Scottish Ensemble at Aldeburgh Festival
Lynne Walker - The Herald
An aching exquisiteness
Programming is an art form in itself: "The nose scents and it chooses - an artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles," according to Stravinsky.
It remains a puzzle that this art form appears to have been largely overlooked by the planners of this year's Aldeburgh Festival.
Yet though the concert given by the Scottish Ensemble before a packed audience in the converted Malthouse at Snape appeared not to fit any of the festival's themes, it worked - not least because it was so stunningly well played.
Jonathan Morton, the ensemble's violinist/director, gave a considered interpretation of the less familiar of Mendelssohn's two Violin Concertos, the D minor, written when the composer was just 13. Clearly undeterred by its tricky technical challenges, Morton turned each phrase engagingly, from the work's martial opening through the passionate slow movement to its gipsy-dance-like finale.How could the listener not be drawn in by the chamber-like intimacy and attention to dramatic detail he also drew from the accompanying instruments?
What distinguished this concert was not only the ensemble's direct, expressive approach in Wolf's Italian Serenade and the wistful character it evoked in Dvorak's Serenade but the aching exquisiteness it conveyed in John Woolrich's instrumental version of seven love songs by Hugo Wolf. Capturing the mood of the sometimes nostalgic, sometimes defiant lover - on deep-voiced viola, pungent cello and double bass, poignant violin - the 12 instrumentalists became the singer, passing the melodic line seamlessly from one to another.
Polished and precise and alive to the nuances of each piece, members of the Scottish Ensemble further delighted the audience with an encore, an arrangement of the haunting folktune John Roy Lyel led plangently on fiddle by Alan John.
