Music

BBC SSO

City Halls, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

five stars

MUCH instrumental music is remembered for the way it begins or ends, rather than what happens in between, and that is particularly true of orchestral symphonies. Danish composer Per Norgard’s Symphony No.7 is a feast of starts and finishes from start to finish.

So it is that there are many moments during it that imprint themselves on the memory, as the initial ensemble gives way to highly complex and colourful writing across the sections. The first movement ends with a distinctive glissando on the low strings and the second opens with a melodic duet from clarinet and oboe, while the third is almost carnivalesque in its opening bars. There are common threads running throughout the piece - especially a vast range of tom toms in the percussion and muted brass - but it is chiefly about the rich resource of the entire orchestra, and was given the fullest expression by the composer’s countryman, conductor Thomas Dausgaard, here.

The Piano Concerto by a third Dane, Simon Steen-Andersen, is, by contrast, all about the piano, or rather pianos, because as well as the Steinway played by Nicholas Hodges, there was film of one falling and shattering - in the manner of artist Raydale Dower’s Piano Drop, seen at Tramway at the start of thus decade - as well as a projection of another Hodges playing the out-of-tune wrecked instrument, facing the real thing and operated by the composer. You may surmise that this is going to mean much less to listeners to Radio 3’s Hear and Now strand when the performance is broadcast than it did for those of us in the well-filled auditorium. Nonetheless, it was also musically highly entertaining, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, and Hodges, wearing fingerless gloves with his white tie and tails, was quite superb.

All of which meant that the world premiere of David Fennessy’s The Ground was in very challenging company, although its experimentation with the modes of pipe music, using a recording of the voice of piper Robert Urquhart Brown, was no less compelling to listen to. There may, however, be more dynamic range and tonal spectrum to be found in it than was immediately apparent in this first performance.