Music

BBC SSO/Volkov City Halls, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

four stars

Conductor Ilan Volkov is now in the third decade of his association with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, appointed Principal Conductor at 26 and subsequently Principal Guest Conductor since 2009. Next month the latest edition of the Tectonics festival he introduced to the orchestra’s calendar will be announced, and every concert he directs has something of that event’s cutting edge.

Two veteran composers of English modernism were in Glasgow on Thursday evening to hear the SSO and pianist Joanna MacGregor play their music, and Volkov dedicated the concert to a third, John White, who died at the start of the year.

The world premiere in the programme was by Michael Parsons, whose LEVELS for Orchestra proved a highly approachable work, seemingly designed to demonstrate the full range of orchestral sounds, either together, as in the first and last of its sections, or sequentially, as in the second.

If the piece was more harmonic than some might have predicted, it also became more playful as it progressed, especially in the short solos for the string front desks and the surprising pizzicato finish.

Howard Skempton’s Piano Concerto, from 2015, was also a BBC commission that Volkov had a hand in, and is a work ideally suited to the pianistic style of Joanna MacGregor.

READ MORE: I took my son to the touring show of Cats and felt like I'd been mugged

No less easy on the ear, for all its inspiration in the sometimes daunting work of Morton Feldman, it opens with long sustained notes in the string and winds, the piano always front and centre in each of its distinct movements. There may be nothing especially virtuosic in the writing for the soloist, but the bluesy third movement is followed by a jazzy march in partnership with the trumpets that dances along the keyboard. All a bit retro, perhaps, but that was part of its charm.

MacGregor’s encore, of Skempton’s Well, Well Cornelius, acknowledged the man who brought White, Parsons and Skempton together in his Scratch Orchestra, Cornelius Cardew.

All this contemporary English music had been prefaced by Igor Stravinsky’s Four Etudes, studies in orchestration from a century earlier that are instantly recognisable as the work of the composer, and the second half of the concert was entirely given over to his ballet suite, Petrushka.

READ MORE: Review: Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Emelyanychev

From their first entrance in the opening Shrovetide Fair, we heard a world class display of absolutely accurate ensemble power playing by the SSO strings. Perhaps the tone of guest first flute Matthew Higham was little fey, but pianist Lynda Cochrane put in a terrific shift, as robust as required, and the whole performance was gorgeously theatrical from the brass to the harp, every player on stage following Volkov’s dynamic instructions to the letter.