City Halls, Glasgow
On the face of it, the composer line-up for this SCO matinee concert – Handel, Mozart and Schumann – was popular mainstream. In reality, it offered this Friday afternoon audience some fresh perspectives. Besides youthful Mozart and some pre-English Venetian Handel, the outer framework of Schumann – an early “sinfonie” to open with and and the late and troublesome Violin Concerto as a programme finale – proved a refreshing exploration.
The man in charge was violinist Anthony Marwood, leading the ensemble from the front desk where appropriate, but taking centre stage for the two concertos. If that lent a certain intimacy to the performances, it also inspired a visceral interaction among the main body of players, both visually and audibly, the outcome of which was to imbue much of this music with frissons of risk and excitement.
Schumann’s Overture, Scherzo and Finale, a loose-limbed triptych dating from the composer’s hot-headed advances and marriage to Clara Wieck, set a spirited tone; though not so much in the slow opening bars, their dramatic character gestures less convincingly addressed than the breezy vistas that followed. The remaining Overture, opulent and debonair, gave way to the measured frivolity of the Scherzo, responded to in turn by a Finale brimming with Germanic lustre and a grand Mendelssohn-like apotheosis.
Mozart’s Violin Concerto No 1 in B major is the least known of the five he wrote in his teens, and likely the earliest he composed at the age of 17, which explains its clean, exuberant persona (and an opening theme that could so easily be viewed as a prototype for that of the later G major concerto). Marwood’s charming, unassuming playing suited the piece, whether in the sunny elegance of the outer movements, or the lyrical expansiveness of the neatly-crafted central Adagio. It wasn’t an accident-free performance, but refreshingly on-message musically.
By itself, Handel’s Overture to his 1709 opera Agrippina assured a vivaciously melodramatic opener to the second half; but Marwood had other ideas, segueing immediately into the stormy landscape that opens Schumann’’s Violin Concerto. It was an inspired move, the same furious scales that drive the Handel prominent too in the sweeping mood-music of the later work.
That said, Marwood’s solo performance was a little touch and go in matters of intonation and generating a genuinely wholesome tone. If the opening movement seemed to exhaust itself prematurely, that was rectified in an idyllic slow movement, SCO principal cellist Philip Higham’s melting dialogue with the soloist a motivating highlight. Uncertainties resurfaced in the Finale, some blotchy solo passage work, but Marwood and the orchestra captured enough of the dance vibe – albeit a tad galumphing at times (Schumann’s fault?) – to sign off convincingly.
Ken Walton