Music review: BBC SSO, City Halls, Glasgow, Rosie Davies, four stars
BILLED as a 90th birthday celebration for Thea Musgrave, the SSO’s commemorative concert was really a celebration of the mutually appreciative relationship between the orchestra and the Edinburgh-born composer, and a reminder of the paramount importance of supporting today’s emerging composers. As Musgrave stated from the stage, heralded by bagpipes and pageantry as she accepted an Honorary Doctorate from the RCS – this was the orchestra who gave her her big break, and what a gift her 70-year career has been to music.
The thoughtfully-curated selection of SSO commissions, works premiered by the orchestra, and pieces by contemporaries and friends was performed with such commitment, such investment, that it felt as if the sound was almost physically moving as one mercurial entity at some points, so present and alive was her music. Conductor Jac van Steen revelled in Musgrave’s enchanting child-in-a-sweetshop approach to instrumentation; the air slithered, seethed, popped and fizzed with the sort of sounds that demand you sit up and match them with visual evidence of who's producing them, and how.
Then there’s the literal physicality Musgrave so often plays with in her work. An obvious highlight was Two’s Company, in which percussionist Evelyn Glennie stormed across the space to different clusters of instruments in an affecting and effective dramatisation of her dialogue with fellow soloist, the oboist Nicholas Daniel.
Throughout, Musgrave sat smiling in the stalls; the icing on a wholly enjoyable birthday cake.
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