SCO, 13/05/2016

Mussorgsky : Dawn over the Moscow River
Sibelius : Violin Concerto (Tedi Papavrami, violin)
Beethoven : Symphony No. 3 "Eroica"

Scottish Chamber Orchestra
Emanuel Krivine

The last SCO concert of the season had a programme chosen by outgoing CEO Roy McEwan, and a very tempting programme it was too.  It was our misfortune that it was entrusted to Emanuel Krivine.  In all honesty, the audience tonight didn't seem to have much of a problem with the performances, judging from the response, but in my opinion, they had suspended their critical faculties for the evening, because the whole concert was a sad disappointment.

The Mussorgsky, a beautiful, atmospheric piece that gives little indication of the complex historical fresco of Khovanshchina, to which it serves as the Prelude, was delivered with a cool efficiency that was wholly misplaced, and flatly prosaic.  Much the same problem came with the Sibelius, although I had half suspected that might happen.  The French don't have anything like a solid track record with Sibelius, he's still very much foreign territory to their musicians and public alike, although Paavo Järvi has done a good deal to put him on the map during his years with the Orchestre de Paris.  Järvi is a generation younger than Krivine, however, and it showed here.  Also, Sibelius is a little off the beaten track for the SCO, since much of his orchestral work is too big for them under normal circumstances.  I'd have said the Violin Concerto was too, but clearly they can stretch to it when needed.  However, they lack the experience with this music to correct or supplement the instructions from the conductor, and apart from getting a good bounce in the last movement, it never really sounded like Sibelius at all.

This didn't help Tedi Papavrami either.  As a concert soloist, and a very fine one, usually, of course he would have the Sibelius Concerto under his belt, it is one of the most important concertos in the violin repertory.  However, I don't know if the idiom comes any more naturally to him than it does to Krivine, and without a conductor who does understand it, he could only really go through the technical motions.  There were pluses and minuses in his playing, at that.  On the downside, I felt he was walking a knife edge with his intonation, quite frequently, and the sound of his violin in the lower registers was curiously hoarse - not unappealing, but a little disconcerting.  On the plus side, the ease and precision with which he could soar up to the highest extent of the range, and into the harmonics - something Sibelius demands frequently - and the beauty and clarity of tone while up there was a real pleasure to hear.

Finally, another Beethoven symphony, the "Eroica|", and there's a difference between 'drive', which we got last night, and 'push' which we got tonight.  This was a noisy, blustery, bombastic reading, much of it too rapid, with little space for the music to breathe, and with little or none of the depth of the music coming through.  Sound and fury signifying nothing, if you'll forgive the paraphrase.  I've heard this band in the "Eroica" before, with Andrew Manze at the helm, and it was a completely different affair.  All the exhilaration we got then, and I heard from the BBCSSO last night in the 7th, was completely absent, this was Beethoven-by-numbers, and a sorry conclusion to what should have been an outstanding evening.

[Next : 15th May]