Music review: Scottish Chamber Orchestra/Jukka-Pekka Saraste

Edinburgh International Festival: Definition, drive and determination: Finnish conductor Jukka-Pekka Saraste's evening with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra was an electrifying and constantly surprising experience.

Usher Hall

*****

Most of all, ­perhaps, in his ­concluding Sibelius Third Symphony, which he grabbed by the scruff of its neck in an urgent, vigorously projected first movement, and which he finished in a blaze of affirmation. The SCO players lapped up Saraste’s exacting attention, with beautifully translucent but chiselled textures, and a bite to their playing that made it thrillingly present.

Before the interval, Canadian pianist Marc-André Hamelin gave a similarly eyebrow-raising account of the Chopin Second Piano Concerto, a world away from dreamy Romantic indulgence, replacing it with crystalline clarity, an almost Mozartean sense of balance and a surprising muscularity.

That ruggedness continued in a blistering encore, Hamelin’s own darkly witty Toccata on L’homme armé, which sent him cascading up and down the keyboard in an unashamedly virtuoso display.

Saraste opened with an expansive Beethoven Leonore No. 3 Overture that felt like he was barely keeping the music’s surging power in check. It was an evening of bristling energy, guided and channelled by expert hands.