Music review: BBC SSO at City Hall, Glasgow

Michael Tumelty, Hearld Scotland, 24th April 2016

★★★★★

“NO holds barred here, ladies and gentlemen. Five stars all round. The BBC SSO on Thursday night, playing as though there was no tomorrow, and this was their only chance to do it, produced a scorcher of a concert with conductor Michael Francis, a new name to me, but clearly a young man with his eye on the ball and his ear and mind on the score…”

“The start and end of the concert were both magical, with the four flutes for Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question positioned in the choir seats, Hedley Benson’s profoundly evocative trumpet solo up aloft, out of my sight, and the softest bed of string sound imaginable providing an onstage, gentle halo of chordal warmth; and then, at the other end of the night, the SSO laid on a red meat course with a gorgeously-juicy, on-the-bone account of Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances.”