Scottish Chamber Orchestra: 50th Birthday Concert (Glasgow)

City Halls, Glasgow - 19/01/24

Scottish Chamber Orchestra | Maxim Emelyanychev, conductor/piano | Dmitry Ablogin, piano

It was 50 years ago, on the night of 27th January 1974, that the Scottish Chamber Orchestra played its very first public concert, so 2024 promises to be a year of 50th birthday celebrations for the ensemble.  The festivities were launched with a two-performance programme under Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, on 18th in Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall and the following night in the City Halls, Glasgow.  This review refers to the Glasgow performance, which was broadcast live on Radio 3. The programme, surtitled ‘Maxim plays Mozart and Haydn’, featured Mozart’s Concerto in E-flat for two pianos and Haydn’s Symphony No.94, nicknamed the ‘Surprise’ for the fortissimo chord early in its slow movement.  For the two solo parts in the Mozart, which were played on a pair of fortepianos, Maxim was joined by his compatriot Dmitry Ablogin.  The programme opened with Moscow-born composer Elena Langer’s suite from her darkly comic opera, ‘Figaro Gets a Divorce’.  It was very well attended and introduced by the orchestra’s Chief Executive, Gavin Reid LVO, who told us that the element of ‘surprise’ was very much the theme of the evening.  He was not wrong.

Langer’s 2016 opera follows the Almaviva household on the run from an unspecified revolution.  The instrumental suite is in 6 movements, evocative of characters and situations in the story.  The music is tonal and engaging, with lots of drama, picture-painting and humour.  The first surprise is the inclusion of an accordion in the scoring, as well as piano, celeste, vibraphone and tubular bells.  A balmy nocturne opens, followed by a love duet with beautiful dialogue between solo violin, clarinet, flute, oboe, vibraphone and celeste, building to an impassioned lyrical climax, great writing honoured by the superb chamber playing that we always get from the SCO, capped with a rich orchestral sound.  The third movement, a hectic panicky chase scene, pacy and rhythmically driven with much hilarity, featured some great writing for brass and timpani, plus the surprise inclusion of a referee’s (or police?) whistle.  The baddie of the opera, a spy called the Major, is portrayed by the tango fourth movement, with accordion, trumpet and violin solos, bongos and maracas.  The fifth movement, representing Susanna and Cherubino reminiscing wistfully on their brief affair in the past, featured fabulous mutually responsive phrasing from solo violin (Stephanie Gonley) and piano (Simon Smith) in a melody that seemed to hint at Maurice Jarre’s film music for ‘Doctor Zhivago’. The finale, a hilarious tango rondo whose episodes provide caricature vignettes of the main characters, included a polka, a waltz, a gypsy dance leading to a big climax and a solo cello interlude before a tango coda.  A super concert opener and it got the full SCO/Emelyanychev treatment, to the evident delight of the Glasgow audience.

The black grand piano that featured in the Langer was on a slightly elevated platform behind the first violins and I did wonder how easy it would be to move it front of stage.  From my seat in the stalls, a second, brown ‘piano’ was just visible centre stage, behind the cellos and in front of the winds.  Cellos and violas parted to the side to make it more visible but no keyboard instruments moved.  Maxim and Dmitry arrived and the latter sat at the visible keyboard, the former at (first surprise) a matching but obscured brown instrument.  Dmitry started playing (second surprise; no orchestral introduction) and the timbre was not that of a piano (third surprise, the solo instruments were fortepianos).  But, biggest surprise of all, the music was not Mozart, but the majestic solo cadenza that opens Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.5, the ‘Emperor’, also in E-flat major. The ‘orchestral’ chords that punctuate that intro were supplied by Maxim on the second fortepiano.  The end of this impromptu surprise introduction dovetailed seamlessly into Mozart’s own orchestral introduction.  In this work, the orchestration is pared back to a chamber accompaniment and the two solo parts are of equal importance with a huge emphasis on dialogue.  Notwithstanding my preference for the modern pianoforte instrument, the reduced dynamic range of the fortepiano, on which Dmitry is an acknowledged expert, is well suited to delivering an intimate chamber interpretation, which is of course very much the SCO’s home turf.  The playing was phenomenal and delivered an aural treat.  Visually, though, I have reservations.  If the solo instruments had been brought forward and oriented in a more traditional ‘interlocking’ arrangement with the soloists facing each other, the chamber interplay would have had an added and equally satisfying visual element.  The bona fide Mozart first movement cadenza was scrumptious, nonetheless.  Another, probably unscheduled, surprise was Maxim adjusting the tuning of one of his strings before the slow movement.  Robin Williams’ oboe intro was very lovely and the movement received an elegant chamber reading.  The playful rondo finale lets the orchestra join the party and drive more of the melodic invention and harmonic excursion.  Another clever, witty cadenza for the two soloists and the brief coda brought the genial chamber interpretation of this Mozart gem to a close.  Encore pieces employing two keyboards are less numerous than those for one, but I would never have guessed what we were about to hear when Maxim and Dmitry sat down again after the thunderous applause.  They were joined by principal cellist Philip Higham for the original two-piano version of ‘The Swan’ from Saint-Saëns’ ‘Carnival of the Animals’.  More exquisite chamber music in a serenely subtle performance.

Ironically, but perhaps thankfully, Haydn’s ‘Surprise’ Symphony delivered no surprises to anyone familiar with the work.  Or, more accurately, no aural surprises.  However, apart from the cellists and timpanist, the players stood throughout, the chairs having been spirited away in the interval.  This seemed to endow the performance with a sprightly vitality and genial immediacy.  I can personally vouch for the fact that it is huge fun to perform with, among others, a particularly generous second violin part with clever counterpoint and cheeky syncopation, which I played in the UCD Orchestra in the early 1980s while at university.  The playing was visibly and audibly committed to the mission of convincing us that Haydn 94 is still a gem of the repertoire, a mission fully accomplished.  The ensemble sound, with period horns and trumpets and those lovely little timpani, was fabulous, while the phrasing and dynamics were moulded to perfection by Maxim’s direction.  The 6/8 G-major dance of the first movement was a gleeful romp.  The C-major Andante theme-and-variations was endowed with a brisk, naïve innocence which set off the surprise chord wonderfully.  The hilariously ‘obese’ minuet was made even funnier with pretensions of elegance in the rallentando before returning to first section, beautifully offset by the genial trio.  A super-fast tempo for the finale ensured added hilarity for the sudden stops, false starts and key excursions and the string playing was impressively agile.  Some conductors eschew the fortissimo timpani joke that sets off the coda, but I’m delighted to report that Maxim is not one of them.  A delightful reading of a repertoire staple – the appreciative Glasgow audience concurred.

One final surprise remained, the furtive return of percussionists and brass to the stage being a none-too-subtle clue.  The SCO’s Associate Composer, Jay Capperauld, has composed a witty birthday encore for them, ‘Jubilee’: a set of theme and variations on the song ‘Happy Birthday to You’.  With a rhythmic vitality and harmonic language not a million miles from those of Copland (and, to a much lesser extent, Stravinsky in party mood), it is a super piece to engender a gala atmosphere   Ecstatic applause from the Glasgow crowd.

Here's to another 50 years!