Music
RSNO
Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
Keith Bruce
Five stars
NICOLA Benedetti has only just returned from a coast to coast tour of North American with the Venice Baroque Orchestra, playing Vivaldi and his contemporaries with a small chamber ensemble. That is a very different discipline from playing the Brahms and Bruch concertos with a full symphony orchestra, but a week later she is with her local national orchestra for concerts previewing the works conductor Peter Oundjian is taking on the RSNO's tour across the Atlantic.
Perhaps a consciousness of that contrast – and the necessity of her own adaptability – lay behind the physicality she brought to the Brahms Violin Concerto in Glasgow on Thursday evening. That might not be what people associate with the composer's music, but it was absolutely right here. There was a near-perfect arc to the performance of the piece – the second movement Adagio quite lovely – but Benedetti's local fans can be excused the rush to applaud after her first movement cadenza, and I bet the Florida audiences react similarly.
The concerto sits at the heart of a programme designed to show off the orchestra in all departments, the low brass and principal horn Chris Gough in particular on Borodin's Overture to Prince Igor, and just about everyone in Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, a work the defiantly refuses to succumb to the depression that its composer was feeling at the time. The winds shone and the brass again had their moment at the end, while the strings – under the guest leadership of Gordan Trajkovic – produced the goods on an exemplary ensemble account of the pizzicato passages in the Scherzo. The Sunshine State has a treat in store.
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