Music

Scottish Chamber Orchestra/Storgards

City Halls, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

four stars

LAST Spring, Finnish conductor John Storgards “took to social media”, as they say, to ridicule the pathetic Scottish response to the inclement weather that left him at a loose end in Scotland as his series of concerts with the SCO were cancelled because of the snow.

The programme he brought this time looked similarly uncompromising, but in fact turned out to be a tuneful delight. The only one of these melodies many in the audience would know came in the Allegro finale of Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto in E-flat, which is one of the composer’s best known tunes. It is not often played with quite the zest star soloist Sweden’s Hakan Hardenberger brought to it however, following the precise construction of the central Andante. Here was music that took advantage of the cutting edge of instrument technology in its day played as if that was still true.

It was preceded by the five-movement Serenade composed by a young Erwin Schulhoff, who would die in a World War 2 concentration camp, in the year the First World War began. Although he was following an older model, the young Czech’s music is startlingly modern, with more than a passing resemblance to the best English music of much later in the 20th century, particularly in its broad orchestration.

It was mirrored, in some respects, by the main work of the evening, H K Gruber’s Busking, with Hardenberger deploying a different horn on each of the three movements and a selection of mutes to further modify the solo sound, with Swedish guitarist Mats Bergstrom on banjo and German accordionist Claudia Buder joining him in the front line. She was occasionally lost in the overall balance (while the banjo was surprisingly loud), but there were some glorious sonic combinations that hinted at early jazz and American roots music, with Hardenberger soulful on flugel horn in the slow movement and then running through the big band vocabulary of gimmicky trumpet sounds in the closing Allegro.

The concert itself closed with a Beethoven curiosity, his Twelve Contradances from 1802 – short pieces that sounded like a disc of Ludwig samples for a hip-hop DJ to mix with beats by James Brown or Kraftwerk on the other deck. Perhaps someone like Gabriel Prokofiev has already done exactly that.

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