Music review: The SCO, Maxim Emelyanychev and Benjamin Grosvenor, Usher Hall, Edinburgh

The SCO was on gripping form for this first season outing since Omicron caused cancellations in December and January, writes David Kettle

Benjamin Grosvenor and the SCO PIC: Stuart Armitt

The SCO, Maxim Emelyanychev and Benjamin Grosvenor, Usher Hall, Edinburgh ****

You never quite know what you’re going to get with Maxim Emelyanychev. Amid what was an interesting but pretty conventional SCO concert, he suddenly pitched us back in time six centuries, ushering on stage a quintet of ancient sackbuts, serpent and himself parping on cornett (a different instrument from the more familiar cornet), plus organ, for his own instrumental arrangement of Jan Sweelinck’s originally choral setting of the Beatitudes. It was gloriously rich and characterful, and made for an arresting change of perspective in among the orchestral sounds from three centuries later.

More importantly, it also threw up questions of what music and eras can legimitately share the stage, how far an orchestral concert can be bent or stretched, and demonstrated just how flexible the SCO’s forces can be. And all in a piece lasting barely five minutes.

Sweelinck’s radiant harmonies served as a generous up-beat and thematic scene-setter to Mendelssohn’s Reformation Symphony, which looks back affectionately to the glories of Bach – though Emelyanychev’s account was rather better behaved than he’d been earlier in the concert. He’d virtually leapt beaming onto the Usher Hall stage to kick off the bustling, brilliant Beethoven First Symphony that opened the programme. It was the SCO’s first season outing since Omicron had forced concert cancellations in December and January (and, in fact, the orchestra’s first two-part concert plus interval since March 2020), and their Beethoven felt like a release of all that bottled-up energy, and of wide-eyed joy at being back.

Emeyanychev matched power and precision throughout, with brisk tempos and stark dynamic contrasts – an energy and vividness he continued in the Liszt First Piano Concerto that followed. The SCO was on gripping form, but soloist Benjamin Grosvenor was more than a match in terms of sheer pianistic power and definition, also playing up the piece’s rhapsodic unpredictability to beguiling effect. As often with Emelyanychev and the SCO, it was an evening of revelations.

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