Festival review: BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

A PICTURESQUE day in the country with Beethoven, and an awesome-bordering-on-treacherous mountain trek with Richard Strauss.

And all from a comfortable seat in the Usher Hall balcony, with Donald Runnicles and the BBC SSO doing all the hard work. What was there not to enjoy in a warm-up that was Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony?

Runnicles injected its imagery with keen colours and fresh scents, avoiding sentiment or indulgence. He let the music speak for itself, and drew moments of individual magic from his orchestra – excepting the uppermost violins, whose nagging imprecisions were at odds with Runnicles’s ultra-precise approach.

No worries in Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony, surely the absolute apotheosis of the Romantic tone poem, given its mesmerising harmonic excesses, sheer size (20 horns, on and off-stage, Wagner tubas and organ), and emotional punch.

This was familiar terrain for Runnicles, who paced its twists and turns to perfection, combining Strauss’s ingestions of Mahler and Wagner into a performance so consuming and invigorating, it transported us to the mountaintops from our cosy seats. Armchair bliss.

Rating: ****