Music

Scottish Chamber Orchestra/Schuldt

City Halls, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

four stars

YOUNG German conductor Clemens Schuldt had a varied programme to direct for his return visit to the SCO, built around a commission from composer Jonathan Dove that completed a long process.

His accordion concerto “Northern Lights” is dedicated to Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, who was originally to have written the work for soloist Owen Murray but who died in 2016 before completing it. Dove, who has personal history with the instrument as well as with Murray and his students at the Royal Academy of Music, has made a work that ticks all the many boxes required of it, and comes into its own in the final movement with quotations from one of Max’s best known melodies, Farewell to Stromness. Before that point it is focused on the technical possibilities of the free base button accordion (and Murray’s instrument did appear dauntingly complex) and its many range of voices. Dove illustrated these by pitting the soloist against a wide range of orchestral sounds, with bass clarinet, contrabassoon and percussion added to the most usual SCO instrumentation. A little like the music of John Adams at points, it never really sounds at all like Maxwell Davies, but Dove’s evocation of the aurora borealis could surely have been no more effective if he had also known the Orkney sky.

The vexed history of Gyorgy Ligeti’s Concert Romanesc, dating from the time when his music was suppressed by the Soviet Bloc authorties, meant that it was unplayed for 20 years after its composition. Given that it seems to have been a genuine attempt to write something that was “acceptable” in its use of folk themes, that treatment seems especially unjust, although the way Ligeti treats his material has his unmistakable signature. If you are a big band jazz fan, the Molto vivace finale can only call to mind the Don Ellis Orchestra’s Bulgarian Bulge, which dates from around the time the Concert Romanesc eventually premiered.

The programme began with Mozart’s Symphony No 34 (his “Farewell to Salzburg”), and ended with Haydn’s Symphony No 90, which is every bit as tricksy as the Ligeti in its 18th century way. Schult has a lovely flowing approach to this music, which allows for some quite lush, extravagant phrasing while never denying the lessons learned from period performance.