Conductor Carneiro has a ball telling of tragedy
Rsno/carneiro Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
Keith Bruce
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FOR a programme of substantially new music, the RSNO will be very pleased with the audience it drew to Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Saturday evening.
Some of that will be down to the orchestra itself, currently on top form across a wide range of repertoire, conducted here by Joanna Carneiro.
But many of the younger faces in the crowd had come to hear the freshest work in the programme, by Errollyn Wallen, the Belize-born composer who has made her home on Scotland’s north coast and has a teaching post at the Royal Conservatoire in
Glasgow. Her Violin Concerto, receiving its UK premiere a month after it was first played by the Calgary Philharmonic and co-commissioned by the RSNO, turned out to be very traditional in form, with three distinct movements and a very familiar balance between the soloist, Philippe Quint, and the orchestra.
Quint is by happy coincidence a teacher of the RSNO’S artist in residence next season, Randall Goosby, and his virtuosic technique was put to full use by Wallen in a work full of rhythmic challenges in which the violinist barely has moment’s pause.
The concerto was preceded by Esa-pekka Salonen’s Nyx, a Scottish premiere from a composer better known as a conductor. It was notable for its use of the horns, flutes and first clarinet Timothy Orpen, as well as the combination of Pippa Tunnell’s harp and Lynda Cochrane at the piano, all of whom would have further prominence in the work in the second half of the concert, Stravinsky’s Petrushka. Carneiro was clearly having a ball working with these musicians to tell the tragic story of the puppet, the Moor and the Ballerina.