Tag Archives: Alina Ibragimova

SCO / Ibragimova

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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

SCO/ Emelyanychev

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Perth Concert Hall

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s marketing department sold this season-closer under the banner “Maxim’s Firebird” and energetic Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev obliged by delivering a singular account of Stravinsky’s score that was only predictable in its unpredictability.

Preceded by the encapsulation of Beethoven’s craft that is the Leonore Overture No 3 and the equally compact and radical First Violin Concerto of Prokofiev, with Alina Ibragimova as soloist, this was a concert of music usually heard by larger orchestras performed by a big edition of the SCO that made explicit use and purpose of its chamber music sensibilities.

In all cases, but especially in the Stravinsky, the result was revelatory. There were details in the music that appeared fresh and newly-minted; from Simon Smith’s celesta and piano and Eleanor Hudson’s harp on the one hand, and from first horn Zoe Tweed, first flute Daniel Pailthorpe and the regulars on the reed instruments on the other.

Just as important, though, was the dynamic control the conductor produced from the musicians all evening. That was evident in his clear insistence on playing more softly at the start of the Beethoven, and reached its apotheosis in the sequence of Rondo, Infernal dance, Lullaby and Hymn at the culmination of the Stravinsky. There have been louder Firebirds, but few with such contrasts in sound and mood, turning on a sixpence with breath-catching impact, and with a momentum that was truly magnificent.

Towards the end of Overture, following a perfectly positioned off-stage trumpet, there was a brief sense that the winds were overloud, even as the strings produced an impressive pianissimo, but in the Firebird Suite (the version Stravinsky made in 1945) the balance was always fascinating. It should be remembered that this is the hall in which Emelyanychev and the SCO worked on filmed music during lockdown, so they know the acoustic well.

That applied to the concerto as well, with Ibragimova fully on board with the project and projecting her own virtuosity at often daringly low volume. The opening Andantino began very quietly indeed and even the central, speedy Scherzo: Vivacissimo was working to hairline tolerances in terms of balance between soloist and ensemble. The concerto may not have had the narrative of the other works on the programme, but it lacked nothing in drama. The lyricism that reappears in the final movement was combined with a powerful edge, honed like tempered steel.

As former chief conductor Robin Ticciati steered the SCO into spheres of music it had previously not visited, as well as recalibrating more familiar repertoire, so too, in his own inimitable style, has Maxim Emelyanychev. He may, however, be bringing a more radical, and – crucially – more intimate approach to that aspect of his job.

Keith Bruce

Concert repeated at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh and City Halls, Glasgow tonight and tomorrow.
Picture: Alina Ibragimova