SCO, Andrew Manze, SCO Chorus & Roderick Williams, Edinburgh review: 'crisp and buoyant'

It was an intricately constructed programme of musical and thematic connections that Principal Guest Conductor Andrew Manze had conceived for his concert with the SCO and Chorus, focused around the evening’s big draw, Fauré’s evergreen Requiem. In the end, though, illuminating though those links were, it was Manze’s performances – crisp and buoyant, sometimes brisk, gently luminous, delivered with moving restraint – that really marked out the concert.

And nowhere more so than in the performance’s main event. Yes, the Fauré Requiem had its moments of drama and volume – as the SCO Chorus swelled for a passing ‘Dies irae’ in the middle of the ‘Libera me’ movement, for example. But otherwise it was a performance of intense focus and care, as though Manze were taking responsibility for this shared contemplation of mortality in a hushed Usher Hall. And it was very much the SCO Chorus’s night: the singers sang with one voice throughout, with crystal-clear enunciation, a similar care in conveying the Latin text, and enormous subtlety in their phrasing and shaping, sometimes velvety, sometimes ethereal, sometimes somewhat harder-edged.

The SCO Chorus had been on remarkably rich and focused form, too, in the earlier Vaughan Williams Five Mystical Songs, which share some of Fauré’s pastel hues and emotional restraint. But baritone Roderick Williams as soloist clearly meant every word of them – it was a high-definition performance of utter commitment, and all the more involving as a result.

The little-known Cringlemire Garden by Vaughan Williams’s student Ruth Gipps injected folk tunes into a more ambiguous harmonic world, and got a beautifully tender account from Manze and the SCO strings. All this composure and quiet contemplation made the concert’s opener – Berlioz’s energetic, colourful Beatrice and Benedict Overture – seem positively raucous, but the SCO revelled in its stop-start rhythms and arch humour. A concert of moving insights, nonetheless.