RSNO: Mozart and Haydn
Usher Hall, 28/11/2025
RSNO and RSNO Chorus, Thomas Søndergård (conductor), Stephen Doughty (chorus director)
Another excellent audience turned up on Friday evening at the Usher Hall for an interesting concert of Clara Schumann, Haydn and Mozart, given by the RSNO, conducted by Thomas Søndergård.
We started with a rare chance to hear three a capella pieces for mixed chorus by Clara Schumann, ‘Abendfeier in Venedig’, ‘Vorwärts’ and ‘Gondoliera’, compositions written in 1848 for her husband Robert’s birthday. Robert was impressed and performed the 3 songs later that year, but they were not published until 1989! Stephen Doughty, the Chorus director, conducted these delightful pieces and we were treated to a lovely performance of music I had never heard before. The chorus had been very well trained and sang with clarity, sonority and some aplomb, filling the hall with a full richness of tone and perfect blending of voices. Mr Doughty, who has been chorus director since 2022/23, has been able to produce a very fine choir sound, fully worthy of singing alongside the RSNO in its pomp!
The orchestra itself now assembled to accompany one of its own, Christopher Hart, principal trumpet and all-round fine fellow, in Joseph Haydn’s late Trumpet Concerto in E Flat Major. It is one of the joys of the RSNO that the holders of the principal desks are so talented that they can, and often do, step up to the front of the stage as soloists in their own right, and Mr Hart was no exception. With a beautiful full tone and excellent virtuoso technique, he was superb in this marvellous creation of Haydn’s later years, which was first heard in Vienna in 1800. Accompanied with skill and discretion by Thomas Søndergård and the orchestra, Mr Hart distinguished himself, playing with burnished golden tones in the Allegro first movement, and glorious warm smoothness in the Andante Cantabile second movement. The marvellous Rondo finale was exhilarating in its technical precision and joyous abandon and was greeted at the end by a great roar of approval. Mr Hart and a few strings treated us to a lovely encore of an arrangement of Debussy’s piano piece, La Fille aux Cheveux de Fin, again establishing him as a supremely talented trumpeter.
After the interval, the full massed RSNO Chorus was seated in the organ gallery behind the slightly bigger but still modest-sized RSNO for a performance of Mozart’s strange, unfinished Great Mass in C Minor, some of which was heard in Salzburg in 1783. Like the Requiem, but for different reasons, Mozart never completed this Grand Mass, and various editions have come and gone over the years to try to make some sense of it. The version we heard tonight was that of the musicologist, Richard Maunder, dating from 1988, largely satisfying but still much truncated, with vast amounts of the Credo and the entire Agnus Dei omitted. There is still much to admire, and some of Mozart’s finest sacred music lurks within, but it is essentially an incomplete masterpiece, which needs a good deal of energy and luck to succeed. That it fell somewhat short was largely down to the under-cooked and unbalanced quartet of soloists, which never quite gelled as we might have hoped for.
The late substitution of American soprano, Brenda Rae, for the indisposed Moyca Erdmann was clearly problematic, although Ms Rae sang with a very sweet tone and cannot be blamed, but the whole quartet seemed underpowered and semi-detached. They only sing together in the final Benedictus, a spirited movement quite unlike most Benedictus sections, but it was symptomatic of the problem. The individual voices rarely projected over the orchestra, and this was the main drawback. When I sang the Mass in the mid-90’s with the LSO and Mikhail Pletnev in London’s Barbican Hall, our solo quartet was made up of singers who could also sing the Verdi Requiem, and indeed the tenor on that occasion, Gwyn Hughes Jones, will be singing Wagner’s Tristan next year with Scottish Opera. A mistake is often made by casting singers of Mozart as if it was music by Handel, and I fear that was what happened here.
Ms Rae sang with unfailing musicianship but almost entirely piano, although her ‘Et incarnatus est’ was exquisite. Her colleague, Katie Coventry, clearly a young mezzo-soprano of some promise, lacked the depth of tone needed for this music. This talented Scottish mezzo, working mostly in Salzburg, will I am sure develop into a fine singer, and she was by far the most committed performer on stage, engaging with the audience and clearly enjoying herself. Sadly, the Uruguayan tenor, Edgardo Rocha, was largely covered by the orchestra, and struggled to make anything of his part, while the Swedish baritone, Andreas Landin, although only singing in the Benedictus, was similarly lacking in projection, and very copy-bound. Without wishing to appear parochial, I cannot see why the RSNO would employ a singer for a small part from Sweden, when we have any number of excellent basses and baritones in Scotland. The RSNO don’t put on many vocal concerts, but I would love to see more Scottish singers given a chance to shine.
The real stars of the Mass were the singers of the RSNO Chorus, who sang with splendid verve and accuracy, blending well together, and showing a degree of commitment lacking elsewhere. In the orchestra, the various solos, particularly in the woodwind, were superbly played, and the whole piece was held together well by Thomas Søndergård.
