Runnicles does it again

The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s Sunday afternoon concerts in Edinburgh are gaining the status of Festival events. To celebrate the 60th birthday of its principal  conductor, the Edinburgh-born Donald Runnicles, this week, the players were  teamed with the Festival Chorus for what was clearly a very special performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

The Usher Hall was packed. Runnicles made an introductory address from the podium telling the audience that as an adolescent he sang in the chorus’s debut performance of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony in 1965 with Alexander Gibson  as conductor.

Since then he has held major appointments in Berlin and San Francisco and has given riveting performances of Britten’s Peter Grimes at the New York Metropolitan (available on DVD and highly  recommended). Regretfully, because it clashed with a family birthday, I did not attend this week’s Beethoven, which has been recorded for television.

But there is more ahead. In February, in tribute to Sibelius’s 150th birthday, Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony and Violin Concerto will be performed by the BBC SSO  at the Usher Hall, with Guy Braunstein as soloist,  flanked by Beethoven’s Coriolanus and Leonora No 3 overtures.

We must make the most of Runnicles while we have him. Scottish Opera should have sought his services years ago, but can now presumably no longer afford him. And what has the RSNO, for which he once sold programmes at the Usher Hall, specially done on his behalf?

For the SCO he has conducted a memorable account of Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night. But it is sad to think how many opportunities to hear Runnicles in Scotland have been lost. It is significant that a Scottish blog was founded some years ago under the name “Where’s Runnicles?” When he leaves the BBC SSO in 2016, we must be ready to say, very assertively,  haste ye back.
18 November 2014