Music

Scottish Chamber Orchestra

Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

Keith Bruce

four stars

THE Scottish Chamber Orchestra has some new, and admirably focused, advertising in Glasgow, saying simply that Fridays at the City Hall is where you will find the band, and leaving out any extraneous detail about the conductor, any soloists, and the musical programme. Trust the SCO’s exquisite taste and make a habit worth sustaining.

At its Edinburgh home, until its own concert hall is realised, things are a little more complex, as the orchestra vacillates between halls depending on the anticipated attendance. For the time being, however, the Queen’s Hall remains its familiar home, and this was a classic season-opening concert of core repertoire: Haydn, Schubert and Brahms, with a soupçon of Mozart by way of a first half encore.

If the reality of the programme was not quite as simple as it appeared, the relationship of the players to conductor Francois Leleux seems as straightforward as ever. Wielding a baton or his oboe, Leleux’s instrumental ebullience is reciprocated, whether he is soloist on his own instrument or directing the orchestra with irrepressible energy.

Haydn’s Symphony No.82, the first of the “Paris” six, may not be considered the finest of the 104 he wrote, but Leleux and the SCO made a very convincing argument for it, with ample quantities of the liveliness demanded by. the “Vivace” indications on its outer movements. Even the bagpipe drone in the finale that is the origin of its nickname, The Bear, was played to raise a smile.

The difficulty with Haydn’s Oboe Concerto is that it is now agreed not to be by the composer at all, but it is still a virtuoso work, to which Leleux brought both soul in the slow movement and virtuosity in lightning fingerwork and stratospheric cadenzas.

A similar misattribution applies to the “Theme of Joseph Haydn” on which Johannes Brahms composed his famous Variations, but that matters less because, attractive tune that he chose to make famous, the Variations are unmistakably Brahms, and beautifully balanced by Leleux here.

Anton Webern’s orchestral arrangements of Schubert’s six German dances, lost until 1931, sounded more like chamber music scaled-up in the context of the rest of the programme, but were a fascinating an addition to it.