Music review: The RSNO - Planets, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Playing on the success of its now regular film music concerts, the RSNO mustered an enthusiastic full house for The Planets: An HD Odyssey – a programme of popular works associated with fantasy and outer space, in particular a complete performance of Holst’s The Planets brought visually to life by choreographed NASA images and footage on giant screen.

The RSNO - Planets, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall ***

In his RSNO debut, conductor Ben Palmer proved an efficient pair of hands. That was both a virtue and a constraint. In this quick-fire sequence of mostly virtuosic openers, he elicited the directness of attack needed to give explosive impact to the short sunburst that opens Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, sufficient motorised energy to drive John Adams’ hair-raising Short Ride on a Fast Machine, and all the full-on indulgence required for John Williams’s Holst-inspired Main Title from Star Wars.

In that first half, too, were Stokowski’s thick-set arrangement of Bach’s organ Toccata and Fugue in D minor (famous from Disney’s Fantasia) and the Allegretto from Beethoven’s Symphony No 7 (X-Men: Apocalypse). Palmer’s four-square interpretation of the former was over-conducted, which robbed its obvious rhetorical moments of their lifeblood. Indeed, safety first informed the majority of these performances.

That was understandable in the evening’s “title track”, where Palmer had to match Holst’s planetary fantasy to film director Duncan Copp’s balletic collage. Both sound and visuals were neatly coordinated, but as a consequence the orchestral performance seemed tight, occasionally edgy. There were, though, some inspired solo moments from within the ranks. - Ken Walton