Music
Scottish Chamber Orchestra/Bezuidenhout
Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh
Keith Bruce
five stars
IF keyboard player and conductor Kristian Bezuidenhout is an important figure of a younger generation of early music specialists – and one with whom the players of the SCO have an obvious rapport – this concert also had plenty to say about the “generation gap” of the composers we heard.
Although Mozart acknowledged the influence of CPE Bach, even over that of his father Johann Sebastian, his own youthful Symphony No 29 from 1774 does not sound a year younger than the Carl Phillipp Emmanuel Bach’s Symphony No 2, which preceded it. Directing both from the harpsichord, with the players producing real power from the gut-strung instruments, Bezuidenhout pushed the Bach along forcefully in the opening and closing movements so that the Larghetto arrived and departed abruptly indeed.
If that approach served the brief work well, there was more light and shade in the performance of the Mozart, with a very distinctive gentle crescendo in the opening bars and then the lightest of touches in the melody of the slow second movement from the first violins. The SCO has made definitive recordings of late Mozart symphonies under two of its principal conductors and now has an ideal collaborator on an album of the work of the composer’s teenage years.
His later Piano Concerto No 24 is one of the best known, and for it Bezuidenhout used a modern Steinway, but configured in the same way, with the lid off and his back to the audience. The effect was revelatory, and the work in no way impaired, although entirely different from a performance by, say, Uchida or Pires. It will be fascinating to hear how it comes across when Friday’s Glasgow City Hall performance is broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Tuesday evening. As well as the sparkling piano playing, keep an ear open for virtuoso guest bassoon Justin Sun.
Reducing the size of the orchestra again was not the only change that linked the closing Rondo in A for piano and orchestra back with the symphony. It also made the programme as much of a composer portrait as a linear chronology.
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