BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra: Mendelssohn and Mozart

The City Halls was looking splendid inside on Thursday night for the concert by the BBC Scottish, although still cloaked in scaffolding outside. The audience was socially distanced so probably around half its capacity in terms of numbers, we were also all masked, something adopted by all the major halls in Scotland this autumn. Whether that continues into the new year will no doubt depend on COVID rates and perhaps also whether Scotland’s proposed vaccine passport gets off the ground. I must say I look forward to it going as soon as it is safe. The experience of going to a concert masked is not pleasant, particularly if like me you wear spectacles and get misted up regularly. There are no drinks at the interval if there is an interval as there was tonight (the RSNO and the SCO are planning straight through concerts). There is limited social interaction at the interval. When we leave the very nice ushers at the City Halls said, “Did you enjoy the concert”? “Yes”, I said, “but I will enjoy them much more when we can attend without a mask”. 

The distinctive point about tonight’s concert was Francois Leleux who has been a star performer with the oboe since becoming principal oboe at the Paris Opera aged 18. Since then he has been a soloist all over the world and more recently a conductor and music director. Scotland has seen him in action in this role with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in the past and there was no doubt he was the star tonight. Not only did he conduct with flair, but he gave a virtuoso performance of arias on the oboe from ‘The Magic Flute’ and ‘Don Giovanni’. 

The concert began with an introduction by Scotland’s favourite tenor and the voice of classical music on Radio Scotland, Jamie MacDougall. Jamie promised an evening of sunshine after the long winter of lockdown and the BBC Scottish and Francois Leleux certainly delivered that. They began with Mendelssohn’s magical overture for ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, written when the composer was 17 in 1826. His later Incidental Music for the same play, written in 1842, which of course includes this Overture, was recently performed in a memorable semi ‘open-air’ concert at the Edinburgh Festival by the RSNO. Both were memorable performances, but here we had the benefit of a purpose-built concert hall with excellent acoustics, which undoubtedly concentrates the musical experience. We then had the delight of Francois Leleux with his oboe giving us interpretations of arias from ‘The Magic Flute’ and ‘Don Giovanni’, the fun was of course to spot the arias in the absence of a programme (another casualty of COVID). We just had to guess and of course when he opened with Papageno’s birdcatcher’s aria this seemed very appropriate. Papageno charmed the birds, Leleux charmed the audience. With half a dozen further arias he was met with a storm of applause and gave us a couple of encores. How much he was directing the orchestra in between was hard to say. I’m sure the BBC Scottish could play Mozart’s music with no direction at all.     

The second half of the concert began with an overture by Louise Farrenc, now having never heard of her I was worried that she was a modern composer and we might be subjected to some ‘plinky plonky’ modern music. But no, she was very much a nineteenth century composer, somewhat neglected in the twentieth century, and recently rediscovered with the contemporary interest in neglected women composers. The overture is a very decent work, certainly suitable as an overture for any concert with touches of Beethoven but also later 19th century composers. The concert concluded with Mendelssohn’s ‘Italian Symphony’, which certainly did bring us that sunshine that Jamie MacDougall promised us. It was a delightful performance reminding us what a good orchestra the BBC Scottish is. Let’s hope they survive the cuts in the budget the BBC is making. It also showed us Leleux in conductor mode and very much in charge, clearly a very talented musician. 

The concert will be broadcast on Radio 3 on October 14th and you won’t have to wear a mask!