Donald Runnicles says he always seeks out chances to "come down" from the podium and make music with the people he conducts.
This was one such occasion: an afternoon chamber concert in which Runnicles took to the piano alongside string players from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. There can't be much time to practise scales and arpeggios while flitting about the world's opera houses, and in in Schumann's Second Piano Trio Runnicles mostly deferred to the ardent leadership of violinist Greg Lawson and cellist Martin Storey. Still, the ethos was exactly right and refreshingly unprecious: just get up and do it.
Which for a maestro takes a certain balance of bravado and humility -- both attributes that came through in Runnicles's on-stage conversation (interviewed by our own Keith Bruce). With his gravelly mid-Atlantic twang he talked about his early romance with the human voice; about his piano teacher, the legendary Colin Kingsley, whose lessons "would turn into fully-gledged musicological journeys"; about taking up the French horn to feel what it was like to be conducted; about failing to get a job as Covent Garden's repetiteur and why he's glad he was turned down. When told that he's hailed as a returning hero in Scotland, he shrugged of the complement. "I don't feel remotely heroic."
Earlier we'd been treated to a hearty if slightly fraught account of Beethoven's String Trio in C minor Op 9 no 3 from Lawson, cellist Sian Bell and violist Andrew Berridge. Introducing the piece, Lawson noted that "it's nice to be able to say hello, something we can't usually do from the orchestra". Likewise, it's very nice to be able to hear our fine orchestral players in chamber mode.
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