Music

Rufus Wainwright/BBC SSO

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Keith Bruce

four stars

HALF a century ago, collaborations with orchestras by The Nice and Caravan were progressive. More recently pop and rock has wrapped itself in lavish orchestrations in a more conservative way, to reboot back catalogue.

On the surface, Rufus Wainwright’s revisiting of the 20-year-old albums Want One and Want Two as “Want Symphonic” looks like that, but the classical ingredients of Wainwright’s music have always been there, as much a part of musical persona as his love of Broadway and acknowledged debt to his song-writing parents, Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III.

With the composition of two operas to his credit, a musical, directed by Ivo van Hove and starring Sheridan Smith, previewing on the West End, and a Requiem Mass premiering in Paris in June, this concert reprised back-to-back BBC Prom concerts at the Royal Albert Hall last September.

If he played the two albums from soup-to-nuts then, that is not what happened at Want Symphonic’s Scottish premiere, which jumped between their track-listings and visited other recordings.

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Far from seeming a grandiose exercise, Wainwright seemed to regard his return to singing and playing piano and guitar as light relief from the arduous task of bringing the musical, Opening Night, to its opening night, and conductor Lee Mills and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra brought a similarly light touch to the performance.

Which is not to say that the arrangements were in any way perfunctory. From the opening overture to the Ravel’s Bolero-sampling Oh What a World, which begins Want One but ended the show here, the musicians were always given interesting music to play, including unusual sonic effects from the front desk of the violins, fine solos from the winds and some marvellous big band and oompah brass.

The way the orchestral percussion and timpani combined with Wainwright’s kit-drum associate Matt Johnson was unusually effective, but also presumably part of the reason why everything onstage was amplified, sometimes rather more than might have been desirable.

The full-on sound was often impressive, though, just as much as the gentler highlights of Wainwright’s tribute to Jeff Buckley, Memphis Skyline, and the minimalist solo triumph of The Art Teacher, which is Wainwright at his wry best.