ROUND my way they are re-turfing the swing park and installing new windows in some council houses, while a main shopping street in central Glasgow is acquiring fancy new kerbs and paving, outside units now occupied by an electronic cigarette emporium and a bookies. However, the end of the financial year also means the arts calendar is bursting at the seams with season launches, as the orchestras and other musical organisations reveal what they have planned, through to this time next year and beyond.
With the RSNO stealing a march on the others as it slotted its event in between tours to Spain and Florida, Scottish Opera’s announcement embargoed until next week and the Scottish Ensemble’s still a few weeks off, this year’s flow of announcements does seems to have been particularly extended, but that has been no bad thing as there has been a lot to look at. Both the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Scottish Chamber Orchestra are under new management, with Gavin Reid moving from the former to the latter and Dominic Parker moving to Scotland from the north east of England to take over at Glasgow City Halls. Both inherited planning that was well-advanced but with enough wiggle-room for their own input. Parker’s stated intention to get his band out of their Candleriggs home more was possibly the top line from his Herald interview with Kate Molleson, while Reid’s “last chance to see” promotional angle on the end of the Principal Conductor Robin Ticciati’s contract (even although it almost certainly is not) made an amusing contrast to the circumspect attitude at the new RSNO Centre in Glasgow’s Killermont Street to the question of succession planning as far as music director Peter Oundjian is concerned.
The common thread that links all three programmes is consolidation, and I am giving nothing away if I say that is pretty much the case as far as our national opera company is concerned as well. So the RSNO is making a big feature of its skill, and huge box office success, playing film music, supplementing the regular weekend concerts with special events that bring in a new audience. It opens its season with the tried and proven hall-filling partnership of Oundjian and violinist Nicola Benedetti (playing the Elgar concerto). That team has, of course, just returned from wowing the concertgoers of Florida as the RSNO dipped a toe into US touring for the first time in 35 years. If you want to see what that looked like, a splendid video postcard made especially for our website by Cairn Productions has just gone up at heraldscotland.com. You may also like to note that Benedetti’s boyfriend Leonard Elschenbroich plays Elgar’s Cello Concerto with the SSO in February.
If you are one of those ecstatic at seeing wonderful Scots mezzo Karen Cargill back on the Scottish Opera stage this week as Judith in Bluebeard’s Castle, take note that she is singing Elgar’s beautiful Sea Pictures with the SSO at the City Halls in Glasgow in September and will be giving a rare performance of Dvorak’s Biblical Songs, as part of Ticciati’s focus on that composer, with the SCO in January. His Scottish Opera roles are one of the reasons baritone Roderick Williams has many fans north of the border, and they will be pleased that as well as singing Mahler’s Knaben Wunderhorn with the RSNO next month, he is back as a soloist for Brahms Requiem with Oundjian in December. Mezzo Jennifer Johnston, who is performing Mahler’s Ruckert-Lieder with the RSNO in May, is one of the soloists in the SSO chief conductor Thomas Dausgaard’s September season-opening concert looking at the roots of the music of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. While the BBC orchestra finds choral partners in the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, BBC Singers and from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, there is a substantial presence by both the SCO Chorus and the RSNO Chorus in both orchestra’s seasons, with the latter celebrating its 175th birthday. Gregory Batsleer, who is chorus-master of both, looks set for a busy year.
But it is also not too cynical to point out that the family-and-friends factor makes regularly programming the choirs a sensible move. Because there is, undoubtedly – and far from unspoken, if rarely publicly – a genuine fear about what lies ahead beyond 2017/18 as far as all the orchestras are concerned, thanks to economic and political factors that no-one reading needs to see spelled out again. Consolidation is not just attractive to the pursuit of box-office receipts, it is also the only sensible approach in the face of uncertainty.
Book while you can, because there really is no guarantee that these riches will be available in the years to come.
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