Scottish Chamber Orchestra plays two 50th anniversary concerts

Five decades on the orchestra remains a vital cog in the country’s cultural life. And if anything, SCO violist Steve King suggests, it sounds better than it ever did. “I think the orchestra is playing at its very best now.”

Maxim Plays Mozart and Haydn (Image: free)

King and I are sitting in the very same City Halls. You join us on December 15, 2023, almost 50 years on and later this evening the SCO will accompany Nicola Benedetti to play Beethoven’s Violin Concerto at the City Halls in Glasgow.

In an hour or two the members of the orchestra will gather for a rehearsal for said concert, but right now King - “number four viola,” as he describes himself - and Su’a Lee, the orchestra’s Sub-Principal Cello, are reminiscing.

Between them, the two of them have 70 years of service with the SCO. “This week is my 40th anniversary week,” King admits. “I joined in 1983.”

By comparison Lee is still a relative newbie, with just 30 years in the orchestra under her belt, having joined on St Andrew’s Day in 1993.

Together, though, they perhaps represent the reason the SCO remains a powerhouse in Scottish classical music. Both bring a sense of commitment and adventure to what they do, an approach which is reflective of the SCO’s approach in general. And both are clearly still enthralled to the music they make with the orchestra.

“I’m loving it more now than I’ve ever done,” says King, who was in his mid-twenties when he joined.

Lee is of the same mind. “I never thought I would stay for as long as I have, but essentially the reason I’ve stayed is because it’s still absolutely vibrant and there is nothing better. It feels like family in a good way. I would never stay in a place that didn’t totally inspire me.

“Everything here ticks all the boxes. It’s just very inspiring to be here.”

King and Lee are two of the 31 members who make up the current line-up of the SCO. They both have a history with the orchestra but it’s the present day that they seem most engaged with.

“It has always been a good high quality performing orchestra,” King suggests. “It’s always been like a family. The ambience obviously changes as different people come and go. The conductors are different and the expectations of the conductors were different.

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“A golden age was our work with Charles Mackerras. That was just amazing.” But, he adds, “I think if he had come into the orchestra now he might have found a slightly higher performing standard.”

Lee agrees. “The calibre of the players is so high. There’s not a weak link in the group and I think that makes it special.”

That said, the present is built on the orchestra’s storied past. And if you can’t celebrate your 50th birthday, when can you celebrate it?

And the history of the SCO is one worth celebrating. In 2013, on the eve of the SCO’s 40th birthday, the then Herald music critic the late Michael Tumelty described the SCO as “one of the best chamber orchestras in the world”, pointing to the composers who have written especially for the orchestra - including Peter Maxwell Davies, James MacMillan and Sally Beamish and, of course, the calibre of principal conductors who have been associated with it over the years.

The SCO has been able to call on the services of the likes of Jukka-Pekka Saraste, the aforementioned Charles Makerras Joseph Swensen and Robin Ticciati in the past.

That tradition continues. The current incumbent is Maxim Emelyanychev who took over for the 2019-2020 season (just in time for the Covid lockdown).

How important has the role of the principal conductor been in the story of the SCO over the years? “They ask different things of us,” King suggests. “When Su-a first joined we were doing these recordings with Charles Mackerras which would last for two and a half, sometimes three weeks. Charles would come in - he was quite old then - and would come to the podium and wax lyrically for 10 minutes about what we were just about to do, about how in Prague he’d seen the original manuscript from Mozart. And that imparts a real excitement in you.

SCO Maxim (Image: free)

“Now, he had quite a reputation in London and other cities. He was a tough taskmaster. When he came up to Scotland he loved working with us. He was a different animal.”

Lee nods in agreement. “He was like a kind uncle,” she suggests.

“And he trusted the orchestra so much,” King continues. “If there were intonation problems in the wind he’d say, ‘Sort it out in the break.’ He trusted everyone to look after their own.”

There was a time when the conductor was seen as God by orchestras. Has that idea faded now?

“We still see some conductors who are a bit precious, but then we’re seeing conductors like Maxim who are just in it for the music,” King says.

“He’s very much a team player and I think that is the way it’s going,” Lee adds.

“The days of conductors coming in and being God or trying to be Karajan,” King continues, referring to Herbert von Karajan, the autocratic conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic who died in 1989, “they don’t really exist now.”

Born in Seoul and educated at Chethams School of Music and the Juilliard School in New York, Lee was 23 when she joined the orchestra. King arrived a decade earlier after playing with the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra. As members of the SCO they are self-employed. What is the commitment?

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“The Scottish season is from the middle of September until the middle of May and we are obliged to do all of that work apart from five weeks,” King explains. “We can, if we wish, take five weeks out unpaid.

“For the rest of the year - that’s the whole of the summer - any recordings and any tourings, we have to do 51 per cent. So, that gives us a huge amount of flexibility.”

That has allowed King to not only compose his own music but also work in the music department at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, where he was director of music for nearly 25 years (he finally stood down in 2022).

Su-a Lee, meanwhile, has worked extensively with folk musicians and in 2022 recorded her own album Dialogues which saw her work with the likes of Donald Shaw, Karine Polwart, her husband Hamish Napier and Maeve Gilchrist. The album was nominated for a SAY award last year.

And back in the 1990s Lee played with Mr McFall’s Chamber, a string quartet who took classical music into nightclubs.

“It felt like an underground movement,” she recalls, before adding, “but that has become the norm. I’m seeing a lot of groups doing roughly that idea; taking music into different venues, trying to find different audiences and that still feels a little bit new now.

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“We now definitely work with different types of musicians and it’s less of a big deal, which I think is a very good thing.”

This flexibility and sense of adventure is also part of the core identity of the SCO these days. At this year’s Celtic Connections in Glasgow it will perform with the likes of Paul Buchanan of The Blue Nile and folk band Altan.

What has changed in the last 50 years is the very idea of what a chamber orchestra can be, you might say. And who it’s for.

As well as playing all over Scotland, the SCO regularly performs in schools and has an ongoing five-year project in Craigmillar in Edinburgh working with the local community. The orchestra is not confined just to the concert hall.

“I think that we take a much more holistic approach to music and community,” suggests Lee. “In the last 10 or so years we have been doing a project with people who are living with dementia. I’ve been part of it pretty much from the beginning and that is now coming into the general orchestra remit. Now the whole orchestra will go and do concerts that are dementia-friendly. There’s much more of an interweaving between those community projects and the full orchestra.”

So what does this tell us? Well maybe it gives us an answer that would have been very different if you had asked it 50 years ago.

Who is an orchestra for? Everyone.

The SCO plays two 50th anniversary concerts at the Queen's Hall in Edinburgh on Thursday, January 18 and City Halls, Glasgow next Friday, January 19. On Wednesday, January 24 the SCO plays with Altan and RANT at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. On Friday, January 26, also as part of Celtic Connections, it performs in the same venue with Paul Buchanan, Aoife O'Donovan, Lau and Maeve Gilchrist. Full details of all events can be found at sco.org.uk