SCO Stays Free in ’21
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra has unveiled its Spring season of online concerts, when it will be continuing to offer all the music free to view and listen to via its website and YouTube channel.
Chief Executive Gavin Reid said that it is thanks to the generosity of individual supporters and the continuing support of its business sponsors that the concerts remain free to view. Capital Document Solutions, Pulsant, Baillie Gifford, Insider.co.uk and Institut Francais d’Ecosse are among the orchestra’s partners.
Former principal bassoon Peter Whelan returns to direct the first concert of 2021 and a Mozart programme with soloist mezzo soprano Katie Bray that also features an overture by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. The season has a strong line-up of singers, with Benjamin Appl performing Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad in a March concert conducted by Andrew Manze. It also features the UK premiere of the Beethoven-inspired Stride by SCO Associate Composer Anna Clyne, co-commissioned by the SCO with the Australian and Lausanne Chamber Orchestras.
A February concert directed by Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev sees the orchestra in Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre for a performance of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella with soprano Claire Booth, tenor Andrew Staples and baritone Roderick Williams. In combination with January’s Queen’s Hall performance of the same composer’s The Soldier’s Tale, this represents a direct clash with the BBC SSO, which has scheduled the same Stravinsky pairing in its own February programming.
The Festival Theatre is also the venue for the SCO’s contribution to January’s online Celtic Connections festival when it is teamed with folksinger Karine Polwart and her regular accompanists Steven Polwart and Inge Thomson under the direction of violinist Pekka Kuusisto.
Emelyanychev is at the harpsichord for part of his first concert of the season, with Benjamin Marquise Gilmore, Nikita Naumov and Philip Higham also soloists in a Queen’s Hall programme of Bottesini, Bruch, Haydn and Hasse. Two more SCO principals, violinist Stephanie Gonley and flautist Andre Cebrian, feature in his March concert of Bach, Adams and Mozart. Gonley also joins Kristian Bezuidenhout as co-director and co-soloist in an all-Mendelssohn programme from the Festival Theatre in February.
Completing the roll call of singers is baritone Marcus Farnsworth, who sings Bach as part of a baroque chamber programme from the Queen’s Hall on January 21. The preceding week sees a chamber ensemble play Dvorak, Hass and Martinu.
In March saxophonist Jess Gillam makes her SCO debut in a concert conducted by Joana Carniero at Perth Concert Hall, and Susan Tomes joins SCO players for Mozart and Faure Piano Quartets. The season concludes in Perth at the start of April when Francois Leleux conducts the world premiere of a work for winds by Clyne, entitled Overflow and inspired by the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Jalaluddin Rumi.