Tag Archives: Anthony Marwood

SCO / Marwood

Posted on by

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

SCO / Marwood

Posted on by

City Halls, Glasgow

Any journey that ends with Kurt Weill’s 1924 Violin Concerto – the work of a young man yet to form his career-making partnership with Bertolt Brecht – is worth embarking on, but the Scottish Chamber Orchestra took a circuitous way there under the direction of violinist Anthony Marwood.

During its composition, Weill’s teacher Federico Busoni died and that is reflected in the work’s sombre opening. It does lighten in tone in the three-part central movement, however, when the soloist finds foils among the percussion, brass and winds in turn, before becoming a real virtuoso piece in the fast finale. Marwood took a very measured approach to the work, leaving plenty of room to make the conclusion especially dramatic.

The might possibly be said of the whole programme, which leapt about chronologically and in scale. Immediately before the concerto was the only work that could really be seen as its precursor, the Three Dances from Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale. Here was the SCO as a cabaret band and closer to the music that Weill would go on to write, and Marwood clearly relished his devilish part in proceedings.

The programme had begun with music that would not be played until after the Second World War but was written before the First, Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question. The American maverick may have predicted a direction in which music would go, but he was alone on that path in the first decade of the 20th century. It was followed by a singularly playful statement from exiled Russian Alexander Raskatov, Five Minutes from the Life of W A Mozart, from the first year of the 21st.

Haydn’s Symphony No 8 “Le soir” was just – like the Weill – the work of a composer in his 20s, and recently employed by the Esterhazys. After the parody of the Raskatov, here was music both baroque and pictorial, played with sparkling joie de vivre.

The two works on either side of the interval fitted even less well into the already opaque scheme of things: the Adagio from Bruckner’s epic String Quintet and Elgar’s five-minute string work Sospiri, which sounded very dated next to everything else in the second half.

Marwood’s title for this selection box was From Darkness to Light, which did not really help clarify the programme. It was great to hear the Weill, but the route there did seem a little random.

Keith Bruce