Music
RSNO
Keith Bruce
four stars
ON the face of it, robust no-nonsense Finnish conductor John Storgards had created a conventional programme for the penultimate concert of the RSNO’s season, with overture, concerto and big symphonic work. But the box-office attraction that is Gustav Holst’s Planets suite, filling the house with less regular attenders alongside the RSNO faithful, was preceded by two contrasting newer works.
In the case of Jennifer Higden’s Tuba Concerto, that meant box-fresh, as RSNO principal tuba John Whitener gave the work’s European premiere. At moments not a million miles from the big music of the Holst, the work is rhythmic and exciting from the start and while it does show a rarely-glimpsed side of the big horn in the hands of a virtuoso player like Whitener – particularly in the lyrical second movement when the sound is like that of a bass flugel horn – there is also some fine writing for the wind section in the first movement, a lovely conversation with principal cello Aleksei Kiseliov in that slow movement and a big finish from the entire ensemble.
It was preceded by the strings performing Panufnik’s Landscape, an interesting 1960s European interlude that surely influenced some composers across the Atlantic, which begins with harmonics on the low strings and builds in intensity before dropping back to sparer sonorities again.
The variety pack that is The Planets should surely be featured by this orchestra more regularly, given that the composer was briefly a member of the brass section. Its seven-track album length arguably set the template for prog-rock a century ago, and could possibly only have come from the mind of a musician unburdened by the demands of a commission. Of course the belligerence of Mars and the bouncy tunefulness of Jupiter were terrific but so too were the more subtle shades of Venus, with fine solos from horn Chris Gough, leader Sharon Roffman and flautist Katherine Bryan, and a beautiful closing Neptune, where the off-stage chorus of women’s voices was pitched precisely right.
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