Music

BBC SSO/Brabbins

City Halls, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

four stars

IN this year’s newly-announced BBC Proms programme there is a concert by the SSO to mark the 60th birthday of conductor Martyn Brabbins which includes a new work to mark the occasion that has the input of no fewer than 14 contemporary composers. New music is among the many things that the music director of English National Opera is your man for, as that commission recognises.

Whether it was the mighty Tenth Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich or the Scottish premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s percussion concerto with Colin Currie, remembering composer Steve Martland, that drew the audience, I cannot say, by the City Hall was very full on Thursday evening. The concert began with the oldest work on the programme, Stravinsky’s Symphonies of wind instruments, a suitable precursor to the Shostakovich, which also features those soloists in multiple combinations as it unfolds. The orchestra’s latest signing, piccolo specialist Luke Russell, could hardly have asked for better music to play for his first appearance on the staff payroll.

Composer Steve Martland died of a heart attack six years ago, and Turnage’s Martland Memorial is a very personal work for both himself and its soloist, who were good friends. That much is apparent in a work that is very much in his spirit if musically dissimilar, contriving to be both elegiac and great fun, often at the same time. Requiring the sort of busy performance at which Currie excels, it culminates in a one-man duo on both vibraphone and marimba, after running through the full gamut of big and small drums and gongs and a full basket of percussion “toys”, swanee whistle and bird calls included.

Decoding Shostakovich is fascinating, but can be a distraction from the music itself. Brabbins took his time to shape the Tenth with the two-paced finale always on the horizon, concentrating on the best expression of all the instrumental colours he produces along the way. This was not perhaps the most powerful account of the symphony that you might hear, but richly rewarding in all its details, with the strings really hitting top form from the third movement to the last bars.