Music

Scottish Chamber Orchestra

City Halls, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

three stars

INSTRUMENTAL soloists, or pianists and string players at least, often talk of the wisdom – even the necessity – of playing Bach as part of their routine. That discipline must surely be good for chamber orchestras as well, and it seemed appropriate that a man as immersed in early music as conductor Philippe Herreweghe should choose to preface this first of two SCO concerts featuring the music of Mendelssohn and Schumann (Emmanuel Krivine brings his approach to the two composers next week) with some bracing Johann Sebastian from The Art of Fugue. Even better, German pianist Martin Helmchen, whose performance of Mendelssohn's Concerto No 2 grew in the telling, his dialogue with the orchestra building through the central Adagio, chose to encore with a little more Bach, setting things up nicely for Schumann's Second Symphony, the premier of which Mendelssohn conducted.

But although Schumann was devoted to and inspired by Bach, Herreweghe seemed to choose not to labour the period performance point in his interpretation of the score. By comparison with Robin Ticciati's sharp and detailed "chamber" approach to the symphonies, Herreweghe often seemed to make to SCO sound like a bigger orchestra, in the first and fourth movements at least, when trombones add brass muscle.

For whatever reasons, this was an edition of the orchestra with fewer of the section principals in their places than we have seen in a while, but that did not seem to matter in the crisp Scherzo and Herreweghe's fluid pulse through the lovely Adagio, very different from Ticciati's superb Linn label recording with the SCO, but arguably no less valid.