RSNO Season 2024/25 - Usher Hall - A Preview

Modified Rapture 

The RSNO has announced the programme for the season 2024/25 in the Usher Hall, which I shall be reviewing for the EMR, and, although there are several mouth-watering concerts planned, my overall reaction is modified rapture. It is clear that a combination of financial restrictions and musical conservatism has produced a programme that is safe and somewhat predictable, a programme for our time, as it were. The prevailing climate of falling public subsidy for classical music and indeed a nervousness about the real importance of our great classical heritage has led to a season of interesting music, heavily weighted towards the core Classic FM playlist, which promises to be excellent but hardly thrilling.

Let’s start by looking entirely on the bright side. The continuing musical directorship of the Danish conductor, Thomas Søndergård, is an absolute delight for Scottish audiences. He has been Principal Conductor and Musical Director since 2018, after being Principal Guest Conductor from 2012-2018, and, despite his recent appointment as Principal Conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra in the USA, he has committed himself to a full range of concerts with the RSNO for the foreseeable future. This is very important, as he has become an extremely good and dominant director of our orchestra, and has presided over a period when the RSNO is as fine as any orchestra in the world, and with his excellent technique and clear attention to detail, his concerts are major events in the Scottish musical calendar.

The appointment of the Austrian conductor, Patrick Hahn, as Principal Guest Conductor, is also an admirable move. He stepped in at short notice in November 2022 to conduct Tchaikovsky’s 4th Symphony, and my review was very favourable. He conducts a lot in Germany, and is clearly ‘one to watch’, so the chance to watch him in Scotland is a fine coup for the management. He will conduct Dvorak’s New World Symphony and Mozart’s Requiem (as well as Rachmaninov’s 2nd Symphony this season in May).

I am delighted to see that Thomas Søndergård will be conducting two Mahler symphonies next season, the 2nd and the 9th. These are the most contrasting works by the same composer imaginable: the second is perhaps the most thrilling and optimistic symphony ever written, as Mahler takes us on a journey from apocalypse to redemption over nearly two hours of totally absorbing music, ending with a climax of huge proportions, involving two soloists, chorus, organ and full orchestra. The performance in 1973 at the Edinburgh Festival in the Usher Hall, with the LSO conducted by Leonard Bernstein, remains in my memory as one of the greatest concerts of my life. That performance was repeated and filmed the following month in Ely Cathedral, by Deutsche Grammophon, and a partial reconstruction, with Bradley Cooper as Bernstein, formed the centrepiece of the recent film, ‘Maestro,’ about the life of the great American musician.

I am sure Mr Søndergård and the RSNO will give us a fabulous performance in October.

Mahler’s 9th Symphony, by contrast, is a great musical peroration and meditation on death, as the dying composer comes to terms with his own imminent demise. Written in 1908/09, after the death of his daughter Maria Anna and the diagnosis of his fatal heart condition, it is emphatically not a work of depression or angst, but an extraordinary examination of life and the end of life, as experienced by a deeply sensitive human being. There is savagery, and there is burlesque, but there can also be found peace and tranquillity, and great beauty. The last movement, Adagio, marked ‘very slowly and held back,’ evolves through various stages with impassioned climaxes and gentle moments, until it ends quietly and softly. This is not a terrible death, but rather almost a welcoming one. Mahler didn’t live to hear his 9thSymphony, nor his symphonic poem, ‘Das Lied von der Erde,’ but his thoughts and feelings live on in this deeply moving work.

These two symphonies stand out for me as the highlights of next season. No doubt others will reveal themselves. I must confess to serious disappointment that in the year of the bicentenary of Anton Bruckner’s birth in 1824, the RSNO has planned none of his symphonies. Indeed the only Bruckner to be heard in 2024 was the Mass No 2 in E Minor which the RSNO Chorus performed in Greyfriars Kirk in February. Surely one of the greatest symphonic writers of all time could appear at least once in the RSNO Season, two hundred years after his birth?

I am however delighted to see that Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana has been scheduled for November, a choral piece I have always enjoyed. It was premiered in 1937, and is, by far, its composer’s most successful work. It has survived its immense popularity in Nazi Germany to become a much loved favourite of audiences throughout the world, and is certain to get a good audience. Several other concert programmes throughout the season are clearly devised for the same purpose, and although one can sigh inwardly at the prospect of yet another New World Symphony or Swan Lake, one can fully understand the necessity for crowd-pleasers in this time of limited public funding.

I must wonder slightly, however, not at the choice of work, but at the timing of the programming of Tchaikovsky’s final symphony, the so-called Pathétique, along with chunks of Wagner, for Valentine’s Day. After the surprising scheduling this year of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet for the same date (a work obsessed with tragic death), a symphony with a most tragic doom-laden final movement and a final section of an opera in which all the participants die, is hardly the stuff of a good romantic night out!

As a great lover of the music of Richard Wagner, I am pleased to see a lot of his music in the coming season, both in this Valentine’s concert and later in the ‘Ring Symphony’ concert on May 16th. However, as both a singer and a Wagner lover, for me, the whole point of Wagner’s great tetralogy, ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’ is the epic scale of this huge work, a work of the theatre and first and foremost, an opera. The idea of a bleeding chunks ‘symphonic adventure,’ lasting an hour instead of 17 or 18 hours, arranged by a Dutch percussionist several years ago, and with no singing, is, for me, a step too far, and represents all the things that are wrong with the modern presentation of classical music. To schedule this in the same concert as Handel’s Water Music (Suite no 3) with the Dunedin Consort, and a new commission featuring the combination of a baroque ensemble playing at baroque pitch and a modern symphony orchestra playing at modern pitch, a semi tone apart, suggests we are in for an odd evening!

There is an encouraging wealth of compositions by female composers, especially firm favourite Anna Clyne. This is hugely welcome, and we will be seeing several female conductors in the season, which is a real source of satisfaction, as there is nowadays no stigma of any sort attached to the idea. Since, as a young man, I was used to seeing whole orchestras of men (with the odd lady harpist), notably the Vienna Philharmonic and the London Symphony Orchestra, the integration of female players and the success of women conductors over the last 50 years has been a great change. I was lucky enough to sing with female conductors early in my career, and could never see the problem, and now we realise there wasn’t one!

Here are my tips for a great night out at the Usher Hall next season:

Friday 4th October – Mahler -  Second Symphony, ‘the Resurrection’.

Friday 25th October – Beethoven -  5th Piano Concerto, with the great Austrian pianist, Elisabeth Leonskaja.

Friday 15th November – Carl Orff - Carmina Burana

Friday 21st February – Mahler - 9th Symphony

Friday 25th April – Mozart - Requiem