Brahms's Second Symphony is many things. It might be his sunniest and most radiant, but there is plenty of intensity and drama within its four movements. And its finale, though it contains a great deal of stealth, boils with action. What the symphony is not - not for one moment - is ordinary or bland, and any interpretation that produces such a result is not so much a transgression of style as a crime.
Yet that's what happened yesterday when South American conductor Roberto Minczuk steered the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra through a version of the great symphony that was four-square, pedestrian in its flow and singularly lacking in character. Sure, it was serviceable and workmanlike, but there's rather more to the music than that. The gorgeous second movement was, structurally, like a dog's breakfast, with no single sense of line uniting the sections, which seemed like discontinuous bits of carpet laid out, scattered like pieces of a jigsaw on a wooden floor.
The SSO's playing was firm, despite the direction, with top-drawer horn playing throughout and some marvellously rich strings in the coda to the first movement.
The five-star element in the programme came from the performance by Lisa Milne of half a dozen of Richard Strauss's most glorious songs: six of the best, indeed, with Zueignung, Allerseelen, Freundliche Vision, Befreit, Morgen and Cacilie all sung wonderfully by the soprano in her most luxuriously voiced form, and with just the right weightless quality to allow the great Freundliche Vision to float. The only observation one has to make is of the dangerously tremulous quality of the violin solo in Morgen. Same concert in Perth tonight.
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