I SUSPECT that everyone who hears the Scottish Ensemble's fascinating April touring programme, which opened in Perth on Monday, will take from it their own impressions of what it was all about.
Somebody on Monday called it "intriguing"; the man in front of me described it to his wife as a "tour de force". Another said it was "a long wait for something we recognised"; and yet another remarked that it was a programme "built on an idea that was challenging and risky".
Risky it certainly was: the ensemble drew a poor audience for the first night of its Inversion tour, with a programme that started at the modern end of the spectrum, with Ligeti's Ramifications, then worked back through time, with Webern's Five Movements for String Orchestra and Debussy's String Quartet in a new arrangement for string orchestra, written by Scottish Ensemble leader Jonathan Morton. Then it was back to the Romantic era with part of Bruckner's mini-heffalump of a String Quartet, back further towards classicism with Mendelssohn's precocious Sinfonia no 10 (written when he was just 14) and then landing on a performance of flamboyance and exhilaration with the E major Violin Concerto by Bach.
For me, the trajectory of the programme was incidental. I heard it as six portraits of musical beauty, with the Ligeti stunningly clear, the Webern more expressive than I have ever heard it and the Debussy, the main work, as a successful orchestral exercise that revealed the revolution around the corner. SE playing was dazzling throughout. From whatever perspective, it's unmissable: Aberdeen tonight, Dundee tomorrow, Edinburgh on Friday and Glasgow on Saturday.
HHHH
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