Music review: 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