Music

RSNO/Sondergard

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Keith Bruce

five stars

THE theatrical convention of orchestral concerts has the musicians onstage stand as their conductor appears from the wings to bow to his audience before the first work on the programme. At Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Saturday evening it really felt as if the fortunate few there to listen should also have leapt to their feet to greet the RSNO’s music director Thomas Sondergard.

Social distancing restrictions limited the capacity of Glasgow’s big hall to a mere 100 masked ticket holders, scattered around the outer reaches of the auditorium, while the players occupied an extended platform. A full-strength symphony orchestra would nearly have outnumbered them, but Sondergard was directing a smaller ensemble that began with 25 musicians and never exceeded 40.

There was no sense, however, that this was anything less than a momentous occasion. After more than 15 months of prohibition as a result of the pandemic, live music was back with a concert that had been hastily added to the national orchestra’s inventive season of online performances. This in-person coda marked the closing of the orchestral year, with the RSNO’s next appearances being a major role in August’s Edinburgh International Festival, but the performance put an important marker down - “RSNO Live: Welcome Back!” read the top line of the programme.

The musicians may have been a small band, but it was an “A” team, with the section principals all in their places for a programme of vivacious 20th century French music that gave each of them a chance to show their skill, and seemed designed to induce ear-to-ear grins beneath the face-coverings of their audience.

Principal oboe Adrian Wilson had the most prominent role, as soloist in Jean Francaix’s L’horloge de flore (The Floral Clock), an oboe concerto by one of Nadia Boulanger’s star pupils that bursts with melodies and cleverly-orchestrated indications of the mechanism of the time-piece from the other winds and pizzicato strings. It sat between works by Ibert and Poulenc that might struggle to find a home in regular concerts but were absolutely perfect in the context of this 75-minute concert.

Jacques Ibert’s Divertissement began life as incidental music for a theatrical farce, and remains full of humour, poking fun at Mendelssohn’s Wedding March and Strauss’s Blue Danube as it dashes around like the soundtrack to some unseen animated film. Huge discordant piano splashes and a very apt referee’s whistle signal the end of the picturesque frivolity.

Francis Poulenc’s Sinfonietta shares some of the same melodic language in more sober fashion, and whets the appetite for larger symphonic works that Poulenc never actually wrote. Brilliant rhythmic variations lead the way into the narrative of the work, with every section of the orchestra, and many solo voices, taking the lead in turn.

That work, and the whole programme, seemed designed to display the riches of live orchestral music that we have been denied. On a weekend with other distractions, the musicians were not explicitly questioning the priorities of Philistine governments in Westminster and Holyrood, but their eloquence was bound to make those who heard them wonder why sporting events are deemed to be so much more essential than artistic ones.