EIF music reviews: SCO: Mozart’s Don Giovanni | Steven Osborne - Tribute to Alfred Brendel + more

SCO: Mozart’s Don Giovanni ★★★★★

Usher Hall

This classy performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni continues the SCO’s winning formula of operas in concert that put music and singing front and centre stage.

Once again, conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, directing with superhuman energy from the fortepiano, assembled a crack team of singers backed by an orchestra that delivered this ravishing score in every nuanced detail. They also formed smaller ensembles for the ballroom scene where strumming stings underpinned a lyrical mandolin solo.

While the deplorable antics of Don Giovanni (Konstantin Krimmel) drive the story, it’s the women he seduces and betrays that shine in their indignation and lust for revenge.

Louise Alder was superb as Donna Anna, whose father Il Commendatore (Clive Bayley) is brutally killed by the Don in the opening minutes. Undeterred, he is soon setting his sights on a young peasant girl, Zerlina, sung with the right balance of innocence and passion by Hera Hyesang Park. Somewhat controversial in our times, Zerlina’s aria asking her jealous husband Masetto (William Thomas) to beat her struck more of a teasing tone here.

Janai Brugger was magnificent as prevaricating Donna Elvira who wants to rip Giovanni’s heart out but still can’t resist the bad boy. The unreliability of human emotions remain unchanged over centuries which is why these operas endure. Giovanni’s servant Leporello has an unenviable job, but the mellow-voiced Michael Sumuel revelled in his witty asides. Giovanni Sala was also brilliant as Donna Anna’s beau Don Ottavio, eager to banish her grief and get her down the aisle. He gets his wish when Giovanni accepts the fateful dinner invitation from Il Commendatore in the dramatic penultimate scene. The moving contributions from Gregory Batsleer’s fabulous SCO Chorus enhanced the action.

But the highlights were the gorgeous ensemble pieces where the different points of view of each character are expressed harmoniously. Susan Nickalls

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Steven Osborne - Tribute to Alfred Brendel ★★★★★

Queen’s Hall

Alfred Brendel was all about seeking the “meaning” in music, argued pianist Steven Osborne in his personable preamble to the first of three tribute recitals that will later feature Brendel acolytes Paul Lewis and Pierre-Laurent Aimard respectively.

Osborne’s programme was so perfectly structured, so intellectually eloquent, so intimately contained it might have been delivered by the great piano legend himself.

Schubert was the mainstay, mostly music from his final years, each concert half progressing from modest gems to grander apotheoses with modern miniatures thrown in to reflect Brendel’s own enthusiasm for living composers.

The opening sequence progressed seamlessly from conversational simplicity in a late Allegretto in C minor, through the gossamer brevity of Judith Weir’s Fragile, to Osborne’s own completion of an earlier Schubert Allegretto in C, all complemented by the Four Impromptus in which Osborne’s impeccable tonal calibration and liquid dexterity were ravishingly fulfilling.

His crafty arrangements of two Schubert songs - Liebesbotschaft and Am Meer from Schwanengesang - only proved the incorruptibility of Schubert’s lyrical genius, especially alongside the shimmering inventiveness of James MacMillan’s Lumen Christi and Weir’s Choral, for Steve.

Schubert’s Sonata in C minor provided a conclusive reminder of Brendel’s intellectual mindset, but equally of Osborne’s interpretational originality. Ken Walton

Up Late with Mark O´Connor and Guests ★★★★

The Hub

With his son stricken by flu, Dad Oskar Dudamel and his orchestra turned Mark and Maggie O´Connor´s evening of sparkle and reverie into Latino chaos.

Let loose Dudamel senior in The Hub, and miss the last bus home. With trombones dancing like dragonflies, rasping emotive vocals and soul-tickling percussion, we danced, and would have done until dawn had Nicola Benedetti not pulled all the evening´s collaborators together for a ragged, jolly shout of Stevie Wonder.

The evening had begun with circumspection, with highly stylised Webern and Haydn from the Kleio Quartet. The Japanese jazz pianist Makoto Ozone unfurled languid streams of Iberian heat before tenor Nicky Spence, king of immaculate diction, launched into a poison party with Tom Lehrer, closer-to-home wickedness with The Deil's Awa then exquisite, personal cabaret.

The O´Connors are collaborators, teachers, composers and fiddling wonders. The playing is deft and dazzling, perfect but beautifully loose in its surfing through centuries of fiddle and violin history.

We had travelled through rugged blue mountains and up winding rivers, arriving in mist and calm before a muddle of music stands and flapping manuscript announced Venezuela in white heat and joy. ‘Bravo’ shouted one of the brass, and we were off, southbound and singing. Mary Miller

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