Music

Scottish Chamber Orchestra

Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Keith Bruce

four stars

IT is, remarkably, five years since Robin Ticciati gave us his cycle of Schumann symphonies with the SCO, subsequently released in acclaimed recordings on Linn. The Symphony in D Minor is properly only No. 4 if played in the composer’s revised 1851 version, as Ticciati chose, and as Emmanuel Krivine selected here.

His wife Clara preferred it, although his other musical executor Johannes Brahms did not, and that disagreement was a source of friction between them.

It certainly seems more considered and flowing than the original score (which Rattle chose to record in Berlin) in the hands of both the SCO conductors, and under Krivine it was the brisker passages that were best of all, utilising larger forces, I think, than Ticciati, and combining modern brass instruments with period timpani.

Those decisions paid off in the expansive acoustic of the Usher Hall with a performance that proved once again how worthy the Schumann symphonies are of their current – and relatively recent – established place in the orchestral repertoire.

Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 perhaps suffers from being between two more obviously radical works in his sequence for the instrument, as well as being both quite jolly and placid by turns. There is something of the Pastoral Symphony in the scoring for the orchestra and Krivine’s interpretation certainly put as much emphasis on that as it left room for soloist Bertrand Chamayou.

There is a querulous and plaintive tone to much of the piano part, especially in the slow movement, and Chamayou captured that beautifully. Here, however, the big hall seemed to be working against the musicians’ approach, which may well prove better suited to the more intimate acoustic of the City Hall in Glasgow.

Mendelssohn wrote his Overture, The Fair Melusina, as a 28th birthday present for his older sister, Fanny, 185 years ago, give or take a week or so. Rather less played than his travel-inspired Hebrides Overture of around the same time, it is still unmistakably the work of the young composer at his pictorial best, and was a fine opening showcase for the SCO’s splendid wind section.