Empire Theatre, Eden Court, Inverness, 30 March 2012

A LITRE of fuel to a Cornish pasty says that most of the audience for Friday’s BBC SSO concert had never heard three of the four items on the programme before.

TAKE into account the facts that the soloist for the familiar piece was injured, calling on the services of a replacement, and that the conductor was making his BBC SSO debut all meant that the Empire Theatre audience was in for an evening of discovery.

Dutch master Pieter Wispelwey was a stellar substitute for the injured Gemma Rosefield (photo Benjamin Ealanova)

Perhaps the powers that be wanted to make the audience feel at home by opening the concert with a work by a Scottish composer before heading off to pre- and post- revolutionary Russia. William Wallace grew up in Greenock and practised as an ophthalmologist before turning to writing about music theory and trying his hand at composition.

Conductor Stefan Blunier, Music Director to the City of Bonn, caught the theatrical atmosphere of Wallace’s first symphonic poem The Passing of Beatrice, which showed more than a passing resemblance to Franz Liszt with copious lush romantic sounds and many periods while the whole orchestra was playing forte or even fortissimo. Wallace himself acknowledged the influence of Liszt when he introduced his score as describing when Dante and Beatrice are taken up from Purgatory to Empyrean as the whole of Paradise is opened before them.

The audience was in familiar territory for the piece in the concerto slot – Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme. The original soloist, Fournier Award Winner and rising star Gemma Rosefield had slipped on ice some weeks ago and injured her arm and shoulder. We wish her well and a speedy recovery. However, as a replacement they don’t come much better that the Dutch cellist Pieter Wispelwey, widely regarded as one of the top artists in his genre in the world.

From the moment that his bow touched the gut strings on his 1760 Guadagnini cello, for nearly twenty minutes pure beautiful sounds swelled out into the audience. This was no exercise of power, but rather a considered, individual, lilting reading that captured the poetic nature of Tchaikovsky’s music. As a well deserved encore, Wispelwey gave the audience a movement from one of the Bach Cello Suites. There are forty-eight movements to choose from, and it could have been the Prelude to Suite No 3, but then again, it might have been one of the Sarabandes.

After the interval the concert reverted to the less-known compositions with Anatol Lyadov’s Eight Russian Folk Songs, each individual and illustrative of the Russian character, whether rustic or jaunty or melancholic. The work had the feel of being a sketch for a tribute to Pictures from an Exhibition, but without the connecting ‘Promenade’. There were moments of country dance with shimmering flutes, elements of birdsong rising to a crescendo and an appealing pizzicato passage with piccolo and tambourine before the whole thing exploded into a merry tutti finale.

The concert came to a conclusion with the Symphony No 1 in F minor by Shostakovich, written when the composer was only nineteen. The programme notes state that the symphony remains one of the composer’s outstanding achievements and that its 1927 performance in Berlin established Shostakovich’s international reputation. That may be so. And certainly every instrument in the large orchestra had its part to play, but whether they were in harmony with the others was pure chance. I have no recollection of ever having heard this symphony before, and to be honest I will not be too concerned if I go to my grave without hearing it again. I dare say that it was played very well, but it is such a pity that an evening with three pieces each with a greater or lesser degree of charm should be brought to a close with half an hour of cacophony.

© James Munro, 2012

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