Classical: Ilan Volkov on his return to the BBC SSO

When Ilan Volkov breezes back into town, expect the unexpected. Or at the very least, expect the kind of challenging, out-of-the-box experience that figured increasingly in his dynamic six-year tenure as chief conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra between 2003 and 2009.

Nowadays – with Donald Runnicles, lover of big mainstream symphonies and heady operas, in the SSO hot seat – Volkov has stepped aside to occupy the principal guest conductor post, which means he’s in Scotland less often and can choose exactly the programmes that interest him, presented where and in what fashion he likes.

It also gives him the ultimate freedom and flexibility to pursue a career agenda that is without limits or labels, whether conducting his new orchestra – the Iceland Symphony Orchestra – in its brand new Harpa concert hall in Reykjavik; or improvising (on violin) with jazz, rock or electronic musicians in Levontine 7, the alternative performing venue he established in his native Tel Aviv several years ago with jazz musician Assif Tsachar.

What’s more, he enjoys just about every musical category in between, recently conducting staple symphonic fare in Washington and Paris and modern opera in Toulouse or Israel, stretching the boundaries of contemporary performance with such vanguard groups as the Ensemble Modern, or as tonight at the Royal Conservatoire Scotland, sharing his ever-youthful enthusiasm with the even younger enthusiasts of the student Music Lab Ensemble in a concert that is part of this week’s Plug Festival at the RCS.

The great news is, Volkov will be in and out of Scotland over the next year, sharing his multiple interests in a series of projects that begins with his Plug appearances, continues over the summer with two separate retrospectives on the Second Viennese School and American composer John Cage with the SSO, includes the recording of his third disc in a superb Stravinsky orchestral series on the Hyperion label, and in May 2013 sees him stage a Glasgow version of the hugely ambitious Tectonic Festival he recently launched so successfully in Iceland.

If anything connects this string of activity it is perhaps the Boulezian question Volkov asked himself when dreaming up last month’s inaugural Tectonic Festival in Reykjavik: “How can an orchestra, the 19th-century beast, be more radical and experimental?”

We’re about to see the answer to that for ourselves in various guises over the coming 12 months, starting with Saturday’s final Plug event, a concert at the City Halls by the SSO (or rather varying bits and pieces of the SSO) that focuses on the music of Netherlands-based English composer Richard Ayres.

Volkov is a fervent champion of Ayres’ distinctive style, which he describes as “anti-academic, with a sort of tonality and a kind of hyper-radicalism that is postmodern”. But the quality that tickles him most is its theatrical humour. “It’s something that is very rare, but Richard does it to great effect,” says Volkov. “I’ve known his music for quite a while, but it has not been played so much in the UK.”

Humour in music? There seems to be no shortage of potential for comic effect in an anti-genre Ayres calls his “NONcertos”, one of which – for horn and ensemble – will be performed this weekend. “The soloist has to do a lot of physical running between notional ‘mountain peaks’,” Volkov reveals.

In another work called MacGowan, scored for violin, Celtic harp and bagpipes, Ayres’ inspiration is none other than Shane MacGowan of The Pogues. “It’s written in a fun way, very simple, like a pub piece,” he adds.

No such frivolity when Volkov returns to the SSO again on 30 and 31 May, to celebrate the almost century-old didactic exploits of the awesome holy trinity of the Second Viennese School, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. Concentrating the event into two days, he says, is the ideal way to help people “get into it”.

“People mostly know this music from recordings, but you can’t hear it properly that way. You have to hear it in concert, where the subtleties come alive,” he argues. Does he have a favourite among this iconic threesome? “I lean towards Webern, whose music is an amazing distillation of musical thought. Berg tends to be viewed as the one who continued the German Mahler tradition, whereas Schoenberg, with his drier style, is seen as the mastermind.”

“Yet they could work so well together, a bit like Cage and his followers,” Volkov adds. Next month’s mini-fest will include Schoenberg’s late Violin Concerto (with soloist Ilya Gringolts), Berg’s seminal Chamber Concerto, and Webern’s 6 pieces for large orchestra as well as his crystalline orchestration of Schubert’s Six German Dances. It will also feature the Hebrides Ensembles’ tried and tested interpretation of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire in the Old Fruitmarket.

Mention of Cage is symptomatic of Volkov’s fondness for alternative formats of musical presentation, a line he will follow in the massive three-hour centenary Cage programme he has constructed for this year’s London Proms, but which will be part-previewed on 28 July in Glasgow’s Merchant City Festival.

“From the 1950s till his death, Cage sought to distance himself from exerting control over performances of his music,” Volkov explains. “And that often meant doing without a conductor in some orchestral pieces. There are times in this programme when I will have little to do – the time bracket piece 101, for instance – where I simply operate a timer.”

The programme, which centres round a rare performance of the Concerto for Prepared Piano, is a mind-blowing diversion from the norm with Volkov giving his own solo rendition of Child of Tree on amplified cactus plant, which is impregnated with electrodes and strummed like a mutant harp.

Finally, Volkov returns in May next year for his Tectonic Festival, which will move around all the City Halls venues and include new co-commissions with Iceland from Scots-based composers John de Simone, David Fennessy and Glasgow-born Colin Suckling.

Out of the ordinary in every sense.

• Ilan Volkov and the BBC SSO present the music of Richard Ayres at the RCS’s Plug Festival, Saturday 28 April (0141-332 5057). Further information on Volkov and his projects on www.bbc/co.uk/orchestras/bbcsso