Music

BBC SSO/Brabbins

City Hall, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

four stars

CONDUCTOR Martyn Brabbins must have been glad to visit his old friends in Scotland at the BBC SSO this week, after the Arts Council of England lobbed an ill-made grenade into the London arena of English National Opera, where he is Music Director.

At the heart of his programme was a work where his expertise with singers was important, the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss. This cornerstone of the female recitalist’s repertoire was performed by Elizabeth Llewellyn, another popular musician in Glasgow after her starring roles in Scottish Opera’s pandemic-era outdoor productions of La boheme and Falstaff.

And delightfully sung they were too. Llewellyn made their elegiac demands seem effortless, perfectly modulated from the first bar and alive to every detail of the phrasing. In the pivotal third song she was give the perfect platform by the SSO strings and the solo playing of leader Laura Samuel, and if it perhaps takes a weightier voice than hers to make the ambiguity of “sinking into slumber” truly heart-rending, that is not to criticise the beauty of her singing.

The Strauss was preceded by a work from the end of the composing career of Jean Sibelius, the tone poem Tapiola, given a very brisk and lively reading by Brabbins, its storm more precisely meteorological than merely pictorial. Here too, the strings were on fine form, particularly the violas, led by Andrew Berridge. The rich sonorities of the low winds were also highly evocative of the Scandinavian landscape Sibelius depicts.

There is a gentler, pastoral feel to much of the Symphony No 5 by Ralph Vaughan Williams, which followed the interval. The 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth has been less celebrated here than in England, but this work’s varied orchestral colours were given full expression here. Familiar faces from the RSNO, flautist Katherine Bryan and Christopher Gough on French horn were guest-leading their sections across the whole evening, and made particular contributions in the symphony, alongside the plaintive cor anglais of James Horan and first cello Rudi De Groote.

If the Romanza slow movement recalled Barber’s Adagio for Strings, the Passacaglia finale was pure Vaughan Williams under Brabbins’ baton, alternating between martial beat and maritime skip to its placid finish.