Music review: RSNO: Firebird, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

RSNO: Firebird, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall ****

The RSNO’s mostly-Russian opener to its live and digital 2021/22 Season presented an awesome sight. When did we last see a band filling every inch of an indoor concert platform, with musicians sharing stands again; and we, the live audience, regaining something of the corporate glow experienced only when fellow music lovers congregate? Yes, we observed social (and masked) distancing, but with increased numbers permitted, the sense of communal warmth felt good.

Music director Thomas Søndergård took the earliest opportunity to express his and the orchestra’s joy, which immediately translated into a fizzing performance of Matthew Rooke’s short and snappy celebration of near-normal service resuming, The Isle is Full of Noises!

Commissioned by the RSNO as part of its home-grown Scotch Snaps series, Rooke embraces minimalist vigour (Adams-like) and kaleidoscopic Stravinskian lustre in this energy-packed fanfare. Thrilling as it was, I couldn’t help feeling that its theatrical impact, and that of a programme effectively containing two overtures, would have been so much greater had Søndergård launched immediately into the music, saving his speech as a logical springboard to the main Russian feast.

That aside, this was a concert that steadily gathered heat. Shostakovich’s Festive Overture mustered the high-voltage precision and undiluted joy its functional ecstasy demands, quickly dispelling the mild anxieties overshadowing its opening bars. Delicate composure informed Tchaikovsky’s flirtatious Variations on a Rococo Theme, soloist Bruno Delepelaire (lead cellist of the Berlin Philharmonic) allowing the naturalness of the music to dictate its own elegant and mellifluous course.

Finally Søndergård brought us Stravinsky’s The Firebird - the complete ballet score – and a performance in which the spiciest detail and textural sensitivities were matched by the vividness of its limitless expressive range. An ultimately mind-blowing return to full power by the RSNO.

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