Music

BBC SSO/Gernon

City Halls, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

****

ALTHOUGH not quite as youthful as Ilan Volkov when he was appointed chief conductor of the BBC Scottish, Ben Gernon, just 30 this year, is nonetheless a very young principal guest conductor with the BBC’s Manchester orchestra, the Philharmonic.

For his return visit to Glasgow since that appointment, he directed one of those works that is a modernist showpiece for both a symphony orchestra and its conductor, the complete ballet score of The Firebird. Doubtless it was no accident that the performance, broadcast live on Thursday evening, came as Composer of the Week was exploring the Stravinsky’s life on Radio 3, and Gernon’s bold reading, and particularly the full-blooded finale, was more exciting than the very musical, but oddly subdued, vintage recording by Bernstein and the New York Phil of the Suite that Donald Macleod had played earlier in the week.

Gernon’s context was not the composer’s life, however, but the time of the work’s composition, and the first half featured two English works that appeared within years of it and could hardly have been more different. It is a moot point whether the coming catastrophe of the First World War is audible in any of them, but both George Butterworth’s pastoral Idyll, The Banks of Green Willow, and the song cycle On Wenlock Edge by Ralph Vaughan Williams have become associated with that conflict because the former was the last work Butterworth wrote before he died at the Somme, and the latter includes Housman’s Is my team ploughing?, now indelibly associated with those who perished.

I am sure it was better balanced on the radio, but David Webb is not the biggest-voiced of tenors, with quite a heavy vibrato and he was often swamped by the orchestra in the Vaughan Williams, although he did manage to assert himself during Bredon Hill, the climax of the cycle. Elsewhere the star of the night was often principal oboe Stella McCracken, both on the Butterworth, which the orchestra had not played over 30 years, and the Stravinsky. The SSO has many fine soloists but her full warm tone is always unmistakable.