They don’t often squeeze 14 musicians onto the small Wigmore Hall platform, never mind a grand piano as well. But the string players of the Scottish Ensemble are an adaptable and up-for-it band who have played in more challenging venues than this. Nevertheless, this highly engaging concert, in which the ensemble was joined by pianist Gabriela Montero, felt at times to be at the top end of what the Wigmore’s delicate acoustic could quite take. This is a hall in which even a soloist needs to calibrate the sound with considerable care.
The programme was a there-and-back-again South Atlantic crossing. Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue, K546 lacked atmosphere, but was followed by an arrangement of Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasilieras No 5 aria for string orchestra, in which the solo part was beautifully played by the Ensemble’s director Jonathan Morton, though the version lacks the exoticism that the soprano voice famously generates in the piece. In an arrangement of the six-part Ricercar from Bach’s Musical Offering, however, the lines were beautifully delineated.
Much the best of all were the two substantial Argentinian parts of the programme. Piazzolla’s Three Pieces for Chamber Orchestra, which weave their seductive and melancholy way through a mix of Buenos Aires tango rhythms and classical counterpoint, was perfectly judged, the prelude pulsing and potent, the fugue and divertimento full of twists and fast-changing sonorities. Golijov’s Last Round, in part a tribute to Piazzolla, was if anything even more successful, with two string quartets strutting their stuff against and around one another in music of fierce physicality, which resolves into a lovely melting final phrase.
Montero played the piano part in the Piazzolla with crisp athleticism. In Mozart’s E flat Concerto, K449, her tone was rather more full and forceful, but the contrapuntal finale had irresistible rhythmic clarity. As a solo encore, Montero characteristically asked the audience for a tune she could play with and duly delivered a thunderously virtuosic set of improvisations on Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
