Five stars
What is the miracle that happens to some composers in old age? Where does the late-life creative surge come from? John McLeod is a classic.
Seven months ago, I helped celebrate his 80th birthday by demolishing all of his sausage rolls while his music was performed at the City Hall, played, breeze-fresh, by a range of musicians. In the autumn, I reviewed a performance of his new, crisp, Janus-faced Fifth Piano Sonata, which had all the stimulation of his creativity focused into one piece.
And if that wasn't enough, then on Friday, in Glasgow, conductor Joseph Swensen and the SCO gave a penetrating account of McLeod's new orchestral commission, Out of The Silence, a wonderful piece that literally emerged from stillness, grew organically from a single sound, developed limbs and character, offered more than an anniversary nod to Carl Nielsen, became an exciting entity, then dissolved into a welter of string pizzicati and a chatter of high woodwind.
It was a perfect structure from McLeod, exquisitely-expressed, with a gorgeous surge of Nielsen's Fourth Symphony welling up from the texture in a remarkable tribute to the great Dane.
And yet another followed with a mesmerising performance of Nielsen's pluralistic Clarinet Concerto, a comprehensive character study, in which the SCO's astounding principal clarinettist, Maximiliano Martin, marshalled and unleashed all of his technical and expressive wizardry on the volatile masterpiece in what must have been one of the performances of his life.
Joseph Swensen and the SCO, in unremittingly-concentrated form, rounded off a great night of Nordic masterpieces with a brooding, inward, and blisteringly-intense performance of Sibelius's dark and ultra-serious Fourth Symphony.
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