Tag Archives: Scottish Chamber Orchestra

SCO / Kuusisto

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City Halls, Glasgow

Time and Tides was no ordinary Scottish Chamber Orchestra gig, nor was it a typical SCO audience. But then, when has the versatile Finnish musical phenomenon Pekka Kuusisto – violinist, director and funky entertainer – ever made claims to doing things the traditional way? In this, the last of his current four-programme residency with the orchestra, it was anything but business as usual.

Nor were we short-changed. As well as two astonishing UK premieres – former SCO associate composer Anna Clyne’s violin concerto and a new song cycle by Helen Grime, written 2023 and 2021 respectively – Kuusisto, doubling on violin and miniature harmonium, teamed up with Scots fiddler Aidan O’Rourke to introduce some of the traditional melodies used by Clyne in her concerto. Thus, perhaps, the reason for the wider-sourced audience, one that was encouragingly young and vocal. And there was more besides.

First and foremost, this was a programme devised with arched intent. It began with a hint of provocation, the curved-ball dissonant writing of Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür as witnessed in his orchestral piece Lighthouse. Its combination of harshness, meatiness and slithery translucence, also its retro-Baroque inflexions, makes for an atmospheric gem. Under Kuusisto, and with the assured SCO strings, it had a beguiling, delirious impact. 

At the other end of the evening came Einojuhani Rautavaara’s avian curiosity Cantus Arcticus, surreal in the way he overlays a luscious orchestral landscape with a cacophony of recorded birdcalls, but also a kind of traditional night cap bringing us back to earth after the concert’s central highlights.

As previously mentioned, Kuusisto’s plan was to ease us into the Clyne Concerto – Time and Tides – by way of a stylistic gear change, he and O’Rourke intimately calming the air with folk tunes from Scotland and Finland, joined ultimately by some upper string backing in close harmony. If physically it wasn’t the smoothest transition, it served its purpose, sharpening the sensitivities required to appreciate the multiplicity of Clyne’s folk-inspired creation. 

Written especially for Kuusisto, his eccentricities were exploited – his knack of whistling while playing, his unlimited vocabulary of violin/non-violin skills – and built into a glittering suite of five movements that embraced everything from zany pastiche and wit to reflective soulfulness and airy pastoralism. Within this, the integrity of Clyne’s chosen folk songs – from Scotland, Finland and America – remained hauntingly intact, especially when the players added their own singing voices to the closing mix.

Helen Grimes’ It Will Be Spring Soon – optimistic texts by Philip Larkin, Sandra Cisneros and Jane Hirshfield set to luminous, opulent music – was delivered engagingly by one of its dedicatees, soprano Ruby Hughes (the other being violinist Malin Broman, whose obligato role was conveniently taken here by Kuusisto). Written with echoes of Britten, Grimes creates a magical relationship between the sprightly strings/harp scoring and the soprano’s controlled intensity. 

Just how effective the foyer presence of DJ Dolphin Boy (Andy Levy) was during the interval likely depends on personal experience, but with him tucked almost anonymously into a tight corner along from the interval drinks, I’m guessing his efficient efforts may have passed some people by. Good idea; more a venue issue perhaps.

Ken Walton

SCO / Kuusisto

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City Halls, Glasgow

THREE centuries on from its first publication, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons has withstood any number of revisions and re-interpretations. At the end of May, the Perth Festival of the Arts has a concert by Il Giardino d’Amore which includes the responses of Astor Piazzola and Max Richter alongside the original, and Nigel Kennedy, who took it to the top of the charts in 1989, revisited it again a decade ago.

Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto is 20 years Kennedy’s junior, and his soloist foil in this concert with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Swedish cittern-player Ale Carr, is not yet 35. They share the sort of eclectic musical experience straddling the classical and traditional music worlds that made this version of the old warhorse work as fresh and vital as anyone might wish.

With the SCO string players around them, mostly standing, Kuusisto and Carr turned the suite into a folk session, combined with the rhythmic rigour of the best baroque ensemble practice. With the support of the SCO front-deskers, Marcus Barcham Stevens (concert-master this week), Max Mandel, Philip Higham and Gordon Bragg, Kuusisto’s direction moved seamlessly between the music Vivaldi wrote and a varied selection of other tunes, some from Nordic traditional sources as advertised, but others from nearer home or familiar in the concert hall. Unpicking this tapestry would be complex and pointless – the intention was to present the result as a whole, Kuusisto’s “shoplifting”, as he styled it, creating additional cadenzas for the 18th century Venetian suite.

Kuusisto is not the first musician to think that Vivaldi might benefit from the addition of a rhythm guitar, but Carr’s contributions on cittern went far beyond that, looking every bit the axe-hero in his leather trousers. The Finn’s additions to the score also included some choreographed page-turning and humming by the ensemble and gleefully embraced a car revving in Albion Street outside.

The Italian composer’s representation of bird song in The Four Seasons shaped the rest of the concert programme. Only listeners as old as this writer will immediately associate the opening of Respighi’s suite Gli ucelli (The Birds), which itself repurposes earlier music, with Arthur Negus and the BBC TV antiques show Going for a Song.

When Grieg’s Holburg Suite is so regularly trotted out, it is strange that we don’t hear this colourful work more often. It is a perfect partner for the Vivaldi, full of colourful pictorial writing, with lovely solos for flute and oboe in particular and harp and celeste decorating the superb orchestration you would expect from this composer.

The icing on the cake of this clever programme was Andrea Tarrodi’s Birds of Paradise. Daughter of trombonist and composer Christian Lindberg, the Swedish composer has, in fact, written a Four Seasons of her own. The orchestrated version of Birds of Paradise, originally for strings, requires some extended techniques on strings and winds alongside bowed percussion to produce startlingly accurate ornithological imitation.

It begins, contrastingly, with specific subdivisions among the string players in a structure of overlapping phrases that alludes to American minimalism but produces a very different sonic result. As a contemporary addition to the musical aviary the piece was a fascinating seven minutes.

Keith Bruce

Pictured: Ale Carr

SCO / Borrani

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City Halls, Glasgow

So you think you know Beethoven 7? Think again, because the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s latest guest leader/director, Lorenza Borrani, can make you hear one of the most popular symphonies in the classical canon with fresh ears.

The over-cited opinion of Richard Wagner that it is “the apotheosis of the dance” – quoted in full in the concert programme – is nonsense word salad (in English anyway) when presented alongside a performance which made the point from the first chord, which sounded uncannily like a fiddle orchestra embarking on a set of reels. Borrani is the apotheosis of what a player/director should be, the eyes of all the musicians – and many in the audience for that matter – on the concertmaster and her eloquent bow.

For faithful SCO-followers – a growing band if this fine Glasgow concert attendance is any indication – Borrani was instantly recognisable as having been the guest leader for previous principal conductor Robin Ticciati’s memorable cycle of Schumann symphonies, recorded on the local Linn label. The pandemic postponed plans for her debut directing the orchestra, but it should be a regular feature of SCO seasons from now on. Borrani’s understanding of the significance of the space between the notes in Beethoven’s score, of the spicy rhythms of the music and the precision gradations of the dynamics were all served with ensemble precision that was at times quite startling.

Of course the SCO’s excellent winds brought their A-game to the performance, but it was the strings that really shone in Borrani’s reading, with a particular swinging, legato approach from the lower strings and especially the cellos, that was simultaneously quite different and clearly absolutely correct . The section’s four note phrase towards the end of the opening movement and the theme at the start of the Allegretto second movement set the pattern for an approach that was sustained throughout the  work. The energy of the scherzo and syncopation of the finale occasioned wide smiles both on stage and in the auditorium.

This revelatory account of the Seventh Symphony was preceded by a first half similarly full of fascination. Borrani’s selection of seven pieces by colourful 20th century Venetian Bruno Maderna from his reworkings of the 1501 collection Odhecaton suggest that she is very much a fellow-traveller with SCO principal conductor Maxim Emelyanychev. As violinist Siun Milne put it in her amusing spoken introduction to the concert, the invention of the printing press meant this collection of early music “went viral” (in contemporary parlance) at the start of the 16th century. Maderna’s arrangements, while faithful to the originals, recasts them for modern instruments in what was plainly a fun exercise for composer and players alike.

It would be wrong to say the same thing of Gustav Mahler’s orchestral arrangement of Beethoven’s “Serioso” String Quartet for the Vienna Philharmonic, even if the composer’s purpose was similar. Whether Mahler’s treatment of the dense work enhances the quartet in any way is still debatable, even if David Matthew’s performing edition has rescued it from obscurity. The power and concentration of the piece survives, but the sharp edges are perhaps dulled.

What is beyond debate is that the resulting score sounds fiendishly difficult to play with the level of ensemble coherence Borrani and the SCO strings brought to the project. The slow movement, unsurprisingly, sounded the most Mahleresque, but the way the players rose to the challenge of the phrasing and rhythms of the faster music was more impressive.

Keith Bruce

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

SCO: The Great Grumpy Gaboon

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Perth Concert Hall

ALL orchestras have education and outreach departments these days, but the Scottish Chamber Orchestra was a trail-blazer with admired initiatives from its earliest days. So it is more than fitting that its 50th anniversary season  should include another ground-breaking project.

The orchestra’s current composer-in-residence Jay Capperauld has achieved something very special with the 45 minute piece he has written for young people. Not only are the tastes of his target audience of four to eight year-olds not fully-formed, but it is also impossible to predict what music they will have been exposed to at home or at nursery and primary school.

Capperauld’s solution is to cover many possibilities. The suite of music he has written for this collaboration with story-teller and illustrator Corrina Campbell includes a little of everything. It opens with a Broadway-like overture, and includes a fair amount of jazz-inflected material, but there are also moments of Scottish traditional fiddle and ceilidh reels, a journey through the countryside with an English pastoral feel, and a drum-kit-led big band excursion. There are many clap-along moments in the score, which suited the very young audience as much as the slapstick action on stage.

Those performances are the other remarkable element of The Great Grumpy Gaboon. Aside from an effective but never intrusive voice-over by director Chris Jarvis, there are no extra performers in this SCO project. Although the bulk of the orchestra are in concert black attire, seven players, alongside conductor Gordon Bragg, are named characters in the narrative, with extravagant head-gear, props and costumes, and a very mobile approach to playing their instruments.

The title role is played by first bassoon Cerys Ambrose-Evan and that rhyming with their instruments is carried through the others, excepting her nemesis, Screature, played by bassist Nikita Naumov. If such expansive performance seems in character for some of the players, regular concertgoers will see long-serving first trumpet Peter Franks and principal flute Andre Cebrian in a new light.

There are details in the narrative that probably don’t come across as they should just yet, and the message of the story (“be kind”, basically) probably escaped a fair percentage of the audience at the first performance, but it is impossible to fault the gusto with which the musicians went about their extra-musical work, with daft dancing, silly clowning and roaming into the auditorium all part of the show.

Without a shadow of a doubt The Great Grumpy Gaboon will get slicker, and the orchestra has clearly invested in it with an eye to many future performances. What is beyond argument is that Capperauld has given the SCO a score that makes the effort completely worthwhile.

Keith Bruce

SCO / Leleux

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City Halls, Glasgow

A familiar presence at Scotland’s orchestral concerts into his 90s, Hedley Wright, who died last year, was also one of Scottish music’s great philanthropists, both in cash and in gifts for performers and promoters of the Springbank whisky produced in Campbeltown by the family firm.

Last week’s Scottish Chamber Orchestra concerts were dedicated to his memory and, as he sponsored the orchestra’s first oboe chair for many years, appropriately featured that instrument. French oboist Francois Leleux was conductor and soloist but it was the holder of that chair, Robin Williams, who had the first solo word in Mozart’s Symphony No 25, the G Minor work he wrote on his return to Salzburg from Vienna in 1773.

If, as has been suggested, the piece documents the teenage composer’s first heartbreak, Leleux certainly made the case for the symphony as an early Romantic work, but without sacrificing any of the SCO’s Classical precision.

Leleux’s own arrangements of arias from Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute opened the second half of the concert, a delightful bit of bold appropriation of the music for his own instrument. The two Papageno songs in particular were treated in a theme-and-variations fashion, becoming show-off party-pieces for oboe – part juke box, part musical box.

The other soloist in the programme was soprano Carolyn Sampson, in absolutely unmatchable form on the Berlioz cantata Heminie. As theatrical as everything the French composer wrote, it provided the musical theme for his masterwork, the Symphonie Fantastique, but is fascinating in its own right. Setting text by poet and playwright Pierre-Ange Vieillard it is the monologue of the titular Muslin princess, in love with Christian crusader Tancredi, the enemy of her people – Romantic story-telling that ranges from dramatic exclamation to anguished prayer. Sampson’s delivery of the composer’s response to the words was masterly, at ease with abrupt changes in tempo and bold leaps across her range. The cantata has an exquisite musical arc too, and the linking of its discrete sections by Leleux and Sampson became persuasively more fluid as the work progressed.

That sense of narrative continuity was also present in Leleux’s account of Ravel’s Ma mere l’oye (Mother Goose) which brought the concert to an end. Ravel’s response to the fairytales of Charles Perrault and Madame d’Aulnoy may be individually readable, with details like the clarinet as Beauty and contrabassoon as The Beast, but it is the use of the full range of instrumentation, including percussion details, harp and celeste, and solos from flute, piccolo and front desk strings, that make the orchestration of the whole work a compelling tale.

Leleux took a symphonic approach to the suite so that the full orchestral climax was a glorious finish to a very colourful, clever programme.

Keith Bruce

Taking the long view

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As the Scottish Chamber Orchestra celebrates its 50th birthday, long-serving viola player Steve King looks back – and forward – with Keith Bruce

It is one of the mysteries of music that orchestras – in Prague and Vienna, but also in Edinburgh and Glasgow – have an identifiable sound that survives changes of personnel over the decades. It is usually assumed that curatorship of that individuality is in the hands of the players that have been there longest while conductors, even those retained on contract, come and go.

As the SCO marks the golden anniversary of its first concerts with a 50th birthday programme, Steve King has just celebrated occupying the viola number four chair for 40 of those years. Not that he is one for looking back wistfully to earlier eras.

“I love the SCO now more than I’ve ever done,” he says. “It’s a brilliant orchestra. When we have extra players they always comment on how friendly it is and how passionate everyone is about making music. With our principal conductor at the moment, Maxim [Emelyanychev], it is a real joy.”

“He’s an amazing playing musician as well as a conductor, and he never stops. Some conductors are quite precious (mentioning no names) but Maxim is just fun. He rehearses in such a way that we really understand what he is looking for, although he is always searching and never content. And that’s the way it should be, I think.

“And of course, as he develops – because he’s still very young – it becomes more interesting. Come the concert he may do things differently but because we’re so with him, it works. It’s exciting and good for the music.

“He’s doing stuff that challenges what a chamber orchestra can do. He appreciates flexibility and openness to change. I’ve seen quite a few principal conductors and hundreds of conductors over my 40 years and he’s definitely the best.”

Now that’s clear, it is possible to persuade King to reminisce a little, and two conductors of earlier in the SCO’s history rate a special mention.

“The Finnish conductor Jukka Pekka Saraste became Principal Conductor not long after I joined, and he was great. He is exactly the same age as me and we got on very well. We did a lot of good touring and recording with him.

“And my idol for many years was Charles Mackerras. We made recordings of the Mozart operas with him and then did concert performances at the Edinburgh Festival. At the beginning of a two-and-a-half week recording project he would spend  ten minutes enthusing about the piece and the original score he’d studied in Prague. He had a tough reputation but he trusted the musicians. I was so lucky to be part of all of that.”

King is from Hertfordshire and, along with his brother, who became a jazz trumpet player, first studied music on Saturday mornings at the Royal Academy in London as a teenager. When he left school he went to the Royal Northern College of Music and, although he was offered postgraduate studies and work with the Manchester Camerata, then elected to stretch his wings with a job in Reykjavik in the Iceland Symphony Orchestra.

Returning to the UK, he was a schoolteacher for a couple of years before applying and winning the job with the SCO. The chamber orchestra has always been a freelance band, however, and like many of his colleagues King has had other work alongside. He led the Quartz string quartet, which grew out of the SCO’s education work and also included Bernard Doherty, once co-leader of the BBC SSO, SCO violinist Lorna McLaren, who also clocked up 40 years before retiring in 2018, and the late Kevin McCrae, composer and SCO principal cello.

And for 24 and half years, King was Director of Music at Edinburgh’s Heriot Watt University – encouraging and developing music-making among students and staff at an institution that does not offer music as a course of study. He stood down from that post at the end of 2022 having overseen a response to the pandemic that kept an audience of two and half thousand people online engaged with one another through sharing their “musical moments”.

If that concluded his tenure at the university, he is as proud of the project with which it began, a contemporary music commissioning initiative that produced 60 pieces, from Scotland-based composers and through a competition for unpublished composers working in Scotland. The common inspiration for them all was the Inchcolm Antiphoner, a few pages of early Celtic plainchant from the abbey on the island in the Forth that King can see from his home in Dalgety Bay.

The compositions were workshopped at residential gatherings in Highland Scotland before being performed at Iona Abbey and St Giles Cathedral. That all seems to chime with the Englishman’s enthusiasm for his adopted home – as well as his Fife home, King has a long lease on a bolt-hole on Loch Shiel.

“The cottage is half way down the loch, on the water’s edge, only accessible by boat and completely off-grid. We go there for about 12 weeks of the year: it is a good place to chill, cook and write music. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea but I like the challenge of living there, and the wildlife is amazing.”

Now 67, his quartet and university post may be in the past, but King still conducts the Dunblane Chamber Orchestra, which convenes twice a year for concerts, and he has no plans to leave the SCO.

“I’m loving the SCO too much to think about retiring. If I felt that my playing started to drop a bit, I would drop out, but we’ve had members play well into their 70s. There are only four of us in the violas, so you can’t ride along, you have to be on the ball all the time.”

It is not just the prospect of more concerts with Emelyanychev that keeps him enthused.

“Our current Associate Composer, Jay Capperauld, is one of the best we’ve ever had in that post. He stands out as being exciting, and he communicates well, and it’s good to see him grow. And violinist Pekka Kuusisto is one of those guys who sees music from a different angle. We see him every year and it is something everyone looks forward to.

“I’ve seen a huge amount of change in the orchestra but some of the young players coming in these days are just stunning. We are currently looking for a number two viola and from the five or six we’ve had on trial it is going to be really difficult to choose.”

The SCO’s 50th birthday concerts are at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh on Thursday and Glasgow’s City Halls on Friday. Maxim Emelyanychev conducts Elena Langer’s suite from her opera Figaro Gets a Divorce and Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony and plays Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos alongside Dmitry Ablogin.

Picture by Christopher Bowen

SCO / Benedetti / Marquise Gilmore

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Perth Concert Hall

With sponsorship from investment managers Quilter Cheviot and busy box office, Nicola Benedetti’s latest appearances with the SCO will be a significant entry on the balance sheet for the orchestra’s 50th birthday year. Crucially, it has its own way of presenting Scotland’s most popular classical musician, and that – as principal cello Philip Higham pointed out in his introductory remarks – involved luring another member of the extended SCO family back to the front desk of the first fiddles.

Benjamin Marquise Gilmore job-shared as SCO concertmaster before taking up his current post as one of the three leaders of the London Symphony Orchestra. Benedetti may be the big marquee name, but his role in this concert was no less significant, leading the orchestra through the whole programme, including the Beethoven Violin Concerto she directed, although it remained her interpretation.

The most ear-catching moment of that was the first movement cadenza, possibly the one the composer himself wrote for the piano version of the score, and certainly following Christian Tetzlaff’s recent lead in having timpani as a foil to the soloist. Louise Lewis Goodwin was warmly embraced by the violinist at the end of the concert and her playing of the rhythmic “fate” motif that Beethoven so loved was a significant ingredient in Benedetti’s approach to the piece.

In her younger years, she might have played the concerto with more obvious virtuosity. Now the darkness at the heart of the work is as clear as the prodigious technique required to perform it. Beethoven was not always the grumpy old bloke of his public image, but there is little levity about this music, at least until the more sprightly rondo of the finale.

Having set the tone for the performance, Benedetti left the direction of the players to Marquise Gilmore, the job he had been doing during the first part of the evening. In a reversal of the usual order of things, the programme’s symphony preceded the interval, but as it was Mozart’s brief three-movement 34th, that made eminent sense.

Whether Symphony No 34 in C Major makes internal sense is another question, but after the brass and horns of the opening movement there was some lovely work from the SCO reeds, the slow movement scored for bassoon and strings and the finale led by the oboes. Marquise Gilmore’s whole-body pacing of the orchestra is the sort of physical urging players are swept along by, and exactly how the work should be performed.

The icing on this classical cake came at the start, in Jessie Montgomery’s Strum, one of at least three compositions from the American to have featured in recent programmes by the Scottish Ensemble. It suited the SCO well too, with plenty of the technique of the title for the string players to demonstrate – especially the violas – before some lush pastoral bowing and touches of folk fiddling, in what is highly accessible modern music.

Keith Bruce

SCO: Maxim’s Baroque Inspirations

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City Halls, Glasgow

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra are shamelessly, but successfully, trading on the “Maxim” brand. He’s the orchestra’s charismatic left field chief conductor – Maxim Emelyanychev – and his zany presentational mark penetrated every aspect of Friday’s programme, entitled Maxim’s Baroque Inspirations. 

Even that had a tantalising dubiety. Did “Baroque” refer simply to the 17th/18th century musical epoch, or to its meaning in arts criticism as something bizarre or exaggerated? Given that this programme cast its net wider than Bach and his contemporaries – both in actual terms and by virtue of later influence – the former was stretching credibility. The latter, however, seemed more appropriate.

It hardly mattered in what was a captivating evening. There was barely a moment where activity ceased. The lights dimmed on an empty stage, then action: Emelyanychev bounded onto the platform with his SCO strings, having foregone their customary onstage warm-up, to launch immediately into Vaughan Williams’ Renaissance-inspired Fantasy on a theme by Thomas Tallis.  

In an acoustic naturally less glowing than the work’s original 1910 Gloucester Cathedral setting, Emelyanychev took every opportunity to explore forensically the score’s finest detail and antiphonal texturing. There were magical interactions, and just one or two moments of wavering intonation.

A few words from the restless maestro on the thinking behind the programme before he leapt towards the harpsichord for his solo spot in Philip Glass’ Harpsichord Concerto. A strangely incongruous work, with frequent jarring collisions between pastiche Baroque fantasia and the composer’s trademark minimalism that wouldn’t have been pout of place in a hammy 1970s TV horror soundtrack, it eventually took flight in an exuberant finale propelled by devilish rhythmic zest.

Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances, Suite No 1, ended the opening half on a delicate note. There was jewel-like precision from an orchestra now enlarged to accommodate the composer’s refined re-imaging of the original Renaissance lute pieces. The opening Balletto: “Il Conto Orlando” was grace personified, complemented by a Galliarda that was sweet and jaunty. A plaintive Vilanella with gorgeous oboe solo and sporadic “pings” from the harp gave way to the closing Passo mezzo e mascherada, its agile flutey trumpet the icing on the cake.

The second half was genuine uninterrupted Baroque, opening with Corelli’s Concerto Grosso in B-flat, one of his fine Op 6 set, before taking us into unfamiliar Telemann territory with his Concerto in D minor for two Chalumeaux (forerunner of the clarinet) and a 1970 reconstruction of Bach’s spirited Triple Concerto in D.

These were a showcase for individual virtuosity within the SCO. The Corelli earned significant overtime for principal cellist Philip Higham, at one point racing through fistfuls of notes at hair-raising speed. The Chalumeau duo, Katherine Spencer and SCO clarinettist William Stafford, displayed an enticingly dulcet timbre in the Telemann, and there was scintillating team play from the Bach solo trio – violinists Stephanie Gonley, Marcus Barcham Stevens and Gordon Bragg.

If all that wasn’t enough to digest, the interval was consumed by Renaissance dances in the foyer, Emelyanychev now on cornett and sopranino recorder and egging on his fellow minstrels. He was even spotted on stage a moment later tuning the small chamber organ for the second half. Clearly his show!

Ken Walton

SCO / Batsleer

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City Halls, Glasgow

The tune in the opening movement of the Bach concerto in this week’s Scottish Chamber Orchestra programme may be one of the more familiar by the composer, but remarkably it was probably also the only instantly recognisable melody in the entire concert – especially when the other composers were Mendelssohn, Schumann and Schubert.

The concert was chiefly a platform for the orchestra’s remarkable chorus and – conducting all bar the Bach – its director Gregory Batsleer. Few amateur choirs could tackle the repertoire, but the SCO Chorus made deceptively light work of it, particularly the Schubert Mass in A Flat that took up the whole of the second half.

It is a glorious showcase of choral singing, but a challenging one. At its heart is a setting of the full Latin text of the Credo, in which the four soloists only come on board for the Amen, and at the centre of that section there is a transition from the crucifixion to a belief in the resurrection that is as musically eloquent as in any mass setting of any era.

The Credo follows a Gloria that is an absolute corker of a choir piece, much more integrated with the singing of the four soloists, and with a fugue that Schubert was apparently persuaded to revise because it was deemed too tricky to perform. Batsleer and the SCO Chorus stuck with the original version.

Those soloists were a story in themselves, because contracted soprano Ruby Hughes became unwell after Thursday’s Queen’s Hall show and Emma Morwood – who is one of the choir’s vocal coaches – stepped in at the last minute, her voice leading off many of the quartet’s contributions. If she pushed her first entry in the opening Kyrie a bit, that was excusable. The blend with mezzo Idunnu Munch, tenor Thomas Walker and bass baritone Callum Thorpe gelled as the work progressed, and the Benedictus trio, with pizzicato cello accompaniment, was another memorable highlight of the score. It was Thorpe who sat that one out, but he has a beautifully precise, resonant instrument which there will be another opportunity to hear in Scottish Opera’s French music concert programme in March.

The choir’s contributions to the first half offered a contrast, opening with Mendelssohn’s hymn-like Verleih uns Frieden, chamber music in scale with the low tones of cello, bassoon, and bass underscoring the singers, and closing with Schumann’s Nachtlied, a masterclass in orchestration to compliment voices, from the horn, brass and timpani of the opening to the clarinet and oboe ornamentation later.

For all its melodic familiarity, the Bach in between was also rare fare, as the C Minor concerto was performed in a 1920 “reconstruction” for two violin soloists, rather than for harpsichord or violin and oboe. Directed by leader Stephanie Gonley, who also took the “oboe” part, leader of the SCO’s second violins Marcus Barcham Stevens was the other soloist. The main interest, however was in the radically different, and very precise, ensemble sound of the 18-piece string orchestra (plus harpsichord) in the outer movements. Bach the precursor was, as ever, also the palette-cleanser.

Keith Bruce

Pictured: Gregory Batsleer

SCO / Emelyanychev

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City Halls, Glasgow

With a week of concerts featuring Nicola Benedetti playing Beethoven next month, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra is on a box office roll at the moment, and the younger pianist she triumphed over in the BBC Young Musician final at the Usher Hall nearly two decades ago was attraction enough to assure another good house in Candleriggs.

Add the popularity of Benjamin Grosvenor and the fan following Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev has built to a programme of Romantic classics, and it was little wonder that the hall was well filled.

Happily, what we heard was not equally a statement of the glaringly obvious, even if it looked very familiar on paper. This was a big SCO, but a particularly-structured one, with equal numbers of first and second violins and of violas and cellos, and four double basses high at the back of the platform. The acoustic balance had been carefully considered, as was the use and positioning of the timpani, brass and winds.

The full might of all that was immediately apparent in Brahms’s Tragic Overture, the companion piece to his more familiar Academic Festival Overture, and far from as miserable as its title suggests. It may lack the catchy tunes, but it is a piece full of drama, and Emelyanychev made sure that every twist of the plot was fully exploited in his meticulous guidance of the musicians.

Grosvenor has recently demonstrated a skill in championing works that have fallen below the radar – witness his award-winning recording of the Chopin concertos with Elim Chan and the RSNO. It is certainly arguable that Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No 1 falls into the same category – it is much less often programmed these days than it would be reasonable to expect.

On one level it is a cracking show-off piece for the soloist, who makes a terrific first entry full of virtuosic pzazz that was subsequently aped by Mendelssohn’s successors for some of the major works of the repertoire. There’s lots of that sort of thing in the work, with breakneck-speed playing required throughout. Every ornamentation was executed with precision by Grosvenor here, while his phrasing in the Andante was exquisite.

The composer integrated the piano with the orchestra in such a way that the work really is chamber music writ large, the soloist in constant conversation with the strings, while dialogue with the SCO’s excellent wind soloists was as expressive as expected. That slow movement featured beautiful ensemble playing from the lower strings, and the variation in tempo towards the end of the finale was the culmination of a superb communicative partnership between conductor and soloist.

Mendelssohn’s other innovation – interestingly, since as a conductor he disliked applause between movements – was to have the work flow without any pauses, and that set up Emelyanychev’s reading of Schumann’s Fourth Symphony perfectly, thoughtfully pre-figured by Grosvenor with a Schumann encore.

The SCO performed the composer’s 1850s revision of the work, originally composed when he was newly married to Clara ten years earlier, but the conductor maintained the earlier incarnation’s through line and flowing narrative, each movement – as indicated in German, rather the original’s Italian – emerging from its predecessor.

The result was less a compromise than obviously sensible, as was the amalgam of instruments – valved trumpets, but a mix of modern and natural horns – and the balance of ensemble playing with star solo turns; guest leader Hed Yaron Meyerson’s obligato in the Romanze was a particular nightlight. By the time we reached the Scherzo, Schumann’s influence on 20th century orchestration was undeniable.

For works that were once relatively neglected, there has been a welter of Schumann symphonies in concert and on disc in recent years. So much so that it might be thought there was little left to add, but Emelyanychev’s intelligent interpretation proved that is emphatically not the case.

Keith Bruce

SCO/RCS Winds: Side by Side

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Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow

Close your eyes, and the reality that half the musicians in Friday’s RCS lunchtime concert were students and half were seasoned professionals from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra Wind Soloists would have passed you by. This was part of the SCO’s Side-by Side initiative with Royal Conservatoire of Scotland students, which has been on the go since 2016 and gives those young pros-in-the-making a first-hand feel for life in the musical fast lane.

Just as there was no compromise on standards, the programme itself smacked of challenge and curiosity. It opened with the wacky world of Darius Milhaud, the fifth of his six pocket-size Chamber Symphonies. To call it short and sweet is but a half truth. Yes, it says all it needs to in about six minutes, but hardly anything it says is sweet. The ensemble acknowledged that in a taut and acerbic performance, encompassing all that is sinister, snappy and sardonic about the composer’s hard-edged style.

Ruth Gipps’ Seascapes effected an immediate sea change. Born in Bexhill-on-Sea in 1921, it’s safe to assume she knew her subject well. The opening, with its liquid imagery however, suggested she’d dashed across the English Channel to consult Debussy. Yet within seconds, a flowering of individual thought emerged, rich in imagery and the resourceful use of instrumental texture. It allowed individuals to shine – the velvety cor anglais for instance, and a myriad of colourful pairings – and gave credence to the programme note’s claim that Gipps deserves to be better known that she is.

Then back to France for the neo-classical effervescence of Jean Françaix’s Nine Character Pieces. They were performed as a continuous sequence, which in itself highlighted the distinguishing charm of each of the succinct movements – a plaintive Amoroso, a rhythmically unnerving Subito vivo, and much more en route to a cat-and-mouse Finale that raced exuberantly to its quasi-operatic conclusion.

The programme ended with Dvorak’s popular Serenade Op 44, in which the winds were infiltrated by an SCO string supplement of cello (Donald Gillan) and double bass (Nikita Naumov). Not everything was smooth sailing – the slow movement took time to find its natural composure – but as the most abundantly-scored of Friday’s works there was gravity in the delivery to match the substantiveness of the score. Not that this cheery Serenade eschews Dvorak’s signature folkish verve, which this energised composite ensemble addressed with no end of spirited enjoyment. 

Ken Walton

This programme is repeated at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh on Sun 19 Nov. Full information at http://www.sco.org.uk

SCO / Currie

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City Halls, Glasgow

When the Scottish Chamber Orchestra was founded 50 years ago, I was but a callow youth, on rhythm guitar and vocals, with limited knowledge of orchestral music. But an evening like this one, conducted by Scottish percussionist Colin Currie, would surely have been inconceivable to those who established the SCO.

For a start, none of the repertoire we heard had yet been composed, and it is very different from the music the orchestra’s earliest concerts explored. And many in the large audience the repertoire and this soloist/conductor attracted were yet unborn.

Yet there is a clear continuum, predating the establishment of the orchestra celebrating its Golden Jubilee this year by a couple of centuries, with the virtuoso soloist directing an ensemble of instruments, even if this one included an electric bass guitar and a couple of saxophones.

Those were required as part of the fullest forces assembled onstage, for Louis Andriessen’s Tapdance, the Scottish premiere of a work composed for Currie in 2013 in which the Dutch composer expresses his love for bebop jazz – most obviously in the use of a tune by Horace Silver. The bop big band sound is only one facet of the work’s eventful quarter of an hour, however. In that section Currie was a sonic Astaire or Kelly with what appeared to be spoons instead of mallets, when he wasn’t using his hands and arms to conduct – and sometimes accomplishing both tasks at the same time.

Later he moved on to marimba, which included an exquisite solo passage, and the music became more orchestral, building to a huge climax before the conductor added glissando tympani and it ended in a very poignant, almost funereal, passage.

The concert had opened with the programme’s earliest work, Fratres by Arvo Part, that most adaptable of the Estonian’s “tintinnabula” exercises, performed here in Beat Briner’s wind octet arrangement with Currie supplying percussion. If the intonation across the winds was not absolutely true at the start, it was quickly sorted as the mesmeric quality of the piece asserted itself, and the control of the whisper-quiet horn duo at the conclusion was very impressive.

The first half ended with a work that even those who had bought a ticket mainly to hear the music after the interval probably talked about most afterwards. Julia Wolfe owes a clear debt to the propulsive music of Louis Andriessen but her Fuel, for string orchestra, upped the ante several notches. Fearsomely challenging to play, it embraces the uglier sounds bowed strings can make alongside the purest tones, and requires constant concentration combined with ferocious technique.

Currie was all over every detail of the work’s changes of pace, tempi and dynamics across – and sometimes within – the string sections, and the SCO players, led by Stephanie Gonley, were quite superb.

The composer whose name was on the evening’s ticket had the second half to himself. Currie knows the canon of Steve Reich intimately as a performer, but for these two works he was conductor only, bringing that expertise to complementary pieces from the second decade of this century.

Pulse, from 2015, might come as a surprise to those who love Reich for his minimalist repetition, highly melodic in the ensemble writing for strings and winds, but with the rhythmic consistency the title suggests in the piano and electric bass. Perhaps a less “toppy” sound on the latter would have suited the work better, and there was some inconsistency of approach in the use of vibrato in the strings, but it is a lovely lyrical piece.

The concert closed with the box-office work, Radio Rewrite, in which Reich repurposes a couple of tunes from the back-catalogue of rock group Radiohead. In fact he plays fast and loose with the songs for a piece that only ever sounds like Steve Reich, even if it was clearly a stepping-stone to the later Pulse. You can bet that Currie knows exactly where each reshaped bar and chord lies in the score though, so focussed was his direction of the musicians.

You would also put smart money on the percussionist’s debut on the podium with the SCO not being his last appearance. The orchestra’s management will be very keen to see this audience back in the City Halls of a Friday evening as regularly as Currie is himself.

Keith Bruce

SCO / Bancroft

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City Halls, Glasgow

Of the many quality ingredients in Friday evening’s SCO concert conducted by Ryan Bancroft, the droll introductory remarks of recent recruit as the orchestra’s first viola, Max Mandell, deserve their own recognition. Chosen to talk about the American music in the programme for his accent, he guessed, the Canadian’s disparaging description of contemporary Connecticut as a haven for dislikeable people will live long in the mind.

He was altogether more admiring of the music Charles Ives composed about the place a century ago, and the performance of Three Places in New England we heard justified his enthusiasm. The SCO strings were beautifully calibrated from the first bars of what was a wonderfully atmospheric reading of the work by Bancroft, the music sounding perfectly suited to these forces.

Through all the snatches of songs and tunes, changes in dynamics and direction, the cacophonous climax of Putnam’s Camp and the pastoral idyll, climax and coda of the closing section, the conductor found a superb musical flow that was always moving, in both senses of the word.

If such a continuous thread was less apparent in the world premiere that followed, that may simply be because Errollyn Wallen’s Dances for Orchestra is quite differently constructed. The work, an SCO co-commission with the Irish and Swedish Chamber Orchestras, is exactly what it says, and in its rich mix of melodies and rhythms, and occasional clashing discord, it sat well between Ives and Copland.

It is a big work that begins with a Latin feel, before morphing into a lopsided waltz led by the flutes. A funky pizzicato string figure opens the second section with the clarinet introducing a one-note samba on top. Later some hard rock riffage from the basses is decorated with a little jig from the winds before a stately pavane expands into cinematic scoring. Perhaps inevitably, the finale borrows from traditional Scots reels, replete with foot-stomping.

On first hearing, the piece seemed a bit of a jigsaw, but a highly entertaining one. The composer had specifically requested that Bancroft direct the premiere because of their shared history as students of dance, and the concert was appropriately completed by the full ballet score of Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring.

The young Californian conductor, who trained at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and is now Chief Conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic as well as Principal Conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, was by chance following Kristiina Poska’s precision reading of the Suite with the RSNO last week. The full score is twice as long and although it is never as dark as the titles of some of its episodes suggest (Fear in the Night, Day of Wrath), its range of colour and tempi means there is less danger of tending towards Hollywood, as Copland explicitly prohibited.

What Bancroft found again was a lovely narrative line, so that choreographer Martha Graham’s outline to the composer was always apparent. The tale came to a quite exquisite conclusion in the last bars of The Lord’s Day as flute, clarinet, strings and percussion exchanged phrases – producing a spontaneous standing ovation from a large number of those in the stalls of the City Hall.

Keith Bruce

SCO / Altstaedt

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City Halls, Glasgow

Although its regular Friday venue was just over half-filled, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra may judge the experiment of a 2pm matinee – the first of three concerts moved to that slot during its 50th anniversary season – a success. Friday evenings have seen smaller houses, and there was a palpable buzz in this audience.

That was substantially down to the quality of the music-making. To start at the end, the concluding performance of Mozart’s Symphony No 38 , the “Prague”, was as vibrant and colourful as you’d expect of a work that has been core SCO repertoire for its history. This orchestra would turn out fine late Mozart without the help of a conductor, and it initially seemed that cellist/director Nicolas Altstaedt realised that and did not impose, although his podium presence was energetic enough.

There was, nonetheless, something very distinctive about Altsteadt’s handling of the opening of the Andante, with its changes of key and chromatic shifts, and the Presto finale rarely sounds quite so anticipatory of the revolutions of Beethoven as it did here.

The Mozart was something of an outlier in this programme, however –  Eastern European in the location of its premiere and nickname alone. We had begun with the early work of his older contemporary Franz Joseph Haydn at the Esterhazy court, with Altsteadt soloist and director of the Cello Concerto in C.

In our era full of rediscovered works, compositions neglected for cultural and socio-political reasons, this is one that simply went AWOL for a couple of centuries before turning up in Prague in 1961. Now firmly re-established in the canon, there was much of the era from which it was lost in the sound and manner of Altstaedt’s approach to the work, using a baroque bow on gut strings.

His first movement cadenza emerged as a thing of mesmerising wonder, a delicate web of notes, and the one in the Adagio was just as beautiful, the space between them as important as the notes themselves. His direction of the ensemble was of a piece with that, the Finale brisk-paced and full of detail.

We remained in the same geographical locale but moved to the mid-20th century for the two works on either side of the interval. Altsteadt the conductor delighted in the rich orchestration of Kodaly’s Dances of Galanta, as well as in fast tempi and changes of pace and gear, the nimble SCO demonstrating its collective ability to turn on a dime. First clarinet Maximiliano Martin was the star soloist, finding exactly the right, slightly earthy, tone for the work.

The four short Transylvanian Dances of Kodaly’s pupil Sandor Veress were the least familiar compositions of the programme and proved a real treat, Altsteadt joining Philip Higham on the front desk of the cellos to direct the string ensemble. The pair’s mournful duet at the start of the third one, underscoring Max Mandel’s solo viola, was just one memorable ingredient of a sequence that climaxed in something even closer to a ceilidh than the Kodaly, with foot-stomps and vocal exclamations all part of the mix.

Keith Bruce

SCO / Emelyanychev

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Stirling Castle

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra could not have engineered it, but a remarkable coincidence of featured artists provided principal second violinist Marcus Barcham Stevens with priceless material for his spoken introduction to Tuesday’s programme in the Great Hall of Stirling Castle.

Playing Max Bruch’s rarely heard 1911 Concerto for Clarinet and Viola were the SCO’s Principal Clarinet Maximiliano Martin and Principal Viola Max Mandel. The orchestra was conducted by Maxim Emelyanychev and – just to max-out on Maxes – the work was originally written for the composer’s virtuoso clarinettist son, Max Felix Bruch.

The work itself begins in a mellow fashion. The range of the two solo instruments is so similar that violists play the late works Brahms initially wrote for clarinet, and in the second movement – a very moderate Allegro indeed – Mandell and Martin completed one another’s phrases like an old married couple. The music is, in fact, occasionally reminiscent of Brahms, as well as of Mahler, and the opening fanfare of the brisker finale was sufficiently like Mendelssohn it would have been small surprise to see a bride make her entrance from the back of the hall. Not a neglected masterpiece, then, but a welcome change from the little of the composer’s output we hear all too often.

The concert had begun with the world premiere that has launched the SCO’s 50thanniversary season, Associate Composer Jay Capperauld’s The Origin of Colour, so the second half performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No3 was the first well-known music of the evening. It would, however, have been a treat also to be hearing the Eroica for the first time, as Emelyanychev launched into a bold account of the first movement, achieving a terrific balance of the instruments and losing no detail of the score in what is not always the most forgiving of acoustics.

There was an airiness about the Marcia funebre initially as well, but by its end it had strayed on the wrong side of the line between stately and lying-in-state. Evidently exhilarating to play for, the SCO’s Principal Conductor usually finds the ideal combination of scale and pace in bringing the lessons of historically-informed performance to the podium, but his tempi did not seem quite so assured here. Although the Scherzo came out of the trap like a hare, he subsequently gave the horns rather more space than they wanted for their hunting calls. Happily conductor and players were on firmer ground in the rhapsodic variations of the Finale.

If the Beethoven was not a complete triumph, Capperauld’s new work assuredly is. In some respects it is quite conventional stuff from a young composer whose catalogue so far is impressive in its eclecticism. The opening of percussive effects across the orchestra giving way to a chorale of winds is a well-marked path, and the blend of melody and orchestration that follows is close kin to Aaron Copland, which is a high bar to reach.

Subsequently there are moments that call to mind Leonard Bernstein and John Adams, which is to say that this musical evocation of colour coming into the world is very colourful indeed for almost its entire duration. Few are the contemporary works that you’d put good money on hearing again on a regular basis, but The Origin of Colour sounds very like a racing certainty.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Jay Capperauld by Euan Robertson

SCO / Maxim’s Eroica

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City Halls, Glasgow

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra has opened its Golden Jubilee season with a bullish programme geared to speak proudly and confidently of this milestone achievement, but also, one might add, of a future that will surely be shaped with the completion, now in sight, of its new purpose-built Edinburgh home, the long-awaited Dunard Centre. 

In the here and now, and in a packed Glasgow City Halls on Thursday, the celebratory atmosphere was palpable. Billed as “Maxim’s Eroica”, Beethoven’s (even now) mind-blowing Third Symphony was the destination point. But before that there was the promise of an epic Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto from the pile-driving Russian-American pianist Kirill Gerstein, and the latest new work from the SCO’s current associate composer, New Cumnock-born Jay Capperauld.

“Maxim”, of course, refers to the orchestra’s hot-rod principal conductor, Maxim Emelyanychev. Only the uninitiated might have expected an off-the-shelf Eroica from this tantalising and unpredictable Russian. This one was a customised flyer, an Eroica supercharged in a way that stripped away the corrosive layers of successive performance traditions to reveal the absolute purity of Beethoven, the sharpness of the drama, the visionary essence of the turbulent and fearless personality, all built around an unshakeable, faithfully preserved chassis.

The detail and insight were extraordinary, extracted with a natural empathy for the possibilities Beethoven presents: a naturally-crafted elasticity in the sculpting of phrases that never once rocked the music’s inevitable flow; a slow movement – the Marcia funebre – as impressive for its lyrical sweetness and chamber-like intimacy as its measured rigidity; a Scherzo touched more by spirited refinement than the typical race-to-the-finish; and an utterly self-assured Finale, free of bombast, rich in expressive substance and directional focus.

It was the perfect counterpoint to Capperauld’s concert opener, the glistening surreal sound world of The Origin of Colour, commissioned by the SCO for this programme, and based on Italo Calvino’s short story, Without Colours, from his speculative fiction series Cosmicomics. It imagines the concept of a grey-only world suddenly and frighteningly transformed by the creation of colour.

Colour is the driving factor in Capperauld’s dizzying score – a wild, effervescent tapestry of instrumental polyphony arising from primitive percussive and vocalised utterances, driven to its delirious, sometimes whimsical, heights by virile rhythmic ostinati. There’s a whiff of minimalism that heightens the mystique, and a starry opulence – gloriously captured in this performance – that suggests Capperauld could easily turn his hand to the ways of Hollywood soundtracks.

Where Tchaikovsky’s famous Piano Concert No 1 might have been anticipated as a sure-fire winner, this performance by Gerstein – using Tchaikovsky’s original version rather than the more familiar revised posthumous edition – was more unnerving than satisfying. The opening movement, despite the uncommon charm of the opening piano chords served up as arpeggios,  never really settled, Gerstein lost in his own combative world, heavy handed and over-peddling, as if Storm Agnes was still with us. 

If the ensuing movements offered more in the way of lyrical eloquence and a crisper meeting of minds, the underlying turbulence never quite receded. All of which was a pity, given the exceptional and sensitive playing from the SCO. 

The second leg in this 50th Anniversary season opening tour travels to Stirling (Tuesday), Ayr (Wednesday) and Aberdeen (Saturday), in which the Tchaikovsky is replaced by Bruch’s rarely-heard Concerto for Clarinet and Viola. VoxCarnyx’s Keith Bruce will be there to review it.

Ken Walton 

SCO / Heyward

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Lanternhouse, Cumbernauld

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra set conductor Jonathon Heyward some acoustic challenges on the last dates of its summer tour schedule. As my colleague Ken Walton noted elsewhere, Troon Town Hall is a boomy barn of a building, while the stage at Cumbernauld presented the opposite problem, with black drapes from floor to flies absorbing a lot of sound.

To the credit of all involved, and Heyward in particular, that became easy to ignore as the evening progressed. Mendelssohn’s overture The Fair Melusine fared worst with the natural trumpets in particular having an odd muted sound and the winds rather less clear than we know to expect from these players.

Nonetheless, there was some lovely playing from the flutes and first clarinet Maximiliano Martin and principal bassoon Cerys Ambrose-Evans had shared the first notes of the piece before they stepped to the front of the stage as soloists in Richard Strauss’s Duet-Concertino.

Following hard on the heels of Scottish Opera’s Daphne, here was another rare opportunity to hear music from the end of the composer’s career. Sounding much better further forward in the space, it begins with just a string sextet accompanying the soloists, flowing clarinet lines answered by the bassoon in characterful exchanges. The conversation develops in deliciously inventive phrases, some of which resolve in predictable ways, others more edgy and abrasive, while the string orchestra alternately shimmers or adds deep chords as it comments on or echoes the soloists.

Only later do the two solo instruments begin to overlap and intertwine, and Martin and Ambrose-Evans told their story eloquently, as Strauss had great fun with the full ranges of their instruments.

They also had a short duet in the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No 4, which made up the second half of the concert. This was a beautifully measured reading of the work from Heyward, communicating with great clarity to all sections of the orchestra. His gestures and deportment are entirely different, but there is a similarity of technique with SCO principal conductor Maxim Emelyanychev in his batonless use of very expressive hands.

In that opening movement, and perhaps especially the Scherzo, the Fourth is full of details that could be the work of no other composer, and Heyward made certain that we heard Beethoven at his most playfully Beethovian in the shifts of rhythm and dynamics. And Ambrose-Evans was still on her best game for the bubbling figure she has in the work’s sparkling finale.

Keith Bruce

EIF: The Magic Flute

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

When actor Neil John Gibson bustled onto the platform with a gag in the local vernacular about the buses at the start of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s concert performance of Mozart’s Magic Flute, as well as laughter in the capacity house there was detectable bristling in some of the more expensive seats.

There is, however, nothing tokenistic about a commitment to access that runs through new director Nicola Benedetti’s first Edinburgh Festival programme, so hackles will have risen in vain at the pantomimic elements in the presentation of this most problematic of operas. That included baritone Gyula Orendt’s Papageno throwing sweets to the front row of the stalls as well as Gibson channelling the spirit of Gerard Kelly or Andy Gray in some of his delivery.

It certainly leavened some of the darkness in a story that includes sexual assault and attempted suicide alongside racism and masonic ritual – The Magic Flute is not without its challenges for modern audiences. The first of what are to be annual concerts of Mozart operas by conductor Maxim Emelyanychev and the SCO, this was a bilingual version, readers Thomas Quastoff and Gibson working with a new English text by Sir David Pountney, and sung in German, with English supertitles.

Seated to the side, Quastoff and Gibson brought a range of voices to their contributions, while the singers were simply the high quality cast that we have come to expect of Festival concert operas at the Usher Hall. Tenor Ilker Arcayurek was an engaging Tamino from the start, who seemed as attached to his magical flute as he was to Julia Bullock’s rather serious Pamina, her characterisation perhaps deliberately in opposition to the playful charm of the Three Ladies, local hero Catriona Morison flanked by Elizabeth Watts and Claudia Huckle.

Of Kathryn Lewek’s Queen of the Night – a role she has sung all over the world in all the best houses – there can be only the highest praise. Quite how she can stride out on to the stage and turn on an instrument operating at that pitch and power is beyond comprehension.

With Brindley Sherratt an imperious Sarastro, there was strength across the whole cast, Pountney even lightening the character of the darkest role, Peter Hoare’s Monostatos with the prop of a cricket bat – a daft visual pun on the sport’s use of the term “guard” that probably stumped as many in the audience as caught it.

With three youngsters singing more of the three boys’ music than is often heard in full productions, the other star vocal ingredient was the SCO Chorus, Emelyanychev ensuring that some of the finest music in the score – at the end of Act 1 and after Pamina’s aria in Act 2 – was given the fullest expression.

Ultimately, and despite the stellar competition onstage, this was the ebullient conductor’s show. His fingerprints were everywhere – on the casting, cueing the singers, in his superb relationship with the players and on the keyboard in front of him, where he added a few ornaments of his own to Mozart’s music.

This was a Magic Flute full of magical moments, and given its occasional emphasis on what used to be called “the battle of the sexes” suggested that the differently problematic Cosi fan tutte might be a good choice for next year – there were a few in this cast who would be good in that too.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Andrew Perry: Rachel Redmond as Papagena and Gyula Orendt as Papageno

East Neuk Festival 2

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Various venues, Fife

What’s the connection between strings, guitar, accordion, church organ and saw? Yes, I said saw – not an implement you expect to see in any normal musical line-up. But then, the music and diversity offered by the East Neuk Festival always has an air of mystique and innovation that sets it apart.

Sunday saw the close of this year’s musical journey, a trip from St Monans to St Andrews via Anstruther that was an utter delight. Duets, ensembles, solo work – whatever the combination and whatever the style of music, from Scarlatti to Philip Glass, it was delivered with the Festival’s customary class.

Classical music can be a serious business, so sometimes needs a lighter touch to break the routine. SCO cellist Su a Lee did just that when she and her long-standing friends – Mr McFall’s Chamber – brought an informal but still strictly professional touch to their Anstruther Town Hall programme. There was tango, both South American and European, North American swing and Elizabethan grace. Su a Lee, on musical saw, gave the performance an unusual but marvellous touch, yet it was one of the more sedate works that took top billing, Piazzolla’s Solitad, which was undeniably beautiful.

Prior to that, in St Monans Kirk, Sofia Ros (accordion) and Morgan Szymanski (guitar) embarked on a tour of Latin American music. Szymanski took the edge in terms of virtuosity – his programme seemed more challenging in that respect – but Ros’ brilliant dexterity shone in two Scarlatti sonatas, the first taken at breakneck speed.

The Festival was rounded off in customary fashion by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, a final concert with a difference as it used the organ in St Andrews’ Holy Trinity Church. It inspired some novel programming, with mixed success. Tom Wilkinson’s performance of Bach’s massive Fantasia and Fugue was impressive and magisterial, but the organ work that complemented it, Philip Glass’ Mad Rush, predictably repetitive, rather outstayed its welcome.

That was a mere blip in an otherwise triumphant programme in which more interesting Glass featured – his  American Seasons – with violinist/director Isabelle van Keulen as soloist. The work was fantastic, a take on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, van Keulen’s solo performance capturing its fervent spirit. It was brilliance personified.

If Glass’ music took prominence, that’s not to say that Britten’s Frank Bridge Variations and Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten were lacking significant presence, superbly performed as one would expect from an orchestra firmly imbedded in the life of this fine Festival.

Garry Fraser

Photo by Neil Hanna

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