from Carnival of the Animals, was a sure way to make the small people in the audience sit up, even after 9pm. Alongside the solo turns from within the band - cellist Aleksei Kiseliov on The Swan and Simon Lowdon’s xylophone Fossils - the Saint-Saens was the concert’s second, more playful appearance by Christine and Michelle Naughton. The American twins had earlier produced a very spangly version of Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos, and their appearance in Scotland on a pair of matched Steinways would have been all anyone was talking about from a less packed agenda of music.