Music

BBC SSO/Wigglesworth

City Halls, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

Three stars

As the BBC Radio 3 producer in charge of Thursday evening’s live broadcast was doubtless acutely aware, conductor Ryan Wigglesworth and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra were pushing the envelope a bit in this concert.

Over-filling their slot in the schedule, with two symphonies bracketing a couple of major 20th century works for tenor Mark Padmore and the orchestra, the programme not only stretched the time available on the network, but also the concentration of the audience in the hall. A few souls voted with their feet before its end.

The crunchy stuff came either side of the interval when the soloist was unarguably the star. Witold Lutoslawski’s Parole tissées, setting French surrealist Jean-Francois Chabrun’s Romantic menagerie of four “tapestries”, was the real rarity. Premiered at Aldeburgh 1965, it shared textures and structure with the Britten’s Nocturne, which had preceded it, but treats the text entirely differently.

Padmore was equal to both the musical use of the French words and the diction required for the Britten, a composer who selected his poetry with singular care. Nocturne’s use of the English Romantics (Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Keats) comes with the anachronisms of Wilfred Owen and a closing Shakespeare sonnet, all married to the music with elegant precision – the muscular extract from Wordworth’s Prelude providing the work's climax.

Timpani drums are the singer’s partner there, and elsewhere the tenor is effectively in duet with wind soloists, bassoon, cor anglais, flute and clarinet all having virtuosic music to play. Padmore dealt stylishly with the demanding leaps in his part from the last line of the Shelley to the penultimate Keats meditation on sleep and poetry.

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The more familiar fare of Mozart’s Symphony No 34 and Schumann’s Second, both C-major works pivotal in the life-sagas on the composers, probably looked better as a programme idea than transpired in practice.

The opening Mozart – his farewell to Salzburg – wanted a crisper edge in the opening chords and although there were hints of the theatricality to come in the composer’s opera music, the strings lacked emotional heart in the central Adagio. Thankfully the finale found some of the “vivace” stipulated that the first movement had lacked.

Those who stayed the distance were rewarded with a very fine account of the Schumann from the fullest forces on stage all evening and Wigglesworth conducting the score from memory. The strings were on fine form in both the playful Scherzo second movement and in the yearning slow movement, which never became maudlin.

If there are deliberate echoes of Mozart and Beethoven in the work, this performance ended in Brahms-like majesty – but it had been a long evening’s journey to get there.

Programme repeated in Perth Concert Hall on Friday November 8