SCO / Leleux
Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh
As its freshly-printed new season brochure further demonstrates, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra is currently a pace-setter in concert programming, and this was another superb example.
Opening and closing with two first symphonies, one box fresh, the other from nearly 150 years ago but strangely overlooked, the ostensible link in the programme was that everything was written when the composers were in their teenage years. Dig a little deeper and you might also note the common influence of their fathers on these early works.
The concluding, older Symphony No 1 was by the 16-year-old Richard Strauss and although it doesn’t sound parodic of its influences, and especially the Beethovian Scherzo, the opening of the Finale could easily be heard as too obviously ‘in the mould’. A canon in the strings then seems to hark back to an earlier era before the suitably grand ‘classical’ last bars. Was the mind that subsequently created those complex tone-poems already dabbling in irony? It is hard to say.
Either way, the work was new ground for the SCO players and well worth the hearing, as was, beyond any argument, the startling new Symphony No 1 that opened the concert. Georgian wunderkind Tsotne Zedginidze is from a family of musicians and also just 16 now, and he was 15 when he wrote the piece, co-commissioned by the SCO. It had its first performance in Salzburg at the end of January, which Francois Leleux also conducted.
There is no insincerity in Zedginidze’s symphony, dedicated to his late mother and ending in a few bars of aching loss. What happens in the half hour before that it quite remarkable, however, from the opening music in the violas, which sets out a clear debt to Second Viennese School serialism.
The precocious composer has taken that early 20th century starting point and then ploughed his own furrow with music that changes direction dizzyingly often, but never in a disorientating way. In fact the work becomes more insistently charming as it develops, with fascinating voicings in the winds, some Romantic strings and a solo for the principal bass before its poignant conclusion. Leleux and the SCO communicated the symphony’s complexities with style as well as fierce concentration. To say that Zedginidze is a talent to listen out for is to damn him with faint praise.
The meat in the symphony sandwich was just as carefully selected, the Strauss preceded by his Serenade for 13 winds, from 1881 when the composer was still 17, and the best known music in the programme.
The first half had ended with a showcase for one of those splendid SCO wind players, Cerys Ambrose-Evans, the first bassoon stepping out in front of her colleagues to play the only extant Bassoon Concerto by Mozart, composed for the Salzburg court when he was an ancient 18. The combination of the animated conducting of Leleux and the soloist’s lively approach to her instrument made the performance a delight. We already know she has the lightest and richest tone, and her articulacy and breath control on the cadenzas was a wonder.
Keith Bruce