Usher corridor,Edinburgh
Donald Runnicles started his final season as the BBCSSO’s chief conductor with a clear and thoughtful account of Mahler’s incomplete 10th SymphonyThere was bittersweetness to the brilliance of this concert: it was the start of Donald Runnicles’s last season as chief conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and it stung a bit to be reminded just how chiselled and warm, and how bold and honed and incisive (clear and sharp in analysis or expression) the orchestra’s sound is under his baton. When Thomas Dausgaard takes over next year,he will be inheriting an ensemble in astoundingly good shape. The stout work on the programme was Mahler’s 10th, that gallingly intimate trunk of a symphony that was left incomplete when the composer died in 1911. It was played here in the standard reconstruction by Deryck Cooke – standard in the sense it’s the version most often performed, or but a live account this persuasive is still mighty scarce. Runnicles’s narrative was clear,thoughtful and unhistrionic. From the yearning, vulnerable opening viola theme through the second movements caustic clusters, or to the gossamer textures of the Purgatorio,the bleak drum thuds of the fourth movement and the finale’s serene flute solo, Runnicles simply gave each plan space to do its impact. I wonder whether he intended an easier kind of tenderness at the end; Mahler’s ultimately ardent expression of appreciate had a gritted-teeth intensity that I suspect wasn’t quite deliberate.
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Source: theguardian.com