SCO / Manze
City Halls, Glasgow
The manufacturers of conductors’ batons may be the only people upset by the appointment of Andrew Manze as Principal Guest Conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Like Maxim Emelyanychev, he often eschews their use in favour of a pair of expressive hands. Also like the SCO’s Principal Conductor, Manze started out as a Baroque specialist but now ranges across much wider repertoire, paralleling, to some extent, the orchestra’s own journey.
His first programme of a fortnight’s work with these musicians focused on Ravel, with Steven Osborne the soloist in the G Major Piano Concerto and the composer’s earlier Pavane pour une infante défunte preceding the last of Haydn’s Paris Symphonies, No 87. It began, however, with another of the French capital’s Les Six group of composer, Arthur Honegger, and his Pastorale d’été.
Composed in the Swiss Alps in the summer of 1920, it is a very lovely work for strings and just five winds – all of whom have solo spots – that deserves to be heard more often. In the context of this programme it was a substantial hors d’oeuvre to the Ravel Concerto, very different in style but sharing some of the jazz influence that was in the air at the time.
Osborne is, of course, a pianist who delights in the prediction of jazz music to be found in a late Beethoven sonata, who plays Gershwin to perfection (as the BBC Proms will hear later this year), and who chose to encore this performance with his own transcription of a piece by American jazz pianist Keith Jarrett. That said, he did not labour the bluesy ingredients of the opening movement, and its kinship with Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. In fact this was a very relaxed Osborne throughout the work, delivering the most virtuosic music with casual grace and delighting in the furious pace of the finale. The central Adagio was arguably the highlight though, the SCO wind soloists once again on top form in the duets with the pianist and Osborne himself wonderfully poised and expressive in the elegiac melody that distinguishes what would be the composer’s final big piece.
It is not, however, a tune that most people would recognise in the hum-along way they would Ravel’s earlier Pavane. As a piano piece it made the name of the young composer and its orchestrated version begins, like the Honegger, with a solo horn – beautifully played here by George Strivens.
There is something operatic about Haydn’s 87th Symphony, also heard less often, because, Manze claimed, it lacks a nickname. The work for the section principals is very characterful and it is not hard to imagine the solos as vocal ones, and the ensemble work as dances. That is only explicit in the third movement Minuet, which the conductor took at a very deliberate pace although it was still light on its feet.
On paper Haydn had looked an odd choice to end this programme. In execution, Manze and the SCO made it the perfect one.
Keith Bruce