Music
BBC SSO, City Hall, Glasgow
Michael Tumelty
four stars
IN the years I've been reviewing the BBC SSO's Discovering Music series, which analyses with a presenter the piece the orchestra will play, dissects it, finds its inner core, reassembles it, then performs the complete work uninterrupted, yesterday's concert, presented by regular guest Stephen Johnson, with Hans Gal's Second Symphony as the subject of the programme, was one of the most persuasive I have witnessed in this species of musical event.
Written in 1942-43, the Symphony might just be regarded as a late Romantic, large-scale, four-movement symphony, which it is. And as such, the work is deeply-impressive in the craftsmanship and skill of its construction: it is absolutely coherent, unhurried in every aspect of its musical architecture: one of those symphonies that needs space to stretch its limbs and make its points. Hans Gal wrote all that into the music, which you could hear in its long, unfolding opening, its gradual accumulation of instrumental texture, right through to the movement's grand climax, where the thudding timpani-tread, almost exactly as in Brahms' First Symphony, generated huge intensity.
The leaping Allegro of the second movement, almost playful, then martial; the sumptuous beauty of the slow movement; and the gathering, rumbling storm clouds at the opening of the finale: all of these displayed highly distinctive and individualistic colouring and features. Nothing was routine or formulaic. And the breathtaking ending, with its deeply-ambiguous repeated chords, will haunt me. That ending seemed to enshrine a memory of all that this man Gal and his generation of fellow Jews witnessed and knew. It was music of enormous life-experience and depth, movingly-realised by conductor Otto Tausk and the BBC SSO.
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