Music

SCO, City Halls, Glasgow

Michael Tumelty

four stars

WITHOUT wishing to cast a shadow over the blazing drama of Robin Ticciati’s electric account of Brahms’ Second Symphony on Friday with the SCO, a brief word on last week’s review where my reflective, though not valedictory, thoughts on Ticciati’s appointment to the Deutsches Symphony Orchestra might have allowed someone to infer that he would be packing his bags for Berlin as soon as his current SCO contract finishes.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In an amicable conversation with the SCO chief executive, through whom I sent a personal message to the conductor, the executive confirmed that he has all Robin’s DSO 2017/18 dates in the book, along with those for the next three SCO seasons, including an overlap period where Ticciati will be chief conductor of both orchestras: a commonplace these days.

So there will be years more of Ticciati’s insights, and, frankly, if those insights continue to flow as they have done in the first two instalments of his Brahms Symphony cycle, he can apply them to any composer he likes. For me, he completely cracked the secret of the Second Symphony. It starts broad and pastoral and it ends up like a triumphal parade. But what about the in-betweens? Ticciati’s secret was momentum: the symphony was on the move all the time: even the slow movement had a sense of pressing forward, while the third surged and the closing stages of the finale were tumultuous and unstoppable. It was almost a continuum. Lars Vogt’s playing of Schumann’s Piano Concerto was a bit too freewheeling for my taste, though it was good to hear Schumann’s Manfred.