United Kingdom Mozart, Webern: Yeol Eum Son (piano), Scottish Chamber Orchestra / Andrew Manze (conductor). Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, 30.10.2025. (SRT)
Mozart – Piano Concerto No.21 in C major; Piano Concerto No.24 in C minor
Webern – Symphony, Op.21
A nice idea for a concert, this: pairing Mozart’s great C major and C minor piano concertos with one soloist in one concert. As played by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Yeol Eum Son, the two concertos sounded like non-identical twins, emerging from the same source by ploughing different furrows.
The orchestral sound was bright, forthright and assertive, with unembarrassed militaristic brilliance to the opening of No.21, and some lovely flecks of detail shaped by Principal Guest Conductor Andrew Manze, such as the occasional leaning into a longer note, or splashes of string vibrato, sparingly used, that were gorgeous in the slow movement and exciting elsewhere. A pall of darkness then seemed to spread over the C minor concerto, the opening silky and dangerous, becoming stormy and angry, with innocuously silky winds only heightening the drama, with the final passage of the finale sounding positively sinister.
In that concerto, Yeol Eum Son’s playing seemed to pacify the angry orchestra, and throughout the evening her touch was poetic, delicate and smooth, her entries in both first movements so subtle that at first they hardly seemed to register. However, there was a lovely spirit of energy to her playing, with a beautiful singing quality to both slow movements, and even a touch of airy poetry to that of No.24. Her cadenzas (her own?) were thoughtful and fairly serious affairs, sonata-like explorations of Mozart’s material that took us to surprising places with it.
Yet perhaps the most effective soloist of the evening was Manze himself, in the beginner’s-guide-to-serialism with which he introduced Webern’s symphony. I always look forward to Manze’s concerts because he is such a great communicator, but have never seen him do it more explicitly than here, where he pulled twelve string players out of the orchestra to illustrate Webern’s use of the tone row, then moved them around to show how the composer adapts his material. It served as a curtain-raiser to a performance of the symphony that exposed its inner workings as forensically as an engineer crowbarring open a mechanism to reveal the whirring cogs within. Exposing for the players, and remarkably still challenging for the audience, there was a diamantine gleam to the playing, sometimes harsh and unforgiving, but always precisely focused.
However, he made the misstep of playing the symphony twice, once before and once (unadvertised) after the interval. He tried this trick before in a 2009 SCO concert involving Webern’s Five Movements Op.5, but it is too much of a good thing. Thanks, Andrew, but once is enough. He at least half acknowledged this in his best line of the evening: ‘For those of you who hate it, this music is much better than it sounds.’
Simon Thompson