Music
BBC SSO/ Brabbins, City Halls, Glasgow
Michael Tumelty
Three Stars
MY, how the world has changed. Or so I felt on Thursday, listening to the BBC SSO playing Bach. I know that, to some listeners, the very notion of a symphony orchestra, even a radically cut-down symphony orchestra, playing Bach these days is anathema.Well, that’s what the BBC SSO did on Thursday. Worse: do you know what else they did? They played in a style that seemed to pay little if any attention to the good table manners of the Baroque: I’ll swear I heard somebody’s finger quiver, if not actually vibrate, on a string. And to exacerbate matters, you know what else those musical scoundrels at the SSO did in this Bach? They used one of those conductor chaps that waves a stick around.
Of course this is all rubbish; but there is a point, and it’s one made here many times over the years: why shouldn’t symphony orchestras, punching at a lighter weight, perhaps, play Bach? Well, it might not have been “authentic”, but I must say I enjoyed my rare encounter with well-cooked Bach, with the Double Concerto sizzling on the plate, delivered with gusto and fried onions by SSO violinists Laura Samuel and Kanako Ito, while conductor Martyn Brabbins, I suspect, enjoyed his bit of Bach from the bridge of the boat. That, I was informed, is the first time in decades the SSO has played the Bach: and that is how much the world has changed.
Elsewhere, Brabbins directed a moody, if colourful, account of Ginastera’s Variaciones Concertantes, while the SSO delivered a breezy, rather dashing performance of Schumann’s Fourth Symphony.
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