TOMORROW Nicola Benedetti joins the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and conductor Peter Oundjian in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall to give the first of two home terrain performances of the repertoire the same team takes on tour to the United States next week. And yesterday the orchestra revealed that its 2017/18 season will begin with the same team, Benedetti playing Elgar's Violin
Concerto in concerts at the start of October that teams it with a very different masterpiece of the same era: Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.
The RSNO's chief executive Krishna Thiagarajan describes the concerts that the orchestra's music director takes charge of in the new season as "meaty repertoire with some fun stuff as well as intellectual and quiet stuff." That translates as a Brahms Double Concerto with Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, and a Brahms Requiem before Christmas and a Bruckner 8, Shostakovich 7 and Mahler 9 in 2108. It is notable that those first two autumn concerts come with two Scottish premieres of new music to open the programme. The new RSNO season brochure takes the conductor to what is currently the end of his tenure as the man at the top, but Thiagarajan will not be drawn on the question of succession. "We are negotiating past the end of that contract," he says.
The Requiem marks the start of a crucial strand in the new season: a celebration of the 175th anniversary of the RSNO Chorus. It traces its roots back to a glee club that met in Nicol's Coffee House in Glasgow's Argyle Street and gave the first Scottish performance of Handel's Messiah in the City Halls in 1844, accompanied by a scratch orchestra that took another fifty years to mould itself into the nascent RSNO. The choir will be giving its regular New Year performance of Messiah on January 2 and before the orchestra's season concert in Glasgow on February 10 – which includes artist-in-residence Jan Vogler performing Schumann's Cello Concerto – the RSNO Chorus makes its a capella debut with unaccompanied performances of Elgar Part-Songs, as prelude to a programme that also includes that composer's first symphony.
The Chorus also makes significant contribution to the Bernstein centenary celebrations, with the RSNO's contribution to what would have been the great American's 100th birthday including the Chichester Psalms and the Scottish premiere, in collaboration with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, of his immense, theatrical MASS. The first of those concerts also includes the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story alongside Barber's First Symphony and Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, all of it concluding a strain of American music in the season that begins with John Adams and Bernard Herrmann before the end of the year.
Hermann's music for the Love Scene in Vertigo – opening a concert directed by Principal Guest Conductor John Storgards that also includes Korngold's Violin Concerto and Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony and sits well with the German Romantics in his other programmes – gives a main season outing for cinema score that has become a big part of the RSNO's work beyond the subscription series. Following the live Raiders of the Lost Ark at this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival, the orchestra teams up with the EIFF again in October to play Hermann's score for screenings of Hitchcock's Psycho in Glasgow and Edinburgh. In February it again revisits John Williams's Star Wars music with conductor Richard Kaufman before playing the score of Brief Encounter (including Rachmaninov) with pianist Leon McCawley for Valentine screenings of the classic British weepie in Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Carefully reconstructed scores of the music for the films of Gene Kelly are also on the agenda, in a collaboration with the great song-and-dance man's wife and biographer Patricia Ward Kelly. She presents a portrait of him in her own words and film clips at the RSNO Centre in November as a precursor for a show in April that has the orchestra playing live with clips from Singin' in the Rain, Brigadoon and others.
The auditorium in the orchestra's no-longer-quite-so-new home sees plenty of other action with musicians John Whitener and Usual Heidecker Allen taking on the presentation roles in the Under The Skin series explorations of composers Elgar and Brahms with conductors Karl-Heinz Steffens and Thomas Sondergard, and associate leader Bill Chandler training the focus on Leonard Bernstein in April. Lunchtime concerts with a symphony, soup and sandwich feature conductors Gemma New, Patrycja Pieczara, Holly Mathieson – and Peter Oundjian, and a seven concert chamber music season on Sunday afternoons provides an opportunity to hear the RSNO players in an intimate setting.
Across the board, and across Scotland, the national orchestra is playing more music over the 2017/18 season than it did even as part of its own 125th anniversary celebrations, with six Dundee concerts, five in Perth and appearances from Langholm to Inverness. Subscription sales open today with tickets on general sale from May 2.
www.rsno.org.uk
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