Royal Scottish National Orchestra, RSNO Centre

Small-scale, consoling, with a touch of escapism – that’s been the tone of a number of online orchestral concerts I’ve heard lately. You can see why orchestras would want to strike that tone during a lockdown, when we could all do with some soothing.

Still, it was good to hear a big-boned ambitious concert from the RSNO which was consoling only in the sense that it was perfectly “normal”, i.e. a programme one might hear in normal times. It launched off with a recent piece by 60-something British composer Errollyn Wallen that was substantial rather than a mere curtain-raiser, which the contemporary piece in an orchestral programme so often is. Titled Mighty River, it’s a piece from 2007 honouring the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, and the composer’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, who was probably a slave herself. That might have inspired an angry or stubbornly defiant piece, but Wallen never responds to a challenge in the way you’d expect. Instead she seized on the image of a river, as irresistible in its striving to reach the sea as the human urge to find freedom.   

The opening was a surprise – the hymn Amazing Grace, intoned by a single horn. We heard much of that redemptive song, woven almost imperceptible with other scraps of hymns and spirituals into the music’s fabric. Around a steady, harmonically still rhythmic pulsation these tendrils of melody unfolded, like eddies in the water’s flow. Wallen very subtly evoked the sense of a river that is never in a hurry, in fact it often seemed to dawdle and digress on its course, but a sudden shift back to the opening harmony would restore a sense of purpose. As always, Wallen’s brilliantly clear orchestration and willingness to use simple, even naive, things was captivating. Did the river digress a bit too much? Possibly. But the piece was winning nonetheless.

After the uncomplicated brightness of Wallen’s piece the heavy romantic yearning of Wagner’s Wesendonck-Lieder came as a shock, but a pleasant one. The poems by Wagner’s one-time lover Mathilde Wesendonck are frankly poor stuff, full of conventional romantic yearning for night-time and oblivion. Conductor James Lowe chose to perform the songs in the prismatic, almost fractured orchestral arrangements by German modernist Hans Werner Henze. They certainly let some air into the songs’ foetid atmosphere, but were distractingly over-elaborate.

But it didn’t matter, because Scotland’s own tremendous Wagnerian mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill was on hand. She sustained Wagner’s enormously long lines with majestic gravity, her tone as strong as steel even when it faded to a near-whisper. Here as elsewhere, Lowe, standing in for Ryan Bancroft at very short notice, paced the music very intelligently, making it both flowing and spacious.

That quality was a boon in the final piece, Dvořák’s New World Symphony, where the long-winded tunes and repetitions can easily clog the music’s flow. Lowe kept tedium at bay so well with subtle dynamic and tempo inflections you could almost believe the symphony was a real masterpiece after all.

Click here to read on the Telegraph website