Scottish Chamber Orchestra: Viennese New Year

Usher Hall - 01/01/24

Jiří Rožeň, conductor | Jennifer France, soprano

In the first concert of their fiftieth anniversary year, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra was definitely in celebratory mood, serenading a packed and eager audience at Usher Hall with a traditional Viennese New Year concert that contained a couple of interesting twists. 

Conductor Jiří Rožeň, whose 2023/4 season has included the headier musical climes of Janacek’s ‘Katya Kabanova’ with Bergen National Opera, led the festive occasion with panache. He was accompanied on five of the twelve featured pieces by accomplished soprano Jennifer France, whose wider repertoire is stretching from Handel’s ‘Jephtha’ at the Royal Opera House to Jonathan Dove’s ‘There was a Child’ with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

This evening’s inevitably lighter fare began with Dvořák’s jaunty Prague Waltzes and ended with Johann Strauss II’s famous ‘Blue Danube’ (the orchestral setting) – followed rapidly by a clap-along encore of the Radetzky March, Op. 228, and a Christmas finale punctuated by poppers and a New Year greeting from orchestra to audience.

In between, Jennifer France confidently tackled the older Strauss’s ‘Voices of Spring’ and Carl Zeller’s sweet ‘Roses in Tyrol’ (from ‘Der Vogelhändler’, following an Entr’acte from the same operetta), before moving on to handle the vocal gymnastics of Richard Strauss’s beautiful Amor, one of six songs from his Op. 68 collection. The latter is an altogether weightier offering, leavened with characteristic charm.

Schubert’s Entr’acte No. 3 from ‘Rosamunde’ was another moment that provided something a touch more reflective among the lollipops, albeit via perhaps his most enduring melody – one the composer reworked and recontextualised for both the B Flat Impromptu for Piano and his A Minor String Quarter.

The programme also included the less performed Eduard Strauss polka ‘Greetings to Prague’, the popular tune-smithing and orchestral fireworks of Franz von Suppé’s ‘Light Cavalry’ overture, and the return of the soprano for Lehar’s ‘Merry Widow’ Vilja (with the audience being invited to join with the final chorus) and Rudolf Sieczyński’s saccharine Wien, ‘Du Stadt meiner Träume’.  

Dvořák made a welcome return in the second half of the concert with his Slavonic Dance No. 1, Op. 46, one of a series of 16 pieces based around Slavic folk tunes and composed between 1878 and 1886. This gave the standard waltz a boisterous, rhythmically accented Bohemian angle. 

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra delivered this entertaining selection to its usual high standards, particularly in the unison moments, and now takes the traditional New Year programme to Aberdeen, Perth and Ayr in the course of the first week of 2024.