Village Hall, Ullapool, 6 June 2009

Alexander Janiczek

JUNE IN the Highlands means the Scottish Chamber Orchestra is on tour, somewhere. These tours have been going on for over thirty years, and have been in a variety of formats. At one time, back in the eighties, the whole orchestra would decamp out of Edinburgh, with families, and take up residence for weeks at a stretch.

There are hosts of wonderful memories of steam-hauled train trips to Kyle of Lochalsh with a piano bar in the guard’s van, of musical cruises on Loch Ness to Urquhart Castle where a marquee awaited, of house parties, of barbecues, and of course, of midges in profusion!

But in these days of austerity, things have changed and the orchestra now just makes forays into the further-flung parts, sometimes as the whole orchestra, sometimes just the winds and sometimes just the strings. Ullapool saw the third and last day of the first of two short tours this month by the whole orchestra when they reached the Village Hall, having started in Stirling Castle and then stopped off in Kingussie with the same programme.

Never let it be said that Ullapool Village Hall is the largest venue on the SCO circuit. By the time the musicians had spread themselves out there was scant room for the audience, but in they came, in their droves, to create a wonderful friendly atmosphere. And if you thought that the seats on Ryanair were tight, then think again!

Directing the orchestra from the violin was their former leader, Alexander Janicek, an ebullient, charismatic character with a hair-framed face who dwarfs the Baron Oppenheim Stradivarius he uses to create such sweet and enrapturing sounds. To open the concert we had the overture to Orfeo ed Euridice by Christoph Gluck, written when Mozart was only six. It formed the perfect scene setter, short and dramatic.

Then a wonderful piece, one of my Desert Island Discs, composed only seventeen years – but ages in musical terms – after the Gluck, the Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola, K364, written by Mozart when he was twenty-three. For this the orchestra’s principal viola, Jane Atkins, joined Alexander Janicek as joint soloist.

Some say there is a tradition that the violin part is always given to the younger musician, leaving the old warhorse the less virtuosic viola part. If this is true, it is a tradition that Alexander and Jane chose not to follow, leaving each to display the mastery of their own instruments. The two parts follow each other through the work, but where the violin tends towards skittishness, the viola is full of expression so suited to its warm mellow tones. The orchestra needed scant direction as they were as enthralled as the audience by the superb playing and rapport between the soloists.

After a welcome break in the evening sunshine it was the not-so-simple matter of squeezing back into our seats for Dvorak’s Czech Suite, a set of five well known and well loved dance tunes that evoke memories of Dvorak’s Czech homeland with Alexander Janicek letting his Czech blood flow with melodic passion.

No concert would be complete without a symphony, and the SCO are renowned as one of the best Mozart orchestras to be found, so the answer lay in the Symphony in A major K201, his 29th, written at the tender age of seventeen, but a remarkably mature work nonetheless.

It begins gently, although at allegro pace, and then gets even more gentle with the andante being played on muted strings. For the minuet and trio things got more lively, and then even more so as the high spirits of the finale sent everyone home happy and exuberant from an evening very well-spent.

Later this month the SCO are back on the road with concerts in Strathpeffer (26 June), Findhorn (27 June) and Pitlochry (28 June), presenting a programme of works by Fauré, Poulenc, Berlioz and Haydn. Then at the end of July, the forces are split with the blowers playing in Birnam, Oban and Crear, while the scrapers go island-hopping to Stornoway, Benbecula and Barra.

© James Munro, 2009

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