SCO / Manze
City Halls, Glasgow
Although it is a habit that persists, it is never useful to compare Mozart’s “hackwork” with pieces he wrote to no apparent commission. It is unarguable that he couldn’t help but put his best efforts into everything he wrote, musically.
Both the composer’s works in this programme were written to specific commissions from wealthy patrons and supposedly under protest. The truth is that Mozart’s words, as they have come down to us in his letters, are less reliable than his music, so Symphony No 35, the “Haffner”, composed for a Salzburg family after Mozart had de-camped to Vienna, and the Flute Concerto, written for an instrument he once claimed to dislike, are full of distinctive writing.
Conductor Andrew Manze, safely back in the SCO fold, his flirtation with the BBC Scottish now ancient history, found all the light and shade in the symphony, its first few bars an opening of ear-catching gradation and the whole package so poised and well-balanced. The finale owes an audible debt to Mozart’s contemporaneous commitment to opera composition, specifically the recently-completed Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serial, and that theatricality reflected the work that preceded it in the concert.
Johann Heinrich Schmeltzer’s Serenata was composed in Vienna over a century earlier, possibly to score a drama. Manze’s new arrangement of the Baroque music sat well in his programme in many ways, not least in his colourful orchestration’s parallels with the Schoenberg Chamber Symphony No 2 with which the concert had begun. The range of dynamics and tempi in both works were exquisitely captured by the SCO players, the Schoenberg displaying an emotional depth that his technical complexity can obscure and the Schmeltzer close to heart-rending in its closing Lamento.
The SCO’s principal flute Andre Cebrian made his own persuasive case for Mozart’s Flute Concerto, his golden-toned playing burnished across the full range of the instrument and his cadenzas quite captivating soliloquys. It was the conversations across the platform that revealed the best of the piece however. In the opening movement the exchanges are between the soloist and oboe and horns and the Adagio is all about the flute, the two in the orchestra under-scoring the soloist’s fleet fingering. They return again in the middle of the witty finale, the flute trio bars following some sparkling writing – and playing – in the violins.
Cebrian’s encore was of a folk tune from his native Spain, preceded by an appeal for donations to help those afflicted by the flooding in Valencia. Fund-raising purchases of his recent CD in the foyer at the interval were rewarded with some excellent home listening: his duo with guitarist Pedro Mateo González, Cartografia de mar, is a very fine recording.
Keith Bruce