Music

SCO

City Hall, Glasgow

Michael Tumelty

three stars

IN the nicest possible sense, Friday night’s SCO concert with Thierry Fischer stepping in for Robin Ticciati was a load of bits‘npieces. I’d better duck to avoid a hurled brickbat for suggesting such a thing; but Mozart’s three-minute mile, the Marriage of Figaro Overture, opening the concert with a whirl and a dash of activity, is itself a "bits‘n’pieces" piece: it was intended to be longer. It is, however, exquisite perfection as it stands.

And if ever there was an entire stylistic catalogue of bits‘n’pieces assembled under the banner of a single composition, it is Richard Strauss’s suite, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, a work of limited homogeneity though, in the gorgeous SCO performance on Friday, a thesaurus of the loveliest stylistic cuttings from the Strauss catalogue.

And, dare I suggest, without critical implication, that Martin Suckling’s Piano Concerto, an SCO commission premiered throughout Scotland last week with Tom Poster as the cracking soloist, is in itself a marvellous, if seemingly-loose, collection of characterisations, moods and impressions. It is highly original, not remotely resembling an orthodox piano concerto: it has five movements, not three; the relationship with the orchestra is extremely varied, the soloist having pages to himself while the orchestra finds itself on occasion, limited – if that’s the word – to providing atmosphere and colour, though at other points controlling mood changes in the music.

Within all that there is tremendous rhythmic writing for the pianist with music of bracing immediacy. Tom Poster was stunning, though I did wonder if the mosaic-like, or maybe mobile-like, structure of the multi-faceted concerto was running a bit long.