BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra: The Lark Ascending
Usher Hall - 13/03/22
This was the first time I had attended one of the BBCSSO Sunday afternoon concerts for some time, not since Sir Donald Runnicles was Music Director, and I was impressed to find a conductor today, Mark Wigglesworth, with two more letters in his name than Sir Donald. Even more wonderful is that the next Principal Conductor of this very orchestra is Ryan Wigglesworth, who is, as far as I can see, unrelated to our conductor today. Ryan takes over in the autumn from Thomas Dausgaard.
The first thing I noticed today was that the Usher Hall was pretty full. They don’t sell seats in the Upper Circle, but the Grand Circle and Stalls were very well occupied. The other thing I noticed was that the audience was considerably younger than the audience for the RSNO. There were several families and a lot of young adults. There must be a message there for the RSNO, but also for the BBCSSO, who don’t visit Edinburgh often enough in my opinion. It is interesting that Glasgow hosts the RSNO, the BBCSSO and Scottish Opera, while Edinburgh only has the SCO, fine orchestra though it is. This major capital city has no opera company and no symphony orchestra based here, an expanding city and the centre of Government.
Mark Wigglesworth is a busy conductor both in the concert hall and the opera house. I have never worked with him, but his CV reads impressively, and right from the start he established a fine control over the orchestra in widely differing repertoire. He is a very flexible conductor, and I enjoyed his expressive movement on the podium.
Wagner’s opera ‘Tristan und Isolde’ was premiered in Munich in 1865 and caused a sensation. However in 1859 the composer had authorised a concert version of the Prelude for a charity concert in Prague, and in 1862 he made the arrangement we heard today. For some it is a delight, allowing us to wallow in Wagner’s luxurious harmonies without the 5 hours of singing in between, but for others it is a sad mistake, removing the voice from the Liebestod, a sort of Classic FM take on Tristan! I hadn’t heard it for a while, and let the wonderful music wash over me, without prejudice.
Wigglesworth and the orchestra played magnificently, and I was reminded that this is the sexiest music ever written. The lush harmonies, the breathless suspensions, the pounding climaxes and the necessary lulls, all these transport us to a world where the senses are paramount, and life and death hang by a thread, but nobody cares. I was an emotional wreck at the end, and I can’t give a higher compliment! The missing soprano voice of Isolde allows us to hear the internal orchestration better, but I recommend readers to listen to the whole opera. It is sensational!
A marvellous contrast was supplied by the second piece on the programme, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ beautiful pastoral idyll, ‘The Lark Ascending’. This was sketched in the heady days of Edwardian England, just before the horrors of the First World War were unleashed, and given an official premiere in London in 1921, played by its dedicatee, Marie Hall, after Vaughan Williams orchestrated it following his return from the war. Ms Hall was a former pupil of Elgar and had had a success playing the older composer’s violin concerto. Vaughan Williams was a keen student of the violin, and his love for the instrument shines through this radiant piece. Inspired by the poem of the same name by George Meredith (1828-1909), Vaughan Williams created a perfect musical representation of a lark taking flight as day dawns, and hovering and flitting above an English meadow. The orchestration is gorgeous, with a super cameo for triangle, and we were lucky to have the young Dutch violinist, Rosanne Philippens, to play today. Using a magnificent 1727 Barrere Stradivarius, she coaxed wonderful sounds from her instrument, and her statuesque beauty and poise made for an outstanding performance, cheered loudly at the end. As always with this piece, I was reminded of when I was at St Andrews University as an undergraduate and was playing on the Old Course at 5.30 on a May morning to avoid the American tourists, and as the sun climbed into the sky, so too did several skylarks, singing for all their worth. Vaughan Williams captured that timeless ease with which the little birds flew over the sand dunes and sang! For an encore, Ms Philippens and the orchestra treated us to an extended piece by Ravel, ‘Tzigane’, a rhapsodic composition dating from 1924, featuring exotic, gypsy-like violin playing. More cheering!
After the interval, we heard Sibelius’ First Symphony, a work of immense invention, first heard in 1899. Ten years earlier in Budapest the world heard, for the first time, Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony. Three years after the Sibelius was premiered, Debussy stunned his audience in Paris with ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’. It must have been an extraordinary time to be alive, as great composers were producing masterpieces on an almost daily basis.
In a sad reflection on events in the world today, at the time of the composition of the first symphony, the Russian Tsar Nicholas II was determined to take much firmer control of Finland, which had been an autonomous grand duchy of the Russian Empire. The young Jean Sibelius was one of many Finns who were desperate for their country’s independence, a country which had a completely different language and mind set to the Russian one. The medium of resistance chosen by Sibelius was to revive the symphonic form, which was growing outdated to many composers, but to do so in an obviously Scandinavian way, using the sounds of Finnish folk song and evoking the landscape of his country.
The result was one of the most breath-taking and innovatory first symphonies in history. Even now, the extraordinary idea of starting the work with a plaintive clarinet solo over rumbling timpani seems amazing, and the totally new sound world invented by the 33 year old composer was miraculous. The BBCSSO, under Mark Wigglesworth, played the symphony at full throttle with excellent contributions by the horns, the timps and the woodwind. The sonority created by the trombones and tuba was stunning, and in fact I was most impressed by the orchestra’s playing in general. Having spent much of the last year reviewing the RSNO, I was prepared to make a few allowances for the BBC orchestra, but my doubts were swept away by the truly magnificent sound produced by this fine group of players. We are blessed with world class musicians now in Scotland, and, as I wrote earlier, I was very pleased to see some more of Scotland’s young people in the audience. The sea of grey hair on a Friday night for the RSNO can be somewhat discouraging, and although not exactly a Rock concert audience, this was immensely hopeful. I wonder if the BBCSSO decision to play in simple black gear, unlike the RSNO in full Edwardian white tie and tails for the men and long black frocks for many of the women, is symptomatic of the younger audience they attract. It might be worth the RSNO having a look at this anachronism of formal dress, in an era when it just looks a bit old fashioned and dated.
All in all then, this was a superb concert, superbly played, and conducted with quiet flair by Mark Wigglesworth. As he walks to the podium, he appears a dapper figure, almost anonymous in deportment, but baton in hand he becomes a lion, coaxing and teasing ever finer sounds from the orchestra. I can only hope that his namesake, Ryan, makes a big impact on Scottish music. Since the departure of Sir Donald Runnicles, this orchestra has become rather becalmed, and of course the danger of government cuts to the BBC always rings alarm bells in relation to the corporation’s orchestras, especially outside London. On this showing, the BBCSSO deserves a major place in Scottish musical life, although it must play more in Edinburgh. With the cancellation of Saint-Saëns’ Organ Concerto concert in January, this as far as I can see from the BBCSSO website was the only appearance of the orchestra in Edinburgh this season. That is shocking and needs to be addressed. The audience was there today, in numbers. Please come more often!
