Varèse
Density 21.5
Bartók
Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
Rachmaninov
Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Op. 44
Matthew Higham (flute)
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Ryan Wigglesworth
Reviewed by: David Gutman
Reviewed: 8 September, 2026
Venue: Royal Albert Hall, London
This was a modest, even self-effacing event with which to celebrate the orchestra’s 90th birthday but room had to be found for the pop proffered later in the evening. Quite apart from the absence of a big-name special guest, the early start capped audience numbers; latecomers were admitted – noisily – after the second movement of the Bartók.
The year 1936 was the theme here, with music dating from that fateful year showing how three very different musicians adapted to their changing circumstances. Perhaps mindful of the 15 minutes of platform reorganisation that preceded Mark Wigglesworth’s conducting of Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta in 1991, Ryan Wigglesworth (no relation) began with his orchestra already seated in its required configuration. The curtain raiser was for solo flute. Standing, spotlit, above and behind the orchestra between the organ console and the bust of Sir Henry Wood, Matthew Higham played Varèse’s Density 21.5 with distinction, taking applause only after the Bartók which followed without a break. A naturalised US citizen who generally refused to soften his approach for American audiences, Varèse mixed the modal and the atonal in this composition, written at the request of Georges Barrère for the unveiling of the world’s first platinum flute (the density of platinum being close to 21.5 grams per cubic centimetre).
Bartók, still in Europe in 1936, was continuing his masterclass in balancing high-modernist abstraction with a rawer emotional energy indebted to Eastern European folk music. As Ryan Wigglesworth has repeatedly shown us – perhaps most notably in his piloting of the UK premiere of György Kurtág’s opera Fin de partie (Endgame) in 2023 – he has the ability to bring lucidity to intractable or inscrutable material. Passion may or may not be his thing. Here, Bartók’s opening fugue was deliberately subdued, entries snapping into focus once Wigglesworth picked up his baton to drive the argument forward. Thereafter everything worked without strain, yet the perspicacious moderation of the final Allegro molto will have disappointed those expecting to hear a post-Beethovenian narrative of oppression supplanted by freedom.
Rachmaninov’s Third Symphony finds the composer adopting other tropes of modernity in his embrace of the American experience, coarser allusions of the kind that Wigglesworth was never likely to play up. Lacking only the heft of a big-name ensemble, his interpretation proved classically balanced both in terms of moment-by-moment sonority (much beautiful playing) and the bigger structural picture (the first movement exposition repeat taken). 2025 found the same conductor and orchestra forced to interrupt a previous performance of the work when a mobile phone ringtone persisted beyond endurance. This time the threat came mostly from bouncing beakers and the impact of unidentified falling objects, some apparently massive. Yes, this was a fine performance of music long traduced and now finding its feet. Autumnal languor and cinematic excess were carefully controlled – and why not? We’ve come a long way since the fifth (1954) edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians and its notorious dismissal of a texturally ‘monotonous’ compositional output unlikely to last. No mention at all there of Rachmaninov’s final projects: the Third Symphony and the Symphonic Dances. Rachmaninov identified only three people who really liked his A minor Symphony: the aforementioned Henry Wood, the violinist Adolf Busch ‘and the third (forgive me!) is myself. When I run out of fingers on both hands, I shall give up counting. But when will that be?’ Victor Seroff, an early Rachmaninov biographer, considered the work both thoroughly Russian and thoroughly outdated. Also less than supportive was Nikolai Medtner, for whom abrupt transitions and fragmented discourse signalled rather submission to an alien modernity, the ‘fashion for fashion’. Missing for me on this occasion at least was the vehemence, the grit in the oyster. The final pages had neither the disciplined dash of John Wilson, nor the chaotic, unpredictable hysteria of Nikolai Golovanov. Does that matter? Perhaps not when Rachmaninov’s own tastes ran to the subtly balanced forms of Bauhaus architecture.