SCO & SCO Chorus, Glasgow review: 'a hint of uncertainty'

Scottish Chamber Orchestra principal conductor Maxim Emelyanychev | Christopher Bowen

SCO & SCO Chorus, City Halls, Glasgow ★★★★

Maxim Emelyanychev is a whizz with Mozart. That we definitely know from the SCO chief conductor’s dizzily insightful opera performances at recent Edinburgh Festivals, also from his regular seasonal work with the orchestra. This latest Mozart extravaganza, at least its Glasgow performance, may not have unleashed the same seat-of-the-pants charisma we’ve become used to, but that’s only because when high expectations are the norm, anything less can be a slight disenchantment.

Which is not to dismiss the many plusses of a programme coupling Mozart’s answer to his disaffection with a fickle Vienna, the hot-blooded “Prague” Symphony, with the uncompleted Mass in C minor, whose extant music is to some extent satiating in itself. Where Emelyanychev imbued the former with abundant rigour and expressive flavouring, his approach to the Mass was to release a pleasing synthesis of steely vigour and nuanced virtuosity.

The very opening of the symphony was a robust declaration of intent, its rhetorical pronouncements filled with the promise of a thrilling journey ahead. Sure enough, the SCO responded with agile exchanges, lyrical shapeliness and a darker theatricality pre-empting what Mozart was soon to produce big-time in Don Giovanni. Yet there was a hint of uncertainty in some of Emelyanychev’s tempi and moments of imprecise tuning from the first violins. Were they using gut strings, the warm hall perhaps accounting for such discrepancies?

The Mass, with its noble phalanx of three trombones (as in the composer’s better-known Requiem), was more confidently executed. The opening Kyrie and closing Sanctus and Benedictus proved the most exhilarating entities, the thrusting Hosannas electrifyingly precise from the SCO Chorus.

There was lustrous and versatile singing, too, from soloists Lucy Crowe, Anna Dennis, Thomas Walker and Edward Grint; just a pity about those moments that seemed a smidgen below perfection.