Music review: RSNO All-Star Gala, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

There was undoubtable glitz in having Beethoven’s awkward child, his truculent Triple Concerto, bring together Nicola Benedetti, Benjamin Grosvenor and Sheku Kanneh-Mason as front line crowd-pullers in this All-Star Gala by the RSNO. But an opening set from the wonderfully alert RSNO Youth Chorus was as classy as anything the grown-ups gave the evening’s capacity audience.

Inspired programming also saw each of the three big names perform successively with the choir. Grosvenor’s rapid-fire pianism animated Errollyn Wallen’s Inherit The World, a short and stimulating protest work originally premiered at COP26. Its powerful message struck a potent chord, the words as clear as day, the music impactful under chorus director Patrick Barrett.

Next up: Kanneh-Mason in Russell Hepplewhite’s The Death of Robin Hood, a curiously fanciful musing on the outlaw’s final moments, again thrillingly sung and with an inevitable twang on the cello string as parting shot. Its Motion Keeps by American composer Caroline Shaw completed the choral trilogy, this time Benedetti adorning Shaw’s Brittenesque shape-note hymn setting with tip-toeing pizzicato and extravagant arpeggiations, akin to the harp in Britten’s A Ceremony Of Carols.

For the Beethoven, the all-star threesome came into their own, economic on ego, bursting with synergy in thought and direction that allowed the music to follow its natural course. Of course, moments of individual spotlighting mattered, not least in the burlesque-like rivalry of the final Rondo. Grosvenor’s incisive touch was a particular, purposeful joy. They encored with Fritz Kreisler’s swooning arrangement of Danny Boy.

The orchestra under Thomas Søndergård closed a lengthy, satisfying evening with Brahms’ First Symphony and a performance that achieved the perfect Brahmsian balance, leisurely lyrical sweeps and dense harmonies freshened by crisp, invigorating detail.