CALL it naivety, but there should be no surprises left from the young musicians of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland: I have reviewed them many times each season, in all their formats, from recitalists to chamber musicians and instrumentalists, from opera and ensemble musicians to full-blown symphony orchestra players.
Yet, despite the familiarity I feel with them all (which is fake, as they wouldn't know me if I fell over them in the street) what one group produced for the Cottier Chamber Project on Wednesday night carried a certain shock value in the quality of the musical product. It wasn't just good, or even excellent: it was superbly organised and structured. Whether it was instinctive or intellectual, the music played by the award-winning Csengele Quartet and ultra-crisp Canadian pianist Pearl-Lynne Chen was delivered with style, confidence and a bulls-eye combination of compactness, clarity of thought and certainty of trajectory.
Please enable cookies in your browser to display the rest of this article.