SCO & Lawrence Power, Edinburgh review: 'enjoyably eclectic'

Lawrence Power | Giorgia Bertazzi

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

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra already has a yearly concert focused on modern composers looking back in time to earlier music for inspiration. But British violist Lawrence Power’s similarly-themed evening felt a far more measured, sober affair than principal conductor Maxim Emelyanychev’s often joyfully madcap annual offering. That contrast in tone avoided any sense of repetition, and Power’s generous, passionate, enthusiastic musical personality was stamped all over his enjoyably eclectic collection of pieces.

The evening’s oldest music – Couperin’s Les barricade mystérieuses (in a quintet arrangement by Thomas Adès) and Rameau’s stomping dance Les sauvages (with sonorous bell-staff thuds courtesy of percussionist Louise Lewis Goodwin) – provided the concert’s competing earworms, while Power made a strong case for Vaughan Williams’s rarely heard Suite for Viola and Small Orchestra (or at least five of its eight movements). It’s full of the composer’s unmistakable folksy melodies and luminous spirituality, but frustratingly its brief movements – essentially concise character pieces – seldom seem to go anywhere, despite Power’s eloquent, perceptive playing, not to mention his endless, agile energy in the closing “Moto perpetuo”.

READ MORE: Soprano Carolyn Sampson to take a starring role in SCO's new season

But it was the evening’s two big pieces that really stood out. Power swapped his viola for a violin to join SCO principals Stephanie Gonley and Philip Higham in a brisk, driven and wonderfully vivid Tippett Fantasia concertante on a Theme of Corelli. With the SCO’s strings and the three soloists all bouncing off each other, it was chamber music writ large, and authentically captured the composer’s almost unwieldy, dense lyricism, though Power saved passion for the quiet euphoria of the piece’s final section.

There was more euphoria, seemingly endless waves of it, in Magnus Lindberg’s 2024 Viola Concerto – written for Power – which he delivered with winning insight and conviction, and breathtaking technical prowess too. Handing over a concert to a trusted soloist is an SCO speciality, and here it proved inspirational.

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