Music

Scottish Chamber Orchestra/Leleux

Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

Keith Bruce

four stars

ALTHOUGH all three were not always the sunniest of characters, the composers in this SCO programme directed by oboist Francois Leleux were represented by some of their sunniest works, all entitled “Serenade” and, the Brahms apart perhaps, all the sort of repertoire you might be more likely to hear when the chamber orchestra is in summer touring mode.

Art song composer Hugo Wolf has had a few successors in his lack on enthusiasm for the music of Johannes Brahms (including one on this newspaper), and may have been dismayed to find himself in the same programme, but his Italian Serenade (composed by an Austrian and conducted by a Frenchman) is a Viennese whirl of an opener, where the orchestra’s strings were on singing form.

In Dvorak’s Opus 44 Serenade in D Minor it is the winds who are to the fore, with bassist Nikita Naumov and cellist Philip Higham adding orchestral colour, Leleux and Maximiliano Martin swapping melody lines across the front of the stage, and Heather Brown’s contrabassoon adding crucial heft to the outer movements with the work’s irresistible march tune. If the Czech composer is clearly aping early music there, the second movement has a jazzy syncopation that marks him as ahead of his time. It is gloriously playful writing, which was performed in that spirit.

If the young Brahms’s Serenade No 1 is symphonic in scale, if not in structure, it is nonetheless very different from the symphonies he would eventually come to write, and of which this orchestra has made one of the best recent recordings. First horn Jacob Dean and flute Fiona Fulton shone in the first movement, and the work reaches some sort of essential statement in the Adagio third, before becoming lighter in tone in the Minuets, Scherzo and Finale that follow, even as the orchestration paradoxically builds in scale. Under Leleux the piece found a shape that was elegance itself.