On Thursday 22 October [at 7.30 pm] Sir Mark Elder joins the BBC Scottish Symphony in the orchestra’s autumn broadcast and streaming series at Glasgow City Halls. The performance marks Sir Mark Elder’s return to BBCSSO for the first time in 25 years and it will be broadcast live on the orchestra’s YouTube channel and recorded for later broadcast on Radio 3.
The concert programme features Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No.1 in F major, BWV 1046, Stravinsky’s Danses concertantes and Schreker’s Chamber Symphony. ‘The Schreker is a favourite piece of mine and a masterpiece,’ comments Sir Mark Elder. ‘It’s very haunting, passionate music, and it is in fact an epilogue to his opera Die Gezeichtenen. Schreker was very successful in Germany in the 1920s, and the idiom is somewhere between late Richard Strauss – early Alban Berg’.
With the Hallé, Sir Mark Elder has just released a new recording [reviewed on this site] devoted to the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams on the orchestra’s own label, following on their critically acclaimed recordings of the composer’s symphonies. The disc features Job ‘A Masque for Dancing’, as well as Songs of Travel, based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s collection of poems of the same name and with bass-baritone Neal Davies as the soloist. ‘These two works come from different periods of Vaughan Williams’s life, but they both take us on heartfelt journeys,’ Sir Mark Elder explains. ‘His outstanding ballet Job is one of his greatest achievements. Many scenes are suffused with a radiant calm, against which the Devil’s electric outbursts prove fruitless.’