SCO, 13/01/2023

Milhaud : La création du monde

Copland : Clarinet Concerto

Bernstein : Sonata for Clarinet and Piano (orch. Ramin)

Poulenc : Sinfonietta

Maximiliano Martín, clarinet

Scottish Chamber Orchestra

Joseph Swensen

This was a singularly appealing programme, and one for which conductor Joseph Swenson clearly felt considerable enthusiasm and affection.  That enthusiasm did not always translate in terms of quality of performance, however, and the opening Milhaud was unsettling for all the wrong reasons.  I've not heard La création du monde live in concert before, knowing it well from recordings.  Recordings, though, usually benefit from a carefully designed acoustic balance, and that was what was missing here.  It's a small band, eighteen players, of which only four are strings, and those strings were largely inaudible most of the time.  So too was the piano; certainly in such a small formation, the piano could be an overpowering force, but the pianist was being rather too cautious.  On the other hand, the percussion was too strong, jarring in its interventions.  The flavour of the music was well caught, but its colour seemed distorted.

No such complaints for the Copland Clarinet Concerto, the piano carried the appropriate weight, while SCO Principal Clarinet Maximiliano Martín deployed elegant, elegiac phrasing for the dreamy first movement, sharpening up smartly for the spikier second movement.  He held centre stage effortlessly, with an attractive, dusky tone (and a particularly effective low register), and plenty of panache.  There were a couple of moments when I thought the strings were a little scrappy, but nothing that truly disturbed the good progress of the piece.

The Bernstein Clarinet Sonata is an early work, his first published piece, from 1942.  I've only ever heard it fleetingly, and only in its original version, but this was an orchestration from 1994 by Sid Ramon (who was co-orchestrator on West Side Story), for forces very similar to the Copland concerto - strings and piano, no harp, but percussion.  Hearing it alongside the Copland, Bernstein did not exploit the timbre of the clarinet as extensively or as effectively as his mentor, and I can't honestly say I recognise Bernstein yet in that music, except very fleetingly.  (On the other hand, I think Christopher Gunning must have had at least the opening somewhere at the back of his mind when he wrote the Poirot theme music!) However, Martín and Swenson gave it a persuasive enough performance.

If the earlier parts of the concert were not an unmitigated success, happily, the Poulenc Sinfonietta which closed it was worth the price of admission all by itself.  This was a delightful performance, bright, nervy, unabashedly, swooningly lyrical, beautifully textured, playful yet nostalgic, absurdly and gloriously Gallic.  The strings played with a lush sweep in the more romantic passages, the winds spiced everything deliciously and, in short, this was as close to perfect as one could possibly have hoped for.  

[Next : 28th January]