Music review: SCO, Peter Whelan & Tara Erraught, Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh ****

First things first: this wasn’t quite the concert it was supposed to be. With violinist Colin Scobie indisposed, the advertised violin concerto by Felix Yaniewicz had been dropped, leaving just a short song by the composer/violinist/impresario in its place. This was disappointing, since the concert had been intended to focus around Polish-Lithuanian émigé Yaniewicz and the impact he had on Scotland’s musical life at the start of the 19th century, not least as co-founder of the inaugural Edinburgh Musical Festival in 1815.

But let’s take the concert as it was, rather than as it might have been. In those terms, it was still a fascinating evening, kind-of recreating the sort of genre-straddling, crowd-pleasing performance that someone like Yaniewicz might have concocted for Edinburgh audiences about 200 years ago. And holding it all together was the athletic, enthusiastic direction of conductor Peter Whelan, who made a bold, sonorous entrance with the Overture from Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, whose clattering, thudding “Turkish” percussion cleverly returned to round off the evening in Whelan’s joyful, light-as-air Haydn “Military” Symphony.

Dundalk-born mezzo Tara Erraught – a luxury late addition as a hastily drafted-in soloist – brought a glorious range of silvery tones to songs by Yaniewicz and Tommaso Giordani. She was most memorable, though, in JC Bach’s elegant arrangement of traditional tune The Broom of Cowdenknows, even if the music seemed balanced precariously between Georgian politeness and folk authenticity. Mozart’s Exsultate, jubilate provided the opportunity for her operatic prowess to shine through brilliantly.

The evening’s real treat, though, was a short, three-movement proto-symphony by Edinburgh-born Thomas Erskine, sixth Earl of Kellie in Fife, which zipped by boisterously, incorporating all the latest musical tricks of the times, wrung for all its surging intensity by Whelan and the SCO players. Though they might not have been as originally advertised, it was an evening of discoveries all the same.