Clyne and Shostakovich

Usher Hall, 4/4/2025

 RSNO, Jess Gillam (Saxophone), Jonathon Heyward (Conductor)

 A pretty decent audience had turned up on a freezing cold April evening for a fascinating but not easy-listening concert, testament to the excellence of the RSNO marketing and the general excellence of the reputation of the present orchestra.

This was a welcome return for the young American conductor, Jonathon Heyward, who we saw previously, in 2022, conducting, at short notice, Beethoven’s 7th Symphony and Grieg’s Piano Concerto. Since then he has become Music Director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Artistic Director of the Festival Orchestra of the Lincoln Center in New York and is obviously ‘one to watch’!

The first piece on the programme was the Scottish premiere of Anna Clyne’s ‘Glasslands’, a concerto for soprano saxophone and orchestra, written for Jess Gillam, and premiered in Detroit in 2023. This is a stunning work, and it was given an overwhelming performance by the Cumbrian saxophonist, whose virtuosity on the instrument is matched by her amazing dress sense, playing today in a sparkly black trouser suit with blue spectacles!

Clyne has Irish roots and ‘Glasslands’ conjures an imaginary world of three realms governed by the Banshee, a spirit character from Irish folklore who heralds the death of a family member by shrieking piercingly into the night. The sound of the Banshee is given to the solo soprano saxophone, an instrument unfamiliar to me, but clearly capable of extraordinary range and textures. Lacking the upward bell of the standard saxophone, it looks more like a brass clarinet, but is amazingly adaptable throughout the range, which is over two and a half octaves with scope for higher notes using altissimo fingerings.

The Banshee’s wailings are heard from the very beginning, and it was immediately clear that Ms Gillam is in a class of her own as a saxophonist. Over the course of about 25 minutes, Anna Clyne explores almost every possible sound on the instrument, and the interaction of the soloist with the orchestra, particularly the woodwind, was spell-binding. It was wonderful to listen to a contemporary piece of music, full of new sounds and effects, but which was also utterly tonal, and rooted in the harmonies to which a classical audience is accustomed.

Throughout ‘Glasslands’, Jonathon Heyward was a most sympathetic accompanist, and it was clear that he had an excellent rapport with Ms Gillam, whose playing was utterly stunning, from passages of almost impossible sounding runs to long, beautiful cantabile lines, worthy of any soprano diva.

This was a fabulous performance, greeted with a loud roar of applause at the end, rewarded with a thoughtful encore by Duke Ellington.

After the interval, the mood changed, and we were privileged to experience live one of the great symphonies of the 20th Century, Dmitri Shostakovich’s 8th Symphony, composed in the depths of the Second World War, not long after the monumental Battle of Stalingrad in 1943. A lot has been written about Shostakovich, the War, his relationship with Stalin and his successors, his attitude to the Russian Revolution and its Soviet government, and whether his music is supportive or subversive. It’s true that he was twice denounced for his anti-state music and struggled to get recognition at various times. However, he was also a member of the Supreme Soviet and earned the Order of Lenin, and so, from my point of view, the endless questions about what his music was trying to say takes us into realms of speculation that are not really very interesting.

I have always tried to listen or sing Shostakovich as pure music, and I feel this has helped me get closer to his genius. I sang in one of the first performances in London of his original score of ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk’ in the 1980s, his early crazy opera ‘The Nose’, the bass part in his 14th Symphony, and several of his songs, notably the Burns poem translated into Russian, ‘Macpherson’s Farewell’, at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. All this is a roundabout way of introducing my reaction to the performance of the 8th Symphony in the Usher Hall on Friday.

Simply as pure music, this extraordinary score, unfolding over a period of just over an hour, has an immense dramatic and lyrical directness that penetrates to the core of one’s being. The long melancholy windings of the first movement seem to be searching for hope and peace in a landscape battered by war. Shostakovich had lived through the ghastly siege of Leningrad from 1941 on and had composed his defiant 7th Symphony under constant bombardment. My erstwhile mentor, Galina Vishnevskaya, the great Russian soprano, also lived through the siege, and it’s worth finding a copy of her astonishing memoirs to get just a glimpse of the horrors of that time.

By the time Shostakovich wrote the 8th Symphony, the tide of the war had turned with the defeat of Hitler’s Nazi army at Stalingrad in February 1943, a defeat which cost both sides between one and three million combatants!

The second and third movements of the symphony are perhaps the most devastating memorials in music to the terrible war machines which pounded each other for months over the freezing Russian winter. The RSNO, urged on to monumental surges of sound by the hugely talented Jonathon Heyward, was overwhelming in its portrayal in music of the ghastliness of modern warfare, at times threatening to blow the roof off the Usher Hall. The Largo of the fourth movement allowed us to react in a state of almost numb intensity to what had gone before, and the change to a major key in the last movement, despite rumblings of conflict and strife, eventually settled into a mood of hopeful calm.

There were many outstanding contributions from all the principal players: plangent cor anglais from  Rosie Stanforth, fluttering flute from Katherine Bryan, fine bassoon playing from David Hubbard, beautiful solo horn from guest principal, Alexei Watkins and, in the manic third movement, absolutely stunning and thrilling timpani work by Paul Philbert.

Everything was held together by the magisterial conducting of Jonathon Heyward, who gave a superb reading of a very difficult score, again receiving great acclaim at the end.

A wonderful concert!