Tectonics – why I can’t really tell you what we’re about to hear.
Every year, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra takes a bold and beautiful risk with its weekend festival devoted to the blazingly, capriciously new,
writes presenter Kate Molleson.
Tectonics is a platform for music that tests, probes and lingers in the margins. For music that refuses to conform. Sometimes (let’s face it!) some of the music doesn’t entirely work out. And yet the players of the BBCSSO embrace that risk, knowing that the alternative – confining themselves to the already-trod – would be much more dangerous. Tectonics is a laboratory that requires the orchestra to exist in the present tense. It stretches the players in thrilling new directions and rejuvenates how they approach Beethoven and Bruckner, too. It reshapes how they sound, who listens, how they listen.