Music

Scottish Chamber Orchestra

Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

Keith Bruce, four stars

FOR all its front-of-house limitations, there are occasions when the intimacy of the Queen’s Hall suits the music perfectly and Richard Egarr directing the SCO in Mendelssohn, Haydn and CPE Bach was one of those. Add to that programme the familial ingredient of principal cellist Philip Higham as soloist on the Bach – and still in his usual place for the other works as well – and this orchestra has an obvious challenge in making its new hall feel as homely.

Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3 may actually be as “Scottish” as bratwurst and a glass of chianti, for all the composers claims for its inspiration, but we have taken it to our hearts nonetheless. It was served as dessert here, with Egarr finding every hue in the colourful score and exquisite balance from Maximiliano Martin’s clarinet and the bassoon of Ursula Leveaux, returning to fill the vacant principal’s chair, to the precision pizzicato strings.

The main course was the cello concerto, well over 250 years old and still as rhythmically exciting as contemporary R’n’B, with the solo part integrated into the second movement Andante in a very modern fashion for its time. Higham was, of course, superbly expressive, but so too was his desk-partner Su-a Lee, supplying impeccable continuo playing immediately behind him.

Sitting between those two works chronologically, but served as the hors d’oeuvre here, Haydn’s Symphony No. 93 was full of the caprice and whimsy that the London Times critic identified in its first performance in 1792. Egarr silenced the capacity house to attention by starting the music the moment he stepped on the platform, and Leveaux made her presence known in the dialogue with a string quartet at the start of the Largo before the humorous “parp” that is indicative of the composer’s playfulness across the score.