SCO, City Hall, Glasgow

Michael Tumelty

Four Stars

WHEN the SCO introduced the concept of an Associate Artist, I cynically thought it meant something nominal, not really suggestive of anything useful to the SCO or its audience in the long term.

I couldn't have been more wrong. Look at the relationships that have developed with Karen Cargill and Alexander Janiczek. And of particular interest is the closeness that has grown between the orchestra and conductor Richard Egarr. He is now in the bloodstream of the SCO. Audiences not only turn out for him: they have come to know him and his engaging ways. But more: they've come to trust him; they will turn out for him whatever he's doing, even if he's leading them into unfamiliar territory, as happened on Friday, when he chucked them in at the deep end of Weber's pretty-much unknown First Symphony. It's not a great piece: it's a try-out of a symphony, and Egarr didn't pretend otherwise. But he was prepared to give it an outing; and his audience, tellingly, was willing to come and listen. We probably won't hear it again: but they came, listened, and appreciated; and that's what I call audience intelligence, rewarded, at the end, with a blistering SCO account of Beethoven Eight.

Otherwise the night belonged to the SCO's super-eloquent principal horn player, Alec-Frank-Gemmill, who with his near-absolute mastery of the natural horn, a primal beast from before the installation of modern valve systems into the instrument, and something of a near-untameable creature of instability and unpredictability, produced spell-binding accounts of Mozart's Second Horn Concerto and, particularly, a recently-reconstructed version of a dazzlingly-acrobatic Concert Rondo in E flat: breath-taking stuff.