Classical review: RSNO - Symphonie Fantastique

HARDLY a week goes by these days without James MacMillan’s music springing up somewhere in Scotland.

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. Picture: Contributed

RSNO: SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

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This weekend it was his clarinet concerto Ninian, written in 1996 for the RSNO’s principal clarinettist John Cushing, and performed here by the same forces that premiered it in 1997.

Unlike Friday’s Usher Hall performance, which was dramatically interrupted when an RSNO viola player unfortunately took ill (he’s OK, by the way), Saturday’s repeat in Glasgow ran without hitch, reminding us what an utterly evocative and moving work this is.

Based on miracle episodes from the life of St Ninian, there is a strong and colourful storytelling thread to this dazzling three-movement concerto. Predictably, too, for MacMillan, a deeply personal underlying spirituality – uncomfortably raw and compellingly introspective towards the end of the opening movement – continually acts as an appeasing counterbalance to the brazen brass chorales and searing interjections that give this music its impulsive theatricality.

Cushing’s performance was simply sensational, every bit the virtuoso protagonist, and ravishing in the way he captured such rapt moments as the fade-to-nothing ending of the first movement.

Under Finnish conductor Hannu Lintu, the orchestra was pungent and alert in a concerto that was the perfect first-half response to the leisurely repose of Sibelius’ The Swan of Tuonela. The evening ended with Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, which Lintu shaped with measured attention to detail, but with a hint of cautiousness that occasionally stalled the vital emotional momentum.