Music

SCO/Emelyanychev

City Halls, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

five stars

WISE up, occasional Glasgow concertgoers! When the Scottish Chamber Orchestra calls a concert “Maxim’s Baroque Inspirations”, it is time to put your hand in your pocket.

You may not go to mainstream classical concerts regularly, but typically you like American minimalism and its offspring, and you also enjoy the livelier examples of early music.

So when the SCO’s young principal conductor Maxim Emelyanychev is given the freedom to pair music from 300 years ago with more recent pieces that show its influence, there is the promise of a programme that will appeal beyond the orchestra’s regular attenders.

Not that there wasn’t a good audience at the City Halls on Friday evening, and a very healthy turnout of young people among that number, but really there should not have been an empty seat for what was a glorious sequence of music that even continued through the interval.

Bar-takings may have suffered at half time, because the conductor, playing recorder, led a sextet with two fiddles, bass, guitar and percussion into the foyer to play some music by London-based contemporary of Vivaldi, Nicola Matteis. It is a trick of Emelyanychev’s that works particularly well in the Candleriggs venue, and it made a very effective bridge between the first half music, which the SCO played seated on the platform, and the second half, performed standing and framed by two Vivaldi concertos with the 26 musicians placed in perfect symmetry on the stage.

Beyond that, the conductor had a larger frame in mind, unveiling an encore of one of Edvard Grieg’s Elegiac Melodies to echo the composer’s Holberg Suite that had begun the programme two hours earlier. It was much less the baroque pastiche it can sometimes seem than effervescent tribute, as well as the evening’s most familiar music.

French organist and composer Thierry Escaich’s Baroque Song was written just 15 years ago but draws on Bach chorales for material to create three movements with a dark underscore. If there was something Hammer Horror or Phantom of the Opera about the result, the 1980 Gorecki Harpsichord Concerto that followed, with Emelyanychev himself as soloist, was equally cinematic in its relentless motorik minimalism.

If there was something of the late Jerry Lee Lewis in the conductor’s keyboard playing there, his mobility during the Vivaldi was more from the Keith Emerson playbook. Between the pieces by the Italian master, Paul Hindemith’s Suite of French dance music, written for Yale music students in 1948, featured a superbly-voiced group of exactly half the number of musicians, and – of course – chimed perfectly with the programme bonus we’d heard in the foyer. A brilliantly conceived and realised event.