Programme Changes

If the raison d’etre for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s concert programme this week was the triptych of rare Mozart concert arias that formed its centrepiece, the absence through illness of the young Swiss soprano Regula Muhlemann, who was to sing them, sadly deprived us of this pleasure.

Mozart’s concert arias are a rare and marvellous mixture of good things and even better things, and Muhlemann’s  selection, starting with a dramatic scene based on  Metastasio’s once celebrated operatic libretto about the abandonment of Dido, Queen of Carthage, by  the roving Aeneas, was something  that boded well.

Mozart, on the brink of unveiling his great opera seria Idomeneo in Munich, grabbed the opportunity to portray Dido when it came his way with a superb Mannheim soprano (the future Ilia in Idomeneo) as soloist. Though Dido’s fate had already been indelibly commemorated by Purcell, and would be dealt with again by Berlioz in The Trojans, it was never the subject of an entire Mozart opera, even if  he gave us a glimpse here of what a Mozart Dido and Aeneas might have been like.

Partnered in this concert by two further Mozartian might-have-beens - comic arias brilliantly written as inserts into works by composers whose operas long ago bit the dust, though they were hugely popular in their time - this potent setting of Metastasio’s text (already the inspiration of many eighteenth-century composers) would have been a real experience.      

Depriving us of three such little-known gems by a mishap in programme planning - the SCO opted instead for three of Mozart’s most famous arias in a performance by the Sicilian soprano Laura Giordano, another bright young talent. In the circumstances, no doubt, Susanna’s “Deh vieni” from Figaro, Donna Anna’s “Non mi dir” from Don Giovanni, and Fiordiligi’s “Come scoglio” from  Cosi Fan Tutte formed a more than adequate exchange. But they changed the concert into something else and, impressive enough  though it was, it was not what was needed.  In concert surroundings these familiar items were simply a bunch of operatic excerpts, adding nothing to our Mozart experience but seeming simply to be flung at us as programme fillers.

But because it is always good to hear Mozart well sung, the evening was not a write-off, even though the dapper Spanish guest conductor Antonio Mendez approached it with what looked like the bravado of a young bullfighter, with Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony as the bull.   Though Beethoven in the Queen’s Hall tends to be very different from Beethoven in the Usher, and though Mendez’s  handling of the Seventh was by no means uninteresting, the overall intention seemed to be to make us think we were hearing the work for the first time, in Vienna in 1813, with the deaf Beethoven himself battling with it as conductor.  The performance, while meticulously attentive to the composer’s repeat signs, to the tramp of the allegretto and the circling swirl of the scherzo, had all the raw abrasiveness of a fist in the face.

Mendez’s is clearly a talent to watch, but not perhaps in the Queen’s Hall, where not only was Beethoven given a good thumping but the humour of Haydn’s 99th Symphony, at the start of the programme, was in danger of being changed into a concerto for kettledrums.
24 January 2016