VoxCarnyx

City Halls, Glasgow

Perhaps more than any other outfit, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra has contrived to combine elements of the season that fell victim to the pandemic with the work it did online during the hiatus in its programming since audiences were again permitted into concert halls.

This journey back in time from John Adams via Mozart to Bach’s Brandenburg No 5 was a case in point, as well as being another illustration of the sparkling relationship that now exists between the SCO and its principal conductor Maxim Emelyanychev.

The young Russian seemed especially hyper on Friday night, even as he introduced and then absented himself from the stage for Mozart’s Gran Partita. That was perhaps not entirely to the benefit of Adams’s Shaker Loops. The composer’s breakthrough work was much better in its more delicate moments than in the opening Shaking and Trembling, which was less precision-tooled and sharp-edged than the music requires. The many discrete string sections were not as distinct as they needed to be, and of the three violin groups, it was Marcus Barcham Stevens’s thirds that seemed the crispest.

The higher the volume, it seemed, the less the ensemble cohered and it is tempting to conclude that the excitable Emelyanychev’s expansive gestures at such moments were part of the problem.

Lovers of symmetry and mathematical precision in music were in hog heaven with this programme, and as much in the Mozart as the two composers either side. With string bass Ciro Vigilante flanked by pairs of horns and quartets of single and double reeds facing one another, principal clarinet Maximiliano Martin was in the leader’s chair for a truly expert and pretty much flawless account of the work. The third movement variations were delightfully individual and the balance of the 13 players in the City Hall acoustic about perfect, which was arguably especially impressive from the four natural horns.

The Brandenburg, from half a century before, could almost seem free-form by comparison, a showcase for soloists first violin Stephanie Gonley, flautist Andre Cebrian and Emelyanychev at the harpsichord, with a four-man string continuo led by cellist Philip Higham, who had added a fine solo to the Adams.

Cebrian looked to be running away with the show in the first movement but his lovely fluid playing drew a virtuoso response from Emelyanychev at the keyboard before the trio settled into a beautifully-measured account of the Affettuoso slow movement. The Allegro finale was a masterful example of warm, bubbling, ensemble playing, and the icing on the cake was an encore of a short Martinu Promenade.

Keith Bruce