Music

RSNO/Søndergård

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

four stars

Principal trumpet Chris Hart was delegated, or volunteered, to break the news to the audience: the concert they had come to see and hear would not be happening. From his usual place in the back row of Scotland’s national orchestra, he arrived at the front of the stage in his white tie and tails to explain that the events of the day had conspired to shorten our evening of music.

Many who had taken their seats already knew that Scotland’s BBC Cardiff Singer of the World winning mezzo-soprano Catriona Morison was unwell and we would not be hearing Ernest Chauson’s Poem of Love and the Sea, setting the words of Maurice Boucher, which she had sung in Perth and Edinburgh on Thursday and Friday. But the RSNO had announced, via email and on social media, that the orchestra’s much-loved first flute, Katherine Bryan, had gamely put her hand up to play Francoise Borne’s arrangement of the melodies from Bizet’s opera Carmen by way of an enticing replacement in the all-French-music concert.

Alas, during rehearsal that afternoon, Bryan herself was taken ill, which not only ruled out the Bizet but left the orchestra a player short for the rest of the flute-heavy programme. Just before Hart spoke, and mere seconds after the orchestra had tuned, a replacement second flute arrived in the shape of Adam Richardson, a young Australian who completed his Masters at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and now pursues a freelance career in Glasgow, taking the seat of Jenny Farley, who now found herself in Bryan’s principal flute chair.

Although the substitution completed the team, it could not rescue the entire planned concert. Hart and, after the interval, conductor Thomas Søndergård, were effusive in their apologies, but the quality of what remained really spoke for itself. The evening now began with Ravel’s Une barque sur l’ocean, those flautists immediately to the fore in the brilliant orchestrator’s arrangement of one of his most sparkling piano pieces.

The re-discovered gem of Mel Bonis’s Trois Femmes de legende, a nod to International Women’s Day, followed. It revealed the late Romantic French composer to be every bit as skilled in writing for a vast orchestra, the pastoral image of Ophelia followed by the spicier spikey dance rhythms of Salome and staying in Eastern mode for a rich portrait of Cleopatra.

The more familiar fare of Debussy’s La Mer also asks for huge forces, but does not fully deploy them until the climactic final bars. With an especially lovely account of the central slow movement and masterly approach to the rhythmic intricacies of the third, Søndergård’s pacing of the piece was pretty much perfect, in partnership with his guest leader, the returning Emily Davis – and, understandably, being particularly attentive to those sight-reading flautists. They received their own deserved bow and cheer at the concert’s earlier end.