The Times - Review October 2011
The Times
Published 26 October 2011
Scottish Ensemble/Beatson
Perth Concert Hall
25 October 2011
By Sarah Urwin Jones
Mendelssohn and Stravinsky might have been born at opposite ends of the 19th century but both were tirelessly experimental, as Scottish Ensemble’s artistic director Jonathan Morton presumably aimed to prove with this pithy season-opener of works from the dawn and dusk of both men’s careers.
The most fascinating came last. The 14-year-old Mendelssohn’s impressive Concerto for Violin, Piano and Strings in D Minor wears its musical influences very much on its sleeve. Exuberantly virtuosic, there’s something curious in its mix of bravura showmanship for the two soloists and the somewhat intermittent scoring for the strings.
Certainly the expressive Alasdair Beatson had its measure, repeatedly called on to scamper up and down the keyboard, sometimes dominating, sometimes accompanying Morton’s refined, gossamer violin. Morton, rather distractingly, swapped between virtuoso and jobbing ensemble musician, but it all resolved in the final allegro molto, a rampant, sparkling, almost endlessly reproducing chase scene between violin and piano.
More classical subversion had come earlier with Stravinsky’s late-life Concerto in D for String Orchestra, opening the concert in a mass of strident passages interspersed with elegant disjointed phrases. It’s a gift for a string ensemble, from its spiky rhythms to its stilted andantino. The 12-strong ensemblemade light work of it.
It certainly seemed the broken-up antithesis of the ensuing Capriccio and Fugue, a double pick from the discrete set of works repackaged as Four Pieces for String Quartet, here beefed up, not always entirely convincingly, for the ensemble’s 12 strings by Morton.
A quick reining-in, then, with Stravinsky’s Concertino, lifted by Morton’s charismatic solo violin; hazy, wayward, evocative. In all, a steal at the new flat-rate ticket price of £10.
