Music

RSNO/Sondergard

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Kelvin Holdsworth

Three stars

MAHLER’S Adagio, the first movement of his unfinished Tenth Symphony, is a strange piece to build a concert around, not least because it is Mahler’s valediction to the world.

Music director Thomas Sondergard’s programme introduction asked the audience to decide whether this was a haunting farewell to life or a great cry of love and longing. However, his interpretation left little argument. There was no mistaking that this was a death bed scene and at its most profound in the sustained silence after the final chord. Complete stillness from the musicians, with every instrument and bow held by an orchestra of suddenly silent statues took the audience to the brink of the grave and made them look in.

Anyone hoping for a change of mood after the interval would have been disappointed. One expects Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony to sparkle with life and energy. However, Sondergard had other ideas. This was the most reserved reading of the work that I’ve heard and completely unexpected.

The restraint did allow one to hear things anew. The timpani beat of a funeral march is an obvious device in the second movement but for the first time I heard its echoes in both the later movements from the double basses, perhaps due to their isolation from the cellos in an unconventional orchestral layout.

For all the hunting horns and country dancing of Bruckner’s score, this was a performance that seemed determined to repackage all that raw energy as elegy. At the end, an echo of the silence that had ended the Mahler seemed to stutter as neither audience nor orchestra could decide whether they were still at a funeral.

Scandi Noir is all the rage in novels and TV thrillers. Who would have guessed it would come to the concert hall next?