Classical review: BBC SSO: The Battleship Potemkim

Published on Tuesday 29 September 2009 09:44

BBC SSO: THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN ***** CITY HALLS, GLASGOW

FOR proof that music plays as powerful a role in film as the images on screen, look no further than Sunday's live orchestra-backed screening of Eisenstein's 1920s propaganda film The Battleship Potemkin.

Against the giant projection of its silent images, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra performed Edmund Meisel's original score with sizzling fervour and pinpoint precision. That's no easy task for a conductor, steering a full orchestra on an occasionally unpredictable course, but it seemed to present no problems for the ever-watchful Ilan Volkov. Gunshots on the percussion had the intended impact, as did many other literal sound effects. And the nail-biting tension of that mounting final scene in which the Potemkin mutineers approach the official navy, wondering whether they are with or against them and marked by a seemingly interminable rising scale, was spellbinding.

Meisel's score – written in 12 days and essentially Weill-like in its kitchen-sink dissonance – may be full of clichd repetitions. But that's what works, especially in silent film, where aural references bind the structure and have the magical ability to say so much more than mere words.

It's not the first time the SSO and Volkov have undertaken such a project for Glasgow's Merchant City Festival – they performed to that other Soviet classic The New Babylon three years ago – and it's something many people would come to again and again. Let's have more while we still have Volkov.