Music

BBC SSO/Volkov

City Hall, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

five stars

IN the midst of the season of carols and cantatas, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra welcomed back its Principal Guest Conductor Ilan Volkov with an inspired programme of 20th century music for people who like to keep their ears open to new experiences all year round.

The SSO marketing bureau enthusiastically sold Thursday evening’s concert of music by Xenakis, Ligeti, Bartok and Debussy on that basis – not anti-Christmas, but certainly a December alternative – and were rewarded by a very good attendance for some rare repertoire.

It is unlikely many in the hall had previously heard the opening work, the five-movement Atrées by Iannis Xenakis, performed live. Scored for a very specific ensemble of flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, horn, trumpet, trombone, violin, cello and percussionists, it is computer music from long before Kraftwerk, composed to an algorithm using an early IBM machine. Starting with a slide on Rudi De Groote’s cello and rasping notes on Simon Johnson’s trombone, each performer had their own individual conductor in the meticulous Volkov with his precision instructions. There were abrasive exchanges across the platform but also an evolving coherence with the flute a bridge between strings and winds and the horn a link from winds to brass.

The second half of the programme began with Hungarian Gyorgy Ligeti’s Ramifications for strings, which has groups of six players tuned a quarter tone differently, and Iain Crawford’s single double bass adding solo buzzing notes that recalled the trombone in the Xenakis.

Those two challenging shorter works were each followed by longer, earlier and more familiar pieces. Debussy’s ballet music for Nijinsky’s choreography and Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, Jeux, imagines a love triangle played out on a tennis court, but that was secondary to its sound-world in this concert. Using a large orchestra, with two harps and six basses, here was more glissando cello at the start, cascades of notes from the flutes, and strings that alternated between staccato plucking and luxuriance – just as Xenakis’s programme would explore in miniature half a century later.

Glissando strings and timpani also feature in Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste, and it – like the Ligeti – requires a symmetrical set-up of two, larger, string ensemble, with the keyboards and percussion centre-stage. This was a sparkling performance, initially as edgy as anything of Ligeti’s that Stanley Kubrick used to soundtrack his films, and finally full of vibrant exuberance.