Music

Scottish Chamber Orchestra

City Halls, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

four stars

BEETHOVEN'S Missa Solemnis is perhaps less often performed because we do not think of the composer as a man of particularly devout faith, but more likely because it is very demanding. It would be stretching a point to say that Gregory Batsleer's SCO Chorus, augmented for the occasion by 14 singers from the Edinburgh University Chamber Choir, made light work of the challenge, but the singers certainly sounded in complete command of their task throughout. The same was true of conductor John Storgards, even if I had initial misgivings about his placing of the quartet of soloists – soprano Rachel Willis-Sorensen, mezzo Karen Cargill, tenor Jeremy Ovenden, and bass Neal Davies – between orchestra and choir where they seemed to lose out to the combined forces behind them early in the work.

Storgard's appreciation of the unique architecture of Beethoven's approach to mass, a contemporary formal structure rather than a grandiose vaulted cathedral of sound, built to what was really a rather operatic finale in the Agnus Dei, even if the orchestra – playing its socks off all the way – has the last word. The low strings have some of the best of the instrumental music, easily comparable with the contemporaneous Ninth Symphony, and guest leader Benjamin Marquis Gilmore was also on top form for his solo spot in the Sanctus.

But if all the professionals were on their mettle, the final credit has to go to the chorus, the power of the male voices at the start of the Credo as impressive as the precision pitch on the demanding soprano line in the opening Kyrie. Glorious stuff.