Music

SCO, City Halls, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

Five stars

I very much welcome the Scottish Chamber Orchestra's relatively recent practice of listing the musicians at the front of their concert programmes rather than further back. For this concert that should have been true of the 60 or so members of the SCO Chorus as well. A Mozart Requiem was always likely to produce a full house, and this concert, conducted by the great founder of Collegium Vocal Gent, Philippe Herreweghe, rewarded the capacity audience in full.

His Requiem, in the original Sussmayr completion, balanced the forces onstage - a superb quartet of soloists from Germany, Hungary, and Croatia also clearly under his direction, between band and choir - from the opening bars of the Introitus when the choir's entrance left plenty power in reserve. That was as true in the contribution of individual instrumental soloists like principle clarinet Maximiliano Martin and in the operatic ensemble contributions from the soloists on the Tuba mirum and Benedictus, and in the delicacy of the orchestral accompaniment to the Lacrimosa. But it was the performance of Gregory Batsleer's chorus that was the best thing in a Requiem that was profound and moving.

In a sense we had heard the encore at the start of the concert, in a clever programme that began with Mozart's Kyie in D Minor from a decade earlier, a fragment that is something of a rarity but a lovely stand-alone showcase for a choir in its elegant simplicity.

Between the two were the two movements of Schubert's "Unfinished" Eighth Symphony. The idea that the composer simply became bored of a work already packed with incident and full of melodies seems fantastical. Here is was the SCO strings that really sparkled in a reading where Herreweghe made the orchestra sing.