Far from being as reverberant as you might fear, the – admittedly heavily draped – restored Great Hall of Stirling Castle seemed to soak up the sound of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra so that there was a lack of brightness in the opening bars of Mozart's Overture to The Marriage of Figaro.
As the evening unfolded, however, it was clear that both conductor Nicholas Mcgegan and baritone Willliam Berger had the measure of the acoustic.
Domenico Cimarosa's 1792 cantata, Il Maestro di Cappella, was not just the party-piece of the programme, but also the best illustration of that, from Rosie Lock's piccolo in the overture to principle bass Nikita Naumov's frequent solo flourishes. Berger revelled in the theatricality of this playful piece, portraying the maestro trying to conduct an unruly orchestra, and proving that it has lost none of its capacity to amuse 220 year on.
It is sure to be a highlight of an upcoming Linn disc this team is making, and for which this tour was also road-testing five Haydn arias. Stirling heard Teco la guida al campo (from Armida) and Gia la morte in manto nero (La vera constanza), the former particularly well-suited to the South African's powerful voice, but the latter giving more scope to his expressiveness.
In Haydn's Symphony no 88, from a few years later in the composer's career, McGegan made the most of the hall's flattering of the lower strings to emphasise the richness of the orchestration, with a basic palette of ingredients. Mozart's almost-contemporary "Paris" Symphony, No 31, made for a fascinating comparison, the slow movement's use of horns, flutes and strings so identifiably from the era's most distinctive voice, as Haydn himself conceded.
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