Music

RSNO, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Five Stars

IT’S not necessary to scale the ramparts and shout about the RSNO’s principal guest conductor, Thomas Sondergard. His work, and the RSNO’s exceptional performance and delivery of that work, speak pellucidly for themselves. He is simply one of the best conductors in the orchestra’s armoury. From Britten to Messiaen and Beethoven he has produced the goods, time and again. He’s a conductor you would trust with anything, and for whom, I believe, the orchestra could excel on every occasion in ensemble and authority. Honestly, how many conductors are there of whom you could say that? Sondergard is a man who knows what he’s doing and how to do it, and in whom the band clearly believes. He’s an intelligent, insightful director who knows how to communicate what he wants from an orchestra, and, moreover, how to stimulate in musicians sufficient confidence that they will know how to give it right back to him.

And that paid dividends right across the board on Saturday in a programme consisting exclusively of four symphonies, with two very different ones each by Schubert and Stravinsky. Sondergard was bang on the nail in Schubert’s Third Symphony, with its delicious classical wit and brio, and dead centre again with the relative darkness and drama of the same composer’s Fourth. The Danish musician then caught exactly the wit and precision of Stravinsky’s Symphony in C, before blowing the whole programme out of the water with a convulsive, explosive Symphony in Three Movements; worth a thousand words. Even better, go and hear him yourselves this week when he couples Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin and the Rite of Spring: safety belts mandatory.