RSNO & Felix Klieser, Edinburgh review: 'sonic majesty'

RSNO & Felix Klieser, Usher Hall, Edinburgh ★★★★

With Bruckner’s colossal, monumental Eighth Symphony threatening to overwhelm the RSNO’s concert with its vast, architectural austerity, there was a danger that such trivial matters as humanity might not get much of a look-in. And in many ways, RSNO Music Director Thomas Søndergård took pains to observe the Symphony’s inexorable build-ups, its expansive repetitions and its carefully assembled megaliths of musical material with due reverence and awe, in a measured, often stately account that drew impeccable sonic richness from a massively expanded RSNO (even if more than a few players looked somewhat disengaged from the whole experience).

Søndergård built up seemingly unstoppable momentum in the second movement scherzo that drove the music forward as if by energy alone, and his fiery finale, full of clipped rhythms and snarling Wagner tubas, proved a resplendent summation of the 90 minutes of music that had gone before it. And while there was certainly the sense of Søndergård gazing beyond the orchestra (sometimes literally) into the vast expanses of sonic majesty that Bruckner summons, it was still a performance whose feet stood firmly in the human world, and he drew particular attention to the composer’s rare moments of quiet, fragility and tenderness.

READ MORE: Raye, Glasgow review: 'huge emotional power'

Far more human, however, was the concert’s understandably brief first half. Søndergård zipped through a spiky, nervy, edge-of-your-seat Mozart Marriage of Figaro Overture with a slimmed down, age-appropriate orchestra, before German horn player Felix Klieser delivered a warm, velvety, immaculately rich account of Strauss’s First Horn Concerto.

Born without arms, Klieser operates the valves of his instrument – secured on a tripod in front of him – with the toes of his left foot. And he offered a beautifully burnished account, one that shaped Strauss’s arching lines immaculately and found a remarkably eloquent range of colours too. It might have been all but overshadowed by Bruckner’s towering sonic architecture, but it was the beating heart of the concert.

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