Music

BBC SSO

City Halls, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

Four stars

IN a weekend pleasingly stocked with musical discoveries, Saturday’s BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra concert with principal guest conductor Ilan Volkov was the one marked out for the curious audience, and his young followers had duly put this date for BBC Radio 3’s Hear and Now strand in their diaries.The people who faithfully turn out for his spring Tectonics weekend are plainly happy to listen to new music at other times of the year.

The bulk the programme was devoted to the music of American James Tenney, with two big pieces, Diapason and Clang separated by a solo for double bass, Beast, performed by Dominic Lash. That miniature of drone and harmonics with next to no variation of volume and pace was a mesmerising encapsulation of the composer’s practice. Clang, the earlier work, employed a fairly conventional orchestra layout for his individual kind of minimalism, while Diapason seeded winds and brass among the strings for its long, slow crescendo in common time and faster diminuendo to a few strings. Whether the onstage geography is detectable when the works are broadcast on March 10 will be interesting to listen for.

My guess is that the specifics of the instrumental layout required by Jose Montserrat Maceda for his Distemperament, performed in the first half, will be more obvious. Here all the instruments were represented in trios with the basses, bassoons, and trombones leading the way on a succession of overlapping phrases that were played like triggered samples in different voices. With trumpets and flutes in unaccustomed stage front positions, the work is a huge textural exercise, sometimes rather militaristic and culminating in waves of cascading notes passed around the sections from strings to winds and brass. Fascinating stuff, and to my ears, the more impressive work of the evening.