Music review: BBC SSO & Antony Hermus, City Halls, Glasgow

“THIS concert is a bit bananas,” observed BBC SSO violinist Alex Gascoine in his pre-concert interview with conductor Antony Hermus. A blunt assessment, perhaps, but – well, as an orchestra insider, Gascoine would probably know. Most definitely bananas – intentionally so – were the coloratura soprano arias swiped from Ligeti’s opera Le grand macabre and repackaged as Mysteries of the Macabre, a thoroughly entertaining if entirely mystifying (yes, intentionally so) stream of gibberish given a flouncing, startlingly incisive performance by Sara Hershkowitz, brandishing a bucket of KFC and a litre bottle of Irn-Bru. Even more bananas was the decision to preface it with Haydn’s sober Philosopher Symphony, which Hermus delivered with wonderful precision and stylish restraint.
Conducator Antony HermusConducator Antony Hermus
Conducator Antony Hermus

BBC SSO & Antony Hermus, City Halls, Glasgow ****

Winning the prize for bananas, however, was Dutch composer and arranger Henk de Vlieger, for his attempt to condense Wagner’s 16-hour Ring cycle into an hour-long, orchestra-only “adventure” which formed the concert’s second half. There were no doubt good intentions behind the 1991 endeavour, but the result is simply bizarre – opera without voices, bleeding chunks sewn together (usually very smoothly, it should be said), and a whistle-stop rattle through the tetralogy’s first three operas only to spend the final half-hour immersed in Götterdämmerung. The gargantuan BBC SSO assembled for the occasion played its heart out, despite Hermus’s rather workaday direction, which struggled to conjure atmosphere when required, and felt a bit foursquare when it might have been yielding and expressive. It was as if Hermus had decided to play it straight, when it all needed to be a bit more – you guessed it, bananas.

DAVID KETTLE

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