Music review: BBC SSO & Ryan Wigglesworth, City Halls, Glasgow

In a programme featuring both the intellectual precision of Bach and the compelling unpredictability of Stravinsky, the latter came out the clear winner, writes Ken Walton

BBC SSO, City Halls, Glasgow ****

It’s been a bumper time for interpretations of Stravinsky’s pulverising ballet score The Rite of Spring. The superlative French historical instrument band, Les Siècles, set the bar unbeatably high with an eye-opening performance at last year’s Edinburgh Festival. The RSNO followed that with their own coruscating season opener. On Thursday it was the BBC SSO’s turn, playing under its chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth and before its fullest audience this season.

It fell in with Wigglesworth’s current penchant for pitting Stravinsky’s compelling unpredictability against the focussed intellectual precision of Bach. This was the second such pairing this season. In this case Stravinsky came out the clear winner, both in the brutal early 20th century modernism of The Rite, and the spine-tingling fusion of serialism that fills his 1950s ballet score Agon with electrifying excitability.

Ryan Wigglesworth with the BBC SSO

The SSO were on fire for the latter, treating Stravinsky’s restive, incendiary textures like randomly scattered firecrackers. Wigglesworth married the astringent madness of this music with the dance forms they represent, that synthesis being the magic that brought order out of apparent chaos.

The challenge of The Rite of Spring is not dissimilar: finding a way to release expressive nuance and colour from the confinement of its pounding framework. There was solidity and bags of intelligent thought in Wigglesworth’s vision, imbuing it with inexorable rhythmic thrill, from which dazzling extremes of savagery and mystical tenderness variously emerged. One or two endings veered towards the raucous, but overall this was utterly compulsive listening.

Wigglesworth took to the piano for the concert opener and an old-fashioned, soft-focus performance of Bach's Keyboard Concerto in E. Despite its poeticism and whispered exquisiteness it all seemed from a faded era: slowish, sentimental and a mode of Baroque performance you might expect nowadays only from the likes of André Rieu.