The SCO & Steven Isserlis, Edinburgh review: 'an evening of rare insights'

A full-scale symphony and concerto by Dvořák wouldn’t usually be thought of as natural musical territory for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, simply because they’re more commonly heard coming from bigger orchestras. Nonetheless, that’s what the SCO and firecracker principal conductor Maxim Emelyanychev had chosen to launch their new season, and indeed, it was a lightly enlarged band that took to the Usher Hall stage. But the big question when a chamber orchestra plays this kind of larger-scale repertoire remains: what does it bring?

In the case of the SCO’s all-Dvořák evening, it brought buoyancy, nimbleness, and an orchestral sound that seemed to gleam from within, certainly in Emelyanychev’s crisply driven accounts.

His opening Carnival Overture fizzed with life and energy, and he revelled in the piece’s dancing tunes (someone should really book him for a Viennese gala).

After the interval, too, he delivered a wonderfully lustrous, compelling Eighth Symphony, so fresh that even if you knew the piece inside out, you might wonder what was coming next. His slow movement dripped with meaning, while he balanced nobility and devil-may-care hedonism in a whirling finale. The SCO players clearly lapped it up, too, in playing that crackled with conviction.

In between, Steven Isserlis’s muscular, passionate but deeply thoughtful traversal of Dvořák’s Cello Concerto proved a very involving experience, and a surprisingly intimate one too: strongly projected though he was at times, the lighter sound of the chamber orchestra allowed Isserlis to pull back, only to emerge magically from the orchestral textures.

Most captivating, though, was Isserlis’s sense of deep purpose: it’s a Concerto he clearly adores, and equally clearly, he meant every single note of it. His otherworldly encore – Sally Beamish’s arrangement of the traditional Catalan “Song of the Birds” – only extended the Concerto’s closing atmosphere of thoughtful introspection. An evening of rare insights.