Ray Chen's Sibelius takes flight with the RSNO

This concert was memorable for lots of reasons, the least happy of them being that it never got to its end. The Usher Hall fire alarm went off during the finale of Dvořák’s Sixth Symphony so the concert was suspended. I'm told that it restarted later and that the symphony was successfully completed. However, the hiatus was lengthy and I wasn't able to stay to hear it. It therefore seems unfair to give the concert a star rating as it wasn’t the finished article (for me, at any rate), which is a particular pity because the Royal Scottish National Orchestra were playing the symphony so well. Thomas Søndergård shaped the opening movement with a gorgeous sense of heft, with the main theme slowly and beautifully filling out but always moving forwards purposefully. The sweet, sunlit slow movement benefited from drop-dead-gorgeous string tone, and a lucidly played Trio sat in the middle of a storming Furiant until the sudden interruption broke its flow.

It also detracted slightly from the memory of Lotta Wennäkoski’s Om fotspår och ljus (Of Footprints and Light). It was inspired by a scene from an opera about the life of the Buddha, but it feels very much as though it’s refracted through a Nordic lens (think Asia meets the tundra) with its forbidding, chilly opening full of bowed percussion and spiralling flutes trapped in a cycle of repetition. The atmosphere is full of secrecy and suggestion, but it also contains half-remembered fragments of melody that seem to struggle out of the darkness, giving the piece an overall sense of mystery that’s never less than compelling.  

And the star of the show who smiled out of every publicity shot? Well, it’s not every week that the RSNO shares the stage with a social media sensation. Even Ray Chen’s programme biography describes him as a “violinist and online personality”, though I guess we should be grateful that they put the descriptors in that order. His persona is so carefully crafted that it informs every element of his stage presence, and you can tell from the moment he appears that he’s a polished product: even the way he faces the audience or takes a stance is carefully calibrated.

That doesn’t mean he’s superficial, though, and his playing of Sibelius’ Violin Concerto in D minor was pretty terrific, at least in the first movement. The opening solo was a gorgeous stream of legato, but it also featured light and shade aplenty, not just relentless full-beam. The melody had a sense of give-and-take as it unfolded organically, and even the virtuoso passagework sounded carefully gradated. Nor did Chen use the cadenza as an opportunity for mere showmanship: instead it surged and flowed but was balanced with restraint and beauty. The orchestra produced a big-boned sound to match him, alive to all the details in the music, particularly in the first movement’s urgent recapitulation, and the opening of the Adagio was detailed and refined.

But Chen lavished so much vibrato on the solo line that its emotional heft seemed out of step with the orchestral delicacy, tipping the balance a little too much in the violin’s favour. He was at his most ostentatious here, a touch of look-at-me taking over, and there was a furious edge to the main theme of the finale, matched by an element of orchestral harrumphing. Perhaps there was a little touch of plate-spinning as this movement developed; less control and more busyness. However, the adoring crowd lapped it up, and Chen was pleasingly modest in receiving the applause. His encore of Paganini’s Caprice no. 21 in A major was pretty marvellous, too. I’ll remember that long after I’ve forgotten about the fire alarm.