Star rating: ****
The ambitious alliterative cultural experiences in the west end's busiest venue multiply. A Concert, a Cocktail and a Canape began just a week after the start of the seventh season of A Play, a Pie and a Pint, with Grieg's Holberg Suite and the premiere of a new piece by Gordon Rigby, commissioned by the proprietor, Colin Beattie, and entitled Oran Mor.
With many familiar faces from the BBC SSO in its number, including section principals, the band, under the baton of Peter Cynfryn Jones, is very fine indeed - and Alasdair Gray's decor on the top-floor space provides a wonderful setting. More importantly, though, the acoustic of the room, which has been a problem at other events, seems to suit the orchestra well, particularly for the Grieg. If Rigby's composition occasionally overpowered it a little, the space may well not have to cope with such Big Music for the rest of the series, which runs on Mondays until November 19.
Oran Mor, the composition, turned out to be a very big piece indeed, with some testing string writing, bags of percussion and brass, and the solo contributions (on vocals, lowland and highland pipes) of Annie Grace, singing (in Gaelic) words specially written by Aonghas MacNeacail. If the work had opened Celtic Connections it would have been trailed as a major event - and we've heard inferior compositions in exactly that context. Opening with the cinematic sweep of Michael O'Suilleadhain, it developed to include many more dynamic surprises and much fuller scoring. It was exhilarating stuff indeed, its only arguable flaw being the inclusion of perhaps too many ideas. But this season has many more to offer (and one further premiere); no-one has yet run the "rush hour" concert idea with such style.
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