Five Stars There are a clutch of conductors around who always produce the goods. By happy coincidence, three of them, Joseph Swensen, John Storgards and Ilan Volkov, were all working in Scotland at the weekend with the national orchestras, each in utterly different repertoire territory.
Swensen has come back to the violin, but he's lost nothing from his electric conducting en route, with his pristine counterpoint opening up the textures of Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks for the SCO to get their freshly-sharpened teeth into, while they all trod purposefully through the finale as though they were scrunching gleefully on broken glass. And then the strings were on display alone in an SCO classic: Swensen conducting with style, terrific elan, and more panache than you could pack into a stupefied grin, while the string section, in dazzling form, with endless brio and wit, delivered a thoroughly exhilarating and breathtakingly-virtuosic performance of Britten's Frank Bridge Variations.
But the night then belonged to Swensen the violinist, whose playing of his own gleaming arrangement of Prokofiev's Five Melodies shimmered with character, while, in a tremendously intense and emotional atmosphere, the City Hall was bathed in the Romantic warmth and open-hearted honesty of Swensen's gorgeous playing of Samuel Barber's luxurious Violin Concerto; and, for the record, I have never heard an account of the racing finale which so took my breath away, all without cornering on two wheels.
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