Music

Scottish Chamber Orchestra

City Halls, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

four stars

IT WAS only as the SCO played the opening bars of the 19-year-old Franz Schubert's Symphony No.5 that I remembered that it was a favourite of my father's, who would have been 95 three days earlier. He was a fan of both Mozart and brevity, and this melodic little gem made an ideal starter for the orchestra's second serving of Mendelssohn and Schumann in a fortnight.

French pianist Bertrand Chamayou has a stellar career across Europe and the USA with some of the world's top conductors on his resume, but is a less frequent visitor to these shores. He is not in any way an exuberant performer, but his relaxed approach to some of the fast fingering required in Mendelssohn's First Concerto was full of feeling, and there did seem to be a real meeting of minds in the approach to the music with conductor Emmanuel Krivine, while his encore of a familiar song by the same composer was a very popular choice.

Krivine's approach to Schumann's Rhenish Symphony was in some ways the antithesis of what we have heard from Robin Ticciati with the SCO, when he emphasised the chamber orchestra essence of the work. The French conductor seemed keener to find the work's Wagnerian sonorities and echoes of Beethoven, and he does produce a really robust sound from this orchestra. The details of the performance were exquisite, and although the credit for that usually goes to the conductor, the return of string section leaders Stephanie Gonley, Jane Atkins (viola), Philip Higham (cello) and Nikita Naumov (bass) to their places this week can surely have been far from irrelevant.