VoxCarnyx

City Halls, Glasgow

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s adept season programming produced another box office hit with this concert of music composed in the last 50 years, proving that there is still a vast young audience for what is broadly categorised as “minimalism” even if those so labelled bridle at the term.

Any reservations about the music, then, have to be set against the reality of 2000 people in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall on Thursday – many of them new faces to the orchestra management – and a City Hall filled to the choir stalls. The box office draw was the name of Max Richter, credited with an hour of the music we heard, and the concert title “Richter+” shockingly relegated composers Philip Glass and John Adams to that simple “plus” sign, when there would, surely, be no Max Richter without them.

Be that as it may, they provided what was, to these ears at least, the most interesting music of the night, played as part of a genius first half sequence conducted, with peerless finesse, by Irishman David Brophy.

Brophy’s clever verbal introduction ensured there was no presumptuous interrupting applause before the end of John Adams’ The Chairman Dances, probably his most performed work after A Short Ride In A Fast Machine. This “out-take” from his opera Nixon in China might equally be described as pictorial impressionism, so precisely does it live up to the composer’s narrative note. In Brophy’s reading, with the largest forces assembled onstage all evening, it was all too easy to see Mao and his glamorous movie-star wife tripping the light fantastic across a ballroom.

It had segued from Philip Glass’s equally theatrical Company, written for a production of Samuel Beckett’s late existentialist work by New York’s ground-breaking Mabou Mines company. Much less often heard, it is vintage Glass and shows how colourful his writing can be even when working with strings alone. Meticulously directed by Brophy, the SCO players were at their expressive best, regardless of the technical demands of the composition, alternating between two metronome markings and full of dynamic variation.

The sequence had begun with Richter’s OPUS 2020, itself a fascinating technical exercise that nods to Stockhausen as well as being based on notes from a late Beethoven Piano Sonata and composed for a German celebration of Ludwig’s 250^th birthday. It ends with two minutes of music from the sonata itself, performed by pianist Michael Bawtree, after extended “tape loops” played live and based on very simple material sourced from the sonata.

With individual players sitting out of sections to vary the sonic ebb and flow and nothing as measured as the beats of Louise Lewis Goodwin’s timpani, this is a precision-engineered score, often as interesting to watch as listen to, and more rewarding than some of Richter’s “ambient” music.

The second half of the concert, although it had Richter’s name on the tin, was completely different. His “Recomposed” version of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, with Norwegian violinist Mari Samuelsen as soloist and director and Chris Ekers in charge of the electronic soundscapes, is still recognisably the music that accompanies many a frustrating wait for a call-centre response, although it is substantially Richter’s own work.

Harp and harpsichord added to 15 strings, playing amplified and with atmospheric lighting, the ambience is crucial to Samuelsen and Ekers well-honed project, but it is still impossible not to listen out for the old Vivaldi bits. This rite of passage for many a young virtuoso violinist influenced generations of future composers and Richter’s gussying-up relies heavily on what he has kept of its tunes.

While some of the amplification is essential to the score’s success – that of the harpsichord and lower strings of the harp in particular – it sometimes seemed that Samuelsen was a little shrill and over loud. But this was undoubtedly her show, one she and Ekers have been touring for a decade, and she found ideal partners in what was her SCO debut.

Keith Bruce