Tag Archives: SCO

SCO / SCO Chorus / Minasi

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City Halls Glasgow

Mozart’s Requiem will forever pose the question “what if?”. If only he’d finished it, what level of masterpiece would we have been gifted? What happened is the stuff of myth, bordering on conspiracy. 

In short, Mozart was dying in 1791 and desperately accepted a clandestine commission from one Count Franz Walsegg-Stuppach via a mysterious agent. The Count, notorious for exercising ridiculous vanity projects in which he passed off such purchased works as his own, faced a dilemma when Mozart inconveniently died before completion. In a bid to fulfil the contract, Mozart’s wife charged his pupil Franz Süssmayr to finish the job, which is the version most commonly heard today, and which the SCO and SCO Chorus addressed to a packed City Halls on Friday.

These are forces that know their onions when it comes to Mozart. Gregory Batsleer’s choristers are a tight, gripping ensemble, even-toned throughout with just the right amount of pizazz, their compact numbers commensurate with the sleek, steely Classical machine that is the SCO. Even with a scoring that incorporates three trombones, it was remarkable to witness the elegant agility from that trio perfectly aligned to this performance’s sophisticated containment.

From Italian conductor Riccardo Minasi came a lead that was both urgent and passionate, rarely outstepping stylistic bounds. Where there was ravishing mystery in the opening bars and in many of those reflective sections within the Sequentia, there was also a living, breathing buoyancy enlivening the fugal Kyrie, belligerent Dies Irae and soul-stirring Offertorium. Subtleties in dynamic control gave voice to the most magical pianissimos, the Chorus’ verbal projection impressive at every level, the SCO forever attentive in support. 

Much was to be admired, too, in the solo vocal quartet, particularly distinguished by the cut-glass purity of tenor Julien Henric and affecting lyricism of bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch. Mezzo-soprano Hanna Hipp and soprano Louise Alder may have been less-consistently matched, not always in perfect step with the exactitude of the prevailing performance style, but both found moments of blissful magic with which to compensate. Perhaps complicit, Minasi’s gestural tendency to over-conduct led to periodic glitches in the rhythmic flow.

What was really striking about this performance, though, was the extent to which it revealed the unmistakable depth of personality in Mozart’s writing – those bits he did write – that wasn’t always as evident with Haydn in the evening’s partner work, the older composer’s war-inspired Paukenmesse. 

There’s no doubting the merits of the latter, not least the quirky colouring in the closing Agnus Dei where timpanist Louise Lewis Goodwin’s wooden-sticked rat-tat-tats conjured up a valedictory martial air. The delivery – using mostly the same forces as the Mozart – was unquestionably sound and faithful to the score; it just seemed, in this case, a tad functional, like the short before the main feature, selling it more as an off-the-shelf offering from a dutiful composer than a rare masterpiece. 

Ken Walton

SCO: The Language of Eden

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City Halls, Glasgow

Had this sweeping, eloquent SCO programme featured only Jay Capperauld’s concise new oratorio The Language of Eden, it would still have been an altogether fulfilling experience. The Ayrshire composer’s tenure as the SCO’s associate composer has been one of the most visibly creative phenomenon in Scottish classical music of late. Each collaborative project, each new work, has exhibited a significant step forward for Capperauld, whose voice and facility are now representative of a mature and fertile creativity. His premieres are now highly-anticipated, not-to-be-missed occasions.

Of course, coming in at little over half-an-hour, there was considerably more to a concert in which The Language of Eden functioned as its magnificent finale. As the orchestra’s principal guest conductor Andrew Manze explained in his introductory spiel, the theme underlying the entire evening related not just to music’s relationship with language, but its subliminal function as a language is itself. 

We had Shakespeare – words from The Merchant of Venice – illuminated by Vaughan Williams in his moonlit Serenade to Music, its melting harmonies and liquid melodies gorgeously woven under Manze’s baton-less gesturing. The SCO and its mid-scale Chorus responded with sumptuous understatement which paradoxically heightened the music’s intoxicating spell.

That sense of relaxation rolled over into Elgar’s Serenade for Strings. Manze – himself a violinist – drew the loveliest of timbres and detailed tracery from the SCO strings: a wispy nonchalance in the opening Allegro; melodious charm in the Larghetto; and a luxuriant, ultimately glowing reserve in the final Allegretto. 

Equally autumnal was George Butterworth’s prophetic pre-First World War settings of six poems from E A Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, presented here in a tastefully generous orchestration by baritone Roderick Williams, who also took the solo role. In songs softly lamenting the futility of young lives lost before their time – the composer himself, at 30, was a casualty of the later 1914-18 French battlefields – Butterworth’s music draws equally on folkish naivety and sophisticated imagery.

Williams’ vocal delivery was smooth, lightly-nuanced and disturbingly calm, especially powerful in its emotional restraint, whether in the quiet pastoral reflection of Loveliest of Trees, the haunting folksong of The Lads in their Hundreds, or the spectral poignance of Is My Team Ploughing?. 

In the second half, Capperauld’s premiere was prefaced by an enticingly elemental performance of Haydn’s Representation of Chaos from his oratorio, The Creation. This made complete sense, given that The Language of Eden, composed to words by Uist-born poet Niall Campbell, is an imagined portrayal, amid the biblical creation story, of the birth of language. 

Adam, sung by Williams, is being “sculpted” by the collective “inhabitants” of Eden, who gift him the Four Elements as engines of the environment around him, and who motivate his ability to communicate through language, not least the innate power of music. 

The propulsive certainty underpinning Capperauld’s score was absolutely mind-blowing in this performance. Where a powerful aura of mystery prevailed, Manze drew also on a seething earthiness within – succinct and questioning in the opening scene-setter; atmospherically vivid and wildly animated in the dramatic depictions of Air, Earth, Fire and Water; quasi-religious as Adam became aware of the music within him; chillingly ritualistic in a fearful, ultimately thunderous portend to humanity’s approaching chaos (hideously pertinent in relation to current world affairs); and a soothing farewell steeped in idiomatic Scots flavouring.

The SCO Chorus were a vibrant presence, powerfully-voiced and physically comfortable with the marching-on-the-spot and breast-beating required of them. Williams, too, embraced his role with in-depth conviction. The SCO played its part with immaculate distinction. It was a veritable tour de force, Capperauld’s music exhilarating, often in the glittering manner of John Adams, hugely versatile in character, but most impressively contained within a singularity of purpose that had this audience on the edge of their seats.

Ken Walton

All Rise for EIF 2026

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After a thinner programme last year, the Edinburgh International Festival boasts a return to full strength on the road to its 80th anniversary celebrations next year, writes KEITH BRUCE.

Orchestral residencies from the Los Angeles and Berlin Philharmonics and Wynton Marsalis’s Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, and the world premiere of Missy Mazzoli’s new post-pandemic opera The Galloping Cure are headline attractions in the full Edinburgh International Festival programme for August 2026, unveiled today.

The Mazzoli opera follows the acclaimed Breaking the Waves at EIF 2019 and reunites the composer with librettist Royce Vavrek, stage director Tom Morris and conductor Stuart Stratford in a production from Scottish Opera and Opera Ventures.

The cast is headed by Argentinian mezzo Daniela Mack, British soprano Susan Bullock and German baritone Justin Austin.

It joins the already-announced Zurich Opera production of Verdi’s A Masked Ball, a revival of Adele Thomas’s acclaimed 2024 staging, as the staged operas bookending the programme at the Festival Theatre.

Operas in concert at the Usher Hall are Mozart’s Don Giovanni from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Maxim Emelyanychev, with Konstantin Krimmel as Giovanni, Louise Alder as Donna Anna and Brindley Sherratt as the Commendatore, and Strauss’s Elektra from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and conductor Karina Canellakis with Irene Theorin in the title role, Vida Mikneviciute as Chrysothemis and Nina Stemme as Klytamnestra.

The Festival has a focus on work from across the Atlantic and its theme, All Rise, is the title of Marsalis’s epic Symphony No 1, whose 12 movements will be the Opening Concert at the Usher Hall on Saturday August 8, teaming the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and its founder, featured soloist and composer with the Edinburgh Festival Chorus and the Jason Max Ferdinand Singers, under the baton of James Gaffigan.

During the following week, the orchestra plays Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige with conductor Chris Crenshaw and then gives two concerts on the evening of August 12 with Yuja Wang at the piano in what is a world premiere collaboration. Marsalis, who is married to Festival director Nicola Benedetti, with whom he has a daughter, has recently announced that he will step down as artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center in the summer of next year.

The LA Phil residency comes in the final year of its conductor Gustavo Dudamel’s tenure as Music Director. Three concerts include two Beethoven symphonies, Nos 7 and 6, and a family concert teaming the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles with Sistema Scotland’s Big Noise musicians.

Zurich Opera brings Verdi’s A Masked Ball

The Berlin Phil and conductor Kirill Petrenko close the Festival on Sunday August 30 with Scriabin’s Symphony No 3, preceded by Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with soloist Augustin Hadelich. The previous evening the programme is Elgar’s Enigma Variations and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 4. A sextet from the orchestra gives the Queen’s Hall chamber music recital on the morning of Saturday August 29.

Other highlights at the Usher Hall include two concerts by the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal, the first of which is a rare modern-day performance of the full three-hours of Coleridge-Taylor’s The Song of Hiawatha with the Festival Chorus and tenor Nicky Spence among the soloists, and Sir Donald Runnicles conducting his old friends the BBC SSO and the Festival Chorus in Mahler’s Das klagende Lied, with soloists including mezzo Catriona Morison.

The Royal Scottish National Orchestra is in the pit at Edinburgh Playhouse for the visit of San Francisco Ballet. The European premiere of choreographer Aszure Barton’s Mere Mortals is danced to a score by Floating Points (Sam Shepherd), conducted by Martin West.

Colin Currie and his group play an all-Steve Reich programme, John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London celebrate the Golden Age of Hollywood, and Jordi Savall and Hesperion XXI perform an Atlantic-spanning early music programme.

A day of Bach at the Usher Hall on Saturday August 22 starts with an invitation to “Come and Sing” Chorales, and has Alisa Weilerstein playing all the cello suites and pianist Vikingur Olafsson giving a late evening concert.

There is a tribute to the late Scottish trumpeter John Wallace from the band he founded, The Wallace Collection in partnership with the Cooperation Band and musicians from all three Scottish orchestras under conductor Clark Rundell, and the Queen’s Hall programme includes a tribute to pianist Alfred Brendel in three recitals of music associated with the great stalwart of Festivals past by Steven Osborne, Paul Lewis and Pierre-Laurent Aimard.

Debuts at the Queen’s Hall include those of mezzo Beth Taylor and guitarist Sean Shibe and that series opens with Dunedin Consort performing Tansy Davies’s new work Passion of Mary Magdelene with Anna Dennis and Marcus Farnsworth. Scottish Ensemble combines forces with small-pipes virtuoso Brighde Chaimbeul in another world premiere collaboration.

A full jazz, traditional music and folk programme at the EIF’s Royal Mile home, The Hub also includes Benedetti’s Classical Jam and a return visit from the global stars of the Aga Khan Music Programme.

Introducing her fourth Festival, Benedetti said: “Marking 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, we put America firmly in the spotlight. The American story is filled with innovation and ingenuity, perseverance and prejudice – tensions that have fuelled some of the most extraordinary artistic achievements in history.

“Our 2026 Festival is an invitation to All Rise together, and in doing so we celebrate not only artistic excellence but the resilience and flourishing of the human spirit.”

Tickets for EIF 2026 are on sale from noon on Thursday March 26 with priority booking for members and friends opening a week earlier. Full details at eif.co.uk

Picture of Zurich Opera’s A Masked Ball by Herwig Prammer; Nicola Benedetti and Wynton Marsalis by Carl Bigmore

SCO: Mozart Matinee

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City Halls, Glasgow

It wasn’t unusual for Mozart, in presenting concerts of his own music, to intersperse the movements of a major work with operatic arias, the odd overture, even bits of other major multi-movement works. He did so in Vienna in 1783, when the Haffner Symphony was split up to host concert arias, a couple of piano concertos, even two movements from the substantial Posthorn Serenade.

By all accounts that was a famously lengthy affair, unlike Friday’s Mozart Matinee by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, which adopted the aforementioned Serenade as its spinal column, with internal diversions ranging from an overture to assorted arias sung by Irish mezzo-soprano Tara Erraught, but doing so within the durational strictures of a standard two-hour concert. 

It was a refreshing scenario, not just for the lateral curiosity of its concept, but in the way it gave our ears a welcome breathing space within a luxuriantly lengthy piece. Bear in mind, the Posthorn was written for an academic graduation day, so may well have been regarded as background noise to some excitable student buzz. 

Mozartian muzak then? Absolutely not. This performance in particular, expertly directed with pincer-like extraction from the fortepiano by former SCO bassoonist (now highly-regarded conducting star) Peter Whelan, delved deep into the colourful vitality of the score. He opened with the first two movements, a wholesome and dramatic symphonic Adagio-Allegro complemented by a Minuetto rich in contrast and featuring the first of many assorted “concertante” showcases – flute and violin – that add lustre to the seven-movement Serenade. 

A direct segue into the aria Soffre il mio cor from a 14-year-old Mozart’s early opera Mitridate, rè di Ponto introduced the versatile Erraught. In this instance, while her technical virtuosity and vocal clarity was remarkable, a certain harshness affected this notably high-pitched piece.

Then it was back to the Posthorn for some classily consorting woodwind in the Concertante and a breezy Rondo that veered wickedly towards Rossini in its final moments. Erraught closed the first half with Parto, Parto from La clemenza di Tito, joined front stage by SCO principal clarinettist Maximiliano Martin in what amounted to a compelling, ultimately spectacular virtuoso dialogue. 

Opening the second half of the concert with the bristling overture to Der Schauspieldirektor was the perfect reawakening after a leisurely interval, a shot of adrenalin that fed neatly – given the commonality of key – into Temerari sortite … Come scoglio from Mozart’s Così fan tutte. Expressing Fiordiligi’s abandonment, Erraught was a tour de force, her now glowing presence feeding vociferously off the music’s febrile agility.

She was to make one more appearance beyond the quietening anguish of the Posthorn’s Andantino, in two contrasting excerpts from The Marriage of Figaro: firstly the Countess’ idyllic Dove sono, Erraught more naturally at ease with the opening recitative’s inherent drama than the long, breathless lyricism of the main aria; then in Susanna’s Guinse alfin il momento …. Deh vieni, non tardar, a role she is clearly in tune with, and with singing that was remarkable for its touching and tender expressiveness.

Old Copper Posthorn

Why is Mozart’s Posthorn Serenade so named? The answer was eventually to reveal itself in the penultimate Minuetto, where principal trumpet Peter Franks laid down his regular natural trumpet to pick up a gleaming modern-day replica of the functional instrument used in Mozart’s time to announce the arrival of the mail coach. 

What resembled a gold-plated yard of ale sounded just as the composer intended, rough and ready, so as to make its primitive mark against the orchestra’s polished refinement. Initially at extreme variance to the tuning around it, Marks’ brief but heroic championing of the parping hybrid inched towards a common pitch. The cuckoo-in-the-nest effect was not lost. Normality was restored in a regular Finale, a lithe and joyous conclusion to a well-considered, stylishly executed, and satisfyingly original programme. 

Ken Walton

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 / Marwood

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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 / Currie: Steve Reich+

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City Halls, Glasgow

The magic of modern musical minimalism lies in its simplistic repetition, organic gear shifts, and compulsive rhythmic propulsion from which springs an addictive Rock-style tension and, in the best examples, a transcendent euphoria. The fathers of that invention were, of course, the American minimalists, among them Steve Reich, whose music was the nucleus of this latest SCO New Dimensions programme – Steve Reich+ – curated and directed by star Scots percussionist Colin Currie.

Who better to engage with Reich’s music than Currie, whose longterm performance association with the now 89-year-old composer has given him a first-hand insight that set the second half of this concert ablaze? It included Runner, dating from 2016, and the earlier Double Sextet of 2002, both as fascinating to the eye as to the ear, given their stereophonic use of mirrored ensembles. 

Currie’s innate rhythmic presence as a percussionist proved the perfect credentials for invigorating these relatively late pieces, both of which lean to the Reich of old – edgy, motorised impetus heightened by cellular organic transformation – yet harness moments of softened, more reflective charm. 

The more heavily-scored Runner, an evolving play on different note durations, benefitted from a vitally sustained performance, rich in textural ingenuity and contrast, compulsive in its unstoppable drive to the finish. If the outer sections of the Double Sextet preserved the mechanistic excitement, with notably virtuosic elan, the ghostly reveries of the calming central movement took us to another, more introspective world. But only briefly.

This being a New Dimensions programme, Currie turned his attention in the first half to younger compositional voices – also friends of his – whose representative works owed varying indebtedness to Reich. First up was Joe Duddell’s Snowblind, the only work of the evening in which Currie jointly functioned as soloist. 

Written originally in 2001 for the former BT Scottish Ensemble, much of it oozes Reichian DNA, the moto perpetuo marimba-led dynamism of the opening Vivace dizzyingly incessant, the final moments equally so after the woozy pseudo-Baroque pastoralism of the central Lento. It wasn’t always the tidiest of performances, and there is something very Tippett-like in Duddell’s writing – a kind of self-effacing intangibility – that felt frustratingly incomplete.

Not so Helen Grime’s River, this being the UK premiere of a work first performed in 2023 by the Staatsorchester Hamburg in its wonderful riverside concert hall. From the very outset, Currie capitalised on the fuller colour spectrum and textural flexibility explored by Grime in her vivid soundscape. From rapid watery flurries to milky calms, spectral luminescence to dark undercurrents, and a final swirling representation of the river’s passage to the sea (signing off with a tangible nod to Britten’s Peter Grimes), this may have been the most un-Reichian music of the evening, but in spirit it certainly played its part.

Ken Walton

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: Baeva & Wigglesworth

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City Halls, Glasgow

It’s a measure of the man that when charismatic Finnish violinist/director Pekka Kuusisto had to pull out of his dual-purpose appearance with the SCO, his replacement was twofold. In came the highly experienced Mark Wigglesworth as conductor, but more especially, the fiery musical persona of violinist Alena Baeva as soloist in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. While Wigglesworth took masterful control of an unchanged programme, Baeva threw fascinating, to some extent enigmatic, new light on a concerto many might have considered exhausted of its interpretative potential.

Unusually, it was the starter to the evening, an approach perhaps aligned to the intended player/director role of Kuusisto. A second half that paired the 2022 work, Pocket Cosmos, by British-American composer Freya Waley-Cohen with Beethoven’s Symphony No 4, in the end presented an evenly balanced listening experience.

It also sharpened the impact of Baeva’s riveting performance. It was hugely personal, immediately evident in an opening that seemed precariously slow and considered, yet which quickly revealed its subtle ploy as a teaser to the compelling direction of travel ahead. There was something very operatic, emotionally unpredictable, but uncannily beautiful in her poetic expressiveness, as if the soul of Tatyana, from the composer’s opera Eugene Onegin, was being transfigured in instrumental form.

In so doing Baeva, along with Wigglesworth’s eagle-eyed precision, unearthed endless surprises: a solo line that never ceased to soar above an exquisitely balanced orchestral presence; orchestral details that opened our ears to often conversational secrets that so often become hidden within the general morass; in short, a genuinely reconditioned approach to an age-old potboiler. 

Equally refreshing was Baeva’s rhythmic buoyancy, articulated with electrifying precision and a power of projection that was both exhilarating and demonstrative. The opening movement encompassed moving affection and dazzling virtuosity on its monumental course, save for a momentary wobble near the end. After the soulful Russian-ness of the central Canzonetta, the Cossack grit of the Finale intensified and Beava signed off with the ecstatic flourish of a Whirling Dervish. A virtuosic Bacewicz encore maintained the heat.

Waley-Cohen’s Pocket Cosmos – written originally for Kuusisto and the London Chamber Orchestra, its title extracted from a poem by Rebecca Tamás – struck a perfect tone with which to open the second half. This is music liberated by its detailed originality. Wigglesworth gave it room to breath, the sheer transparency of its shifting textures charming the senses, its purposeful journey shaped with scintillating delicacy and sheen, its musical language – with unrepentant nods to Messiaen and Stravinsky – self-assured but also questioning. 

Where Beethoven’s Fourth is sometimes unfairly considered the runt of his symphonic litter, here was a performance to reaffirm its relevance and distinctiveness. Again, this was down to Wigglesworth’s assertive but non-interventionist lead. An acutely disciplined SCO reacted to his key signals with lightning exactitude, giving unceasing impetus to the dynamic flow, as much in the helter-skelter Scherzo and Finale as in an unlaboured Adagio. When Wigglesworth chose to step back, the orchestral machine remained a cohesive organism, instinctively interpreting his thoughts. 

Kuusisto will also be absent from Sunday afternoon’s Chamber Music recital (9 March) at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, in which he was to perform with members of the SCO. At the time of writing, he is still down to complete his advertised mini-residency directing next week’s SCO New Dimensions programme of Britten, Adès, Andres, Beamish and Haydn.

Ken Walton

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 / Swensen

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Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

We all hear music differently, but conductor Joseph Swensen’s introduction of the Sixth Symphony of Jean Sibelius as an ineffably sad work of proto-minimalism that needed the balance of an encore of the same composer’s Valse Triste to send us home with a spring in our step did seem a little eccentric.

If his view of a piece that is more usually seen as surprisingly buoyant given the composer’s personal circumstances at the time of its composition did not compromise a programme that had attracted a very full house, there was still a suspicion that it affected some of his tempo choices, although the occasional lapses of rhythmic rigour sat oddly with the supposed kinship to minimalism.

That unbilled encore worked well though, as a closing statement by a string ensemble (albeit with a few wind soloists added) which had opened the evening with Grazyna Bacewicz’s 1948 Concerto for String Orchestra. Like Sibelius 6 it looks to early music – although Baroque rather than Renaissance – for some of its material, but the orchestration is often redolent of contemporary film scores, the interweaving textures topped off with solos from guest musicians – at first cello and in the front desk of the violas – before leader Stephanie Gonley was featured in the finale.

As well as the familiar figure of Swensen on the podium and the appeal of Sibelius, the excellent attendance at  the Queen’s Hall spoke of the popularity of concerto soloist Geneva Lewis. The young New Zealand violinist has just finished two years as a BBC Radio 3 Young Generation artist, and coincidentally a fine Aberdeen performance of Piazzolla’s Histoire du Tango with accordionist Ryan Corbett had been broadcast earlier in the day.

Lewis’s precision approach to the Sibelius Violin Concerto, a pinnacle of the orchestral repertoire for her instrument, was exemplary. There was no lack of feeling and expression in her interpretation but it was the pin-sharp focus on every note in the score that really impressed.

That was no less true of the cadenza in the long first movement, while the balance with the orchestra was pretty much perfect throughout, at least from my seat upstairs in the Queen’s Hall. This was a large SCO for the venue, with five horns and five brass, but her top line was always clear. She and Swensen were not quite in sync at the last bar, but that hardly mattered.

There was an odd hesitancy about the questioning conclusion to the symphony as well – another of the composer’s challenging endings – as well as an uneasiness in the pulse at the start. Given his introductory remarks, perhaps this was all part of the conductor’s interpretation, but it was unlikely to be to all tastes. If there was a clarity about the pacing of the concerto – although the Adagio was probably as slow as it could stand – the symphony seemed much less assured.

But perhaps that is exactly how Swensen sees the difference between the two works.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Geneva Lewis by Matthew Holler

SCO / Podger

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City Halls, Glasgow

One of the greatest realisations in historic music performance over the past century has been to recognise and emulate the intrinsic spirit of the dance that lies at the heart of most European Baroque music, not  least that of JS Bach. If the clues were obvious in most cases – suite movements labelled Menuetto, Gavotte, Bourrée, Gigue, etc – it took time for even the pioneering 20th century revivalists to apply that lithely to their often earthbound interpretations. Thank goodness we’ve moved on – or rather, perhaps, moved back.

Nothing expressed this better than Baroque violinist Rachel Podger’s mainly-Bach programme with the SCO on Friday, one of its newly-established matinee concerts which played to a near-capacity Glasgow audience. Podger is like a breath of fresh air, cheerily and eruditely introducing the programme, before addressing the band with such balletic playing and directing as to extract the same supple refinement from the entire ensemble, which stood throughout .

Predominant within this nimble 18th-century cocktail were some of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, one (albeit the opening movement only of No 3) sneakily disguised in its self-borrowed form as the opening Sinfonia to the Cantata 174, “Ich liebe den Höchsten von ganzem Gemüte”. 

Podger opened with No 1, a dazzling showpiece for the natural horns whose counter rhythms at the start were a foretaste of the hooligan element they were to exhibit in the closing Menuetto. Hornists Boštjan Lipovšek and Jamie Shield were well up to their riotous task, rowdy but complicit in a performance – complete with Podger on delicate piccolo violin – that bristled with tantalising contrast and character.

The first half ended with that Cantata version of the Third Concerto, in which Bach amplifies his original with the colourful addition of winds and horns (how do they achieve those electrifying trills with mere lip action?). But not before sidestepping into Telemann’s Sonata in E minor (a dance suite in all but name) and a reminder that Bach wasn’t the only virtuoso circus act in town. Another svelte performance, and Baroque writing notable for its own idiosyncratic quirks (almost Purcellian in bits), proved once again that exquisite poeticism and spirited flamboyance are exhilarating bedfellows.

The second half coupled Brandenburg 4 with Bach’s Orchestral Suite No 3 in D. The former proved a thrilling, physically expressive showcase for SCO flautists André Cebrián and Marta Gómez, as well as for Podger herself, conquering the rollercoaster violin solo with easeful, gobsmacking facility. Equally, she elicited touches – judiciously unexpected hiatuses from the entire ensemble – that seemed magically spontaneous.

The Suite brought with it a sense of destination, the arrival on stage of the skyrocketing trumpet threesome and pertinent timpani lending a burnished sheen to this stirring concert finale. Most remarkable, however, was the appealing focus of the sound, Podger insisting on a precise, ringing clarity from the brass that kept everything superbly in proportion. Her tempi were pressing but perfectly accommodating. The Air – universally familiar as the old Hamlet cigar advert – served up a refreshing song-like interlude, coloured by neat improvised fill-ins on the lute. The closing dance movements summed up the choreographed perfection of the entire afternoon. 

Ken Walton

SCO / Bancroft

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City Halls, Glasgow

Eric Lu is not what you’d call the most exuberant of interpreters. The young American-born pianist, who rocketed to international fame as winner of the 2018 Leeds International Piano Competition at the age of only 20, is an artist who applies consideration before panache. We witnessed this two years ago when he played a cool Chopin with the BBC SSO. 

That’s not to say his Grieg Piano Concerto with the SCO on Friday lacked showmanship – after which, in any case, his flashy Chopin encore dispelled any doubts lingering in that direction. And where superlative bravado did surface in the Grieg it did so with mindful and inter-relational context. There was much poetic reflection where others settle for sustained urgency.

If this introduced a certain ambivalence to the performance, giving us becalmed episodes in the outer movements where Lu’s reluctance to push the music forward had a questionable tendency to counter its natural momentum, it also offered flecks of insight into the concerto’s inner charm. 

Under American conductor Ryan Bancroft (a one-time Leverhulme Conducting Fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) the SCO unveiled gems of orchestral detail that so often get lost in the wash. When, for instance, has the central Adagio ever sounded so timeless, the strings patiently teasing out the opening theme with subliminal warmth, over which Lu’s pianism emerged in a liberated (if not completely flawless) flow of self-expression. 

Where the opening movement bore faltering momentum, the Finale enjoyed a more convincing exuberance, its breezy rusticity imbued with a modicum of wistfulness that further stamped this performance with distinctiveness of its own. 

The overall programme theme was Nordic, a happy coincidence in the wake of last week’s Nordic Music Days festival. Before the Norwegian sounds of Grieg came Swedish composer Andrea Tarrodi’s Lucioles, a short work from 2011 that translates an evocative haiku describing a lake illuminated by fireflies by French writer François JJ Ribes into a vivid impressionistic soundscape. Swarms of orchestral density are shot through with darting flecks of solo instrumentation, which Bancroft engineered with delicate and shimmering precision. A pity about the unanswered mobile phone that antagonised and outlived the final stillness.

As SCO violinist Aisling O’Dea suggested in her thoughtful spoken introduction to the concert, there was a literal sense of journey implicit in this programme, where the final destination was Finland and Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony, famous for its radiant Swan Hymn and an ending that keeps you guessing as to which repeated chord is actually the last.

As with the Grieg, it took time to truly establish its persona. The impatient gathering of motives that mark the opening lacked bite and anticipation, leaving the first movement a little short of conviction. That changed instantly with the slow movement where Bancroft established a neat combination of edgy but delicate persistence, homing in on the Mahler influences that colour its wilder moments. The Finale delivered in literal terms but lacked that necessary coating of wonderment. The final chords, touched by a perceivable anxiety, echoed that matter-of-factness.

 Ken Walton

This programme is repeated in Aberdeen Music Hall on Sat 9 Nov.
Andrea Tarrodi’s Serenade in Seven Colours is available on the SCO’s Digital Series from 10 Nov – 10 Dec. See www.sco.org.uk for details.

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 / 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: 50th Birthday Concert

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City Halls, Glasgow

It was in this very hall, on 27 January 1974, that a brand new Scottish Chamber Orchestra first broke onto the scene, offering a mid-sized complement to the magnitude of the nation’s existing symphony orchestras. On Friday, in a spruced-up City Halls – refurbished 18 years ago – today’s SCO presented its 50th Birthday Concert to both a packed house within, and a live Radio 3 listenership at home.

As its current chief executive Gavin Reid explained in his pre-concert welcome, this was a programme representative of an orchestra with an exciting future ahead, but expressed in terms of the unique strengths that have sustained it for half a century. So there was a core Classical menu of Mozart and Haydn, offset by the contemporary sounds of composers Elena Langer and Jay Capperauld, not forgetting the vivacious, spontaneous creativity of principal conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, who makes every programme he directs seem like it is fresh out the box.

That was true from the word go in Moscow-born Langer’s quirky suite Figaro Gets a Divorce. In the same way that Christopher Rouse’s percussion concerto “Whatever Happened to Alberich” imagines how life for Wagner’s miserable Ring Cycle anti-hero turned out, Langer muses on the comic fate of Mozart’s (and Rossini’s) Figaro. 

Emelyanychev took it for what it is, a musical pantomime playing free with pastiche and parody to  manufacture its gauche, sometimes cartoonesque, delights. After the shady, scene-setting fog of Almaviva’s castle, a love song introduced a theme not dissimilar from one of Ravel’s in his Daphnis et Chloe. Indeed, the spirit of Ravel was often conjured up in music that was artfully textured, often unnervingly beguiling.

And there was plenty fun – a Keystone Kops-like chase, a steamy tango (all the more woozy for Ryan Corbett’s accordion interjections within the ranks) and a big-time Cabaret-style skirmish – A Mad Day – that romped unchallenged to the end. It was a piece that triumphed on adrenalin, its attendant energy overlooking any momentary weaknesses in compositional continuity.

Emelyanychev was joined by fellow pianist Dmitry Ablogin as duelling soloists in Mozart’s Concerto in E flat for Two Pianos – or rather fortepianos, as the Russian duo opted for the more delicate period choice of instrument. It may not feel like one of Mozart’s most accomplished works (everything’s relative!), but with the entertainment value provided here, and the gutsy clarity that is the SCOs signature Mozart sound, thrills weren’t short in supply.

And surprises! What was this showmen-like tit-for-tat preamble improvised by the pianists? Surely not Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto? Which is exactly what is was, conveniently in the same key of course, and a languorously hanging dominant chord to complete the joke, the punchline being its segue into the Mozart proper. 

From hereon in, Emelyanychev and Ablogin ramped up the solo dialogue into a cat and mouse game, enclosed physically within the surrounding orchestra, the whole mischievous visual interaction adding to the playfulness of the music. The final Rondo was the icing on the cake. 

Or rather it would have been, had it not been marginally upstaged by principal cellist Philip Higham’s poetically breathtaking encore performance of The Swan from Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals, accompanied by the two pianists. 

On paper, the second half was exclusively populated by Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony, the orchestra now standing to deliver a performance that responded immaculately and vitally to Emelyanychev’s imaginative twists and turns. It was perfection without being boring, neatly coordinated nuances that momentarily froze time without losing focus and direction. Ample surprises, but all in the best possible taste.

What followed was also meant to surprise – a masterful piece of “occasional” writing by the SCO’s composer-in-residence, Ayrshire-born Jay Capperauld. His birthday gift was an ingenious variation-like fantasy on the tune Happy Birthday to You, the theme’s rhythmic essence teasingly displaced, almost hooligan-like in its swagger and belligerent domination of the entire piece. 

This was virtuosic writing, bullishly imaginative, concise but emotionally extravagant, perfect for its purpose and ripely thrown off by an obliging SCO. I’ve probably said this before, but Capperauld should turn his hand sometime to the world of film music. He has an instinctive feel for capturing the moment.

Ken Walton

Here this concert again on BBC Sounds

SCO / Storgårds

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City Halls, Glasgow

Finding a truly unique voice among living composers is not a guaranteed occurrence, but that’s what SCO audiences were treated to last week in the UK premiere performances of a new Viola Concerto by the Canadian-born, UK-based Cassandra Miller. 

It was unique enough, in that concertos for this instrument are – and have been throughout its occasionally maligned history – a testing challenge. But what of the fascinating novelty of the music itself, a language and style governed by adventurous free-thinking and explorative self-confidence, that was so completely original and absorbing. 

“I cannot love without trembling” – a title borrowed from the writings of the early 20th century French philosopher Simone Weil – was written for, and performed by, the exceptional Lawrence Power, whose musical persona was as much the impulse as the vehicle of its success. He lives up to his name, but more than that, Power extracts a purity of tone from his instrument – no doubt a very good one – across the full range of its possibilities, possibly even beyond.

Take the fingered harmonics that lend the opening its ethereal intensity, piercing through a gathering underscore; or the gauche succulence of exaggerated vibrato and trembling oscillations that, in sultry interaction with the orchestra, spiral up to the highest reaches of the fingerboard. Throughout the work’s five sections, which blossom with expressive intensity despite Miller’s deliberate compositional containment, Power’s free-flowing virtuosity was spellbinding.

The concerto, Miller tells us, is “about the basic human need to lament”, its flickering ornamental language drawn from improvised moiroloi compositions by the early 20th century Greek folk violinist Alexis Zoumbas. Both the resulting work and its performance under conductor John Storgårds fully captured a spirit of gnawing ecstasy.

The other fascination in this programme was, itself, a well-worn work, Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. The obvious question is, why was a chamber orchestra tackling such hefty symphonic repertoire? The answer is, they weren’t, at least not in the form we know it. 

Instead, Storgårds introduced us to a reduced chamber orchestra version by conductor/arranger George Morton which may have played havoc with listener expectations – the single wind all-too-often smacked of a lo-fat alternative, not their fault, and the inevitable thinning of textures led to uncomfortable imbalances – but much of which drew focus to aspects of Tchaikovsky often overlooked. The performance, itself, was admirably lithe and perceptive.

More satisfying all round was the opening work, Sibelius’ Suite No 2 extracted from his incidental music to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Here was a sequence of scene-setters and character sketches richly portrayed by a composer prepared to enrich a theatrically-prescribed musical response with his own enigmatic, sharp-edged personality. Storgårds’ casual authority ensured an illuminative performance. 

Ken Walton

SCO / Schuldt

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SCO / Schuldt

Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

Getting the best out of Schumann is not as easy as one might imagine. There’s something about his orchestral music in particular that tells of an ardent and instinctive creative mind working hard to express the fullness of its fruits, but where an overabundance of his own self-criticism looms menacingly, threatening to suffocate its natural flow. Get the right conductor, and the threats dissolve. Clement Schuldt is one such exponent, something he proved beyond doubt in an SCO programme that began and ended with Schumann.

It was in the final work, the Symphony No 3 known as the Rhenish, that the distinctive character of Schuldt’s approach was most forcibly illustrated. He is a gestural conductor, who paints vivid pictures with his hands and which an orchestra as responsive as the SCO latches onto with stimulating results. 

This was by no means a pristine run-of-the-mill Rhenish, in that a certain riskiness gave this performance ample biting edge and spontaneous thrills. Dubiety of pulse in the opening bars instilled an unsettlingly mystifying ambiguity, resolving quickly to assert the extremes of pomposity and brooding melancholy that frame the first movement’s stormy polemic. 

The moderately-paced Scherzo was both weighty and fluid; the third movement meaty and mellifluous; the final two moments sombre and vivacious respectively. Informing all of this was a richly-flavoured SCO – its bold winds, punchy brass and brazen strings emphasised in the immediacy of the Queen’s Hall acoustics.

Compare that to the Scottish premiere of Julian Anderson’s Cello Concerto “Litanies” which preceded it, its shimmery impermanence a million miles from the gravitational solidity of the Schumann. Performed superbly by Alban Gerhardt, its dedicatee, Anderson’s originality sat to the fore, lacy textures bearing an almost ephemeral appeal and exhilaration, Gerhardt fully absorbed in the music’s translucent charm, sympathetic to the ingenuity of orchestral flavourings punching the air around him. 

The work which opening the concert – Schumann’s Overture, Scherzo and Finale – presented the composer in uncommonly high spirits, reflected by Schuldt’s vibrant, cheery realisation. It was a performance that danced on air, oozed theatricality and languished in heart-felt lyricism. Yet it resisted any temptation for anodyne complacency, Schuldt’s vigorous precision keeping it fresh and dynamic at every turn.

Ken Walton

SCO / Emelyanychev

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Perth Concert Hall

James MacMillan’s new Violin Concerto No 2, given its world premiere last week by co-dedicatee Nicola Benedetti, boasts a lengthy list of co-commissioners – The Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Swedish Chamber Orchestra, Adam Mickewicz Institute and Dallas Symphony Orchestras – so we can safely assume it is guaranteed to have several key performances in the immediate future.

It was with the SCO that the honour of presenting the very first performance of this intriguing concerto fell, part of the orchestra’s opulent, and clearly popular, season opener in Perth. At the helm was chief conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, a musician of mesmerising unpredictability, never boring, often illuminating, willing to take daring chances where others wouldn’t.

So what would he, and what would Benedetti, make of a work that MacMillan composed during lockdown, additionally dedicating it to a Polish composer he much admired, Krzysztof Penderecki, who died in 2020? In recent interviews, he had alluded to a work of sincere intimacy, freshly explored musical solutions and very personal flashes of wit and reflection.

If this initial performance didn’t appear to capture all of these, it did challenge the listener to make sense of a work that is dizzily transient in style, novel in the imaginative relationships it explores between soloists and orchestra, and tough in the perception of its overall shape.

In this initial performance, both Benedetti and Emelyanychev seemed, at times, preoccupied with resolving the last of these points. There were so many individual moments to savour: the playful succession of “conversations” to be had with individual players in the orchestra, from the soloist’s pugnacious encounter with timpani to a lustrous engagement with lead violin, Joel Bardelot; or such lighter episodes where MacMillan slackens the tension with parodic interjections of Scots reels or German burlesque. But there was also a discomforting fragmentation in Benedetti’s overall presentation that suggested this is a work she has to live with for a while to get fully to grips with. 

That said, the poise she brought to that heart-stopping moment where the opening material recapitulates, and the delicacy of those final bird-like exchanges with the flutes, were as ravishing as they were conclusive. 

As for the rest of this programme, the term mixed fortunes comes to mind. It opened brilliantly with John Adams’ The Chairman’s Dances, extracted by the composer from his first opera, Nixon in China. The impact was immediate, Emelyanychev’s vital downbeat setting the incessant mechanised energy in motion as if switching on a light, then drawing endless detail from the constantly shifting textures, and variously caressing the score’s more restful episodes with wit, airiness and finesse. 

Where he succeeded with the Adams in extracting the absolute best from the SCO, that was not always the case in Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony. Emelyanychev took massive liberties with this – an opening Adagio so laboured-over it risked being dismembered, and a general overindulgence that threatened the symphony’s natural momentum, provoked nervous mishaps with exposed entries, and ignored some dubious brass intonation. 

Not all of it fell flat, the central movements far tighter in spirit and execution than the outer ones, and therein a sizzling clarity from the orchestra. But as a whole, this was not a performance that always knew where it was going.

Ken Walton

Further performances at the Usher Hall Edinburgh on Thu 29 Sep; and City Halls, Glasgow on Fri 30 Sep

Letting The Cracks Show

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Jay Capperauld’s new flute concerto is a Japanese repair job, but it represents a positive healing process, he tells KEN WALTON

For Jay Capperauld, Christmas has come early. It’s only a matter of weeks since the RSNO performed the 33-year-old up-and-coming Ayrshire composer’s Fèin-Aithne, written originally for the BBC SSO, alongside Strauss’ monumental Alpine Symphony. Last week, the SCO announced that for the next four years he is to succeed Anna Clyne as its associate composer. This weekend, his new flute concerto, Our Gilded Veins, is premiered by the RSNO and its principal flautist, Katherine Bryan.

When we spoke, the SCO announcement was still under wraps, but there was a pent-up excitement in Capperauld’s manner that suggested something big was in the offing. “I can’t say at the moment,” he blurted cautiously, clearly wishing he could.

We’d met to discuss Our Gilded Veins, a work that began life pre-pandemic, was duly postponed from its planned 2020 premiere, underwent subsequent refashioning during lockdown, and will now emerge in its freshly-minted form this week under the baton of RSNO music director Thomas Søndergård and in the exalted company of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. 

Anyone who has followed Capperauld’s upward trajectory since graduating from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland will appreciate to what extent extra-musical inspirations – often surreal, often funny, always potent – are a defining feature of his music. “I generally always write to a concept. I rarely work in absolute abstract terms,” he says. Our Gilded Veins is no exception.

The title refers to the Japanese art of Kintsugi, “a tradition whereby you break a plate or a bowl, then put it back together using gilded lacquer in order to highlight the breakage, as if you are celebrating the history of the object, warts and all,” he explains. “To me that’s just a delicious metaphor for the human condition, especially after what we’ve all been through over the last couple of years.”

“Kintsugi has been a hugely positive influence on me, in the sense it allows you to perceive things you’ve gone through, those bad experiences, in a positive way and not cover things up. The biggest step forward in the past five years or so is that we’re able to talk about mental health. It’s visible in the same way as the ‘gilded veins’ on these objects. It leads to conversations that need to happen.”

The “conversation” explored in Our Gilded Veins had already taken root in a previous piece for solo flute, The Pathos of Broken Things, which itself acted as the prototype for the concerto. Both stemmed from his encounter with Katherine Bryan. Impressed by a work Capperauld had had performed as a participant in the RSNO’s 2015/16 inaugural Composers’ Hub scheme, Bryan had later sought him out and asked if he had written any flute music. The answer was no, but he immediately set about composing one, which led in turn to the concerto commission.

Revisiting a work is not unusual for Capperauld. He did so for last month’s RSNO performance of Fèin-Aithne, rewriting around half of it, and he’s done the same for Our Gilded Veins. “The pandemic played a part in the nature of these revisions. It was, for me compositionally, an opportunity to spring clean. It also made complete sense as both pieces are about self-identity, and my perception of myself had changed significantly during that period.”

That’s reflected  in the altered narrative. “That now starts at a place where trauma has just happened. In the original version, we were seeing it unfold and transpire over the entire narrative. So there’s a fractured sense to the music straightaway, where the lines are unconnected. The whole first half of the piece is now about those lines trying to find each other, gluing themselves together, so we can then explore what that positive aspect of Kintsugi implies. By the end we revisit the trauma material, but in a new and reassuring harmonic context.”

Another key factor in the ongoing evolution of the piece has been Capperauld’s creative dialogue with Bryan. As she herself says, “Jay got to know me well during the process as a player: that I like to tell stories; that I love big-hitting, powerful stuff; that I like the emotional drive behind a piece that I can really talk to an audience with. He must have thought I liked a big challenge. This piece is so hard, but breaking through those challenges really enhances it.”

Katherine Bryan: “I love big-hitting, powerful stuff”

With so much original music excised in the revision process, does it just go in the bin? “No,” insists Capperauld. “I hang on to absolutely everything. I learned that from Harrison Birtwistle, whose advice to young composers was ‘keep everything’. There might be something you’re working on that you don’t have a context for at the time, but years down the line you find one. So who knows, maybe some scraps from the old version will find their way into a new piece of music at some point.”

Meantime, Our Gilded Veins – which Bryan and Capperauld will also be utilising in an outreach project at the Kibble Educational and Care Centre in Paisley – is partnering Beethoven’s Prometheus Overture and the Choral Symphony in this week’s close-of-season concert by the RSNO. How daunting is that?

“Hugely,” says Capperauld. “Knowing that was very scary, but all I can do is focus on the matter in hand. I’d be foolish to think that because my piece is being performed alongside Beethoven Nine I must try to express myself to that same level, cos that ain’t gonna happen! I can’t make that judgement call as a composer. That’s for the audience to decide. All I can do is my best work.”

Katherine Bryan and the RSNO premiere Jay Capperauld’s Our Gilded Veins at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh (3 March) and Glasgow Royal Concert Hall (4 March). Full details at www.rsno.org.uk

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