Music

Scottish Chamber Orchestra/Egarr

Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

Keith Bruce

five stars

SOPRANO Carolyn Sampson, in her final appearance as one of the SCO’s featured artists this season, comprehensively stole the show at the Queen’s Hall on Thursday evening with her performance of the aria from Handel’s Semele, Myself I shall adore.

Deploying an old-fashioned dressing-table set vanity mirror as a prop, she did not stop at examining her make-up but also checked out the rear view of her gold brocade frock before the song was over. It was a tour de force of performance, most importantly in the singing, with some gorgeous, and increasingly elaborate – and stratospheric – ornamentation of her vocal line.

Only pyrotechnics could follow that – and fortunately Richard Egarr had programmed just that in the same composer’s Music for the Royal Fireworks. The only work of the evening to which he did not also add harpsichord continuo, the conductor was constantly re-balancing the band in a performance that made a virtue of power and tonal range of modern instruments on this mid-18th century ceremonial music.

That was an interesting choice to end a concert entitled Brilliance of the Baroque, which had begun with Egarr’s selection of music from Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, from the 1690s. His sequencing was entirely about the music, rather than the narrative, with the lovely oboe duet that is the Prelude to Act II appearing near the end and a sequence of dances and a “symphony” between Sampson’s first two vocal contributions – the second being the best known O let me weep.

Back in the summer of last year, co-leader Benjamin Marquise Gilmore directed the SCO strings in a programme showcasing the theorbo of Matthew Wadsworth and both were both key to the success of Egarr’s programme here, notably on that song, the latter with sympathetic continuo and Marquise Gilmore an eloquent melodic foil to the soprano.

He was also to the fore in Handel’s Concerto Grosso Opus 3 No1 that opened the second half, alongside the winds. Egarr had been entirely correct to introduce his concert as an evening of theatre music, but there was always ensemble precision in the drama.