Music review: SCO & Nicolas Altstaedt, Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

Thanks to the galvanising presence of Nicolas Alstaedt as both conductor and cello soloist, this was an inspiring and very entertaining performance from the SCO, writes David Kettle

Music review: SCO & Nicolas Altstaedt, Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh ****

If matinee concerts are a quiet SCO innovation for its 50th anniversary, they’re clearly a welcome one – that’s judging by Edinburgh’s reassuringly well-filled Queen’s Hall at 2pm on a Thursday afternoon. And it might be fanciful to suggest it, but there seemed to be a particular daytime energy and freshness to the orchestra’s playing, too – in her introduction, bassoonist Alison Green quipped that they’d enjoy having an evening off for a change. But that freshness was surely largely down to the galvanising presence of Nicolas Alstaedt, in his more conventional role as cello soloist, but also as a demanding, energising conductor.

With his forceful gestures and his tousled hair, Altstaedt is a striking figure, but he more than lives up to his image with powerful, vividly projected performances. His opening Haydn C major Cello Concerto, for example, was wrung for every last drop of drama and meaning: you’d never have suspected this might be unpretentious entertainment music from Altstaedt’s furiously committed performance, which the SCO musicians met with sharply hewn power of their own.

Nicolas Altstaedt PIC: Marco Borggreve

The intensity continued in Kodály’s Dances of Galánta, which builds inexorably from its quiet opening to the whirling, devil-may-care hedonism of its concluding dance. Alstaedt charted that slow build-up with extraordinary focus and precision – which only made the closing whirlwind all the more exhilarating. He had a lot of help, too, from the SCO’s wind players in a clutch of eloquent solos: principal clarinettist Maximiliano Martín was in his element channelling the Hungarian folk tárogató, to slinky, sultry effect.

Altstaedt travelled further east after the interval with the pungent Transylvanian Dances from Sándor Veress, directing the SCO strings with just as much insight from the principal cello stool. And if his closing Mozart ‘Prague’ Symphony was at times a little too hard-driven, a little too brisk for comfort – well, it bristled with character and life all the same. An inspiring and very entertaining afternoon of music.