Music Review: SCO: Maxim’s Eroica, City Halls, Glasgow

In the opening concert of their 50th anniversary season, Maxim Emelyanychev and the SCO offered a riveting and personalised account of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, writes Ken Walton

SCO: Maxim’s Eroica, City Halls, Glasgow ****

If the Scottish Chamber Orchestra has achieved anything over its 50 years’ existence, it has been to offer a distinctive alternative in Scotland to what was previously the sole domain of the larger symphony orchestras. Not only has this classy, compact and intimate ensemble championed bespoke new music, it has served up refreshingly alternative takes on even the most seasoned of classics.

Look no further than this 50th Anniversary Season opening programme, conducted by the SCO’s idiosyncratic principal conductor Maxim Emelyanychev. Besides shedding fresh light on Tchaikovsky’s famous Piano Concerto No 1, it offered a riveting and personalised account of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony – teasingly billed as “Maxim’s Eroica” – and introduced a work conceived for the occasion by the gifted young Ayrshire composer, Jay Capperauld.

Scottish Chamber Orchestra principal conductor Maxim Emelyanychev PIC: Christopher Bowen.

Capperauld is the orchestra’s associate composer and his experience of its internal dynamic spoke loud and clear in The Origin of Colour, a tantalising and fantastical concert piece inspired by Italo Calvino’s surreal short story Without Colours, which imagines the miraculous creation of colour in a previously monochrome world.

Exquisitely crafted, its narrative shifts from nebulous percussive rumbles to hi-energy lustre, feverish motorised rhythms (echoes of John Adams), culminating in a tantalising conflict of wonderment and trepidation. Emelyanychev’s razor-sharp motivation ignited its virtuosic zeal.

The evening’s one mismatch was pianist Kirill Gerstein and the Tchaikovsky concerto, performed in the composer’s softer, original version. Against a sensitive, super-clean SCO, Gerstein was brash and unforgiving, while the encore, the gorgeous central movement of Scriabin’s Piano Concerto, proved what lyrical enchantment he is capable of.

Maxim’s Eroica was all-consuming, minutely detailed, judiciously energised, in which such surprising touches as the natural horns’ deftly manicured Trio in the Scherzo served their provocative purpose – to awaken and delight.