Music

RSNO/Sondergard

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Keith Bruce

Four stars

WITH the national orchestra’s run of traditional Christmas concerts, including Howard Blake’s music for The Snowman, still to come next week, here was RSNO music director Thomas Sondergard rounding off the year’s season concerts with his own programme for the festivities. With the orchestra on tour in China at New Year and its Messiah moved to Easter, having two tilts at the Christmas market seems more than permissible, and the presence of the RSNO Junior Chorus in the choir stalls added family groups to a large audience.

The familiar overture, march and dances from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker was the big work of the second half. Quite what it all means to a young person who has never seen the ballet is an interesting question, because I was surely not the only adult for whom the absence of dancers to watch as the story unfolded was a real gap. The music sparkled at it should, the young voices were perfectly drilled, and the Sugar Plum Fairy tune was exquisite, although the suite as a whole perhaps lacked that final effervescent fizz at the close, the conductor’s approach just a little too controlled for the occasion.

His choice of opening work, Prokofiev’s Winter Bonfire, was inspired however. As the programme note suggested, there are perhaps political reasons why this work for young comrades, from the pen of the man who wrote Peter and the Wolf - the greatest ever classical piece for children - is so little played in the West. Over half a century on from the Cold War of its composition, we can enjoy its pictorial simplicity and masterful evocation of the coldest season.

In between, came the debut of the orchestra’s new cellist artist-in-residence, Johannes Moser, on Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme. It has been a big week for cello fans, with Pablo Ferrandez making his BBC SSO debut with the Dvorak concerto on Thursday, and Moser is another superb player, even if his flamboyant showmanship divided opinion at the interval.

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