Classical review: Scottish Chamber Orchestra, City Halls, Glasgow

OLIVER Knussen was present and correct last night to conduct the SCO, but his scheduled new composition, commissioned as part of a varied and mainly modern programme, wasn’t. In its place was Hindemith’s Kammermusik No 2, effectively a small piano concerto, with American Peter Serkin as soloist.

If we were left without the buzz of a brand new work, Knussen did at least open the concert with a couple of his earlier works, the Two Organa of 1994. The small ensemble harvested the fruits of their deliciously ripe sonorities, the ecstatic bells and whistles of the first, against the dense freneticism of the second.

The rest of the evening was awash with its own extreme juxtapositions of style. In Helen Grime’s A Cold Spring”, nods to Messiaen dominated a work that neatly counterbalances wild excitement with slow-moving melodic threads that weave through its occasionally soulless textures.

Serkin’s Hindemith – for all he looked business-like in his city gent suit – revealed the soul that actually lurks under this surface-dry Germanic music, colouring the second movement with a hauntingly austere charm. He was back in the second half in Stravinsky’s Movements for Piano and Orchestra, offering a side to the composer – his late serialist phase – that we rarely get to hear, and doing it with shimmering perspicacity.

Knussen’s precision conducting was less convincing in Beethoven’s explosive Eighth Symphony.

Rating: ***