BBC SSO & Sir James MacMillan, Glasgow review: 'tough, rugged music'

There was probably something in the water, quipped Sir James MacMillan. He was referring to the six Ayrshire composers – okay, five from Ayrshire and one from Yorkshire – that he’d supported and championed in his own Cumnock Tryst festival, and whose music he’d chosen to complement the Scottish premiere of his own recent Concerto for Orchestra (‘Ghosts’). MacMillan himself directed the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra with unwavering power and precision, in performances that were by turns fragile, ethereal, gutsy and blistering with energy.

It was a generous, forward-thinking idea to shine a light on new (mostly) Scottish musical talent in this way. But it also made for an inevitably bitty, sampler-like evening of wildly contrasting tastes and flavours, from the post-modern tapestry of faltering quotations in Matthew Grouse’s Solos and Tuttis to Michael Murray’s very Ayrshire-themed Visions of the A-Frame, whose slowly shifting clouds of sound had single-minded purpose and no lack of sonic subtlety.

Jay Capperauld’s Inertia of a Bona Fide Psychopath collided together disparate ideas in a witty, perceptive study of awkwardness that was – well, often quite (intentionally) uncomfortable, while Scott Lygate was a lithe and charismatic contrabass clarinet soloist in his own Engines and Men, even if his rich scoring – including the authentically clanking sounds of Dalmellington Ironworks – sometimes left him struggling to be heard. Most impressive were pairs of miniatures by Electra Perivolaris and Gillian Walker, both quiet and focused, deeply lyrical, emotionally resonant, and with exquisitely fresh perspectives on orchestral colour.

There were plenty of unusual hues, too, in the eclectic duos and trios of MacMillan’s own Concerto for Orchestra (‘Ghosts’), which indeed seemed haunted by other musics – Beethoven and Debussy, as well as klezmer, Scottish reels and even a nifty bit of EDM. It was a striking, immediate piece, one that took several unexpected turns in its otherwise organic unfolding, and it drew a fiercely vivid account from MacMillan and the BBCSSO players. Beforehand MacMillan had received the Royal Philharmonic Society’s prestigious honorary membership – an accolade more than warranted by this tough, rugged music.

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