RSNO, 23/10/2021

Rooke : The Isle is full of noises!

Shostakovich : Festive Overture

Tchaikovsky : Variations on a Rococo Theme

Stravinsky : The Firebird

Bruno Deleplaire, cello

Royal Scottish National Orchestra

Thomas Søndergård

This, the official opening concert of the RSNO's new season, was to be placed under the signs of festivity and magic, Thomas Søndergård declared at the outset, and he kept his word.  The evening began with a new work specifically commissioned for the occasion, and which was therefore receiving its world premiere performances (always at least two with the RSNO, since the Saturday night Glasgow concerts have usually been played the night before in Edinburgh).  It's a short, bright, breezy piece, partly fanfare, with the orchestra deployed in full, yet the overall texture is pleasingly light and buoyant.  I was a little reminded of some of the Jonathan Dove pieces I've heard, a use of repetitive patterns, but a transparent, glittering texture that's very easy on the ear.  

Next followed the more explicit Festive Overture, by Shostakovich.  There is not a great deal of Shostakovich's output that is unambiguously happy, for fairly obvious reasons, but this is one of those rare pieces, Commissioned to mark the 1954 anniversary of the October Revolution, it is perhaps a huge sigh of relief at the death of Stalin and the lifting of his crushingly oppressive shadow - interestingly, three years later, Shostakovich would receive another commission to mark the same event, but the result, the 11th Symphony, is an altogether darker affair.  The Festive Overture, however, was specifically written for the Bolshoi Theatre's celebrations, and the associations for Shostakovich were perhaps less fraught than those with the state.  The orchestra's brass was amiably pompous for the opening fanfare, and then the rest joined in an effervescent scherzo, scampering off like a bunch of children on a sugar high, led by gleefully squealing woodwinds.

Bruno Deleplaire is the Principal Cellist of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra since 2013.  As such I have surely heard him play dozens of times on recordings and broadcasts, but this is the first time I have seen him as a featured soloist.  The initial impression was of a warm timbre that was neither very rich nor very lean, but somewhere comfortably in-between.  Later on, though, I became aware of a sort of 'buzz' behind the tone, particulary in the lower-middle register, that was a little grating to hear, and that I cannot explain.  The last time I heard this work was just under three years ago, same orchestra and conductor, but Johannes Moser as the soloist.  As I wrote then, I am not a great fan of this work, but Moser came close to convincing me.  Deleplaire, for all his qualities, did not show the same level of communication with the orchestra that made the piece interesting to me, he seemed very much the soloist in regal isolation, rather than one of the family.  His technique was impressive, making light work of the all the trills and rapid scales, but as a whole, it did not speak to me.

Finally, magic in its purest state, the complete 1910 ballet score of Stravinsky's The Firebird, in all its mystical, shimmering glory.  This was the work that put Stravinsky on the map, in which he laid out every trick of orchestration learned from his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov, himself a master, if not the master of the orchestra.  It's a very complex score, and there were, in the orchestra's execution, a lot of scuffs - instruments not quite coming in together, or passages (the start of the Game with the Golden Apples) that were a little scruffy, instead of sharp and precise.  However, it didn't matter a bit, because what Søndergård was doing was telling a story.  He unrolled the glowing, scintillating tapestry of The Firebird with the assurance of a master raconteur, every passage clear and vivid, leading confidently and logically into the next, from the hushed obscurity of the enchanted wood at the start, to the triumphant blaze of the final new dawn.  In that new dawn was our new dawn, a new season of live music-making once more in prospect, an uplifting thought with which to end the evening.

[Next : 29th October]