Edinburgh Arts: SCO play Mozart and Prokofiev

SCO play Mozart and Prokofiev

This season's concerts from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra is largely devoted to Mozart in combination with his contemporaries, composers who influenced him and those he influenced. A shame, then, that the programme notes do not examine this relationship instead of spinning dubious theories about such things as the overture to The marriage of Figaro giving a "foretaste of the sound of the guillotine falling in the Place de la Concorde a few years later".

The link with Prokofiev is perhaps a little tenuous, particularly as the latter's Classical symphony is in (what was then believed to be) Haydnesque style, but little matter. It was a fine performance, though perhaps lacking something in wit (at least until the helter-skelter finale). The Andante of 1930 suffered by being so unfamiliar, with its scoring (for strings only) taking away much of the orchestral colour one expects from this composer.

Two Mozart piano concertos more than made up for this minor shortfall. Piotr Anderszewski, directing for the keyboard, made a fine impression in the dramatic no. 14 (in E flat, K. 449) and did better still in the better-known no. 17 (in G major, K. 453), dwelling on the silences of the second movement in such a way as to make one understand that there is more to these concertos than witty dialogue between the soloist and the wind instruments.

(26th January 2006)