Music review: SCO & Pekka Kuusisto, Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

The highlight of this wide-ranging concert was an extraordinary performance from Finnish violin virtuoso Pekka Kuusisto, writes Susan Nickalls

SCO & Pekka Kuusisto, Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh *****

There wasn’t much of a unifying thread running through this disparate programme, other than the stand-out performances from the SCO and conductor Maxim Emelyanchev and the fact that the pieces weren’t quite what they seemed. Apart, that is, from Magnus Lindberg’s sublime Violin Concerto No. 1 – not so much played as completely absorbed by the extraordinary soloist Pekka Kuusisto.

With edgy coolness he plunged us into Lindberg’s mesmerising landscape of icicle sharp glissandi and shimmering crushed glass punctuated by reverberant woodwind chorales. Emelyanychev and the orchestra beautifully laid down a dreamy gossamer thin backdrop to Kuusisto’s meanderings which built to a frenzy of double stopping and eerie fingerboard harmonics. A masterpiece for our times.

At the other end of the spectrum Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony, an inspired arrangement of his String Quartet No. 8 by Rudolf Barshai, packed a powerful emotional punch. Shostakovich burnt his initials, DSCH, into the very fabric of his piece and the dedication “to the victims of fascism and the war” gives the work an uncomfortable contemporary relevance. While the original string quartet has a rawness, the grumbling basses amplified the ferocity of the music. Emelyanychev kept the focus tight in this magnificent performance.

At first listen, it would be difficult to pin Stravinsky’s name on Dumbarton Oaks, inspired by Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and written in a neoclassical style. However, the bright flutes and bassoons chattering away as if at a posh cocktail party were a bit of a modernist give-away.

Fauré’s Suite: Pelléas and Mélisande was written as incidental music for Maurice Maeterlinck’s play about the doomed lovers. This is semaphored by the horns in the opening Prelude and by the fourth movement Mélisande is dead. There was a dullness to this reading which never quite captured the dance-like qualities of the drama.