BBCSSO: ‘Scheherazade’
City Halls, Glasgow - 01/12/22
Poetic publicity, ‘basket of goodies’ programmes, insightful conductors, virtuosic soloists: the BBC at Glasgow’s City Halls continues to spoil us this season and the night of the 1st of December was no exception. The tagline “Colourful, Dramatic, Epic Rimsky-Korsakov” promised the great Russian orchestrator’s most popular work, ‘Scheherazade’, and I for one was equally excited to welcome back the BBCSSO’s Associate Conductor, Birmingham-born Alpesh Chauhan. As eagerly anticipated was another great favourite of mine, the far too infrequently heard single-movement cello concerto in all but name, Ernest Bloch’s ‘Schelomo’, a rhapsodic exploration of the Swiss composer’s Jewish identity through the medium of a musical quasi-biography of King Solomon. Thomas Adès’ whimsically-titled ‘Three-Piece Suite’ from ‘Powder Her Face’, his first opera based on the scandalous life of the Duchess of Argyll, was the riotous concert-opener, introduced by Kate Molleson and broadcast live on Radio 3.
To describe Adès’ eponymous ‘Three Pieces’ as a foxtrot and a waltz morphing directly into a final tango, whilst accurate, would convey nothing of the outrageous loucheness of the music, to say nothing of hilarity. The foxtrot was jazzy and sleazy, full of glitz and glissando and a liberal dose of wah-wah mutes. The waltz was spiky and brittle with much use of motor rhythms, muted trumpets and xylophone, yet enveloped in surreal drunken haze painted by the harp and bowed strings. Polyrhythms and syncopated percussion completed the disorientation, concealing the emergence of the tango, a crazed romp with sudden inexplicable pauses. It was clear that the players had an absolute blast playing this bonkers music as Alpesh Chauhan shamelessly egged them on. It was pure deid brilliant and your funny bone will thank you for ever if you catch it on BBC Sounds. The Glasgow audience got to hear (and see) it live and erupted into rapturous applause at the end.
I first encountered the music of Ernest Bloch in my teens through his wonderful Violin Concerto and Baal Shem, but it wasn’t until my twenties that I purchased on a whim an LP of Janos Starker playing ‘Schelomo’ and ‘Voice in the Wilderness’ with Zubin Mehta and the Israel Phil. ‘Schelomo’ has been a firm favourite ever since. The solo cello is Solomon himself and the music is truly epic and indeed foreshadows a style that would coin the term ‘filmic’. To my ears, the first of the openly Hebraic music’s passionate climaxes must have been at the very least at the back of John Williams’ mind when he scored the scene where the Ark is opened in the desert in ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’. I personally think it is a direct quotation, especially the swirling wind parts towards the end of the episode. Madrid-born cello virtuoso Pablo Ferrández was the soloist and his tone in the plaintive incantatory melodies was glorious, powerful and characterful. It was a superb performance of this dramatic work. Following another enthusiastic ovation, Pablo Ferrández performed Pablo Casals’ heartrending ‘Song of the Birds’ as an encore.
Epic and dramatic too is Rimsky-Korsakov’s four-movement symphonic suite. Imperial Russia’s fascination with the perceived exoticism of the Islamic regions to the southeast of the empire found expression in all the arts, including music, and in the hands of the great orchestrator Rimsky-Korsakov, the legend of the storyteller Scheherazade and The Arabian Nights, prolonging her life with cliff-hangers, is a truly colourful one. Solo violin accompanied by harp depicts the storytelling princess and Laura Samuel’s sweet characterful tone achieved this perfectly. The outer movements deal with the seafarer Sinbad with unmistakeable depictions of the sea, heroic in the first movement, tragic in the dramatic finale when Sindbad’s ship is wrecked. The inner movements comprise a gripping adventurous scherzo depicting the exploits of the Kalendar Prince and a slow elegant romantic interlude with two young lovers. The pace and narrative coherence of these thrilling sound pictures were expertly woven by Alpesh Chauhan, while the playing was consistently excellent: thrusting stern brass chording, exquisite arabesques in the winds, swelling polyphony in the strings. What a treat for the Glasgow audience, the Radio 3 listeners and, thanks to the wonders of digital technology, anyone with access to the internet and BBC Sounds.
I want to conclude with a remark about the horns in the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. The French horn is a remarkable instrument with a unique timbre which leads to it being given frequent prominence and exposure in the scoring of most composers, especially of the Romantic Period. It is also a temperamental instrument and sometimes fails to speak as intended, usually when it is most exposed in the orchestral texture and taxed with the ‘heavy lifting’ of the drama. I find it remarkable that, through the whole of this season, I have not encountered a single occasion when the horn-playing in the BBCSSO has been anything less than perfect. I am in awe of the horns of the BBCSSO. That is all.