Music

SCO/Benedetti

Perth Concert Hall

Keith Bruce

five stars

TIMED with a significance the Scottish Chamber Orchestra would not have planned, here was a pre-Christmas treat for music-lovers that combined its own talented squad with the nation’s best-known classical star in the most original fashion.

A concert with Nicola Benedetti was the last event by the SCO at the start of the pandemic in March 2020 and here we were under threat of further restrictions with the violinist again in the joint role of soloist and co-director. The event was entitled Benedetti plays Mozart, but the precocious teenage composer’s first concerto for her instrument was not the most substantial work on the programme.

For Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht, she and Benjamin Marquise Gilmore made up the front desk of the first violins in a rich string ensemble for which Perth may be the perfect venue. With the cellos augmented to comparable strength with the upper strings, there was a rich resonance to the music as well as a sectional balance that was flawless. Benedetti was far from the sole solo voice, with all the front desk players making memorable contributions as well.

Ben Gilmore took the leader and director’s role in the two works by Johann Srauss II that framed the concert, a very different sound from Vienna, written not so many years previously. The Overture to The Gypsy Baron was the perfect set up, as an example both of musical story-telling and of the SCO’s unique way with two dozen string players and fine wind soloists. Tales from the Vienna Woods, which sent everyone home with a spring in their step, is one of the most substantial Strauss waltzes that can be heard in the orchestra’s regular New Year concerts. Its long preamble culminates in a lively flute solo and octet of strings before the big tune arrives to be developed and orchestrated in a myriad ways.

The full platform for that, with percussionists and tuba, was some distance from the lean band behind Benedetti for the Mozart, in many ways the least picturesque work on the bill. As in the Schoenberg though, the violinist was very much an ensemble operator here.

As second violin Gordon Bragg suggested in his introduction, in both Gilmore and Benedetti the SCO have a pair of star strikers on the team.