Typical Andrew Manze! There can’t be many conductors who have such an omnivorous and voracious musical appetite, permitting him to comfortably programme an evening that stretches from Schoenberg through Mozart right back to music from 1660s Vienna arranged by Manze himself – and yet sound equally comfortable conducting all of them.
He’s a great communicator, as much with the microphone as with his baton. He has developed a welcome habit of chatting to the audience about the thinking behind his programmes, and his spoken introduction brimmed over with enthusiasm for Schoenberg’s Second Chamber Symphony so that the audience was primed for it before a note was played. The musicians of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra clearly love playing for him, their Principal Guest Conductor, and they lit Schoenberg’s densely orchestrated score from within, with languid winds, curiously squashed-sounding brass and a pungent, slightly acidic tone to the strings, who played with only sparing vibrato to heighten their impact on the music’s drama. The whole piece felt like a simmering cauldron of unspoken emotional turmoil, though the con fuoco second movement felt a little too dainty and could have done with a bit more fuoco.
The same was true of the finale of Mozart’s “Haffner” Symphony, which felt like it was being kept on the leash rather than let rip. Elsewhere, however, there was plenty of fire in the bright-as-a-button D major tuttis, bristling with natural timpani and brass, all of which was balanced by silky softness of the strings in the slow second movement. There was also plenty of punch in Manze’s arrangement of the 1667 Serenata by Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, a mysterious but charming confection full of dramatic effects like crashing drums and twinkling bells. Manze made it sound as though Stravinsky had given it the Pulcinella treatment, his orchestration by turns witty, tender and affectionate.
And for Mozart’s Flute Concerto no. 1, we got an SCO speciality: the principal as soloist. These are always lovely occasions, when the orchestra and the audience support one of their own, so principal flautist André Cebrián arrived on stage buoyed up by a wave of good will. His total mastery of Mozart’s solo line showed that he needed no special pleading to make a big impact. He imbued the concerto with a touch of athleticism, even heroism, that lifted it out of the instrument’s stereotypical pastorale or galant idiom, climaxing in the buoyant confidence of his cadenza. There was lovely bounce to the outer movements, the finale having an almost operatic sense of to-and-fro, while the limpid slow movement had a lovely sense of legato. Yet he almost upstaged himself with his encore, a song by Falla which he dedicated to the victims of the floods in Valencia in his native Spain. It was so simple, the flute playing Falla’s slow-moving tune over an unchanging cello and bass drone, yet he managed to make it terrifically moving.
