VoxCarnyx

SCO / Egarr

City Halls, Glasgow

Pairing a box office favourite with harder-to-sell new music is familiar enough in classical programming, but the tactic rarely makes as much sense as it did in this concert from the SCO, which featured impressionistic music separated by two centuries without any of the “Impressionism” that happened in between.

Aaron Jay Kernis’s Musica Celestis was the most speculative of those impressions, the young American’s work for strings an instrumental evocation of the holy choir of angels, whose eternal praise he sums up in 10 minutes.

A student of John Adams, that debt is detectable but not overstated in a piece that uses subdivisions of the string sections, with the front desk players as featured soloists, and builds to a (very high) pitch before a pause and a recapitulation of its more sedate beginning.

It was a perfect hors d’oeuvre for the UK premiere of Peter Eotvos’s Aurora, a concerto for double bass and string orchestra with accordion. The Hungarian composer wrote the work five years before his death exactly a  year ago, and the Covid pandemic was the major factor in the delay in this performance by the SCO, who co-commissioned it.

Much more recently, the orchestra’s principal double bass has defected to lead the basses of the RSNO but Nikita Naumov returned as soloist, and won an enthusiastic reception for doing so. As it turned out, the conductor was also a much-missed figure in recent SCO seasons, Richard Egarr stepping into to replace Mark Wigglesworth, directing the concert as advertised.

The fresh score he took on stipulates that the two string basses of the orchestra take up positions on opposite sides of the platform, and are tuned differently from each other and the soloist. The exchanges between them and with Naumov, who had to produce the really virtuosic stuff at the front of the stage, was the theatre of the piece.

Inspired by a view of the Aurora Borealis from an aircraft window, the work covers a lot of ground in its 20 minutes. The triple basses add slap punctuation to the swirl of sound from the strings and squeeze box in the opening movement, and the role of the front-stage soloist grows more prominent and complex as the composition develops.

There must be very few feasible techniques on double bass left unexplored, in bowing and pizzicato, fast fingering and delicate harmonics. Naumov gave a masterclass in all of it, including a glorious melodic passage in the second movement that followed propulsive work from strings and accordion reminiscent of John Adams’s A Short Ride in a Fast Machine.

The finale was a showcase of every skill heard from the soloist so far, only at twice the speed, with the strings and accordion now providing the punctuation. Naumov capped it off with an encore that required him to become an entire Bulgarian folk band.

If it was an accident that his extra treat chimed with the third movement imitation of a peasant dance band in the Pastoral Symphony, it was a very happy one. Beethoven’s Sixth is the most impressionistic, and arguably the most popular, of his symphonies, and Egarr and the SCO made it the perfect culmination of the evening.

Orchestra leader Charlotte Saluste-Bridoux, who plays alongside Alina Ibragimova in the Chiaroscuro Quintet, was a very active partner in Egarr’s delivery of a delightful Pastoral, everyone on stage – and not only the playful bird-imitating wind soloists – clearly having a ball.

Keith Bruce