BBC SSO/Payare, City Hall, Glasgow
Michael Tumelty
THREE Stars
THERE is no question that Rafael Payare, a graduate of Venezuela’s El Sistema, now principal conductor of the Ulster Orchestra, is a fine stick-man: confident, big-gestured and clear. And some of the things he secured on Thursday night in his debut appearance with the BBC SSO were very impressive indeed, and I’ll touch on them in a moment. But, minority opinion though this will be, as Payare was such a crowd-pleaser, his account of Dvorak’s great Seventh Symphony was the weakest element in his programme. I’d better say why.
It simply didn’t hang together and some of the balancing of the orchestra was excruciating. It was bitty, lacked cohesiveness and therefore coherence. It went from one movement to the next, and there was no sense of inevitability in its overall progression: it simply didn’t drive to the end. And, astonishingly for the SSO, the heavy brass overwhelmed the ensemble, which I found difficult to credit. Paradoxically, perhaps, that diminished rather than intensified the drama. It was as though the symphony didn’t have a core, but relied instead on the accumulation of the component parts. To me, it just felt flat.
The first half was of a different order, with Payare conjuring a bewitching soundscape from Gareth Williams’ beautiful Fields of Light, an evocative landscape imagined from the countryside farm of Williams’ childhood in Armagh, exquisitely given form in sound by Payare with the SSO at its most sensitive. But without question, the performance of the night belonged to cellist Alisa Weilerstein for her comprehensively-enthralling account of Shostakovich’s tough Second Cello Concerto: a forensically-detailed tour de force of interpretation of an underplayed masterpiece.
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