VoxCarnyx

Perth Concert Hall

With sponsorship from investment managers Quilter Cheviot and busy box office, Nicola Benedetti’s latest appearances with the SCO will be a significant entry on the balance sheet for the orchestra’s 50^th birthday year. Crucially, it has its own way of presenting Scotland’s most popular classical musician, and that – as principal cello Philip Higham pointed out in his introductory remarks – involved luring another member of the extended SCO family back to the front desk of the first fiddles.

Benjamin Marquise Gilmore job-shared as SCO concertmaster before taking up his current post as one of the three leaders of the London Symphony Orchestra. Benedetti may be the big marquee name, but his role in this concert was no less significant, leading the orchestra through the whole programme, including the Beethoven Violin Concerto she directed, although it remained her interpretation.

The most ear-catching moment of that was the first movement cadenza, possibly the one the composer himself wrote for the piano version of the score, and certainly following Christian Tetzlaff’s recent lead in having timpani as a foil to the soloist. Louise Lewis Goodwin was warmly embraced by the violinist at the end of the concert and her playing of the rhythmic “fate” motif that Beethoven so loved was a significant ingredient in Benedetti’s approach to the piece.

In her younger years, she might have played the concerto with more obvious virtuosity. Now the darkness at the heart of the work is as clear as the prodigious technique required to perform it. Beethoven was not always the grumpy old bloke of his public image, but there is little levity about this music, at least until the more sprightly rondo of the finale.

Having set the tone for the performance, Benedetti left the direction of the players to Marquise Gilmore, the job he had been doing during the first part of the evening. In a reversal of the usual order of things, the programme’s symphony preceded the interval, but as it was Mozart’s brief three-movement 34^th, that made eminent sense.

Whether Symphony No 34 in C Major makes internal sense is another question, but after the brass and horns of the opening movement there was some lovely work from the SCO reeds, the slow movement scored for bassoon and strings and the finale led by the oboes. Marquise Gilmore’s whole-body pacing of the orchestra is the sort of physical urging players are swept along by, and exactly how the work should be performed.

The icing on this classical cake came at the start, in Jessie Montgomery’s Strum, one of at least three compositions from the American to have featured in recent programmes by the Scottish Ensemble. It suited the SCO well too, with plenty of the technique of the title for the string players to demonstrate – especially the violas – before some lush pastoral bowing and touches of folk fiddling, in what is highly accessible modern music.

Keith Bruce