VoxCarnyx

City Halls, Glasgow

Visits to Scotland by pianist Yeol Eum Son – who has appeared with the BBC SSO, as an EIF Queen’s Hall recitalist, as a guest soloist in the Usher Hall’s Sunday concert series, and at the East Neuk Festival as well as with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra – are to be treasured.

The opportunity to hear her play Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto would be an added incentive for many and for that work to be presented in the context of this programme, with the peerless SCO Chorus singing Haydn’s Nelson Mass in the second half, completed an unmissable bingo card that predictably attracted a good audience.

That the conceit of the programme – all three works being linked to Haydn – did not stand up to much scrutiny, as the programme notes acknowledged, was neither here nor there. The brief student/teacher relationship between Beethoven and Haydn was long over by the time of the concerto, and had never amounted to much in the  face of both composer’s driven agendas anyway.

The opening work, Brahms’ Variations on a theme by Haydn, we now know to be based on tune that had nothing at all to do with the earlier composer, whatever Brahms believed at the time. Nonetheless, the  St Anthony Chorale was worthy of his attention and his set of orchestral explorations of that raw material, employing an early music device on a piece of early music, was an ideal beginning.

The symphonic scoring makes full use of the range of pitch available from contrabassoon to piccolo and the flow of ideas comes swift and fast – ideal music for conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, always fleet of musical thought.

He and Yeol Eum Son had agreed a brisk tempo for the Beethoven too, and it was in that context that her first entry, phrased with conversational pauses, was so immediately arresting. Her playing was captivating from start to finish, precision filigree ripples and runs married to a mighty left hand and technical mastery always at the service of emotional expression. Beethoven had recently emerged from a time of documented personal turmoil and a sense of that ran through Eum Son’s performance as well as a delight in the musical artistry – radical as it was at the time – inherent in the work.

If Beethoven was pushing the envelope with the Third Piano Concerto, Haydn was ever the opportunist in (re)naming his Nelson Mass in honour of the victorious English Admiral who attended an early performance. Originally it had been his “Missa in angustiis” or “Mass for troubled times”, and perhaps reinstating that title would suit our own times.

It needs a terrific soprano soloist, and had one in this performance in Anna Dennis, on stellar form. There was nothing at all wrong with the rest of the vocal front line either, and mezzo Katie Bray, tenor Anthony Gregory and bass baritone Neal Davies took their briefer moments in the spotlight well and also combined beautifully, notably on the Benedictus quartet.

As usual, Emelyanychev had thought carefully about the placing of his musicians, with the vocal soloists in front of the chorus but behind the players, and the bass instruments split across the platform, a returned Nikita Naumov partnered by bassoonist Cerys Ambrose-Evans stage right and the other pair of double basses stage left.

The result was an integrated sound which showcased the orchestra as much as it did the choir, immaculately prepared by Gregory Batsleer.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Yeol Eum Son by Andrew Castro