Music

SCO Ensemble

Cottier's Theatre, Glasgow

Michael Tumelty

Five Stars

On Thursday night a superb ensemble from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra gave an exemplary performance in the Cottier Chamber Project. Despite the quality and reputation of the players, it didn't attract much of a crowd. Why? It's busy just now, of course; but can I suggest one reason is that the concert dared to venture into little-known territory?

The fact is that, though composers Darius Milhaud and Bohuslav Martinu between them wrote over 800 pieces, nobody really wants to know them. But folk thus cannot appreciate the potential appeal of their music if they won't go and hear it when the rare opportunity occurs. I fear that people prefer the known and the familiar. The acid truth is that in much of musical society there is little curiosity in music beyond near horizons, or in music that hasn't been overdone with endless repetition.

Yet Milhaud's sparkling, buoyant, airy and witty Trio for Violin, Clarinet and Piano, winningly played by Ruth Rogers, Maximiliano Martin and Peter Evans, would have brought a smile to the face of an Easter Island statue. Alas, the statues stayed at home too.

And if you love your Bach for its motoric momentum, you'd have delighted in Martinu's Madrigal Sonata, featuring flautist Alison Mitchell in a terrific piece that spiced up its Bachian drive with splashes of syncopation, generating an irresistible momentum.

The coup de grace from the group, however, joined by cellist Martin Storey, was a mind-blowing performance of Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony, a late-Romantic masterpiece with a modern glint, straddling two musical eras, embracing a seismic upheaval in musical language, and stunningly played in Webern's translucent quintet arrangement.