Music

RSNO/Carneiro

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Keith Bruce

four stars

For a programme substantially of new music, the RSNO will be very pleased with the audience it drew to Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Saturday evening. Some of that will be down to the orchestra itself, currently on top form across a wide range of repertoire, and here conducted by Joanna Carneiro who has become a familiar and popular figure on the podium with Scotland’s orchestras.

But many of the younger faces in the crowd had come to hear the freshest work in the programme, by Errollyn Wallen, the Belize-born composer who has made her home on Scotland’s North coast and has a teaching post at the Royal Conservatoire in Glasgow. Her Violin Concerto, receiving its UK premiere a month after it was first played by the Calgary Philharmonic and co-commissioned by the RSNO, turned out to be very traditional in form, with three distinct movements and a very familiar balance between the soloist, Philippe Quint, and the orchestra.

Quint is – by happy coincidence – a teacher of the RSNO’s artist in residence next season, Randall Goosby, and his virtuosic technique was put to full use by Wallen in a work full of rhythmic challenges in which the violinist barely has moment’s pause. On first hearing – and the concerto certainly warrants repeated listening and more considered assessment – that was a slight drawback. It was simply impossible to concentrate on both Quint’s frantic solo part and the detail of the orchestral writing, which was often, superficially at least, the more attractive to the ear.

The melody in the first violins in the first movement, the lower strings in the slow central section and the big brass and timpani start to the finale are what stick in the mind, while the solo line sounded less bow-shredding than it clearly actually was, as Quint detached horse-hairs at regular intervals.

The concerto was preceded by Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Nyx, a Scottish premiere from a composer better known as a conductor, who first directed this orchestra four decades ago. It was notable for its use of the horns, flutes and first clarinet Timothy Orpen as well as the combination of Pippa Tunnell’s harp and Lynda Cochrane at the piano – all of whom would have further prominence in the work in the second half of the concert, Stravinsky’s Petrushka.

Carneiro was clearly having a ball working with these musicians to tell the tragic story of the puppet, the Moor and the Ballerina and first flute Katherine Bryan and principal trumpet Chris Hart were just two of the players on stellar form.