A bold concert with a mighty juggernaut

The Herald Scotland

08-06-2025

Keith Bruce
five stars
THE RSNO's Music Director Thomas Sondergard has form with Shostakovich, and especially the mighty juggernaut that is the composer's Symphony No 11, 'The Year 1905'. It was the work he conducted as a late replacement for Alexander Lazarev in 2009, beginning his relationship with the orchestra, and the one with which he made a significant impression on metropolitan critics conducting the BBC National Orchestra of Wales at the London Proms.
This concert boldly placed the work at the end of an all-Shostakovich programme that began with the exuberant Festive Overture of a few years previously, and featured the much chewier Cello Concerto No 2 of a decade later, with Daniel Muller-Schott the guest soloist.
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The RSNO was rewarded with a very well-filled auditorium for its season-closer, a result few might have predicted and which should give the management food for thought. Especially gratifying must surely have been the rapt concentration given to the concerto, composed for Rostropovich and much thornier than his first concerto for his illustrious countryman.
Muller-Schott brought the required powerful intensity to the work, his solo introductions to the movements absolutely compelling. It is a huge work for the cellist, but the details of his exchanges with the orchestra were just as memorable. The RSNO's horns and the percussion team were superb, and the classic combination of harp and flute later provided a moment of calm reassurance in an anxious piece.
Muller-Schott added a palate-cleansing encore of Bach to send the audience into the interval, but echoes of the opening of the concerto with the start of the symphony were still apparent after it. The RSNO strings on the platform were a mixture of well-known, recently returned and new faces but the sound was richly familiar and focused. The dynamic flexibility of the modern RSNO is not all of Sondergard's making, but he drives this orchestra with great skill and not a detail of the composer's score, in all its programmatic ambiguity, was left on the page.
If the opening overture's boisterous celebration of the October Revolution sounds uncharacteristically straightforward, everything that followed was less concerned with decoding the composer's vexed relationship with the Russian authorities than with making the best possible case for his music. As Lazarev has said, and Sondergard would surely agree, that is exactly as it should be.