SCO, Maxim Emelyanychev & Colin Currie review: 'a fitting start to the season'
This was a concert that soared from grief to glory in exceptional performances, writes David Kettle
SCO, Maxim Emelyanychev & Colin Currie, Usher Hall, Edinburgh ★★★★★
The SCO’s new season opener? That’s not quite the whole story. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra had just got back from a six-date European tour with principal conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, playing largely the same pieces as those in their first Scottish concert of the new season, in a well-filled and appreciative Usher Hall. And it showed. Not just in terms of easy familiarity, confidence and vividness of their playing – all present and correct – but rather in the way that the music seemed to be coursing through their veins, urgent, alive and needing to be shared.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in their closing performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: Emelyanychev seemed to have blowtorched off centuries of over-familiarity and accumulated tradition to find something essential behind it all, and something that needed to be heard. Best of all were his remarkable insights into the Symphony’s details – not to stamp his mark on a well-worn work, but to join listeners and SCO players in discovering aspects of the well-worn piece that had been staring us in the face all along.
It was a remarkably fresh, sincere account, as was percussionist Colin Currie’s astonishingly authoritative, athletic performance in Sir James MacMillan’s Veni, Veni Emmanuel that preceded it – played almost entirely from memory, and teasing apart MacMillan’s dense, complex percussion writing powerfully. If Emelyanychev lacked MacMillan’s own granitic, somewhat didactic approach to the piece’s contrasting sections as a conductor, he made up for it with a seductive sense of organic flow and inevitable development.
To begin, Strauss’s Metamorphosen hadn’t been part of the orchestra’s European programmes, but Emelyanychev surrounded himself with 23 solo strings – both standing and seated – in a hushed, intimate account that traced the work’s perpetual sense of yearning and development very movingly, in velvety pillows of sound.
This was a concert that soared from grief to glory in exceptional performances – a fitting start to the season.
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