Music review: RSNO & Thomas Søndergaard, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

The RSNO’s recently-appointed principal cello Pei-Jee Ng was a remarkably calm, precise soloist in Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No 1, writes Ken Walton

RSNO & Thomas Søndergaard, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall ****

It was seasonally heart-warming in this first RSNO December concert to savour the sounds of youngsters from Sistema Scotland’s Big Noise Govanhill. Side by side with RSNO mentors, they supported a gutsy choir in Penny Stone’s We Make A Big Noise, in an arrangement by Seonaid Aitken.

Inevitably, a mildly chaotic clearing of the decks ensued before the main orchestral programme could swing into action, which it did with the mighty wallop of Russian-born polymath Lera Auerbach’s Icarus.

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Swinging frenetically between seismic brutalism and ethereal bliss, its music – a sound world characterised at one extreme by murky string clusters, at the other by the wailing electronic purity of the theremin – comes from her First Symphony, in turn derived from her lengthy ballet The Little Mermaid. As conductor Thomas Søndergård demonstrated, however, it is gratifyingly complete in itself. In the final moments, a dissipating ascent into infinite space, time stood magically still.

No danger of that in Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No 1, featuring in the hot seat the RSNO’s recently-appointed principal cello Pei-Jee Ng. His was a remarkably calm delivery, a cool and calculated precision animated by biting bow action, that persisted from its exposed starter-gun opening, through the poised drama of the extended cadenza, to the cello’s bellicose tussle in the finale with such heavy artillery as the sharp-shooting timpani.

There were as many virtuoso orchestral moments, notably from guest principal horn Zoe Tweed. Søndergård steered a tight ship with enough latitude to capture the shifting moods, not least the ominous, spent rapture of the Moderato.

Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade was a triumph of musical story-telling, a panoply of exotically-coloured scenes, emotive narrative (enchanting solos from leader Maya Iwabuchi) and Søndergård’s all-consuming grasp of the big picture.