VoxCarnyx

City Halls, Glasgow

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s former principal cellist David Watkin was not just a hugely respected musician but also a man much loved by his colleagues and then by students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland when illness curtailed his playing career.

His death last week occasioned a tribute online from his SCO desk partner Su-a Lee and another from his successor in the first cello chair, Philip Higham, at the start of this concert, which was dedicated to his memory.

The most affecting memorial, though, was the piece conductor Maxim Emelyanychev and the chamber orchestra’s strings added at the end of their programme, the second of Edvard Grieg’s Two Elegiac Melodies, the wistful Last Spring.

It is of exactly the same era as Brahms’ Violin Concerto, the work that had opened the programme and which attracted a capacity audience, including many younger faces, because of its soloist, Nicola Benedetti. For many in the hall it may have been the first opportunity to see her in a while, following her maternity leave break in performing, and the work is one with which she has long been associated.

The composer and its dedicatee, violinist Joseph Joachim, created a concerto that balances its virtuoso moments in the opening movement, including its closing cadenza, and in the fiery dance of the finale with long conversations with the orchestra, especially the first oboe in the Adagio. Benedetti and Emelyanychev delivered a beautifully integrated account of the work, his relationship with the orchestra evident in the precise dynamic calibration of the score and her familiarity with the piece clear in the accuracy of her double- and triple-stopping as much as her intensity of expression.

With extra numbers in the strings, totalling 32 players, and four horns, this was an enhanced edition of the SCO, which was even more crucial to the conductor’s account of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No 3, the “Scottish”. His tempi were brisk but he took pauses before the second and third movements in a reading that seemed – even more than the Brahms – focused on sonic balance. Maximiliano Martin’s clarinet was perfectly clear in its statement of the first movement theme, but far from dominant, and when the six cellos took up the tune of the slow movement it was with ensemble richness rather than volume.

It is sometimes suggested that the symphony, written a long time after Mendelssohn’s visit to Scotland and a long way away, is not very “Scottish” at all, but this performance had ample dour climatic colour and stress on the traditional and country dance music rhythms to please its Highlands-loving dedicatee, Queen Victoria.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Christopher Bowen