Mozart, Strauss and Bruckner
Usher Hall, 20/02/26
Royal Scottish National Orchestra
Thomas Søndergård (Conductor)
Felix Klieser (French Horn)
There were definite rumblings from the management of the RSNO about the size of the audience for this concert of Mozart, Richard Strauss and Bruckner, but in the end, although not remotely sold out, a healthy turnout greeted the orchestra in its cut-down shape for the Overture to ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ by Mozart. The programme had a slightly odd feel to it, with no obvious similarities between the works, and no clear reason to play this exhilarating overture here.
The piece hurtled by and Mr Søndergård was taking no prisoners. Most of the overture is setting the scene, and within the confines of the Usher Hall, we could imagine a tale of suspicion, false identity and a lot of costume changes. The norm these days is to play up the class war and play down the physical relationships, but fortunately we were able to skip that aspect today. I have been lucky enough to appear in two iconic productions of ‘Figaro’, one at La Monnaie in Brussels, conducted by Antonio Pappano, directed by Christof Loy, and the other at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, conducted by Marc Minkowski, and directed by Sir Richard Eyre. I will always remember listening to the wonderful overture, prior to being summoned to the stage for my first appearance as Dr Bartolo. I felt that Mr Søndergård slightly overused the accelerator pedal tonight – there is a recent tradition of taking Mozart terribly fast, and I’m not convinced by it.
The second piece on the programme tonight was Richard Strauss’s youthful First Horn Concerto, written when he was only 21, for the Meiningen Court Orchestra. The young student had been taken to see the world premiere of Richard Wagner’s last opera, ‘Parsifal’, in 1882, a performance in which his father, Franz Strauss, played French Horn. Franz Strauss was, to say the least, ambivalent about Wagner’s genius, and indeed discouraged his son from becoming too involved with the radical composer, and so the first horn concerto is a much more conservative piece, although already showing glimpses of what the mature composer would become.
The performance in the Usher Hall tonight was played by the extraordinary German virtuoso, Felix Klieser. Born without arms in 1991, he, astonishingly, at the age of 4, decided he wanted to play the French Horn and set about doing so. By getting a construction built that would allow the horn to be fixed in position, he taught himself to play the valves on the instrument with the toes of his left foot. Lacking arms, he left the bell of the horn alone, unlike able-bodied players who adjust the tuning and volume by putting their right hand in the bell, and so the sound of the instrument is more vibrant and sonorous. Years and years of hard work and practice have resulted in an amazing horn virtuoso, whose skill makes the listener forget what he is seeing.
The horn concerto is quite short, lasting 16 minutes over three movements, and although clearly the work of a student, it has already some of the hallmarks of the mature Strauss. The soloist enters almost immediately after a first orchestral chord, with a fanfare-like theme, and thereafter has a great time taking the horn to extraordinary levels. Mr Klieser produced a gorgeous sound from his amazing instrument, known as Alex, which has a life of its own on Facebook and Instagram.
We were treated to an encore of the 3rd movement from Mozart’s 4th Horn Concerto, a tune immortalised by Flanders and Swann in their 1964 album as ‘Ill Wind.’
The Horn Concerto (and Mr Klieser) was used by the RSNO Marketing people as the main item on the programme, apparently because the mere name Anton Bruckner on a programme has become a turn off for audiences. The second half of the concert consisted of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, in my book one of the greatest symphonies ever written, and the performance under the direction of Thomas Søndergård was the stand out event of the 2025/26 season. Why one wouldn’t want to advertise this fact is a weird commentary on musical taste nowadays, and to me an unfathomable decision. When I was beginning to find out about Classical Music in my teens, Bruckner and Mahler among symphonists and Wagner and Verdi among opera composers were the bench marks against which all other composers were compared, and Bruckner’s greatest and final completed symphony, no 8, which premiered in Vienna in late 1892 was the pinnacle. To be told that it is now an audience killer is completely incomprehensible to me, and this wonderful performance and the audience reaction at the end were a fitting riposte to that view.
As with all Bruckner symphonies, the audience needs to know which version it will be hearing, as the composer was so lacking in self-confidence that he altered and rewrote almost everything he composed if anyone suggested to him that he had made a mistake. I won’t bother you with the various editions and amendments which have occupied musicologists for a century, but all you need to know is that we heard the ‘final’ 1890 version. This is, in my view, the definitive version and it is absolutely fantastic.
Like Wagner’s scores, a Bruckner symphony is not in any way a minimalist undertaking. You have to be prepared for the long haul, through painstaking build up and symphonic construction. The 8th lasts for about one and a half hours over four movements: an opening Allegro Moderato, a Scherzo with a slow trio in the middle, an Adagio movement, described as slow and solemn but not dragging, and a turbulent, measured finale, ending in a coda of awesome wonderment and triumph.
To say Bruckner was an enigmatic figure is an understatement – shy, self-effacing, deeply religious, slightly creepy in his private life, and naive, he was also a famous star organist, playing all over Europe, and a prominent professor of Music at the Vienna Conservatoire and later at Vienna University. He was described by the great conductor, Hans von Bülow, as “half genius, half simpleton”!
His music is also enigmatic. He wrote a great deal of devotional sacred music, emerging from his period as organist of the great Augustinian monastery, Stift Sankt Florian, near Linz, close to his birthplace. I have often visited Sankt Florian, and one still feels the spirit of Bruckner in its vast rococo spaces. He only turned to symphonic composition in 1861, aged 37, but what immense vision he had even then. This is not the work of a simpleton, but more that of a musical architect, and by the time he reached his 8th symphony in its revised form in 1890, he was the equivalent of a Thomas Telford or a Michelangelo.
There is a great temptation to read all manner of emotions and personal traits into the great Eighth Symphony, and indeed the programme notes for the RSNO performance delved into psychological depths revolving around death and loneliness. I prefer to respond at the listener’s level, unencumbered by psychological insights, and the chance to hear the symphony live in a fine concert hall has been one of the joys of my life. I have heard it conducted by Bernard Haitink, Günter Wand, and I think, Sir Alexander Gibson, and it was marvellously apposite that this concert was dedicated to the memory of the great Scottish conductor, who would have been 100 this month. I was lucky enough to sing with Sir Alec many times in the 1980s, and what an inspiration he was to all of us young Scots then!
I was intrigued to see how Thomas Søndergård would tackle the Bruckner, and I was absolutely bowled over by his control and imagination over the whole length of the symphony. His creative and interpretive skills were of the highest order, and I can’t congratulate him enough on the performance. From huge crescendi and enormous climaxes to deliciously subtle pianissimi and meltingly beautiful melodies, he was fascinating to watch from behind, and coaxed playing of world class from the RSNO. There were so many felicities that it is impossible to pick out any in particular, and all the solo sections were brilliantly played. I am, however, going to contradict myself by mentioning the ravishing playing on French horn in the slow movement by Amadea Dazeley-Gaist . This young player, who only graduated from the Royal College of Music in 2024, has impressed enormously in her first year as Principal Horn, and her solo playing in the adagio, one of the most beautiful moments in all music, was absolutely wonderful.
Great plaudits also go to Jason Lewis, associate Principal Trumpet, who, in the absence of Christopher Hart, played an absolute blinder in the crucial first trumpet part. Indeed the brass section, augmented by four Wagner tubas (what a gorgeous sound!) was on world class form in a work that gives them plenty to do. Woodwind and strings (led splendidly by Igor Yusefovich) all played their part in what was for me definitely the highlight of the season so far!
