Classic review: BBC SSO: Glass Premiere, City Halls, Glasgow

By KEN WALTON
Published on 26/05/2012 00:00

IT has taken ten years for Philip Glass’s Sixth Symphony Plutonium Ode to reach a British concert hall. Written originally to mark his 65th birthday, it finally received a UK premiere last night as part of this year’s ongoing celebrations of the American composer’s 75th birthday.

And Glass was there in person for the event – a performance by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of the young British conductor Nicholas Collon, which signalled the start of this weekend’s Glass celebration in Glasgow.

The symphony spans almost an hour, and is sewn together by a lengthy anti-nuclear poem by the late Allen Ginsberg, whose words were sung – as in the original premiere – by the dynamic and effusive lyric soprano, Lauren Flanigan. The three distinctive sections – a tirade against radioactive contamination, a realisation of its evil, and a final glorious epiphany – shape Glass’s three-movement concept, threading through it like a binding, flexible spinal chord.

Right from the dusky opening, the musical language is vintage Glass, its powerful insistence fuelled by those familiar cellular chord patterns, electrifying ostinati, hammering gunshot motifs, as fearsome as a Mahler fate rhythm, and the inevitable ecstatic outcome of the slowly evolving climaxes.

Flanigan’s high-pitched vocal line carried with it an ethereal glow that, even where words were obscured by the orchestra, was animated and evocative. Meanwhile Collon’s patient unwinding of the block-like structure gave it Brucknerian chunkiness.

Rating: ****