Scottish Chamber Orchestra
The Queen’s Hall
I took a friend, who is doing some work for the Edinburgh Music Review, to the concert and I hope will eventually become a reviewer. I had taken her to the Ellen Kent La Boheme at the Usher Hall the night before, and then to the SCO concert tonight. At the end of the SCO concert she said: “wow I thought the orchestra last night was quite good, but now I realise they weren't, this orchestra is amazing!” Those of us who know the SCO of course are not surprised; as Michael Tumelty the fine former music critic of the Herald said some years ago ‘The SCO are in my view the best band in Scotland.’ Harry Johnstone, the SCO horn player, says in his programme note, ‘What makes the SCO special? The size of the orchestra at 37 players allows for a friendly cooperative atmosphere where players from all sections mix well without cliques. Watching the SCO you can see that they all take joy in music making, unlike some London orchestras I know where the musicians look bored! Tonight, under the leadership of Kristian Bezuidenhout, the SCO are clearly enjoying their music and give us a triple treat of Haydn, Beethoven and Mozart - you can't get better than that! Centrepiece was Beethoven's Triple Concerto, rarely played and very difficult to get right, it and the concert was a triumph - a five-star triple treat!
The concert opened with Haydn's wonderful Symphony No 52 in C minor. In his very good programme notes David Kettle (who is a music critic for the Scotsman among others) says “No wonder the great Haydn scholar HC Robbins Landon described the Symphony as 'the grandfather of Beethoven's Fifth'. Not only does it share that work's key of C minor and all the musical symbolism of struggle, tragedy and high drama, that tonality has accrued over the centuries - but also its tension, it’s power and its audacious ambitions.” The fine pianist Kristian Bezuidenhout (whom Kate Calder reviewed recently for the Edinburgh Music Review) was conducting from the harpsichord. Now we created a certain amount of controversy last week when we suggested that cellist Nicolas Altstaedt had played Shostakovich's cello concerto beautifully, but hadn't really conducted it. Indeed, Norman Lebrecht's music blog Slipped Disc (the biggest read music blog in the world!) ran the whole review and it aroused a lot of interest. Tonight Kristian was very clearly conducting the Haydn, but of course he wasn't playing his harpsichord very much, and when he did you couldn't hear it - certainly in the stalls and I suspect by most of the orchestra. So really the harpsichord became a music stand in the Haydn and even more so in the Mozart Prague Symphony at the end. The irony is that Kristian is a good conductor as well as a fine pianist, and as one of the members of the orchestra said the real work is done in rehearsal. Of course, the SCO played it wonderfully and it was a great opening work.
We then had Beethoven's great Triple Concerto which is rarely performed as it requires three exceptional soloists in violin, piano and cello. Fortunately, we had three of the best tonight in SCO leader Benjamin Marquise Gilmore on violin, Kristian Bezuidenhout on piano (and what a pianist he is!), and SCO principal cellist Phillip Higham, plus of course the SCO backing them up. It was a triumph, the wonderful lyrical theme of the first movement is swapped around between the three soloists and picked up by the orchestra, the lovely slow second movement and the lively finale were all delivered wonderfully by the soloists, in particular by Phillip Higham's impassioned cello playing, and the orchestra was superb. It was in every way a triple treat.
After the interval we had Mozart's Prague Symphony No 38 which is one of his best. Apparently, as David Kettle told us in his notes, it wasn’t written in or for Prague! Instead it was meant for a visit to London, but Mozart's father Leopold refused to babysit so Mozart had to go to Prague instead! It was a great triumph in Prague, so much so that they commissioned Mozart to write Don Giovanni! Kristian had his harpsichord back in front of him but there was little attempt to play it as he was really into conducting this great symphony, his arms flying all over the place and the SCO players responding splendidly. It was a great end to a superb concert and showed us why live music is so much more exciting than recorded music. The packed Queens Hall responded with a roar of approval and many of the audience stayed on in the bar to congratulate the musicians and to get Kristian's signature on their CDs.
