Music

BBC SSO/Wilson

City Halls, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

****

ALTHOUGH he is a fascinating example of how fashions change – an interest in early music that made him seem a fogey a century ago was almost a requirement of a more recent generation of composers – it is still the case that Ottorino Respighi is often seen as a writer of attractive picturesque music rather than a “serious artist”.

Maybe conductor John Wilson, who made his name with the light music of Hollywood musicals and has shown a deep understanding of other repertoire in his appointment as associate guest conductor with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, relates to that.

Having directed fine SSO performances of British music, his programme of all three of Respighi’s Roman suites revealed them as sumptuous orchestral works much more contemporary than is assumed.

There were some magnificent solo performances from principals across the orchestra, as well brass front of house and backstage, three keyboard players, four clarinets, a mandolin, a battalion of percussionists and timpanist Gordon Rigby playing his socks off, but the power of the ensemble was what most will remember. The evening came to a powerful climax with the martial end to the Pines of Rome, the best known of the three, but the Epiphany at the end of later, and rarer, Roman Festivals had no less impact. It was that work’s carnivalesque cabaret of instruments that made clear just how modern Respighi’s melodic style and orchestration were at the time of writing. In between those, the Fountains if Rome was a less flamboyant beast, given a carefully paced interpretation by Wilson, who had the music for Pines open before him even as it ended.

Given that the trilogy was the point of the exercise, it was, then, an odd decision not to play them in chronological order, which would certainly have worked just as well.

The short first half with Donizetti’s Overture to Don Pasquale and Puccini’s Capriccio sinfonico, which includes music he re-used in Boheme, was no less dramatic, and also illustrated just how far orchestral music for opera is from Hollywood fare, so condensed and requiring the ability for a big band to turn on a sixpence.