HHH

THIS is very personal, so possibly a lone view; but there seemed to me a dichotomy, if not several dichotomies, between the music programmed on Friday night by the SCO and its performance.

One piece displayed absolute integrity of interpretation and performance: that was Wagner’s glorious, exquisitely intimate Siegfried Idyll, upon which Robin Ticciati and his peerless band lavished thinking and playing of supreme sophistication and elegance, drawing from the composition all of its wonderful motivic clarity without impeding the progress of the music.

They did that too with Franz Schreker’s Chamber Symphony, a fascinating stylistic melange of impressionism, atmospheric music, high Romanticism, slightly diluted expressionism, and every shade in between. But it remained just that: a melange, with little sense of shape and direction, which went on and on.

Faure’s Requiem, on the other hand, despite the piecemeal nature of its creation, has a lovely unity of sonority and colour: it is never vivid or bright: it is the smoothest musical velvet with a warm, slightly dark hue.

But Ticciati broke all that up on Friday night in a version whose basic tempo was on the swift side, and whose microcosmic attention to nuances of phrasing and dynamics, with a lot of surging and swelling, got in the way of the gentle flow of the music. The balance of the SCO Chorus, within itself and with the orchestra, was at times uneven, soloists Carolyn Sampson and Neal Davies were fine, but the electronic organ was clunky, leaving the ethereal, weightless In Paradisum firmly earthbound, a contradiction in terms if ever there was one.