SCO, City Hall, Glasgow
Michael Tumelty
Five Stars
WELL, all good things come to an end; and the announcements late last week about Robin Ticciati’s conducting career frankly come as no surprise. His contract as principal conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra comes to an end in 2017/18, and at that point he will take up a new five-year contract as music director of the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester, Berlin, when he might reasonably be considered to have taken a whacking great leap up the conductors’ ladder to fame. He’s already on the way with his appointment last year as music director of Glyndebourne Festival Opera.
So I guess in Scotland, three things now happen: we start getting used to seeing less of him; the SCO will be keeping its eye open for a replacement; and we the listeners start really savouring the remaining number of appearances and insights we will have from this bright, gifted young English musician.
And that began on Friday with his demonstration that there is freshness yet to be uncovered in that most hoary and hackneyed of warhorses, Brahms’ Academic Festival Overture, where Ticciati, with characteristic unaffectedness, delivered it with freshly-sprinkled dew. And that transformed into a near-hormonal energy and drive in a spirited, muscular, propulsive account of the First Symphony, where there was a magical urgency to everything, from the momentum of that introduction, to the irresistible seductiveness of the violin solos in the slow movement, to the intoxicating magnetism of the horn calls.
And we will also have to reflect on Ticciati’s authority and command as ultra-sensitive accompanist to soloists, on Friday, violinist Isabelle Faust, for me one of the supreme violinists, whose mesmeric account of Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, exquisitely ravishing and played with a beauty that was luminous, actually seemed to stop Time in the progress of the music. This was the two of them, Faust and Ticciati, in indivisible union, the one transcending time in the magic of her playing, the other in the spell-binding stillness within his orchestral accompaniment.
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