Music

BBC SSO/Farnes

City Halls, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

four stars

NOT MANY of the musicians now playing in the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra will remember BBC Scotland’s former Head of Music, composer Martin Dalby, who died last week, nor will they have played Cradle Song (after J Scott Skinner), his arrangement of a 19th century traditional music favourite that was once an encore staple of the orchestra’s international touring repertoire.

That will be especially true of young principal flute Charlotte Ashton, but she seemed to be enjoying stating the melody at the opening of this tribute to the man who played a crucial role in saving this orchestra from the bean-counters. With lush string writing and concluding swell in the brass, it suits the strengths of the current line-up very well and was a lovely addition to this afternoon concert.

It preceded the second-half performance of Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony, given a beautifully balanced and paced reading by conductor Richard Farnes, with whom the orchestra is building an important, if sporadic, relationship. The contrast between the defiance of the third movement and the despair of the finale was perfectly pitched.

Principal clarinet Yann Ghiro’s distinctive tone was crucial at the opening of the symphony as well at the start of the aria La pace mia smaritta, from Moses in Egypt, placed right at the centre of an all-Rossini first half. Mezzo Victoria Simmonds has made something of a specialism of contemporary music, including Scottish Opera’s recent fine production of Jonathan Dove’s Flight, but she proved herself more than at home with Italian coloratura in her SSO debut. That song was framed by the classic Una voca poco fa from The Barber of Seville and Cinderella’s last song La piu mesta, with the overtures to The Thieving Magpie and The Silken Ladder opening and closing the sequence.

Farnes, the former music director of Opera North who makes his New York Met debut early next year, was in his element here, are were the winds of the orchestra again, particularly the oboe of Alexandra Hilton on the less-often-heard earlier overture.