Music
SCO/Emelyanychev
Perth Concert Hall
Keith Bruce
four stars
Starting its new season with a box office double-header, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s Mozart Gala next weekend is very much a home fixture in repertoire terms, while this first all-Dvorak concert programme looked more like an away tie, even if Perth Concert Hall, where the SCO filmed lockdown recitals during the pandemic, must feel like home ground.
It was an unusually large chamber orchestra on the platform for the opening Carnival Overture, with brass and three crucial percussionists stage left, four basses and harp. Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev was careful to keep those ingredients at an appropriate level in a performance that was carnivalesque but also interestingly darker hued at times, with terrifically crisp rhythmic playing at its end.
Guest soloist Steven Isserlis is in the midst of a run of performances of Dvorak’s Cello Concerto with orchestras in France and Germany as well as this week's SCO concerts, and it is a virtuoso work he could probably play in his sleep.
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After the darkly conspiratorial opening bars from Emelyanychev and the orchestra, his entry at first suggested that familiarity might be a problem, but the enveloping narrative of the work – a deeply personal one for the composer – soon swept doubts aside. The heart-felt simplicity of the central Adagio is always affecting and the answering life-affirming pulse of the opening of the Finale was phrased perfectly by the conductor.
An added treat was the encore, the pizzicato party-piece of Georgian composer Sulkhan Tsintsadze’s Chonguri, when the cellist’s 1726 Strad sounded more like a Spanish guitar.
Dvorak’s Symphony No 8 is as replete with tunes as the better-known 9th, “From the New World”, and arguably his real signature work. Emelyanychev found a space and lightness of touch in the slow second movement that made this a benchmark performance in all its detail, and the waltz that followed, while less remarkably original-sounding, was equally lovely.
Czechs will tell you their history is one of pragmatism rather than heroic adventure and the way this orchestra played the symphony’s closing march spoke eloquently to that – it often seemed like a send-up of militarism, and a very long way from uniformed pomp and square-bashing.
Isserlis, Emelyanychev and the SCO give the same programme at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh and Glasgow City Halls Glasgow tonight (Thursday September 26) and tomorrow (Friday September 27).
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