City Halls. Glasgow 5/11/26
BBCSSO, Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor), Sophie Bevan (soprano)
I was back to Glasgow’s City Halls on the of 5th November for a programme of Russian goodies, continuing the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s 2026-27 afternoon season under the baton of their Chief Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth. The headline work after the interval was Tchaikovsky's Symphony No.5. The concert opened with Lyadov’s 2 brief orchestral pictures ‘Baba Yaga’ and ‘The Enchanted Lake’. In between, soprano Sophie Bevan was the soloist in the Shostakovich orchestration of Mussorgsky’s ‘Songs and Dances of Death’. There was quite a respectable turnout in the stalls for an afternoon concert. Associate leader Kanako Ito was our leader for the afternoon (and not Alessandro Ruisi guesting as indicated on the programme). The concert was recorded for later broadcast on BBC Radio 3, after which it will be available on BBC Sounds for a further 30 days. As I have often remarked with BBCSSO concerts, occasionally some wind and/or brass players warm their instruments up on stage before the performance, trading random quotations. Early arrivals will have enjoyed snippets of Bartók’s ‘Concerto for Orchestra’ from James Horan’s cor anglais and Yann Ghiro’s clarinet, as well as Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto from the latter. I love this orchestra.
The Lyadov miniatures from the first decade of the 20th century are wee gems, orchestral interlude remnants from an opera not so much “unfinished” as “unbegun”. Prokofiev’s teacher is shown to have been unmistakably Russian and no mean orchestrator. ‘Baba Yaga’ portrayed the witch in playful mood, but no less menacingly demonic. Sprightly and rhythmic, there was great writing for xylophone and piccolo for the aerobatics, yet dark malevolence in the trombones and tuba. A cheeky flourish of the piccolo at the end concluded the aerial dance. ‘The Enchanted Lake’ was slower and wonderfully atmospheric, muted shimmering divisi strings evoking misty exhalation over the still waters. The front desk of the cellos sang a dreamy ‘solo’. The orchestration reminded me of Paul Dukas. Winds and horn comments built to a central climax, with timpani rolls and brass chords in the texture, before subsiding to a peaceful end. A very pleasing concert-opener. There was the sensation that conductor and orchestra really enjoyed performing it.
Composed between 1875 and 1877 for low male voice and piano, Mussorgsky’s four macabre ‘Songs and Dances of Death’ set poems by Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov, all of which feature the archly ironic figure of Death, claiming his harvest from those clinging to failing life, with an element of wry, dry gallows humour. For nearly a century, the songs remained the unchallenged province of the lower male tessiture, and almost exclusively great Russian basses at that. This was even though female voices speak in the first two poems, and in the third, Death is a ‘she’. Shostakovich’s 1962 orchestration changed all that. It was written for and dedicated to his friend, the Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya (also the wife of his friend and former pupil Mstislav Rostropovich). Although I remain an ardent fan of Vishnevskaya’s legacy (was there a greater Katerina Ismailova?), I confess to occasionally finding the intensity and breadth of her vibrato, especially towards the end of her performing career, a tad unsubtle and wearing. There is a delicious blend of unvarnished directness and teasing irony in Mussorgsky’s songs (and Shostakovich’s orchestration) that demands subtlety. With husband-and-wife team, Ryan Wigglesworth and Sophie Bevan, that is exactly what they got, with perfect dynamic balance into the bargain. Shostakovich was attracted to the songs by their avoidance of false consolation in both text and music, a bluntness he then emulated in his Fourteenth Symphony. The performance I heard honoured that truth. The first song ‘Lullaby’ is a mother’s vigil by her ailing baby’s cradle, while Death offers the unwelcome promise of release from suffering. The mother tries to dismiss Death but the baby sleeps finally and permanently after his ‘lullaby’. Subtle shifts of vocal timbre made clear that there were two voices speaking (with a third narrating), supported by shifts of pulse and expression in the music. I don’t number Russian among my languages (other than a tiny vocabulary gleaned from following libretti provided with operatic CDs), but the text of the songs in Romanised spelling and English translation was provided in the programme and the afternoon light in the hall was more than adequate to read it (thank you, BBC and the City Halls – would that this were the norm). The quality of Sophie Bevan’s diction (and especially her flawless consonants, crucial to Slavic languages) meant I could follow the words with ease. In the second song ‘Serenade’, a beautiful woman is gravely ill and in pain, unable to sleep. Death, in the guise of a knight come to release her from her ‘captivity’, sings a seductively lilting but menacing serenade inviting her to elope with her ‘lover’. The mask comes off in the end, with his triumphant “You are mine!”. Gotcha. For the third song ‘Trepak’, the victim is a drunken peasant, trying to stagger his way home through the woods in the dark, overtaken by a blizzard. Death assumes a seductive female voice, offering him a place for the night (and, of course, eternity). The last song, composed two years after the others, is called ‘The Field Marshal’. The scene is after the carnage of a brutal battle. Death surveys the battlefield full of dead and dying, like a military commander, but with grim satisfaction. Whichever side has won, he has thousands of ‘recruits’ awaiting his command. He is all-powerful and all-conquering. He will stalk the battlefield and dance on their graves. Mors stupebit. Death’s triumph is snarled by one final orchestral climax. Back in March, the Glasgow audience had heard Wigglesworth’s 2022 ‘Magnificat’ for solo soprano, chorus and orchestra, with his wife and dedicatee of the piece, Sophie Bevan, as soloist, and the BBC Singers as the chorus. The Mussorgsky/Shostakovich is a very different sound world with a radically different underlying philosophy. But the magic was the same. As was the conductor and soloist kissing on the lips and holding hands as they bowed. What’s not to like?
Throughout his tenure, Ryan Wigglesworth’s “shaping of a romantic narrative” credentials have had numerous opportunities to register with Glasgow audiences, none more so than that same concert in March, with a radiant performance of Bruckner 4. Tchaikovsky’s unbridled romanticism, as found in all of the last three symphonies, got the outing it deserves. Yann Ghiro’s clarinet set the predominant mood of brooding fatalism that haunts the first movement even as passions are roused. We heard a reading that absolutely let the players be maximally expressive, but shaped every phrase with the awareness of where this journey is going, and it is not triumph. The chromatic falling phrases of the start of the Allegro con anima had falling dynamics to match. There was exquisite clarity of detail from start to finish, fully exploiting the super acoustic of the City Halls. The playing was phenomenal, with the famous slow movement horn solo from principal Chris Gough particularly touching, and some gloriously passionate string playing for the ‘love theme’, not without its share of heartache and cruelly interrupted by Fate. The third movement’s waltz tempo was elegant (when I was at university and hanging out with music students, I heard their rude words to that waltz melody, but I’ll refrain from sharing them here), the rubato naturally expressive and unforced, the cantabile string melody sweetly contrasted with their agile balletic scurrying in the central section. But a spectral appearance of the Fate motif shuts down the mood of insouciance, then presides over the introduction to the finale. Stormy passion alternates with rueful introspection in a relentless drive. Wigglesworth kept it real and compelling, and ultimately satisfying, not as triumph but as catharsis, even as the trumpets’ “nah nahnee nah nah” and the orchestral barrel-organ amplify the self-mockery in the return of the first movement’s opening theme Four concluding hammer-blows could be anything, but are probably the last nail in the coffin. Superb.
Link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/events/e5j4mb