Music overview: SCO, Peter Whelan & Tara Erraught, Queen’s Corridor, Edinburgh
Although the personnel may not have been as initially marketed, this was nonetheless a night of discoveries, writes David Kettle
Music overview: SCO, Peter Whelan & Tara Erraught, Queen’s Corridor, Edinburgh ****
First issues first: this wasn’t fairly the live performance it was purported to be. With violinist Colin Scobie indisposed, the marketed violin concerto by Felix Yaniewicz had been dropped, leaving only a brief music by the composer/violinist/impresario instead. This was disappointing, for the reason that live performance had been meant to focus round Polish-Lithuanian émigé Yaniewicz and the impression he had on Scotland’s musical life in the beginning of the nineteenth century, not least as co-founder of the inaugural Edinburgh Musical Competition in 1815.
However let’s take the live performance because it was, somewhat than because it may need been. In these phrases, it was nonetheless an interesting night, kind-of recreating the form of genre-straddling, crowd-pleasing efficiency that somebody like Yaniewicz may need concocted for Edinburgh audiences about 200 years in the past. And holding all of it collectively was the athletic, enthusiastic course of conductor Peter Whelan, who made a daring, sonorous entrance with the Overture from Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, whose clattering, thudding “Turkish” percussion cleverly returned to spherical off the night in Whelan’s joyful, light-as-air Haydn “Navy” Symphony.
Dundalk-born mezzo Tara Erraught – a luxurious late addition as a swiftly drafted-in soloist – introduced an excellent vary of silvery tones to songs by Yaniewicz and Tommaso Giordani. She was most memorable, although, in JC Bach’s elegant association of conventional tune The Broom of Cowdenknows, even when the music appeared balanced precariously between Georgian politeness and people authenticity. Mozart’s Exsultate, jubilate supplied the chance for her operatic prowess to shine by means of brilliantly.
The night’s actual deal with, although, was a brief, three-movement proto-symphony by Edinburgh-born Thomas Erskine, sixth Earl of Kellie in Fife, which zipped by boisterously, incorporating all the newest musical tips of the instances, wrung for all its surging depth by Whelan and the SCO gamers. Although they may not have been as initially marketed, it was a night of discoveries all the identical.
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