Tyranny and repression of freedom, explained artistic director Jonathan Morton in his onstage introduction, were the starting point for this latest programme from the Scottish Ensemble and pianist-composer Gabriela Montero. This was another typically individual piece of programming from the group that, in the last few years, has carved itself a niche exploring visual and theatrical ways to present its programmes. This concert kept the visual aspect low-key, although the two large black screens that the players wheeled around the stage between numbers (and sometimes during) was a distraction at times.
Theatrics aside, the strength of any concert programme ultimately lies with the music. Here, following an opening improvisation at the piano from Montero and a response from the string players, the ensemble performed Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony, not the brutal Eighth Quartet but the less familiar 10th, enlarged for string ensemble by Rudolf Barshai. This is an uncharacteristically optimistic work from the composer, at times almost folk inflected and without the oppressive sense of darkness that characterises the last quartets.
This was the most substantial work on the programme, which was otherwise largely populated with single-movement pieces – Vasks’ Viatore and Glass’s Echorus and a single movement from Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. There was also the European premiere of Montero’s Babel.
Montero writes about her music reflecting the turmoil and tragedy that has overcome her native Venezuela in recent years and describes “the mocking absurdity of madness and incoherence” that pervades the work, but at first hearing it is the piece’s debt to 20th-century French music, above all Ravel, that stands out. For all the video montage of Venezuela’s plight that prefaced the performance (difficult to see clearly when projected on to those black screens) the work failed to come across as a desperate cry against repression.
The same could be said of the programme as a whole. The playing of the Scottish Ensemble was as sharp and vibrant as ever, the music thoughtfully programmed, but overall there was a lack of substance that weakened the emotional impact.
•At Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh on 12 February. Then touring until 16 February.
