Review: Music

City Hall, Glasgow

Michael Tumelty

WHAT a stonker of a concert on Thursday night, at which the BBC SSO and Donald Runnicles, first out of Scotland's orchestral starting blocks, launched their new winter season. Just what we need: blazingly incandescent playing and a ferocious challenge to our preconceptions and expectations.

Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony is The Total Masterpiece: anyone who knows anything about the composer and the circumstances in which he lived and worked could tell you that. The Great Dictator had finally shuffled off this mortal coil and Shostakovich, working in a rather different but still-repressive regime, could get his gloves off, his boots on, and speak his mind a little more openly.

It's all there in that symphony, in its every movement and every moment. But, if I dare to read Donald Runnicles's mind, I have not heard a more intelligent version of the symphony, where the conductor seems to have stripped it down and re-thought the whole thing. Every nuance of pacing was gauged anew. Not a single climax was independent or premature. Everything led to everything else. Orchestral balance was reinvented. The scope, momentum and span of the symphony was re-calibrated to reveal an enormously long-form structure. Physically, emotionally and psychologically, it was a devastating piece of structuring, all manifest in a superlative performance.

It dominated an evening that had opened with an atmospheric Night on the Bare Mountain and Barry Douglas's sumptuously Romantic account of Scriabin's early Piano Concerto, written before the composer went psychedelically bonkers, and when Rachmaninov and Chopin were still his link to planet Earth. Splendid stuff.

SNJO with Bob Mintzer

Queen's Hall, Edinburgh

Rob Adams

In one of his between-song introductions, Bob Mintzer noted that Yellowjackets - the band in which he's played a crucial role for almost 25 years - like to draw on a wide variety of musical influences and genres. As he'd doubtless already found in the rehearsals that preceded this latest Scottish National Jazz Orchestra celebration, this presents little in the way of a challenge to SNJO.

Within the first three selections, Mintzer and the orchestra had given convincing accounts of funk, Latin American and New Orleans-flavoured compositions. After an interlude that set Mintzer's fluent, superbly cohesive tenor saxophone improvising in the jazz-quartet ballad form of Everything Happens to Me, they were off on another tack, the rockin' bebop of Runforyerlife, whose title neatly encapsulates the urgency of its variations on I Got Rhythm.

Mintzer was not only a commanding featured soloist, with a fertile imagination and a satisfying ability to develop musical ideas meaningfully and attractively, but also a genial guide through music that might well light-heartedly gauge his wife's enjoyment of it - as outlined in When the Lady Dances - but also calls for disciplined section playing when expanded from its original small-group form into orchestral arrangements.

Civil War featured superb collective playing of speedily intricate lines and the contrasting, lovely Even Song, in an arrangement by Vince Mendoza, found bass clarinet, soprano saxophone and flute adding to the variety of tones and moods. There were also ample opportunities for the orchestra members to share the solo spotlight with Mintzer throughout a set that struck just the right balance between generally feelgood-factor music and high-quality jazz blowing.

Llyr Williams/ Elias Quartet

City Hall, Glasgow

Michael Tumelty

WILL the day come when we stop parcelling Beethoven's music into three chronologically convenient periods? Probably not; it's just too useful to bracket the music into "early", "middle" and "late" periods; and if somebody questions the practice, it's easy to stitch in stylistic developments to validate the labelling.

Yet it only takes one perceptive, genuinely original performer to set the package unravelling. And, in Glasgow's intensive weekend survey of Beethoven's music, with performances shared between the Elias String Quartet and pianist Llyr Williams, that dismantling nearly came about, thanks to the unfailing questioning by the Welshman of templates, assumptions and preconceptions. That man Williams doesn't have a second-hand thought in his head. This was a survey of "middle-period" Beethoven. Someone should have told Williams. Each of the three sonatas he played - the opus 26 in A flat and the two opus 27 Sonatas, including the Moonlight - was off the leash in sheer freedom of expression.

Indeed, I sat gobsmacked during his performance of the A flat Sonata, thinking this performance was a study in texturing and sonority, with a dash of serenity lifting the music light years away from any "period". Few pianists can provoke thought in the way Llyr Williams does.

The Elias Quartet provoked a bit of thought themselves with their performance of the great F Major Rasumovsky Quartet: should the wonderfully long cello theme that opens the piece really be played that fast? I'm unconvinced. It loses breadth, nobility, and not a little of its glamour if it seems urgent and over-paced. The value of their post-concert coda account of the opus 95 Quartet, however, in an punchy, concise performance, was incalculable.