THE SCO's second season of Cl@six is a winning concoction on three counts at least. As winter draws in, the six o'clock timing feels perfect; as does the setting of St Cuthbert's Church with its great acoustic, painted apse and pink marble Last Suppe
r sculpture providing radiant context. Then there were the two distinguished string serenades, pieces which fit the emotional bill and are glorious heard live.
Elgar's Serenade for Strings in E Minor is one of his earliest works, tantalising for the way it moves agilely between outer and inner worlds. Pastoral and full of lively romantic lilt in the first and third movements, its middle Larghetto is imbued with wistfulness and intense glimpses of a deeper emotional search. Standing to play (apart from cellists and double basses) the SCO created a burnished palette as richly shaded as an autumn landscape, bringing wonderful vitality to a work Elgar himself adored for being "really stringy in effect".
This energy was palpable as the strings plunged into Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence, with a dramatic first movement that does not beat about the bush. Vigorous physicality gave way to a singing second movement full of delicate flourishes, flowing into the third with its mellow, almost elegiac conversation between violin and cello over rippling plucked accompaniment. The final movement, with its dashing fugue, pulsated with swinging folk dance rhythms, the SCO proving how exhilarating it can be to hear classics played with panache and pleasure.
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