Tag Archives: Maxim Emelyanychev

SCO / Emelyanychev

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Perth Concert Hall

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra musicians have been rewarded for a sensational season with very good sales for the closing week of concerts, and that was especially good to see and hear in Perth, where a superb programme could be enjoyed in what is the finest acoustic in which to appreciate their playing.

Proving once again that nothing is beyond the SCO’s range, Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev’s programme bracketed two Ninth Symphonies around the singular character of Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No 1.

The piano soloist for that was Steven Osborne, a musician of similarly eclectic capabilities, but ideally matched to this mercurial work. He was teamed with the solo trumpet of Aaron Azunda Akugbo, reflecting the origins of the work as an abandoned Trumpet Concerto.

Scored for a string ensemble, and benefitting from the augmented sections required for the symphonies, it is a strange but beguiling work, incorporating quotations from Beethoven and Haydn, and hugely virtuosic for the pianist. That was the composer himself at the work’s premiere, and it is not hard to hear his day-job as a movie-theatre accompanist in much of the writing.

It was preceded by the same composer’s Symphony No 9, one of his briefest, and less frequently heard than many of his longer works. That’s a pity, because it is a very colourful piece and the Allegro first movement makes a lively concert-opener, even if its frivolity was not what Stalin expected as a celebration of victory in 1945. Emelyanychev set a pacey tempo that didn’t deny the hints of music-hall about the score and maintained a lightness of touch in the performance.

After a robust solo from guest leader Sini Simonen, the scoring moved on to feature first clarinet Maximiliano Martin and principal trumpet Peter Franks before bassoonist Cerys Amrose-Evans had the lion’s share of the limelight from the Largo into the closing Allegretto. All were on top form, and, with some terrific pizzicato passages from the low strings, the orchestration was always intriguing and beautifully clear.

That set the template for a superb account of Dvorak’s Symphony No 9 “From the New World” after the interval. If the Perth audience had been enthusiastic for music that was probably unfamiliar to many, they were about to be blown away by the interpretation of a well-loved work.

As they had been placed for the Shostakovich symphony, four basses were centre-stage, high at the back of the platform, the four horns on their right and trombones and tuba to the left. The strings were augmented to 18 violins and six each of violas and cellos. This was a big SCO, but still far short of symphony orchestra size and the winds were as usual, with oboist Katherine Bryar doubling on cor anglais for the Largo and first flute Andre Cebrian also playing piccolo.

If Shostakovich 9 is a compact symphony, albeit in five movements, here was a deliciously compact reading of Dvorak 9, the dynamic accuracy of the strings under that slow-movement cor anglais tune utterly mesmersing. Emelyanychev brought such finesse from the string players that it couldn’t help but draw as much attention as the composer’s best-known melody.

The rhythms of the Scherzo, be they Native American or Czech, were as precision-tooled and, indeed, every gleaming detail of Dvorak’s masterpiece shone as if being played for the first time in what was an unforgettable reading of an old war-horse of the repertoire.

These season-ending performances, in Perth, Edinburgh’s Usher Hall and Glasgow City Halls have been dedicated to the memory of viola section stalwart of over 30 years, Brian Schiele. In the programme, 10 of his colleagues, past and present, share memories of his character, musicality and generosity. It is another example of the SCO doing things properly, but it was the music-making of the orchestra that really did him proud.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Aaron Azunda Akugbo by Olivia da Costa

SCO / Emelyanychev / Higham

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City Halls, Glasgow

Finding soloists within its own ranks is no longer a tactic the Scottish Chamber Orchestra reserves for summer touring to Scotland’s smaller halls, although that was where principal cello Philip Higham last played the Schumann Cello Concerto with his colleagues.

In another superbly-structured programme from Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev and the SCO, Higham’s performance of a work he has securely under his fingers was preceded by the young Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage and followed after the interval by the UK premiere of Jorg Widmann’s 5 Albumblatter, the composer’s concerto-like homage to Schumann, written as a competition piece for cello students. The orchestrated version of Debussy’s gorgeously melodic Petite Suite brought the concert to a sumptuous conclusion.

In contradiction of the printed programme, it was only in the Mendelssohn that we heard natural timpani, horns, and trumpets, the latter especially effective towards the end of the piece. Emelyanychev found a very wide range of orchestral sound and intricate balance in this brief piece, that might be seen as minor Mendelssohn.

Higham may know the Schumann well, but he never succumbed to the temptation of Romantic wallowing in the music. This was a rigorous performance of a work that surely now has its proper place in the pantheon of concertos for his instrument. If the opening is structurally similar to Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, the flow of the piece is all Schumann and the finale, with the soloist’s fiendishly tricky arpeggios in dialogue with the orchestra, surely influenced the composer’s revision of the Fourth Symphony.

Schumann’s chamber music for piano and cello (his own instruments) lie behind the fun and games of Widmann’s 2022 work, also highly technically demanding, but smile-making as well. There is some deconstruction of those influences in the opening movement, amusing dialogue with the bassoons in the rhythmic Liebelei, and a fourth movement that imagines Clara and Robert doing a Bossa Nova around the ballroom. The finale is entitled Mit Humor, but that is an instruction that seemed superfluous.

Debussy’s Petite Suite began as a work for two pianos and the first two movements contain two of his best known tunes. The orchestrated version his publisher commissioned becomes richer as  the four movements unfold, and, as he had with the Mendelssohn, Emelyanychev revealed the work’s riches incrementally. Like the Schumann, this is music that can become mushy, but that was never a danger here, in the conductor’s pin-sharp attention to detail. Pointillism, rather than Impressionism perhaps.

Keith Bruce

SCO / Emelyanychev

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City Halls, Glasgow

For logistical reasons, the version of this season’s Scottish Chamber Orchestra concert with Nicola Benedetti that Inverness heard at Eden Court Theatre was radically different from that played in Edinburgh and Glasgow.

The only common ingredient was the violin concerto Benedetti played, the one by Mendelssohn which she recorded with the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields 20 years ago, at the age of 18. It was at the centre of an all-Mendelssohn programme in Inverness, opening with the Hebrides Overture and with the ‘Scottish’ Symphony in the second half.

Perhaps because that option was less appealing to BBC Radio 3, whose recording of the Glasgow performance is broadcast this evening, the Central Belt concerts opened with the much larger forces required for the Academic Festival Overture by Brahms, and had the same composer’s Fourth Symphony after the interval.

Most unusually for the normally adept SCO, the programme flowed less well than might have been guessed at, and presumably than the one heard in Inverness a day later.

It did get off to a splendid start with the Overture though, Brahms’s seamless assemblage of borrowed tunes now much better known than any of the ingredients, save perhaps the climactic “Gaudeamus Igitur” Latin hymn to the joys of youth. This is not a chamber orchestra work by any measure – and by specific design on the composer’s part – and conductor Maxim Emelyanychev revelled in the sonic potential of a vastly augmented SCO, who duly gave it laldy, although with no loss of detail in the performance.

The band was slimmed down, without losing any of the string strength, for the Mendelssohn, and natural horns and trumpets replaced modern instruments. The result was an impeccable balance between orchestra and soloist, for which Benedetti should take as much credit as the conductor. The rich sonorities of her lower string playing cut through as clearly as the nimbly fingered high notes on the E string, even when there was some glorious swells of ensemble playing from the SCO strings.

Obviously this is a work Benedetti has had under her fingers for at least half her lifetime, but the detailed thought she brought to the pivotal first-movement cadenza, the emotional heft audible in the Andante and the lightness of touch in the exchanges with the woodwinds in the finale were all the work of her mature talent.

The orchestrated version of Elgar’s Salut d’amour was an obviously appropriate encore, given that it, like the concerto and some of the music on her recent Violin Café small group album, revisits music she learned in her student years.

Perhaps it was chosen for another reason too, because the opening theme of the first movement of Brahms 4 turned out to be an eerily close cousin. Did Elgar have the Brahms in his head at the time he wrote it?

In other ways, however, the symphony followed on less well from the music in the first half. While there was still some excellent string playing and the SCO’s seasoned clarinet partnership were on stellar form, Emelyanychev seemed most in his element when the music most resembled the Academic Festival Overture, which it doesn’t very often. So the declamatory scherzo third movement was a burst of exuberance, and the clever chaconne or passacaglia form of the finale was at its best in the liveliest of the 30 variations.

Keith Bruce

The concert, sponsored by Quilter Cheviot, was recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Monday, March 2, and available on BBC Sounds for 30 days thereafter.

Picture credit: Christopher Bowen

SCO / Emelyanychev

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City Halls, Glasgow/Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

It is not yet an imminent problem, but there are two succession issues that the Scottish Chamber Orchestra will have to address, and they both look challenging.

Scottish composer Jay Capperauld has set a very high bar for whoever follows him as the orchestra’s Associate Composer, in providing bespoke works that suit every aspect of the SCO’s multi-faceted schedule. He was at it again last week with the world premiere of his Stylus Scarlatti, arrangements for chamber orchestra of four keyboard sonatas from the first half of the 18th century by Domenico Scarlatti, precision-tooled to fit Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev’s now-annual “Baroque Inspirations” concerts.

In those, the conductor, often leading ensembles from the keyboard and throwing in some wind instrument playing during the interval, matches classic early music with more recent works that draw on that era. Capperauld’s new work was perhaps one the most straightforward pieces he has supplied to the SCO library, but in its nods to the way other modern composers – like Michael Nyman – have visited the same territory it was characteristically knowing, as well as containing music tailored to specific solo talents in the orchestra.

The other challenge will, of course, be the eventual departure of Emelyanychev himself. It is almost inconceivable that there may be someone else with his combination of talents and enormous, infectious, energy waiting in the wings.

On Sunday afternoon at the Queen’s Hall, “Maxim & Friends” teamed him with the SCO’s string section leaders for two Schumann chamber works from 1842: the Piano Quartet, Op 47 and the Piano Quintet, Op 44.

With the string players using gut strings, Emelyanychev’s keyboard was a London-built 1888 instrument from French piano-makers Erard, borrowed from Glasgow University. Its distinct ringing tone – absolutely clear even if it lacked the muscle of a modern concert grand – combined beautifully with the string sound in a performance that may have been very close to how the works were originally heard, but refreshed them bracingly for modern ears.

These demanding pieces, composed for Schumann’s virtuoso wife Clara and the top string players in Germany at the time, are among the sunniest he wrote, particularly the Quartet, with its lovely Andante Cantabile movement – set up here by a startlingly brisk account of the Scherzo.

Both are in E flat, but the Quintet is more epic in scale as the composer explores and reworks his material with the thoroughness of a Beethoven symphony. The performances of both, with Emelyanychev’s keyboard skills matched by those of violinists Stephanie Gonley and Marcus Barcham Stevens, Max Mandel on viola and Philip Higham on cello, were absolutely first rank.

At Glasgow’s City Halls on Friday evening, there was a very specific chamber approach to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No 3, played by just ten strings, opening a programme again played entirely using gut strings. Both warm and rustic-sounding, the sound gave a particular quality to an expanded ensemble for Britten’s youthful Simple Symphony which suited its folk-influenced music well.

For Handel’s Water Music, it was a more hybrid band on stage, with modern rather than natural horns joining the ensemble. Perhaps that was simply a pragmatic decision, for reliable accuracy of pitch, but the result was more than satisfactory, and the little harpsichord flourishes at the start of some movements were a characteristic Emelyanychev addition.

SCO Principal Condustor Maxim Emelyanychev directs the orchestra in a programme of Baroque Inspirations, featuring works by Bach, Handel, Britten and Schnittke, plus the world premiere of an arrangementt of Scarlatti keyboard sonatas for orchestra (‘Stylus Scarlatti’) by the SCO’s Associate Composer, Jay Capperauld.

As was the procession of a few of the players to the foyer during the interval, heralded by a drum beat and led by the conductor himself playing a selection of early flutes and recorders. Perhaps this ingredient had more impact when it was a complete surprise to the audience and front of house staff, but it was still great fun, even if the SATB choral Spanish work handed out on hymn sheets for audience participation was a challenge too far for many ticket-holders.

Friday’s programme ended with a work from the conductor’s native Russia that was composed by Alfred Schnittke just eight years before Emelyanychev was born.

There is indeed “Baroque Inspiration” to be heard in Schnittke’s Gogol Suite, a sequence of eight short pieces based on short stories by the writer, but there is also the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Mozart’s Overture to The Marriage of Figaro. At other times, however, it sounds as much like the Merry Melodies of Warner Brothers cartoons or the pantomime of Spike Jones and his City Slickers.

With the players still gut-strung, the band included perhaps the most integrated use of electric guitar and bass guitar that any composer has achieved, a vast panoply of percussion from the whole toy box to tubular bells, and no fewer than four keyboard players. Simon Smith was imperious on concert grand, Stephen Doughty and Andrew Forbes covered harpsichord, celesta, and something invisible in between, and Emelyanychev himself handled the centre-stage prepared piano which played out the ominous “Testament” at the end.

The expression “multi-tasking” barely hints at what the SCO’s Principal Conductor brings to the job.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Maxim Emelyanychev by Andrej Grilc; picture from City Halls foyer by Christopher Bowen

SCO / Emelyanychev

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

The attendance was no disgrace, but really there should have been no empty seats in the Usher Hall for a Mozart gala featuring back-to-back performances of his last three symphonies. Written in a remarkable few summer weeks of 1788, it is still unclear for whom the cash-strapped composer dashed off the masterworks, and all sorts of theories have been advanced, some more credible than others.

Veteran German conductor and musicologist Peter Guelke, in his 1998 book Der Triumph der neuen Tonkunst, made the case for seeing them as a deliberate triptych, “a world in a cycle”, and the SCO’s energetic Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, seemed persuaded by that thesis.

He opened Symphony No 39, K543, with a strong statement of the opening theme, but one that was far from loud. The conductor had clearly worked on a very specific string sound for this programme, with extra players in every section, aiming for a rich intensity rather than volume, and the mellow sound of the first movement was a clear indication of what was to come.

Elsewhere on the platform, the forces were as usual, and the changes Mozart makes in the wind scoring (no oboes in No 39, no clarinets in No 41) and the role of timpanist Louise Lewis Goodwin – crisp but very quiet in No 39, absent in No 40 – seemed especially significant.

Although there were historically-informed ingredients in all the playing, this was a hybrid performance, best illustrated by the cello section where the front desk hugged their instruments with the knees, Baroque-style, with the three players behind using spikes.

If Emelyanychev was indeed focused less on authenticity than on an arc of performance that ran from the rich grandeur of the opening chords of the E-flat major symphony to the grand double fugue that concludes the Jupiter, it was an interpretation that embraced many contrasts and illuminated many parallels along the way.

The pace of the opening of No 40, one of the best-loved pieces in all Mozart but played in a wide range of tempi over the years, was not as fast as might have been expected but that allowed its dotted rhythms to shine as echoes of the bolder syncopation of the finale of No 39. Just as fascinating was the progression of the writing in the triple-time third movement, from the folksy clarinets in No 39 through a very fresh up-beat reply to the Andante in No 40 to the remarkable complexity of the ensemble scoring in No 41, again with a boldly quiet beginning.

There was, however, rather more exuberance and a sense of being off the leash in much of the Jupiter, as if the conductor had been keeping his powder dry until after the interval. That perhaps explains why it was the central G Minor work, K 550, that seemed to lack quite the verve it deserves and requires, but that reservation about No 40 may well have been remedied for the repeat performances in Glasgow and Aberdeen.

Keith Bruce

SCO/Emelyanychev

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City Halls, Glasgow

Some members of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra Chorus doubtless sang Hector Berlioz’s L’Enfance du Christ under the baton of Emmanuel Krivine when the SCO last performed the oratorio in Glasgow City Halls almost a decade ago – but equally many of the current cohort of singers will have been tackling the work for the first time. It is surely that constant process of renewal, under chorus director Gregory Batsleer (who has just extended his contract with the choir), that makes the SCO Chorus so special.

It was on its finest form for this concert, making The Shepherds’ Farewell, the best known music of the score, sound newly-minted, its luscious harmony delivered with ideal balance and precision, and then exceeding that achievement with the closing a cappella hymn, surely some of the finest and most perfectly calibrated singing ever heard in this venerable venue.

It included two sopranos singing from outside the choir stalls door and tenor soloist Andrew Staples moving from the front of the stage below to behind the choir to deliver his contribution. If the quieter elements of all this were daringly demanding of the silent attentiveness of the audience, the chorus of offstage Angels at the end of Part One  delivering their ethereal Hosannas had already prepared the ears.

Batsleer and conductor Maxim Emelyanychev had evidently planned the delivery of Berlioz’s theatrical music very carefully, and that extended to the instrumentalists as well, not just Michael Bawtree’s harmonium, located somewhere invisible alongside the women of the chorus.

The composer’s own libretto adds  a lot to the bare bones of Mary and Joseph’s flight to Egypt as it is recounted in the Bible, with the encounter between Herod (Callum Thorpe) and the Soothsayers (the men of the choir) owing much to the one between Macbeth and the Witches. Much of the narrative of the work is in the music, with that section, for example, using a superb combination of low strings, natural horn and bassoon.

All of these details could not have been clearer under the conductor’s meticulous direction, and nor could the architecture of the piece, with the odd-time-signatured ritual music of those mystics in Part One mirrored by the instrumental interlude of home-making in Part Three. Typical of Emelyanychev, the maestro took a chair amongst his string players to enjoy the pastoral trio that followed from flautists Claire Wickes and Carolina Patricio and Eleanor Hudson’s harp.

The vocal soloists, then, had to be content to share much of the spotlight that usually falls on them, but their contributions were of equally high standard. Roderick Williams set the standard for French diction with his animated Polydorus before becoming a more sedate Joseph, while Paula Murrihy’s Mary was radiant, with just the right measure of anxiety.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Paula Murrihy by Barbara Aumuller

SCO & SCO Chorus / Emelyanychev

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City Halls, Glasgow

The clue was in the title. The odds of an SCO programme labelled Gloria! being anything less than euphoric and uplifting were slim. Maxim Emelyanychev and his band, with their in-house SCO Chorus never failed to deliver, but we shouldn’t leave Poulenc off the credits, whose mischievously seductive music dominated the longer first half.

Across the entire programme there were, in fact, two Glorias composed centuries apart by Poulenc and Vivaldi respectively, but as fascinating for their similarities as their fundamental differences. Both thrived on the flawless precision of the SCO Chorus, the stylistic adaptability of the SCO, a thrilling assortment of vocal soloists and the singularly-minded dynamism of conductor Maxim Emelyanychev. 

To whet the appetite, however, Emelyanychev had turned to a rarer Poulenc, the 1940s post-war Sinfonietta he wrote for the BBC celebrating the first anniversary of the erstwhile Third Programme. Bang and we are off: a fearsome explosion of Stravinsky-infused joy immediately capturing the mood and establishing a journey through which Poulenc frequently tempers the exuberance with breezy wit, elegiac schmalz, and a specific way with melody that tugs on the heartstrings. 

Emelyanychev grasped the seething ambiguity of the music, its pungent similarities at times to the  earlier Organ Concerto, the breezy joie de vivre of the second movement Scherzo, the spectral delicacy of the Andante cantabile, and the undisguised echoes of Tchaikovsky, even Dvorak, surfacing occasionally above the transient hubbub of a truly sparkling score. He got the very best from a visibly energised SCO.

It offered the ideal preparation for the same composer’s Gloria, the perfection of the ensuing performance – with its renewed allegiance to Stravinsky, this time owing much to A Symphony of Psalms – critical to its gripping success. Again, there was electrifying playing from the orchestra, at times screamingly brutal, at others liquid and ephemeral. The Chorus – if slightly overwhelmed at the very start by the band – quickly found its feet in a performance ranging from idyllic reverence to declamatory exultation, yet always within the bounds of crystalline homogeneity. 

Soprano soloist Anna Dennis was breathtaking, picking notes seemingly from nowhere with pinpoint accuracy in the Domine Deus, casting an otherworldly spell over the gorgeous Agnus Dei.

The remarkable thing about the Vivaldi performance was the complete transition of the players and singers to authentic Baroque-style performance, Emelyanychev now directing from the harpsichord. The same precision applied, but now with a silver purity (vibrato-less strings, ravishingly pure oboe, agile single trumpet, with organ and theorbo completing the continuo group) and stylish persona. 

It introduced further soloists – Dennis joined by Glasgow-born soprano Rachel Redmond for a spritely duelling account of Laudamus te, countertenor Alberto Miguélez Rauco bringing an alluringly fresh dimension to the line-up. Oboist José Masmano Villar took the limelight in the Domine Deus, Rex coelestis, spinning out the solo obligato with increasingly rapt ornamentation.

The SCO Chorus was again a distinguished, life-giving presence, appropriately so in a week that welcomed the news of chorus master Gregory Batsleer’s decision to extend his SCO contract till August 2028. Definitely something to sing about!

Ken Walton 

SCO / Emelyanychev & RSNO / Sondergard

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh / Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra entitled the opening of its new season From Darkness to Light and that idea was just as audible in the concerts that began the seasons of both the BBC SSO and the RSNO.

At Glasgow City Halls the previous week, it was undoubtedly behind the celebratory strings of Ryan Wigglesworth’s tribute to the SSO’s former leader Laura Samuel, and applied just as well to the trajectory of Schumann’s Violin Concerto, as performed by Daniel Lozakovich.

In the SCO programme it clearly worked for both the opening and closing works. The famous fate motif that opens Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was predictably not laboured by Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev in a pacy and detailed interpretation of the work, following on from a much-lauded BBC Proms performance. It was in the transition from the Scherzo to the finale that the sense of emerging into brightness was most obvious, but this was a far-from-simplistic reading of the symphony with refreshing changes of power and tone in the slow movement as well as in the unfolding of its conclusion.

The concert had begun with Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen in a compact and intense version that was truly “chamber” music, with some excellent solo playing from the string front desks and carefully controlled ensemble that always kept a little in reserve. It was a performance that is well worth listening out for when the BBC recording is broadcast.

So too, it hardly needs saying, is the orchestra’s playing of Veni, Veni Emmanuel with soloist Colin Currie, even if the trajectory of the piece arguably defies the Darkness-to-Light equation. Currie must have given a fair proportion of the remarkable number of performances MacMillan’s early percussion concerto has enjoyed since the SCO premiered it with Evelyn Glennie at the 1992 Proms.

It is still one of the most thrilling works in the composer’s now extensive catalogue, and it was good to be reminded that the brasher music is more than balanced with much gentler, melodic, and equally virtuosic, music. The closing bars, when the soloist moved to tubular bells at the back of the stage and the whole orchestra adding tinkling percussion was movingly evocative of the Ascension, so perhaps the SCO’s concert title did work here as well.

‘From darkness to light’ is only one interpretation of the complexity of Mahler’s Symphony No.7, the major work of the RSNO’s season-opener as Music Director Thomas Sondergard continued his commitment to a full cycle of the composer’s symphonies. It’s a valid one, nonetheless, and the conductor certainly suggested as much in his dynamic marshalling of the large orchestra through its long structure. The two Nachtmusik movements emerged especially well, the horn calls in the former, and the sequence of solos – violin, guitar, mandolin and oboe among them – in the latter beautifully calibrated.

There is much operatic about the work’s conclusion, and Sondergard was in his element with the theatrical changes of pace leading up to the dramatic bells that also punctuate this work’s ending.

In a great run of concert openers, the RSNO began its season with Oliver Knussen’s terrific miniature, Flourish with Fireworks, which has long transcended its specific commission by the LSO at the end of the 1980s to become an emblem of the composer’s infectious enthusiasm.

The concerto that followed was Ravel’s in G Major with Francesco Piemontesi the perfect partnership soloist, embracing his dialogues with orchestra members and as eloquent in the lush Romanticism of the central Adagio as in the more 20th century jazzy rhythms of the contrasting outer movements.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Martin Shields

EIF: La clemenza di Tito

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Although he made a very brief one of opposition to the war in Ukraine at the beginning of March 2022, no-one looks to the SCO’s Russian Principal Conductor for political statements. Maxim Emelyanychev is a musician with every fibre of his being: “I live for the creation of music and art” he said in that same bulletin.

Nonetheless, it would be easy to see a message to belligerent leaders across the world in his odd choice of La clemenza di Tito for the third of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s concert performances of Mozart Opera’s at the Edinburgh Festival.

Not so many years ago the merciful titular Roman emperor, prepared to forgive betraying consorts as readily as would-be assassins, was seen as a bit of a sap in the canon of opera heroes; in 2025 his lack of vindictiveness looks like something we could use a deal more of.

That’s not the only reason that La clemenza is rarely seen as of the same rank as The Magic Flute and Cosi fan tutte, the operas Emelyanychev and the SCO have presented in the last two years. Dating, like the Flute and the Requiem, from the last year of the composer’s life, it was composed at astonishing speed to a lucrative commission from Prague, is thought to contain some recitatives that he farmed out to a pupil, and has had a very uneven performance history since 1791.

This EIF performance featured the unmistakable roar of the RAF Red Arrows adding a flypast to the Castle Esplanade’s Tattoo around fifteen minutes in, but everything else was under the firm, charismatic direction of the conductor, whose Mozart readings are now easily escaping the long shadow cast by the SCO’s partnership with Sir Charles Mackerras.

Emelyanychev worked his socks off in this concert, playing eloquent fortepiano continuo as well as directing orchestra and chorus and – just as assiduously – the cast of soloists.

And what a terrific cast he had. The opening partnership of mezzo Angela Brower as Sesto and soprano Tara Erraught as Vitellia – dramatic, full of character and powerfully sung – only hinted at the riches to come, even if those two deserved the prize laurels at the end. A little later in Act One, the uncannily parallel duet by Maria Warenberg’s Annio and Hera Hyesang Park’s Servilia is one of the score’s best tunes and the singers made the most of it.

If bass Pater Kalman’s Publio has an onstage musical partner it is not Tito but the Chorus, he the voice of the Senate and they that of the citizens. If he was authoritative, with a nice suggestion of perplexity at turns of events, Gregory Batsleer’s SCO Chorus was as marvellous as it reliably is, to the extent of prompting the wish that they had had more to do.

More of an unknown quantity in Scotland – although he will sing Germont at Covent Garden next year – was tenor Giovanni Sala, who brought a troubled vivacity and palpable vexation to his portrayal of Tito, as well as a very fine voice that was never at all strained by the demands of the score.

Those are considerable on the soloists, but Brower and especially Erraught were more than equal to the huge vocal range that they were required to demonstrate.

There may still be elements of the plot of La Clemenza that are hard to swallow, but that is true of many operas. Emelyanychev and this ensemble made a cast iron case for the music being of the very first rank.

Keith Bruce

SCO / Emelyanychev

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City Halls, Glasgow

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s former principal cellist David Watkin was not just a hugely respected musician but also a man much loved by his colleagues and then by students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland when illness curtailed his playing career.

His death last week occasioned a tribute online from his SCO desk partner Su-a Lee and another from his successor in the first cello chair, Philip Higham, at the start of this concert, which was dedicated to his memory.

The most affecting memorial, though, was the piece conductor Maxim Emelyanychev and the chamber orchestra’s strings added at the end of their programme, the second of Edvard Grieg’s Two Elegiac Melodies, the wistful Last Spring.

It is of exactly the same era as Brahms’ Violin Concerto, the work that had opened the programme and which attracted a capacity audience, including many younger faces, because of its soloist, Nicola Benedetti. For many in the hall it may have been the first opportunity to see her in a while, following her maternity leave break in performing, and the work is one with which she has long been associated.

The composer and its dedicatee, violinist Joseph Joachim, created a concerto that balances its virtuoso moments in the opening movement, including its closing cadenza, and in the fiery dance of the finale with long conversations with the orchestra, especially the first oboe in the Adagio. Benedetti and Emelyanychev delivered a beautifully integrated account of the work, his relationship with the orchestra evident in the precise dynamic calibration of the score and her familiarity with the piece clear in the accuracy of her double- and triple-stopping as much as her intensity of expression.

With extra numbers in the strings, totalling 32 players, and four horns, this was an enhanced edition of the SCO, which was even more crucial to the conductor’s account of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No 3, the “Scottish”. His tempi were brisk but he took pauses before the second and third movements in a reading that seemed – even more than the Brahms – focused on sonic balance. Maximiliano Martin’s clarinet was perfectly clear in its statement of the first movement theme, but far from dominant, and when the six cellos took up the tune of the slow movement it was with ensemble richness rather than volume.

It is sometimes suggested that the symphony, written a long time after Mendelssohn’s visit to Scotland and a long way away, is not very “Scottish” at all, but this performance had ample dour climatic colour and stress on the traditional and country dance music rhythms to please its Highlands-loving dedicatee, Queen Victoria.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Christopher Bowen

SCO / Emelyanychev

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City Halls, Glasgow

Visits to Scotland by pianist Yeol Eum Son – who has appeared with the BBC SSO, as an EIF Queen’s Hall recitalist, as a guest soloist in the Usher Hall’s Sunday concert series, and at the East Neuk Festival as well as with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra – are to be treasured.

The opportunity to hear her play Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto would be an added incentive for many and for that work to be presented in the context of this programme, with the peerless SCO Chorus singing Haydn’s Nelson Mass in the second half, completed an unmissable bingo card that predictably attracted a good audience.

That the conceit of the programme – all three works being linked to Haydn – did not stand up to much scrutiny, as the programme notes acknowledged, was neither here nor there. The brief student/teacher relationship between Beethoven and Haydn was long over by the time of the concerto, and had never amounted to much in the  face of both composer’s driven agendas anyway.

The opening work, Brahms’ Variations on a theme by Haydn, we now know to be based on tune that had nothing at all to do with the earlier composer, whatever Brahms believed at the time. Nonetheless, the  St Anthony Chorale was worthy of his attention and his set of orchestral explorations of that raw material, employing an early music device on a piece of early music, was an ideal beginning.

The symphonic scoring makes full use of the range of pitch available from contrabassoon to piccolo and the flow of ideas comes swift and fast – ideal music for conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, always fleet of musical thought.

He and Yeol Eum Son had agreed a brisk tempo for the Beethoven too, and it was in that context that her first entry, phrased with conversational pauses, was so immediately arresting. Her playing was captivating from start to finish, precision filigree ripples and runs married to a mighty left hand and technical mastery always at the service of emotional expression. Beethoven had recently emerged from a time of documented personal turmoil and a sense of that ran through Eum Son’s performance as well as a delight in the musical artistry – radical as it was at the time – inherent in the work.

If Beethoven was pushing the envelope with the Third Piano Concerto, Haydn was ever the opportunist in (re)naming his Nelson Mass in honour of the victorious English Admiral who attended an early performance. Originally it had been his “Missa in angustiis” or “Mass for troubled times”, and perhaps reinstating that title would suit our own times.

It needs a terrific soprano soloist, and had one in this performance in Anna Dennis, on stellar form. There was nothing at all wrong with the rest of the vocal front line either, and mezzo Katie Bray, tenor Anthony Gregory and bass baritone Neal Davies took their briefer moments in the spotlight well and also combined beautifully, notably on the Benedictus quartet.

As usual, Emelyanychev had thought carefully about the placing of his musicians, with the vocal soloists in front of the chorus but behind the players, and the bass instruments split across the platform, a returned Nikita Naumov partnered by bassoonist Cerys Ambrose-Evans stage right and the other pair of double basses stage left.

The result was an integrated sound which showcased the orchestra as much as it did the choir, immaculately prepared by Gregory Batsleer.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Yeol Eum Son by Andrew Castro

SCO: Ad Absurdum

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City Halls, Glasgow

The programme was entitled Ad Absurdum – “to the point of absurdity” – and it lived up to its name. In a good way. For this was a collection of music that mostly walked on the wild side. That’s not necessarily a label you’d attach to James MacMillan’s seminal early work Tryst, but the company it kept – the barmy creative mind of Jörg Widmann and a side to John Adams seething with cartoonesque irony – smacked of ballsy insurgence and irreverent fun. As SCO principal viola Max Mandel’s introductory remarks pithily warned us, there was comedy in this music …… of the alternative variety.

If MacMillan’s Tryst – a work dating from the 1989 St Magnus Festival that first established his definitive orchestra style (his first big popular success, The Confession of Isobel Gowdie, came a year later at the BBC Proms) – offered a more serious opening gambit, this was a performance by the SCO under chief conductor Maxim Emelyanychev that highlighted the inspired individualism and latent edge of the then young MacMillan. 

Those screaming clarinets countering the pulsating strings at the start, the paradoxic blood-curdling serenity of the contrasting second section, the dagger-like shards that challenge any prevailing calm, and ferocious dances ignited by incendiary rhythms, all fused tantalisingly together as a potent reminder of where it all began for this now ennobled composer.

Then came the fun and fireworks, firstly in Widmann’s extraordinary trumpet concerto ad absurdum, effectively the title track of the evening – a breathless moto perpetuo that, had the musicians been paid by the note, would have secured them a considerable fortune for the gig, not least its soloist, Israeli-Russian trumpeter Sergei Nakariakov. His was a mind-blowing display of supersonic tonguing, Schnittke-like exaggeration, virtuosic eccentricities and infinite stamina, not to mention the infectious musicality through which he elicited lyrical nuance from a swarming volcanic morass.

The same composer’s Con Brio threw the spotlight on the orchestra itself. To some extent it’s a skit on Beethoven, written originally to partner two of his symphonies, pitting snapshots of his idiosyncratic rhetoric – often just an isolated chordal explosion or momentary quote – against a sea of hi-octane musical psychedelia. Both Widmann pieces were a veritable showcase for the SCO’s in-house expertise, not least a solo theatrical break by timpanist Louise Lewis Goodwin that a frenzied Keith Moon would have been rightly proud of.

All of which led to John Adams’ Chamber Symphony, disarmingly mis-titled, in that any perceived influences (declared by Adams himself) from a similarly-named precedent by Schoenberg were instantly swept aside by the more dominant and truculent sway – also self-declared – of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale and Milhaud’s street savvy La Création du monde. 

An animated Emelyanychev inspired a performance of sizzling energy and infinite hues. The compact 15-strong ensemble sounded way greater than the sum of the parts, invoking the raw jazz-infused menagerie of the opening Mongrel Airs, the weird bittersweet cool of the central Aria with Walking Bass, then in Roadrunner a helter-skelter race to the finish line reinforced by the grizzly synthesiser presence. A glorious end to a night of infinite surprises, breathless excitement and unrelenting absurdity.

Ken Walton

SCO / Emelyanychev

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City Halls, Glasgow

There were a couple of extra gifts under the tree at the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s last Glasgow concert of 2024. At its end, conductor Maxim Emelyanychev added an encore at the harpsichord and at the beginning of the second half he preceded Eine kleine Nachtmusik with the recently unearthed “Ganz kleine Nachtmusik”, discovered in Leipzig a few months ago.

That chamber work by the teenage Mozart sat well in a programme that framed one of the composer’s best-known works with music of his peers that is much less familiar. It began with an opera overture from Haydn, written for the Esterhazy court. His shipwreck tale, L’isola disabitata, may be a rarity on stages now, but the music was theatrical enough.

We were in Vienna for the rest of the programme, beginning with Franz Krommer’s first double-clarinet concerto, one of a number of pieces the prolific Moravian composed for the wind instrument that was then a single-reed novelty. Mozart and Brahms were similarly inspired by the clarinet, but Krommer was clearly like a kid with a new toy, and the E-flat Concerto for two Clarinets is a glorious exploration of the instrument’s capabilities, and particularly how its range can be used by the duetting voices.

Other players – the strings, flute, horns and trumpets – have a share of the score, but the focus is always on the soloists, and SCO players Maximiliano Martin and William Stafford brought the tune-packed work vibrantly to life. The energy level of the performance was, however, just as clearly emanating from Emelyanychev at the keyboard.

The SCO strings played Eine kleine standing, all eyes on the conductor at the keyboard, and there are few ensembles in the world who could take such a well-known work and make it seem so fresh and new. Emelyanychev used his resources carefully, stripping things back to a central quintet for the more contemplative sections and taking the whole work at often bracing speed.

The fuller forces required for Paul Wranitzky’s Symphony in D meant that it could only really sit at the end of the evening, but that did the piece few favours. He may have been an important figure in Vienna at the time, but Wranitzky’s music lacks the musical meat to support the repetitions in the early movements of the symphony. The second movement gavotte may have the best melody in the work, but it seems under-developed, as does the tune in the Polonaise, although the trumpets and horns liven things for the finale.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Maxim Emelyanychev by Andrej Grilc

SCO: Mozart Gala

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City Halls, Glasgow

Mozart’s Mass in C minor is something of an enigma. He never completed it, partly because he was doing it off his own bat rather than at the behest of an impatient patron, so it’s missing bits and pieces, including the entirety of the Agnus Dei. Successive editors have attempted varying degrees of completion, but as a general rule, performances that stick closest to what Mozart left us tend to be the more satisfying.

That was the approach adopted by the SCO and SCO Chorus on Friday, which formed part of a Mozart Gala programme directed by the orchestra’s irrepressible chief conductor Maxim Emelyanychev. And while the opening “Prague” Symphony and its punchy complexity offered a wholly compatible Mozartian complement, it was the Mass performance that provided, ironically, the most complete satisfaction.

Which it did right from the start in a Kyrie sung with penetrating clarity – great consonants! – by Gregory Batsleer’s finely tuned chorus and soon introducing angelic soprano Luce Crowe, whose vocal versatility and acrobatic precision were to remain a feature of her performance. Compare that to her companion soprano Anna Dennis’s more rapturous numbers, moments of languishing expressiveness and generosity that especially lit up the Gloria. 

Of the male soloists, Scots tenor Thomas Walker added a more operatic edge, while bass-baritone Edward Grint, though with relatively little to do, fitted seamlessly into the full quartet in the Benedictus. 

Emelyanychev’s direction was, as ever, energetic and packed with detailed idiosyncrasies. There’s something very Bach-like in much of this music, and he treated it a such, lithesome and thrustful, but its phrases given plentiful space to breath. There were moments where he allowed the orchestra to overwhelm the chorus, and the SCO’s upper strings seemed anxious at times, occasionally affecting intonation and unanimity in attack. But this is music that deserves to be heard, and in that justice was done.

To an extent, the same applied to the “Prague” Symphony, though this wasn’t the SCO at its absolute finest. Where things went smoothly, the dramatic excitement of this work played out effectively, in particular the quasi-operatic thrills and spills of the opening movement, the rusticated stateliness of the central Andante, and the homeward sprint of the Finale. Again, the upper violins occasionally faltered, and even Emelyanychev seemed less fiery than usual in places. That’s only because he normally delivers perfection-plus.

Ken Walton 

SCO / Emelyanychev

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Perth Concert Hall

Like Mozart and Haydn, although closer to the successful marriage of the former than the matrimonial disaster of the latter, Dvorak settled for the sister. And like Wolfgang’s Constanze, Anna seems to have coped with Antonin’s initial hopes of the hand of her older sibling; perhaps the success of her husband’s Cello Concerto helped.

Its deeply moving central slow movement, is, however, an elegiac statement of lasting affection for Josefina, who was gravely ill at the time it was written. Was Steven Isserlis’s performance of it with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra as heart-rending as it can be? Not really, but the strengths of the all-Dvorak programme that launched the SCO’s new season were not always emotional ones.

Introducing the concert, the orchestra’s own first cello, Philip Higham, praised Isserlis’s peerless way with the story of the concerto. It is a narrative he’s been giving with other orchestras in France and Germany recently, and to which he’ll return in Paris next month. What lifted this telling was the partnership with the SCO, conductor Maxim Emelyanychev perfectly supportive but also characteristically imaginative in his highlighting of details of the orchestral writing.

The opening bars on the winds enticed the ear in a “once upon a time” way, and the pacing and dynamics of the opening movement were such a secure foundation that Isserlis seemed to respond with more expression as the work unfolded. It was a reading that built in impact so that the moment of wistfulness from first violin Marcus Barcham Stevens, in dialogue with the soloist near the end, was especially effective.

Emelyanychev was even more persuasive on the composer’s Eighth Symphony, its robust outer movements bracketing a memorably spacious Adagio and a sparkling triple time Allegretto. The SCO winds – especially first flute Andre Cebrian and principal clarinet Maximiliano Martin – were on stellar form from the start, and the balance the conductor achieved in Perth’s fine acoustic on the slow movement was magical while the waltz became the definitive statement of Dvorak’s skill in making orchestral music from folk ingredients.

The real indulgence of the programme was the opener, the largest forces being required for the briefest piece, the 1891 Carnival Overture. The three chaps on tambourine, triangle and cymbals deservedly took a bow for their part in the pin sharp rhythms, but the low brass and double basses made as distinctive a contribution to what was a most memorable beginning to the chamber orchestra’s new season.

Keith Bruce

The SCO’s Celebration of Dvorak is repeated on Thursday and Friday, September 26 & 27 at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall and Glasgow City Halls.

EIF: Emelyanychev; Kanneh-Mason; Bostridge

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Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

As a constant presence in the Edinburgh International Festival, the Queen’s Hall 11am concerts have once again proved a regular comfort blanket at that brunch time of the day. But there’s a change this year that seems hard to justify, and which has lessened the completeness of the experience. 

For whatever reason – and I’m guessing production and commissioning costs may be a factor – the Festival has ditched its comprehensive programme booklets and replaced them at the extreme with skimpy free leaflets. The programme listings are skeletal, any notes to clarify context are either minimal or non-existent. Okay, you can unfold it to reveal a frankly useless poster, but there has to be a happy medium where better quality information can be articulated.

So thank goodness for the music. 

Tuesday was pure entertainment with a touch of class. This was Maxim Emelyanychev & Principals of the SCO, in other words conductor and players, but with the effervescent Russian maestro swapping his baton for a fortepiano. The music was exclusively Mozart – at least that’s what the meagre programme sheet told us – whereas Emelyanychev chose to insert Haydn’s acrobatic Fantasia in C where an Improvisation was indicated, albeit personalised by him turning Haydn’s “lunga” pauses into pure Victor Borge moments where endless waits – twiddling of thumbs – drew the laughter as intended.

But that was the magic of this programme, good-humoured repartee mixed with classy music-making. Emelyanychev was joined firstly by violinist Stephanie Gonley, violist Max Mandel and cellist Philip Higham in Mozart’s Piano Quartet in G minor, a work constructed around intricate interplay that was playfully realised by the ensemble: a robust opening Allegro and spring-like Rondo finale separated by one of the composer’s most heart-stopping Andantes.

Clarinettist Maximiliano Martin brought contrasted texture to the ‘Kegelstatt’ Piano Trio in E flat, a performance in which he and Mandel jostled lyrically, initially reflectively, and ultimately with heightened spirit. After the Haydn intermission came the meat of the programme, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 12, K414 – the smaller A major compared to the later K488 – in a string chamber version that expanded the original group to include violinist Marcus Barcham-Stevens and double bass Nikita Naumov.

It was a triumph of scale, the sparkling delicacy of Emelyanychev’s fortepiano an integral yet dominant answer to the intimacy of the wider ensemble – a tasteful protagonist. In truth, it was also a much more cleanly assured performance than the concert opener, in which the apparent use of gut strings required some settling in.

For the following day’s cello-piano duo recital by Sheku Kanneh-Mason and Harry Baker, the repertoire was a lighter mix, founded on the principle that Bach’s influence threaded through it, and that his influence straddled the worlds of classical and jazz. In the latter camp, Baker’s velvety jazz persona held sway, adapting the coolest of numbers by Bill Evans (Waltz for Debby – Kanneh-Mason striking up a mean walking bass), Pat Metheney (the gentle whimsy of James) and the upbeat soul of Laura Mvula’s Green Garden. Kanneh-Mason collaborated in a laid-back arrangement of La Havas’ Sour Flower. 

Two Janacek works – more Baker arrangements in a steely selection of Moravian Folksongs and a straight but expansive reading of the Czech composer’s Pohádka – and the pair’s jointly composed Prelude and Fugue (a mixed success in the style of Shostakovich) completed the opening half.

Bach’s solo Cello Suite No 1 wove a binding thread through the second half, Kanneh-Mason’s warm performances (if occasionally rocked by ill-tuned double-stopping) sitting prettily with the stylistic offshoots of he and Baker’s free-flowing improvisation on Bach’s chorale “Ich ruf zu dir”, the heightened rhythmic idiosyncrasies of music from Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras No 2, and a dizzy sign-off duo arrangement of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D flat minor.

Thursday’s Lieder recital promised its own curiosity factor, the combination of Ian Bostridge and Steven Osborne in a programme that wrapped Schubert’s song cycle Schwanengesang around four miscellaneous settings of appropriate verse. It was often painful to watch. How on earth does Bostridge pull such agonised facial contortions, as if Munch’s The Scream has come horrifyingly to life? Neither Rellstab’s or Heine’s poems necessarily warrant such histrionics, yet away from the visual agony there was considerable depth and lyrical poignance in the tenor’s delivery. 

Indeed, he and Osborne made a profound coupling, the Scots pianist complementing Bostridge’s intensity with deep, searching tone production and instinctive responses to the singer’s expressive freedom. From the calm of Liebesbotschaft to the literary cuckoo in the nest – the breezy closing setting of Seidl’s Die Taubenpost – it was the sense of unwavering conviction that won the day. The centrally inserted songs offered a breath of fresh air in the midst of the heat.

Ken Walton

EIF: Cosi fan tutte

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

The librettos Lorenzo Da Ponte wrote for Mozart pose problems for modern audiences which opera directors love to wrestle with, not always to the benefit of the works or, indeed, the ticket-buyers. As SCO Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev has mischievously said, one of the benefits of concert performances is the absence of that input.

Directing Cosi fan tutte from the fortepiano, he and his cast of six absolutely top-notch soloists demonstrated that the work not only survives but thrives without the benefit of a full production. The quality singers, led by Golda Schultz as Fiordiligoi and Angela Brower as Dorabella with Christopher Maltman as superb as you’d expect in the role of Don Alfonso, could not overshadow the fact that this was musically Emelyanychev’s show.

From the distinctive pacing of the familiar overture to the oddly ambivalent sextet at the work’s close, when Da Ponte undoubtedly pulls his punches even if Mozart is still at full throttle, the conductor was all over the score. Many conductors leave star soloists to get on with it and concentrate on their orchestra in such performances, but that is not Emelyanychev’s way and he was rewarded with full engagement from his singers, playful flirting and playground joshing included.

A particular strength of Cosi is that the whole story, in all its ludicrous detail, is sung with great clarity, so the absence of full costuming and silly disguises matters not a jot if the audience is listening (and reading the surtitles). The singers did enough in the costume department, but were crucially all highly mobile. That was especially true of the clowning of Josh Lovell and Huw Montague Rendall as Ferrando and Guglielmo, but also of Maltman and especially Hera Hyesang Park as Despina, who perhaps pushed the boat out too far at times with her brusque characterisation of the mercenary chambermaid.

The singing from all six, and by the SCO Chorus in their contributions, was consistently superb. For all the animation onstage, the cast contrived to disappear into the wings to give each other full focus during many of the solo arias, while the ensembles, whether huddled together as Don Alfonso sympathises with the deserted women or scattered across the platform for the Act 1 sextet, were all excellently well balanced.

The augmented SCO was on similarly stellar form, the quality of playing undoubtedly lifting the singers to their best game. How they managed not to giggle at some of the more outrageous keyboard ornamentation Emelyanychev added to his continuo playing remains a mystery.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Andrew Perry

SCO / Elijah

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SCO / Elijah

Usher Hall, Edinburgh 

If Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah has had a mixed press over the years, it’s not because the piece is second rate, but rather because it poses a musical, as well as technical, challenge to anything less than first rate choirs. This superb performance mounted by the SCO and SCO Chorus to complete its 50th Anniversary Season was living proof.

Rarely have I felt so gripped by the lengthy, yet energetically succinct, theatrical thread with which Mendelssohn depicts the turmoil of Elijah’s testing mission to return the God-forsaken idolaters of Baal to recognising their true God, with all the cataclysms that accompany it. What the composer did, in time for its Birmingham premiere in 1846, was to encapsulate this in vivid, quasi-operatic terms. On Thursday at the Usher Hall, SCO chief conductor Maxim Emelyanychev harnessed its  unfaltering intensity, gleaning from his orchestra, chorus and soloists a performance that flew like “the mighty wind”.

The unorthodoxy of the opening played its own part in tilting us towards the edge of our seats – an awakening pronouncement from Elijah (baritone Roderick Williams) before the down-to-business assertion of a fugal overture whose chromatic, two-note opening motif could so easily have inspired John Williams’ Jaws theme. Then with hardly a second to catch breath, the SCO Chorus announced their own presence with an opening chorus, sung with penetrating precision, yet warmed by neatly nuanced phrasing.

Thereafter, the momentum never once flagged. The soloists, seated either side of the stage, remained alert to their cues to move to and from centre stage, and from whom some of the loveliest arias took flight.

Tenor Thomas Walker brought heartwarming purity to “If with all your heart”, soprano Carolyn Sampson imbuing “Hear ye, Israel” with sublime lustre. Anna Stéphany’s gorgeous mezzo tones sat perfectly with “Woe unto them who forsake him!”, unshaken by an errant (if perhaps timely) mobile phone. The sublime resignation in Williams’ “It is enough” gained added poignancy against the vibrato-less cellos, while Soprano II, Rowan Pierce, cut a soaring presence as The Youth, even if it that brief role remains more characterful when sung by a young treble voice.

Beyond all else, though, this was a collegiate triumph in which Emelyanychev’s vision held firm in shaping the common will. Every note had defined purpose; each paragraph in the drama bore distinctive cogency.  There wasn’t a singe moment where the energy or excitement sapped. If the SCO has proved over this Anniversary Season that it’s riding on a magnificent high, this was the absolute pinnacle.

Ken Walton 

SCO / Emelyanychev

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City Halls, Glasgow

Alongside world class musicianship and a breadth of programming that leaves few ears unengaged, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s 50th anniversary season has been distinguished by very thoughtful and original programming. This concert, built around the world premiere of a new choral work by Sir James MacMillan, was a stunning example of that.

MacMillan’s Composed in August – not a diary note but the real title of the Robert Burns lyric known mostly by its first line Now Westlin Winds – is an SCO commission with partner organisations in Estonia and Sweden. Once they have had their premieres, it is likely to become a very popular piece with choirs, challenging in parts but tune-filled, and unusual in being a secular work from MacMillan for these forces.

The singers have to employ a range of techniques and the excellent SCO Chorus members were as assured in their diction of the rhythmically overlapping phrases as in the wordless music at the gentle finish. The instrumental music is for the SCO’s standard set-up, with the odd extra string player, and echoes the pastoral music of the Baroque era in the strings, horns and woodwind birdsong while still bearing the clear signature of the composer. With a wealth of different music over the five stanzas, it is an exquisite piece.

The work of two Ayrshire lads was followed by a Mancunian’s impression of Orcadian celebration, with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s perennially popular An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise. There are few conductors who so obviously enjoy their work as Maxim Emelyanychev, but the young Russian was in ecstatic form here, enjoying all the theatre of the piece with foot-stomping enthusiasm. That included a tray of drams being brought on for himself and leader Stephanie Gonley as the work slides into inebriation, greeted with a hilarious massed “slanj” of hipflasks from the chorus, still seated in the choir stalls.

If the larks set up the arrival of piper Robert Jordan, in full regalia, from the back of hall to perfection, there was also a characteristic precision in every detail of their performance – especially the “tuning up” moment, which Emelyanychev surely recognised as being a gag partly at his own expense.

The programme began with a French composer’s way with Scots romanticism, Berlioz’s Rob Roy overture, which takes Burns’s tune Scots Wha Hae and finds a lot of different things to do with it. With some period instrumentation, it is a curious and fascinating response to Sir Walter Scott’s novel, full of colour and a reminder, perhaps, that the melody makes a strong claim to National Anthem status.

The overture teed-up a superb performance of the same composer’s La mort de Cleopatre with mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill on her best form. Rather than a soloist at the front of the stage she was embedded in the music, but at the same time gave an expressive reading that was straight off the opera stage. The low string pulse that sets up her welcoming of death sounded startlingly contemporary, and emblematic of how this orchestra and its associates span the centuries.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Karen Cargill by Nadine Boyd

SCO / Emelyanychev

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City Halls, Glasgow

The music commentary cliché “luxury casting” is usually wheeled out to describe starry concert performances of operas like those that have distinguished Edinburgh International Festivals in recent years, but it seems appropriate to dust it off for this concert, smaller in scale but no less spectacular in success.

As part of what is shaping up to be a very memorable 50th anniversary season, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra has a three-concert residency from Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto, and he will also be directing the other musicians onstage in the other two. For the first, however, the SCO’s equally individual and idiosyncratic principal conductor Maxim Emelyanychev was in charge (he is very rarely “on the podium”), only ceding that position to Kuusisto for a specific moment around the cadenza of Magnus Lindberg’s Violin Concerto.

If there were any risks in having two such powerful personalities share the platform, the result was only positive. The Lindberg is a very clever, demanding work, using a Mannheim Mozart ensemble to create uncompromisingly 21stcentury music, and it requires both a rigorous strict time conductor and a virtuoso soloist – being both at the same time would be impossible.

Although he did not give the New York premiere, Kuusisto is surely the perfect soloist for the work, dealing with its technical demands – not least in that cadenza – almost playfully, but also finding emotional depth alongside its theatricality.

There was an element of theatre in the presentation of the entire programme, albeit a subtle one. From the positioning of the players for the four movement suite of music from Faure’s Pelléas et Mélisande, basses at the back and clarinets off to the right, through to the extra strings added for Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony, the music of his Eighth String Quartet in the 1967 arrangement by Rudolf Barshai, this was a concert always in a state of flux and without a single superfluous ingredient.

That was most obvious in the smallest ensemble of the evening, for Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks, where 15 musicians huddled around Emelyanychev, unusually perched on a stool, in the centre of the stage. Here that starry cast also included the five wind soloists, but elsewhere the spotlight fell as often on the strings, with cellist Philip Higham having a particularly prominent – and practically perfect – night.

The programme was a profound repertoire statement from a conductor, and indeed an orchestra, more readily associated with earlier music. It was, beyond debate, world class in execution and a magnificent statement of the range of the SCO’s capabilities.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Christopher Bowen

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