Music review: BBC SSO & Ryan Wigglesworth, City Halls, Glasgow

The SSO’s performance of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony may not have clicked, but it was preceded by a memorable rendition of a new piece by the orchestra’s principal conductor, writes Ken Walton

BBC SSO & Ryan Wigglesworth, City Halls, Glasgow ****

It was, literally, an heroic start to the new BBC SSO season. Not in the familiar sense of, say, an Eroica Symphony, or any of musical history’s many torrid Byronic depictions, but the simply-named Heroic Overture by an obscure female compatriot of the Second Viennese School, Johanna Müller-Hermann.

​She would have struck gold in early Hollywood. For embedded in this steamy, restless concert piece is a fiery and impatient soul, an idiom just inches short of the esoteric modernism of the Schoenberg set, commensurate with Korngold’s silver screen style, a follow-on from Wagner and Richard Strauss taunting us with swathes of decadently disfigured schmalz. SSO principal conductor Ryan Wigglesworth let its personality gush: explosive, colourful, voluptuous, unashamedly hyper.

Ryan Wigglesworth

Then came a Piano Concerto that revealed another unsung hero: Wigglesworth the composer. Steven Osborne took the solo role in this strikingly imaginative pre-pandemic work, its journey initiated by delicate titbits that transfer immediately from ricocheting woodwind to filigree piano before exploring deeper, more agitated landscapes.

The clarity of the writing was particularly alluring in the mercurial sparkle of the Scherzo and disquieting spectral treatment of the Notturna’s central Polish folk tune. It was a potent factor in tempering heightened outbursts reminiscent of Bartok. Osborne’s pianism was exquisite right up to the work’s questioning conclusion.

In its memorable wake, Wigglesworth’s Mahler Four struggled to assert itself, its flow stilted by unconvincing tempi, even soprano Sally Matthews seeming ill-at-ease in the gorgeous finale. It simply didn’t click.