VoxCarnyx

City Halls, Glasow

It’s not often you hear delirious cheering, verging on rock hysteria, at a classical music gig, but the noticeably young audience section, whose unrestrained appreciation crescendoed over the course of this all-Mozart SCO programme, certainly wasn’t backward in liberating its Friday night fizz.

This was heartwarming to say the least, as concert-going inches back to normal. Nor was it difficult to identify the source of their adulation, Maxim Emelyanychev, the orchestra’s fresh-faced Russian principal conductor, whose rousing frontman presence – punchy, unpredictable and a whisker short of anarchic – is to the SCO what Freddie Mercury was to Queen. 

To describe the SCO, though, as a Mozart tribute band on this occasion, is perhaps taking the pop analogy too far. Yet these were performances through which Emelyanychev seemed intent on marrying the impression of Mozart the disorderly showman of his day with Mozart the musical museum piece. 

Full credit to the Russian, these performances really brought the music to life, not simply as if the ink was still wet on the score, but that some bits had even been left unfinished, to be made up on the spur of the moment.

That was literally the case in Emelyanychev’s solo number as performer/director in the Piano Concerto No 20 in D minor. He’d hardly sat down at the Steinway when he cut the applause dead, defying expectations with a short improvised fantasy, allegedly based on a harmonic sequence from Mozart’s Requiem (the Lacrimosa), delivered with a sort of pre-Lisztian demonism that eventually hung endlessly on a dominant chord in preparation for the concerto proper.

It was daring and electrifying. With the SCO tuning vigorously into this spirit of deflection and danger, grittily and spontaneously, the concerto’s familiarity was jeopardised in the best of senses. Yes, the purity of Mozart’s content and construction was judiciously maintained, its motivic interplay and seamless melodic invention bound by integrity, but this was also an object lesson in dynamic, on-the-spot music-making, which can only happen when an orchestra has such absolute belief in the man at the front. 

They won over their audience with interactive spontaneity and unheralded surprise. There was no second-guessing Emelyanychev’s chosen course, which sometimes involved walking away from the piano and into the midst of his colleagues. His own performance was fiery and fickle, just occasionally, in softer passages, failing to communicate the fullest of tone. And why make such an issue of retuning the orchestra between movements? It seemed more like an act than a necessity.

The concerto sat between the curiosity that is Mozart’s Serenade No 6, “Serenata notturna”, introduced by Emelyanychev who then disappeared to let this unconventionally orchestrated delight take care of itself, and the late Symphony No 39 in E flat.

The Serenade played its part as a showpiece opener, the central “concertante” group (a string quartet with double bass instead of cello) encased within the exuberance of the wider band. Louise Goodwin’s timpani, placed centre front stage, unleashed a solo break to rival Buddy Rich. 

Emelyanychev was back in harness to direct the closing symphony, predictably unpredictable, set ablaze by a freedom that invited snatches of improvised ornamentation from the woodwind and febrile gutsiness from the strings, but nearly burned to the ground when Mozart’s mischievous false finish, riskily exaggerated, set off premature applause and subsequent laughter. 

Was that the intended response? I wouldn’t put it past the SCO’s charismatic enfant terrible.

Ken Walton