SCO & Lawrence Power, Edinburgh review: 'brilliantly incisive'

Lawrence Power | Giorgia Bertazzi

SCO & Lawrence Power, Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh ★★★★

What was actually the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s contribution to the Nordic Music Days festival felt – at its 31 October Edinburgh outing, at least – more like a Halloween party. That’s judging by the concert’s first piece, the gleefully gruesome Death in a Nutshell by Ayrshire-born Jay Capperauld, currently the SCO’s associate composer, whose six hectic, spectacularly scored movements offer musical clues to solving macabre miniature murder tableaux created to train US homicide investigators.

The SCO premiered the piece in 2021, and it felt right that it should get a re-airing: it’s a swaggering, at times film noir-ish maelstrom of vivid ideas that cracks apart very movingly to reveal genuine pathos and compassion for human fragility.

Conductor Andrew Manze gave a thrillingly detailed, energetic account, brimming with commitment and conviction, and the SCO were on magnificent, particularly sonorous form, with guest saxophonist Lewis Banks contributing some especially slinky, slippery solos.

Banks had a prominent role, too, in the 2021 Viola Concerto by Swedish composer Anders Hillborg that followed, joining crack soloist Lawrence Power in some otherworldly sonorities. But it was very much Power’s show, from frenetic scrubbing to icy stillness and back again, with a lot of wit and humour along the way. Power was an immediately captivating presence, transforming Hillborg’s hair-raising writing into what was virtually a display of endurance and virtuosity, though it was a work of strange, compelling beauty too.

In some ways, however, the concert felt the wrong way round, and things got substantially more serious, even austere after the interval.

Flows (Tornio) by Hillborg’s compatriot Madeleine Isaksson was exquisitely evocative but too brief to leave much of a mark, while Sir James MacMillan’s sometimes astringent 1999 Second Symphony felt a little grey among such kaleidoscopic company. Nonetheless, an evening of revelations – some new, others rediscoveries – in brilliantly incisive performances.