BBC SSO 90th Anniversary Concert, Glasgow review: 'profound insights'
This was a concert of of seriousness and vision, but - for a birthday party - perhaps a little light on celebration, writes David Kettle
BBC SSO 90th Anniversary Concert, City Halls, Glasgow ★★★★
For a birthday bash, the BBC SSO’s 90th anniversary concert had a deep, thick thread of seriousness running right through it, most evidently in Tippett’s concluding oratorio A Child of Our Time, a howl of grief and a prayer for hope born out of the turmoil and despair of World War Two, but powerfully relevant to our own increasingly fractured times too.
It was quite a statement for such a historic occasion – no doubt an intentional one – and conductor Ryan Wigglesworth ensured a clear-headed, expertly paced survey of Tippett’s sombre creation. It was an account that throbbed with barely suppressed emotion that erupted in the spirituals the composer dotted throughout the work, which still deliver a powerful gut punch more than 80 years after its creation.
Wigglesworth had a fine quartet of vocal soloists: Ashley Riches made a particularly stentorian narrator, while Pumeza Matshikiza’s honeyed soprano brought richness to her grieving mother’s contributions. Stars of the performance, however, were the young singers of the National Youth Choir of Scotland, who brought power, precision and enormous conviction to Tippett’s complex choral writing, sometimes granitic and declamatory, sometimes intricate.
There was quite a lot of seriousness, too, in pianist Stephen Hough’s quietly revelatory account of Grieg’s evergreen Piano Concerto. He took it at quite a leisurely pace, but stripped back its accumulated layers of virtuoso flamboyance to rediscover the raw, authentic emotions underneath. The piece can rarely have sounded quite so fresh and new. Chopin’s E flat Nocturne made for a similarly unfussy, elegantly dispatched encore.
That left the concert’s opener to supply the requisite birthday sparkle, and Ayanna Witter-Johnson’s Bacchanale – getting its world-premiere performance – glittered with scintillating colours and bristled with vibrant rhythm, but it always seemed about to break into a big tune that never quite arrived. It was a concert of vision and profound insight, then, but perhaps one a little light on celebration.
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