Music

RSNO/Prieto

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

****

THE POOR weather in Malaga and Ibiza for last week’s school holidays was a cruel riposte to those who left so many empty seats for the RSNO’s concerts of sunny Hispanic music with Mexican conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto, but it is tempting to think it was arranged as carefully as a programme that majored on Ravel but balanced the colonisation of all things Spanish by French composers with chunky offerings of the real thing.

Most substantially that was the complete dance suite The Three-Cornered Hat by Manuel de Falla, a score that actually suggests movement in every bar in a way that even the ballet music of Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev cannot match. The only actual choreography here, however, was in the movement of soprano Ana Schwedhelm, who popped up in different locations around the auditorium to add her brief, but telling, contributions to the music. She shared the limelight with the RSNO winds who made the most of their prominent role in the vast orchestration.

The premiere performance of Gabriela Ortiz’s Hominum Suite also made use of the fullest orchestra, with the five percussionists, timpanist Paul Philbert, guest principal clarinet Maura Marinucci and harpists Pippa Tunnell and Helen Thomson to the fore. The composer’s name would be unfamiliar to many, but this was one of the most exciting pieces of new music heard in Scotland this year.

If Ravel’s Bolero was the crowd-pleasing closer to the programme – and was played as compellingly as it demands – his Piano Concerto in G is the richer musical feast, given a poised performance by Vanessa Benelli Mosell, a dedicated student of music of its era. There are other jazz-inflected concertos of the first half of the 20th century but Ravel’s is a supreme example of the dialogue between the classical orchestra and big bands of the time. The long solo passage at the start of the slow movement stands apart, but the focus the pianist brought to that demanded a similar response from the listener. Our reward was a flashy encore of the Dance Boheme from Bizet’s Carmen, as arranged by Horowitz.