Star rating: *****
THIS is going to sound facetious, so I hope the seriousness of the point I make will be inferred: did you know there were that many right notes in Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto? How many hundred performances of the great Romantic warhorse have I heard in my lifetime? I don't know; I've long since lost count.
But I do know this: I have never heard such an accurate reading of the score - the text - as that given by Canadian violinist James Ehnes with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and conductor Louis Langree on Friday night. So: 100% accuracy. Fine, but what about the spirit, the passion and the sheer romance of the piece?
Quite simply, the performance was saturated with them, but delivered without hyperbole, bombast or flash.
James Ehnes, just approaching his mid-thirties and with a rapidly burgeoning career, is a great violinist. He doesn't look the part. Walking on stage with his lounge suit, shirt and tie, he might be a faceless accountant who has just left the office. There is no act, no stage personality projection and no sense of a musical athlete or acrobat. As I have said of him before, he just does the business, and the result on Friday was glorious music-making, with the SCO firing on all its polished cylinders.
The Tchaikovsky was the centrepiece of a tremendously decisive and authoritative programme with Langree conducting riveting performances of Beethoven's Egmont and the Seventh Symphony, which the SCO played with devastating clarity and the emotional intensity of a band possessed. Just how good can music-making get? Well, the SCO got its reward on Friday with a huge ovation from the near-capacity crowd (choir stalls opened and just 55 tickets unsold).
