FOUR STARS
I’VE observed over the years that the RSNO’s Music at the Museum concert, given in Kelvingrove on Friday night and repeated on Saturday, has shifted from being a schedule-filler to becoming an annual institution. Friday night’s terrific show added another layer: it was a complete treat, indeed a double treat, with the glamorous American soprano Angel Blue adding a ravishing quality with her luscious singing of operatic extracts, and the prize-winning young Uzbekistani conductor, Aziz Shokhakimov, still in his twenties, impressively, if occasionally hurriedly, powering through a very popular programme of music from Verdi to Wagner.
I should also comment on the famous-notorious resonance of Kelvingrove’s gallery, so reverberant as to make mincemeat out of orchestral textures. Not on Friday it wasn’t, as all manner of details, from the strings’ decoration of the majestic big tune in Wagner’s Tannhauser Overture, to the rhythmic intricacies of Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsody, were quite audible. And I did overhear someone being advised to move upstairs as “downstairs you will hear nothing”. That wasn’t just bad advice. It was wrong, from the perspective of a downstairs listener.
The orchestral playing, in extracts from Carmen to Mascagni’s Intermezzo and Tchaikovsky’s Polonaise, was full-on and richly-delivered. But Angel Blue, creamy in her middle register, and stellar in her radiant and brilliantly-clear top register, won hearts and then broke them in her extracts from Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur, Puccini’s O mio babbino caro, and, stunningly, Verdi’s Sempre libera from La Traviata before lavishing the wrap-around beauty of her sound on Rachmaninov’s Vocalise. And she added an authentic bluesy tinge in Gershwin’s Summertime. A good and entertaining night in the museum.
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