Music

SCO/Manze

City Halls, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

five stars

CONDUCTOR Andrew Manze’s programme with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra last week was of music first heard in Vienna, but the SCO’s Spanish principal flute, Andre Cebrian, took the audience on a moving detour to Valencia to remember those affected by the devastating floods.

Following his  virtuosic performance as soloist in Mozart’s Flute Concerto, he encored with a Spanish folk tune, accompanied only by a drone note from the cellos, and invited donations to the relief effort with the purchase of his recent recording, Cartografia de mar, in the foyer at the interval.

It was an especially memorable detail in an evening packed with delights. The concerto, while less familiar than those the composer wrote for French horn or his masterpiece for clarinet, has a lovely slow movement where the two flutes in the orchestra are the foil for the soloist’s voice, and a vibrant finale that began with some sparkling work from the first violins. Cebrian’s even tone projection across the full range of the instrument was given the best possible showcase.

Manze’s dynamic approach to the concerto was continued in the Mozart symphony that concluded the concert. Coincidentally, it was the “Haffner”, No 35, following the BBC SSO’s unremarkable No 34 in the same hall the previous week. The beautifully measured opening bars signalled that this would be a more rewarding experience, and in its briefer span, Manze managed to find a dramatic range of dynamic colour and revelled in the variation of tempi, rewarded by crisp, precise playing across the orchestra.

Other eras of Viennese cultural history were represented by Arnold Schoenberg and Johann Heinrich Schmeltzer. The master of the Second Viennese School shares the spotlight very democratically across the orchestral players in his Chamber Symphony No 2, and the work’s seamless dovetailing of the composer’s earlier style with his radical later thoughts was given emotional expression that contradicted his austere reputation.

Manze’s own orchestration of Schmeltzer’s 1667 Serenata took the Baroque ingredients and gave them a contemporary voice, notably with modern instruments where natural horns and trumpets were used for the Mozart. As he and the orchestra showed with every piece in the programme, and most obviously paralleling the Schoenberg, the variations in volume and pace made gripping listening.