VoxCarnyx

City Halls, Glasgow

There were a couple of extra gifts under the tree at the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s last Glasgow concert of 2024. At its end, conductor Maxim Emelyanychev added an encore at the harpsichord and at the beginning of the second half he preceded Eine kleine Nachtmusik with the recently unearthed “Ganz kleine Nachtmusik”, discovered in Leipzig a few months ago.

That chamber work by the teenage Mozart sat well in a programme that framed one of the composer’s best-known works with music of his peers that is much less familiar. It began with an opera overture from Haydn, written for the Esterhazy court. His shipwreck tale, L’isola disabitata, may be a rarity on stages now, but the music was theatrical enough.

We were in Vienna for the rest of the programme, beginning with Franz Krommer’s first double-clarinet concerto, one of a number of pieces the prolific Moravian composed for the wind instrument that was then a single-reed novelty. Mozart and Brahms were similarly inspired by the clarinet, but Krommer was clearly like a kid with a new toy, and the E-flat Concerto for two Clarinets is a glorious exploration of the instrument’s capabilities, and particularly how its range can be used by the duetting voices.

Other players – the strings, flute, horns and trumpets – have a share of the score, but the focus is always on the soloists, and SCO players Maximiliano Martin and William Stafford brought the tune-packed work vibrantly to life. The energy level of the performance was, however, just as clearly emanating from Emelyanychev at the keyboard.

The SCO strings played Eine kleine standing, all eyes on the conductor at the keyboard, and there are few ensembles in the world who could take such a well-known work and make it seem so fresh and new. Emelyanychev used his resources carefully, stripping things back to a central quintet for the more contemplative sections and taking the whole work at often bracing speed.

The fuller forces required for Paul Wranitzky’s Symphony in D meant that it could only really sit at the end of the evening, but that did the piece few favours. He may have been an important figure in Vienna at the time, but Wranitzky’s music lacks the musical meat to support the repetitions in the early movements of the symphony. The second movement gavotte may have the best melody in the work, but it seems under-developed, as does the tune in the Polonaise, although the trumpets and horns liven things for the finale.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Maxim Emelyanychev by Andrej Grilc