SCO & Rachel Podger, Edinburgh review: 'dazzling'

Rachel Podger bounded beaming onto the Queen’s Hall stage brandishing what looked like a miniature-sized kid’s violin. It was actually, she informed us, a piccolo violin, almost never played nowadays, but adored in JS Bach’s time – and a prominent solo instrument in the composer’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 1, which opened the SCO’s gratifyingly ram-packed, almost all-Bach afternoon concert.

Others might have laboured scholarly points about musical authenticity, fidelity to the letter of Bach’s intentions and more. For Podger, though, using this somewhat arcane instrument was clearly all about the music – and her pint-sized violin duly pierced its way through the Concerto’s slow movement, even if it struggled slightly to be heard later amid more bustling orchestral sounds.

All that set the tone for a concert of warmth (just as well, given the Baltic blast outside) and fellowship, showcasing not only Podger’s own liquid, silvery but strongly defined playing – especially dazzling in her airborne arpeggios in the later Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 – but also several of the SCO’s own musicians. Flautists André Cebrián and Márta Gomez were superbly matched in tone and agility in the particularly vibrant Fourth Brandenburg, while the trio of trumpeters – Peter Franks, Shaun Harrold and Marcus Pope – brought bracing, brassy splendours to the closing Orchestral Suite No. 3.

In that piece, it was Podger’s effortlessly evocative Air – the famous “Air on the G string” – that lodged in the memory, delivered with insight, buoyant briskness and even a certain rhapsodic freedom, as well as rich but tasteful continuo contributions from harpsichordist Jan Waterfield and lutenist Toby Carr.

By way of contrast, the Sonata in E minor by Bach’s mate Telemann made for more forward-looking, exploratory listening, and Podger ensured there was an unfailing focus on the drama, colour and emotion of the music. It might be a cliché to talk of Baroque splendours, but it was a concert of splendid music making all the same.