Music RSNO/Sondergard

Perth Concert Hall

Keith Bruce

four stars

“I HOPE you like Brahms,” said RSNO principal flute Katherine Bryan, at the start of her introduction to the evening’s concert. It raised a chuckle from the ticket-buyers, partly because it is not a daft question – of the best known names in classical music, few are as divisive as Johannes Brahms. There are some who cannot take to the German Romantic: The Herald’s Michael Tumelty was not a fan.

So a concert made up of his music alone – an overture and two sympho-nies – has its work cut out on that front. Add in the fact that a modern symphony orchestra has to wrestle the interpretation initiative back from smaller ensembles and period instrument bands and the exercise is an in-teresting one, leaving aside the odd coincidence of the RSNO’s focus on a single composer just a week after the SCO devoted its programme entirely to Handel.

Conductor Thomas Sondergard is your man for this challenge though. When he has the RSNO in front of him, you can be sure you will hear the musi-cians in full flight, but at the same time there will be the sort of attention to details in the score that owes something to the lessons of historically-informed performance.

It was visible as well as audible in the Academic Festival Overture, in a one-man, one-job outing for a percussion section on bass drum, cymbals and triangle – the three of them perfectly placed in the mix, and their sole ap-pearance in the concert. In what is one of the composer’s more familiar works, the balance between winds and strings, and then the entrance of the brass, was perfectly modulated.

Following it with the Symphony No 3 – almost contemporary and composed when Brahms was 50 years old – made perfect sense, from the sweeping strings of the opening bars. Sondergard’s pacing of the Andante second movement was very deliberate but he extracted every ounce of emotion from the strings later. The third is the master tunesmith at the height of his melodic power, beautifully realised by guest first horn Alexander Boukikov and principal oboe Adrian Wilson.

From half a decade earlier, Brahms Symphony No 2 may have its darker moments, but it is mostly the composer at his sunniest. The RSNO strings were on top form, the cellos' leading role at many points in the score acknowledged with a section bow at the end, and there was also some fine horse-riding rhythm in the horns in the pastoral opening movement and lovely ensemble winds in the tricksy third one.

Repeated at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh on Friday, March 31 and Glasgow City Halls on Sunday April 2.