BBC SSO & Fazal Qureshi, Glasgow review: 'intoxicating'

BBC SSO & Fazal Qureshi, City Halls, Glasgow ★★★★

Zakir Hussain attained rock star status in the world of Indian tabla playing, as fruitful in his collaborations with the great Ravi Shankar as with George Harrison and the Grateful Dead. That he died last December robbed us of a chance to see him star again in his own Triple Concerto for tabla, sitar and bansuri with the BBC SSO - he had previously played it in Edinburgh with the Symphony Orchestra of India - but his brother, Fazal Qureshi, stepped in. What turned into a touching tribute did Hussain proud.

Fazal Qureshi | AFP via Getty Images

The performance elicited a visual magic - Qureshi, sitarist Niladri Kumar and bansuri (flute) player Rakesh Chaurasia sat crossed-legged on a raised platform as if occupying a world detached from the formality of the surrounding symphony orchestra. Yet it was this cultural juxtaposition that defined the aural fascination of the piece, the free-flowing improvisational style of the traditional Asian instruments warmly amplified by a halo of Western symphonic opulence.

The traditional musicians alone struck up an intoxicating vibe, their nascent, intimate opening conversations eventually spurring the orchestra into action with a cocktail of searing unison melodies, mystical harmonic underlay and, where intense climaxes came and went, rock-style ostinati.

If the orchestration bore a certain benign, movie soundtrack persona, its lack of pretension, and the focus that placed on the central protagonists was also its strength. Conductor Alpesh Chauhan gave the performance the space it needed, firmly controlled yet exotically fluid.

In the second half, Rachmaninov’s The Isle of the Dead, superbly moody and desolate at the start and judiciously paced throughout, fell a little short on sustained persuasiveness, but in Stravinsky’s suite The Firebird, Chauhan revelled in the colourful dynamism of its stark extremes.

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