Music review: RSNO: Beethoven Revolution, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Concert-going is a slightly surreal experience just now. Rows of empty seats for an RSNO programme that should have drawn a large audience, and an RSNO Chorus that sounded more reduced than intended for Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, induced a church-like reverence that spoke of cautiousness and anxiety.

Thomas Sondergard

Music review: RSNO: Beethoven Revolution, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall ****



There was a change of programme, too. Composer/pianist Fazil Say, unable to travel to Scotland, was not only replaced as pianist in Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto by former Leeds Piano Competition winner Sunwook Kim, but his own orchestral opener, Grand Bazaar, had to be replaced by more Beethoven, rather aptly the turmoil and tragedy expressed in the Coriolan Overture. 


Yet the towering presence of Beethoven seemed in tune with our current predicament. Here was a figure, racked with multiple physical torment, prone to violent extremes of temperament, but somehow capable of rising above that with music of transcendent hope.


So there was something inexplicably profound in the defiant opening chords of Coriolan and in the pleading lyricism of its “Volumnia” theme, which conductor Thomas Søndergård gave time and space to in an acoustic paradoxically warmed by the lack of people.


The Stravinsky spoke potently too, only here as suppressed defiance, expressed in the emotional containment of the choral settings and the acid precision of the orchestration.
No holding back the heroic resilience of the Emperor Concerto, Kim’s pianism assertive and expansive with thought given to every note, Søndergård again using the acoustical bounce to maximise its unpredictable, yet unshakeable logic.