Colin Currie in Glasgow
City Halls, Glasgow 6/2/25
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Mihhail Gerts (conductor), Colin Currie (percussion)
In a week in which the announcement has been made of the appointment of Bulgaria-born Delyana Lazarova as Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, commencing September 2025 at the beginning of the orchestra’s 90th anniversary concert season, and the orchestra’s Israeli Creative Partner Ilan Volkov was due to conduct the orchestra’s Thursday night City Halls Glasgow concert, the latter’s unforeseen late unavailability led to Estonian maestro Mihhail Gerts stepping in. “Imagine ... an irrational robot goes terrifyingly off the rails and percussionist Colin Currie is the only man who can stop it.” – a reference in the advance publicity to the UK premiere of Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth’s 2016 percussion concerto Trurliade – Zone Zero‘ with Scottish superstar percussionist Colin Currie as soloist. The printed programme carried the briefer legend “Imagine … the world’s most daring percussionist” The emotionally raw post-war 1947 Sixth Symphony of Prokofiev concluded the programme after the interval. A youthful Prokofiev piece, his ‘Autumnal Sketch’ of 1910, replaced the originally advertised Shostakovich Festival Overture as the concert-opener. As usual, the concert was broadcast live on Radio 3 in Concert, introduced by Kate Molleson, and will remain available as a podcast on BBC Sounds for a month. Australian violinist Kate Suthers added BBCSSO to her portfolio of guest leaderships. Attendance was modest – I would estimate somewhat under 50% of the 1066 capacity of the Grand Hall.
Mihhail Gerts cut a youthful dapper figure as he came to the podium. This was the first live and second ever hearing of Prokofiev’s ‘Autumnal Sketch’ for this reviewer, and it received a committed and revelatory outing. The melancholy, brooding Late Romantic scoring of the opening recalled that of Rachmaninov’s ‘Isle of the Dead’ with which it is almost contemporaneous, while as the mood lightened and impassioned climaxes built, the white heat of a high trumpet soaring over a sumptuous full orchestral texture put me in mind of late Scriabin from about that time too. These and other influences on the young Prokofiev were cast in sharp relief. Yet it was also clear that the influences were absorbed and expressed in an emerging individual musical language, with hints of the sardonic spikiness that had already emerged and would become his hallmark. The closing pages return to the opening spectral gloom. A super piece in a persuasive interpretation with great playing from the orchestra, especially harp and bass clarinet, boding well for the symphony later.
A performance of a percussion concerto cannot but be theatrical and the Neuwirth was, in this respect , very much “on brand”. From the start of the evening, the front of the stage had been occupied by an array of percussion instruments arranged in three ‘rigs’, which for want of better description I would term, ‘junk-yard’, ‘tuned (especially crotales)’ and ‘drumkit’. At the back of the stage was an even larger assortment played by at least four orchestral percussionists. In between was a large orchestra. The spectacle of Colin Currie bounding back and forth between the three rigs was balletic in itself. In a single episodic movement over half an hour in length, the music conjures a series of images, all involving a monstrous automaton looming menacingly ever closer. A variety of motor rhythms, including clockwork noises from the orchestral percussion, is framed by discordant brass chording to sustain the horror-movie illusion. I did find myself imagining a steroid-pumped nightmarish version of ‘Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers’ and indeed there were brief flashes of humour in the occasionally “drunken” brass writing and novelty timbres, like Swanee whistles, bowed plates and cymbals, quotations including “We Shall Overcome”and, near the end, a weakened disembodied robotic voice-recording announcing that “2 + 2 = 7”. In a final hyper-theatrical and very Mahlerian moment, Colin Currie delivered the coup de grâce by raising a huge long-handled mallet over his head and bringing it crashing down on a wooden block.
If this publication were the ‘Edinburgh Theatrical Review’, I could leave it at that. But it isn’t and I won’t. The ‘raw theatre’ was a blast. But what about the actual music? Hmmm … well … There is much to praise in the ingenuity, novelty and individuality of the orchestration and its evocation of terror. The soloist and orchestral musicians were on top form and unfazed by the technical demands of the piece, responding fully to Mihhail Gerts’ capable moulding of mood and a sense of pacy horror-movie narrative. But I cannot remember a note of it and am unburdened by any trace of a longing to hear it again. A performance in which the musicians gave so much left me with nothing to take away. I found it theatrically entertaining but musically unsatisfying.
Both Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony and Shostakovich’s 1943 Eighth deal with the complex emotions of a survivor in Soviet Russia after the horrific devastation and loss of life in the ‘Great Patriotic War’, as the Second World War is known there. Both works are deeply personal testaments, with individual trauma, grief, rage, survivor guilt and numbness finding expression. Both seek to find a way in which “life goes on”. They come to very different conclusions. I love both almost equally and never hear one without thinking also of the other. My slight preference for the Shostakovich is due to the fact that the younger composer’s music has always spoken more directly to me; the fragile hard-won optimism of its conclusion holding greater appeal. It is worth mentioning that both symphonies ended up being banned by the Soviet authorities for their propaganda-busting gloominess, with (perhaps ironically) Prokofiev being one of those most vocal in the denunciation of the Shostakovich, three years before completing his own Sixth.
The Prokofiev has only 3 movements (compared with the Shostakovich’s 5) as it has no scherzo (the Shostakovich has 2). The Allegro moderato opens with a gruff brass descending scale and two lyrical but nervous lilting melodies are introduced as the two minor key themes, sometimes raw, sometimes disconsolate, always seeming fragile in the face of menacing and destructive brass interruptions. Lots of unison and octave writing sustains a sense of solitary unease, punctuated by eruptions of emotion, angry and elegiac by turns. The movement concludes with a sense of benumbed indifference. Searing pain and anguish opens the Largo. Then an elegiac cantabile melody on the cellos is answered by consoling violins, but interrupted by clockwork, industrial and military noises. Horns with bass clarinet sing another lament, sweet but melancholy, followed by an elegiac clarinet-and-oboe dialogue with brass chords, harp, celeste and horns. A high descending melody on violins builds to a climax of emotion recalling similar moments in the Romeo and Juliet ballet music. The movement concludes with calm wistful nocturnal scene with a lovely muted trumpet and a sweet cadence. The Vivace finale opens as a scampering playful romp, more than a little reckless ,headlong and unstable with that sense of forced rejoicing that Russians do so well. Plenty of Prokofiev quirky ‘wrong notes’ to suggest the knees-up is vodka-fuelled. Eventually, the party winds down on bassoon. A return to the uneasy mood of the first movement, before tremolo strings introduce two overwhelming waves of crushing grief. A grim, anguished, brutal, final rush with timpani hammer-blows confirms that we have not ‘moved on’. The scars are too deep.
Every nuance of this amazing score was realised in a profoundly moving performance of the highest quality. Of course, I now would love to hear Mihhail Gerts’ reading of Shostakovich’s Eighth, preferably with the BBCSSO, as I feel certain it would prove equally revelatory.