Classical review: Portraits and Reflections, City Halls, Glasgow

THIS programme ranged from 19th-century German song to jazzy Argentinian tango, by way of contemporary Scottish chamber music.

Portraits and Reflections

City Halls, Glasgow

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Elgar’s masterful Enigma Variations, not in its well-loved orchestral garb, but in the composer’s version for piano. A Schumann song turned – quite literally – on its head. All in all, it was a pretty odd evening.

Motherwell-born pianist Graeme McNaught’s eclectic event was based around the theme of friendship – in the individual pieces’ themes and in his choice of co-performers – as well as portraits and reflections, ideas that refracted across the evening’s music. And what rescued it all from self-indulgence was the sheer passion and quality of the performances.

Soprano Jane Irwin was powerful yet sensitive, with a clear, ringing tone, in a selection of songs by Brahms and Quilter, and McNaught provided a vivid accompaniment. Vivid too was the chamber piece Nocturnes by Scottish composer Edward McGuire, a stormy, dark work given a highly persuasive reading by the ensemble of strings plus piano and percussion.

Although the Piazzolla tango numbers might have been a bit too careful, McNaught’s solo traversal of the Enigma Variations was masterful, and he made a strong case for the piano version in colourful, idiomatic playing that tracked the mysterious theme’s characterful transformations beautifully. His Nimrod was noble yet unsentimental, and his finale wonderfully sonorous.

But the only question about McNaught’s upside-down version of Schumann’s song Die Lotosblume (played with conviction by cellist Rudi de Groote), where high became low, low became high, melodies became basslines and vice versa, is: why?