Outside the Proms, British orchestras from beyond the M25 get far too few opportunities to showcase their achievements in the capital’s concert halls. It’s not surprising, then, that those bands often have points to prove when they do make their annual visits to the Albert Hall, and the three that have appeared there during the first week of this summer’s Proms have all shown what London is missing the other 10 months of the year.
After the fine concerts from the Hallé and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the third to acquit itself so well was the BBC Scottish Symphony, under its chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth. The range and originality of the concerts that Wigglesworth has come up with during his first two seasons in Glasgow have quite often put the BBCSSO’s London sibling to shame, and while this programme of Brahms, Schoenberg and Mahler was very much a mainstream affair, the way in which it was put together and the musical connections it suggested were never commonplace.
Wigglesworth began with Brahms, a slow-burn performance of the Third Symphony that almost seemed too relaxed in its opening movement, and reserved its dramatic intensity for the finale. The movement’s quiet, perfectly tuned coda was marked out by the beauty of the wind playing, with the horns particularly outstanding as they had been throughout the symphony.
Whether or not Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht is really suited to a space like the RAH, even in its string-orchestra version (when it seems a very different work from the string-sextet original), is debatable. Those listening to the concert on Radio 3 may have got a better sense of the careful way in which Wigglesworth was managing and terracing the string textures than we sometimes did in the hall, but the quality of that string playing was never in doubt. There were moments in Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder too when the size of the space robbed the searing music of some of its impact, and perhaps blurred some of the finer-grained detail of mezzo Alice Coote’s singing. But her projection of the meaning of each word, combined with Wigglesworth’s meticulous shaping of every orchestral phrase, always provided plenty of compensation.
• Available on BBC Sounds. The BBC Proms continue until 14 September.
