SCO/Markl, City Hall, Glasgow
Michael Tumelty
Four Stars
I HAVE one teeny reservation about the SCO's concert with German-Japanese conductor Jun Markl on Friday night. It's not a criticism, just an observation that I've been chewing over in the two hours since I left the City Hall. Why did the slow movement of Chopin's First Piano Concerto with Argentinian dynamo, Ingrid Fliter, seem so much longer than usual? It's not as though either the pianist or Markl appeared to be dragging it out or languishing in its loveliness. And Fliter, who is a steel-core player, and as much a power-driver as a poet, wallows in nothing: she knows all about forward momentum, as she demonstrated in Friday's glittering account of the Chopin.
I have a notion what might have contributed to that perspective. This is not a complaint: I'm just curious about what alters perspectives on a performance. And one thing which certainly does is the intense observation of detail: the more detail you pack in, and the more there is going on, the more space the music seems to occupy, possibly creating the impression of more time taken. Now: did you notice the phenomenal detailing in the orchestral texture around Fliter's dazzling performance, especially from the SCO winds, and outstandingly, in the ultra-lyrical singing from the bassoons? The whole thing felt like a huge canvas; and time appeared to stretch to accommodate it.
No such perspective applied in the SCO's exhilarating, al fresco playing Of Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony, where the warm wind whipped your face, and in Stravinsky's glowing, beautiful arrangement of Chopin's A flat Nocturne, the piece that started it all for the Russian composer.
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