SCO / Ibragimova
City Halls, Glasgow
ALINA Ibragimova’s schedule over the next few months is remarkable. She is on tour with Ivan Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto before a run of chamber music dates with her piano partner Cedric Tiberghien and then the period instrument Chiaroscuro Quartet she founded, playing a long list of repertoire.
The quartet also has dates in Europe at the end of January, playing different music, before which she performs the Stravinsky Concerto in Montreal with conductor Robin Ticciati. And before that she is in Minnesota, playing with and directing the St Paul Chamber Orchestra.
Alongside a Mozart concerto, there’s a Haydn symphony in those US concerts, but it is a different one from the “Drum Roll”, No 103, that featured in the programme she directed from the violin with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra last week. The other work in her SCO programme, Karl Hartmann’s hugely challenging Concerto funebre, has just one further scheduled performance, in Leipzig in the middle of November.
That massive workload does not appear to stop Ibagrimova being very much an ensemble player, but finding a third work to complete the programme for her three Scottish dates presented the SCO with a challenge to its usually deft concert-compilation skills.
Although a comparison of the conduct of Hartmann and Richard Strauss during the Second World War made for an interesting programme note, Strauss’s early Suite in B-Flat major for winds, Op 4, was perhaps an odd way to start. The composer won praise, and a job, for his conducting of the premiere of the work, but the SCO’s wind soloists needed no direction with the orchestra’s top class principals – specifically Andre Cebrian and Maximiliano Martin – cueing their colleagues when required.
Strauss may have been inspired by a Mozartian model, but his quartet of horns and contrabassoon produced a sonorous underscore that was a long way from Mozart, prefiguring the composer’s own orchestral tone poems. In fact the 13 players often sounded like a much larger group, while the solo playing, and especially the oboe of Miriam Pastor, was exquisite.
Much stage shifting, and mental reset, was required for the Hartmann, scored for strings and virtuoso violin soloist and a tough piece for players and listener. Composed in 1939 (although revised twenty years later), it is full of grim foreboding of the calamity about to unfold in Europe, even if the funereal hymn with which it closes seems to embrace glimpses of light.
There was not a lot of direction required of Ibragimova here either, with the SCO strings eloquently responsive to her expressive, robust playing with muscular performances of their own. The ensemble is a very creative partner in the work’s conversation, regardless of the technical range required of the soloist, in what is a powerful, if mostly unremittingly dark, work.
The musical fun of the Haydn symphony was a welcome contrast after the interval, with Ibragimova in the concert-master’s chair, giving a beautiful performance of the cadenza-like solo in the slow movement. Other notable contributions came from the first oboe once again, and, of course, timpanist Louise Lewis Goodwin with those crisp drum rolls that give the work its nickname.
Keith Bruce