SCO

SCO

City Halls, Glasgow

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IF you don't mind, I'm going to personalise this review a wee bit. On Friday night the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and conductor Oliver Knussen gave the world-premiere performance of a new work by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, a concert overture entitled Ebb Of Winter, written for the SCO in honour of its 40th birthday.

Max, as he is known, and the SCO go back a long way. But Max and I go back a long way too. He was my first major interviewee 30 years ago when I started work on The Herald, an experience I found absolutely terrifying. On Friday night, not having seen each other for some years, and with both of us having been seriously ill in the interim, we met again, after his fascinating pre-concert talk on the new work.

He said he hoped that Ebb Of Winter would be seen as a "mature" piece, perhaps less-abrasive than some of his works from the sixties. Well, it is, but without one ounce of compromise evident in its composition, or in its brilliant delivery by the SCO. You could take the piece any way you want: in the pictorial literalism of the music (the realisation of "slippery underfoot" the best I have ever heard) or the sun-kissed but freezing atmospheres throughout the piece, with its dazzling, radiantly spring-like major chord at the end.

But my own preference in this wee masterwork is the (by now and long since established) natural Scottish accent in the music that underpins its identity, and the dance-like figuration, lilt and momentum that propels the piece in its later stages. And, for me, the fact that Max's music is still dancing, which I said to the great man after the performance, is one of the most enduring qualities of his work.

Elsewhere in the concert, Peter Serkin's playing of Bartok's great Third Piano Concerto was a bit bookish and never got off the leash, while the SCO's account of Stravinsky's Symphony in C, though stunningly-accentuated and articulated, was a little heavy-footed.

A good concert, poorly attended.

MICHAEL TUMELTY