Maxim Emelyanychev and the SCO play Haydn, plus the best of January’s classical concerts

Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh ★★★★☆

Streamed orchestral concerts have come in many shapes and sizes during the pandemic, but last night’s concert from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra was the smallest I’ve seen that boasts the word “orchestra” in its title. There were just seven players on stage at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh, and in terms of duration it was similarly diminutive: just 52 minutes of music-making.

But what music-making it was, electric and alive from start to finish. At the centre of it was the SCO’s young, Russian and extravagantly talented music director Maxim Emelyanychev. The 32-year-old had won international competitions in both harpsichord and piano before he opted for conducting in 2013, but on this occasion he was back at the harpsichord.

After Emelyanychev introduced the concert in his fruity Russian accent, he and the players plunged into an eccentric but thrilling piece by a near-contemporary of Bach, JA Hasse. Hasse’s music is full of conflicting currents, driven by motoric energy at one moment and stopped dead in its tracks by an operatic coup de théâtre the next. The SCO players caught this double-edged character to perfection, right up to the startlingly impassioned drive to the stark final chord.

In that piece, Emelyanychev’s character as a musician was necessarily somewhat hidden, as the string players took the lead. In Haydn’s Keyboard Concerto in D, however, it stood out in full force. Often we hear this piece performed on the piano, but on this occasion one never missed that instrument’s greater volume or power of dynamic contrast, as Emelyanychev’s performance was so riveting.

His way of seizing the repeated chords at the beginning made the music’s gleeful naïveté shine out, but he never maintained that incessant energy #for long. The instant the music’s mood changed he bent the tempo like a reed, so as to give his right hand the time it needed to lean on an expressive note, or lend a touch of pathos to a descending melodic line.

It was a huge expressive distance from the dry plucked-quill notes of a harpsichord to the richly upholstered piano sound needed for Max Bruch’s cello-and-piano piece Kol Nidrei, but Emelyanychev managed it without turning a hair. Once again he proved to be a tactful accompanist, ceding the limelight to the SCO’s principal cellist Philip Higham. He was also sensitively understated, bringing out the melancholy of the first Jewish folk melody without exaggeration, and managing the transition to the more consoling second melody with lovely subtlety.

Available via YouTube until February 28. The next filmed concert from the SCO is on February 25; see sco.org.uk

London Symphony Orchestra, LSO St Luke’s, London EC1 ★★★★☆

Every critic has their blind spots, and for me Schubert’s final symphony, his Ninth, is one. The piece’s nickname, “Great”, is practically a command to accept its masterpiece status, but the work’s enormous length seems anything but heavenly. All that parade-ground pomposity, all those repetitions, and that endless tiddley-pom, tiddley-pom rhythm in the strings in the finale – it’s the musical equivalent of the brainfever bird’s maddening call.

Still there’s always the hope that a performance will come along that makes the scales fall from my eyes. Last night’s from the LSO under Simon Rattle didn’t manage it, but it did make the moments of romantic mystery stand out in sharp relief. The opening horn melody was deliberately quiet and modest, in contrast to the heroic tone many orchestras strike. The long trombone melody later in the first movement was also surprisingly quiet, almost fading into the background. This paradoxically had the effect of magnifying its epic quality, the way mountains seen through mist appear grander than in full daylight.

Throughout, there were numerous examples of beautifully moulded, sensitive playing from the LSO’s principal players, above all oboist Juliana Koch and clarinetist Chris Richards. And Rattle’s subtle tempo inflections softened the work’s monumental quality, especially in the Scherzo. Here the rat-a-tat vigour of the opening was nicely offset by his fractionally slower tempo for the violin’s delicious, upcurving melody.

The work that preceded it, Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, has always been in my personal pantheon of masterpieces. It was written in 1935 in memory of the teenage daughter of Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius, and is full of moments of anguish and protest. In this performance, those moments told with maximum force, thanks in large part to the stunning Greek virtuoso Leonidas Kavakos. He can summon an immense tone, and had no trouble soaring over the angry outbursts of the orchestra in the despairing second movement.

Up to that moment, the performance was unusually dark, the fleeting waltz-like moments sarcastic rather than charming. This meant that when the music turned to a more consoling mood with a nostalgic Carinthian folk-tune, it was all the more moving. Berg’s quotation of a hymn-harmonisation by Bach floated in tenderly, and at the end Kavakos ascended to an impossibly high note over radiant harmonies, placed exquisitely by Rattle and the orchestra. It was as rapturous an image of transcendence as you could hope for.

Available for free until January 28 at lso.co.uk