SCO Mozart Oboe Concerto Queen's Hall Edinburgh 20th February 2025 Review
Scottish Chamber Orchestra – Mozart Oboe Concerto at the Queen’s Hall Edinburgh tonight was, as usual, a carefully curated programme of music featuring early works by some of the most famous names in musical history, and a new world premiere by a contemporary composer, SCO's current associate composer Jay Capperauld.
The full programme for this evening was as below
SCHUBERT Symphony No 1
MOZART Oboe Concerto
CAPPERAULD Bruckner’s Skull (World Premiere)
BEETHOVEN Symphony No 1
As is so often the case with an SCO musical programme, there are connective threads that run through the programme of music and, here, one of those threads is first symphonies, and here the contrast between Schubert and Beethoven is worth noting, mainly due to the age at which they wrote their works and their approaches to creating them.
SCHUBERT Symphony No 1 is considered by some people to be a fairly basic work, but it needs to be remembered that the composer was only 16 years old when he wrote it and nearing the end of his time at boarding school. The work may in fact have been first performed by the school's orchestra, so perhaps Franz Schubert was taking their technical level into account too at the time of writing. In many ways though, this is a sort of arranging the building blocks of a symphony of the period (1813) as everyone expected them to be. Before his all too early a death at only 31 years of age, Schubert had more than mastered re-arranging these musical building blocks to reflect his own unique talents.
BEETHOVEN Symphony No 1 is from an older and more experienced hand (25-30 years of age) and written between 1795 and 1800. Unlike Schubert, Beethoven is not taking the expected path of a symphony and in some ways he is marking the passage of time and tastes from one century to another.
This is a work that from the very beginning, with its dominant 7th chord opening, is breaking established norms and creating a sound that, although very familiar to us today, would have sounded very strange to audiences in the 1800s, particularly when Beethoven did not go into the musical key that they were expecting.
Both the above works, for different reasons, are full of joy and sorrow, light and darkness, and the different ways that these two composers achieve all of this is interesting as their four very distinctive movements unfold. For me, it was re-assuring to hear both of these works and realise that even musical geniuses have to have a starting point and that they also learn and develop their craft by sheer hard work.
If there is one recognised musical genius of them all, it is child prodigy Mozart, and by the time of his writing his oboe concerto in 1777 aged 21, he already had the benefit of many musical works to his name. This concerto is a little different though as, here, Mozart is writing for the instrument almost if as it were a human voice and that feeling of listening to an operatic soprano singing is never far away.
To bring this concerto to life you need someone who has a special relationship with both this work and their instrument, and here that was Ivan Podyomov, and he deserved every moment of the applause that this audience gave him this evening.
Taking us forward in time, but also very much connecting us all to the past, was one of my favourite contemporary composers, Jay Capperauld, with Bruckner’s Skull. There is so much attention to musical history and details in this work that it could easily be a review on its own, but sadly there is just not space to do this. From its opening few moments though, that bold and unexpected opening ties us directly into what we had already heard from Beethoven, and at times this is a very dark work. This is no surprise as the work, as we are informed in the programme notes by David Kettle, is written as a death-mask homage to composer Anton Bruckner in the year of the 200th anniversary of his birth (1824).
Here in this work you can clearly hear the obsession with counting so many everyday things that Bruckner had, but also, if the story is true, Bruckner's obsession with both Beethoven and Schubert to the point that he held both their skulls when their bodies were exhumed and moved to their new resting places in 1888.
Taking all of tonight's diverse musical threads and weaving them all together with the SCO for tonight’s music, and doing it all in his own unique and always expressive style, was Maxim Emelyanychev, Conductor.
Review by Tom King © 2025
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com
The full programme for this evening was as below
SCHUBERT Symphony No 1
MOZART Oboe Concerto
CAPPERAULD Bruckner’s Skull (World Premiere)
BEETHOVEN Symphony No 1
As is so often the case with an SCO musical programme, there are connective threads that run through the programme of music and, here, one of those threads is first symphonies, and here the contrast between Schubert and Beethoven is worth noting, mainly due to the age at which they wrote their works and their approaches to creating them.
SCHUBERT Symphony No 1 is considered by some people to be a fairly basic work, but it needs to be remembered that the composer was only 16 years old when he wrote it and nearing the end of his time at boarding school. The work may in fact have been first performed by the school's orchestra, so perhaps Franz Schubert was taking their technical level into account too at the time of writing. In many ways though, this is a sort of arranging the building blocks of a symphony of the period (1813) as everyone expected them to be. Before his all too early a death at only 31 years of age, Schubert had more than mastered re-arranging these musical building blocks to reflect his own unique talents.
BEETHOVEN Symphony No 1 is from an older and more experienced hand (25-30 years of age) and written between 1795 and 1800. Unlike Schubert, Beethoven is not taking the expected path of a symphony and in some ways he is marking the passage of time and tastes from one century to another.
This is a work that from the very beginning, with its dominant 7th chord opening, is breaking established norms and creating a sound that, although very familiar to us today, would have sounded very strange to audiences in the 1800s, particularly when Beethoven did not go into the musical key that they were expecting.
Both the above works, for different reasons, are full of joy and sorrow, light and darkness, and the different ways that these two composers achieve all of this is interesting as their four very distinctive movements unfold. For me, it was re-assuring to hear both of these works and realise that even musical geniuses have to have a starting point and that they also learn and develop their craft by sheer hard work.
If there is one recognised musical genius of them all, it is child prodigy Mozart, and by the time of his writing his oboe concerto in 1777 aged 21, he already had the benefit of many musical works to his name. This concerto is a little different though as, here, Mozart is writing for the instrument almost if as it were a human voice and that feeling of listening to an operatic soprano singing is never far away.
To bring this concerto to life you need someone who has a special relationship with both this work and their instrument, and here that was Ivan Podyomov, and he deserved every moment of the applause that this audience gave him this evening.
Taking us forward in time, but also very much connecting us all to the past, was one of my favourite contemporary composers, Jay Capperauld, with Bruckner’s Skull. There is so much attention to musical history and details in this work that it could easily be a review on its own, but sadly there is just not space to do this. From its opening few moments though, that bold and unexpected opening ties us directly into what we had already heard from Beethoven, and at times this is a very dark work. This is no surprise as the work, as we are informed in the programme notes by David Kettle, is written as a death-mask homage to composer Anton Bruckner in the year of the 200th anniversary of his birth (1824).
Here in this work you can clearly hear the obsession with counting so many everyday things that Bruckner had, but also, if the story is true, Bruckner's obsession with both Beethoven and Schubert to the point that he held both their skulls when their bodies were exhumed and moved to their new resting places in 1888.
Taking all of tonight's diverse musical threads and weaving them all together with the SCO for tonight’s music, and doing it all in his own unique and always expressive style, was Maxim Emelyanychev, Conductor.
Review by Tom King © 2025
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com
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