Music

Scottish Chamber Orchestra

City Halls, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

****

A FEW years back, Rosenna East, then a violinist with the SCO, wrote a thoughtful piece in The Herald questioning the necessity for conductors, and it came to mind on Friday when necessity was indeed the mother of invention. With both conductor Robin Ticciati and the billed soloist, pianist Igor Levit, unwell, the music in the programme was unchanged, but the direction of it passed into confidently different hands.

For Schumann’s Piano Concerto, the last minute substitute was Spaniard Javier Perianes, returning to the venue where he had played Saint-Saens with the BBC SSO under Matthias Pintscher, but not well-known in Scotland. I’ll wager he’ll be back to play with the SCO again, very likely directing from the keyboard as he did here, even if his nods to the strings noticeably diminished along with any requirement for them. His playing was beautifully measured and exquisitely lyrical and there was a palpable ensemble feel to the performance.

It came in the midst of a programme where SCO leader Benjamin Marquise Gilmore had stepped up to take charge during rehearsals and the players had decided things were just fine like that. For the opening Bach Brandenburg No 1, this was a compact standing band, with bassoonist Amy Harman and bassist Nikita Naumov the most mobile section on stage. There were fine contributions from all the winds and horns Alec Frank-Gemmill and Harry Johnstone too in a performance where a stickman would have been entirely superfluous.

Whether a conductor might have brought more propulsion to Haydn’s Clock Symphony is perhaps more debatable, but to my ears you could not fault either the balance or the dynamics of the playing with concertmaster Gilmore in charge.

I have no idea how far down the road the SCO are with a replacement for the departing Ticciati at the end of this season, but this week certainly raised the question of whether it is one they need to be on at all.