Music

BBC SSO

City Halls, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

three stars

COME the Edinburgh Festival in August, we shall be seeing Canadian soprano Erin Wall in the role of Ellen Orford in a concert of Britten's Peter Grimes and in a rare performance of Elgar's Viking cantata, Scenes from the Saga of King Olaf, so perhaps she is saving herself. But there was a sense in Thursday evening's performance of Strauss's Four Last Songs that she was singing to the broadcasting microphone rather than projecting to the audience in the hall as she can, and her voice was sometimes lost in the ensemble. While conductor Thomas Dausgaard was coaching a rich sound from the SSO, the third lyric, Beim Schlafengehen, was not as heart-rending as it should be, although the solo contribution of orchestra leader Laura Samuel could not be faulted.

In a feast of big German music, the songs sat between Wagner's Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde and the Prelude to Act 1 of Parsifal, with Samuel's string colleagues on superb form and the brass and horns matching them in the second work particularly. But again there seemed to be some emotional distance in Dausgaard's reading.

In this musical company, the conductor had to have great confidence in the Sixth Symphony of Danish composer Rued Langgaard, The Heaven-Rending. Although written in 1920, this was its UK premiere, and at times it sounded much more modern than that date and at others rather earlier. A strange beast, with loads of Wagnerian influence in its scoring, it kept the strings very busy indeed, but the Theme-and-Variations structure seemed an odd one for something labelled a symphony, with little narrative on the road to its powerful climax.