Music

SCO

City Hall, Glasgow

Michael Tumelty

Four stars

I DON’T want to sound like a spectator on the side-lines revelling in the spills of the action, but there was an edge-of-the seat element in the SCO’s concert on Friday. It was originally intended as a celebration of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, with his new accordion concerto the centre of attention. But the composer died in March, the concerto unwritten. So the programme was revamped, and conductor Alexandre Bloch booked to take over the evening, which became a tribute concert, now featuring Max’s Second Strathclyde Concerto for cello, from 1988.

Then last week Bloch fell ill, and we turned up on Friday to a different conductor and an amended programme. Man of the night now was Rumon Gamba, an under-rated but terrific British conductor, who put on a stunningly dynamic show with the SCO, which worked its socks off in every department of instrumentation and musical characterisation, from the half-breathed murmur of Sibelius’ Valse Triste to the sinew-stretching tensions of Bartok’s Divertimento.

The core of the evening was William Conway’s unremittingly-intense performance of the Second Strathclyde Concerto, a long, sustained and difficult work in which Conway found and did not let go of the soulful, lyrical and searching quality of the piece, while Max’s typical orchestral writing, sometimes dancing lightly, sometimes with the trumpets screeching, garlanded the solo line, which was an exploration of the soul through the body of the cello. A riotous and well-blootered version of Orkney Wedding had us (or me, anyway) pelting out to join in. And news to end: Robin Ticciati won’t make it this week: he’ll be replaced by Duncan Ward, a young Simon Rattle protégé.