Music
BBC SSO
City Halls, Glasgow
Michael Tumelty
Three Stars
HONESTY time, folks. Did anyone in the City Hall on Thursday “get” the performance of Charles Koechlin’s Seven Stars Symphony, a series of portraits of seven Hollywood stars, including Douglas Fairbanks, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Charlie Chaplin? The programme note, unfortunately, was desperately scene-specific. Apart from Greta Garbo, represented by the curvaceous allure of the sensual tones from the ondes martenot, I didn’t have a clue where I was at any stage of the rambling, poorly-structured music, and after 32 years at this game, I kinda know my way round a piece of music.
As I hit the street, the usual suspects were waiting, including one lady who (fulminating) declared she knew every single scene in Chaplin’s The Circus and was waiting yet to hear the wee man characterised. She was not alone. Nobody had a clue where we were. One audience member dumped his programme with the words, “This is mince”. The playing, under Ilan Volkov, was fine, the music anodyne and featureless.
On a similar note, did anyone “get” Unsuk Chin’s Clarinet Concerto, despite the sensational playing of soloist Kari Kriikku? It just seemed to me a vague collection of atmospheric and virtuoso devices. I know Chin is a goddess of contemporary composition, but in the five days before this concert, I heard five tough contemporary works, from the SSO and an RCS ensemble, which had one thing in common: they all had a point and purpose. That’s what Chin’s amorphous concerto lacked. It was replete with atmospheres and thrilling soundscapes, but little sense of depth or direction. Best-defined element of the night was Volkov’s precision-tooled Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
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