Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf is one of music's lesser-known pioneers. His Symphonies After Ovid's Metamorphoses - six in all, written around 1780 - were the first major attempt to weld symphonic form to literary narrative. The results were revolutionary. Programme music came into being; Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, Berlioz's dramatic edifices, and the 19th century tone poem wouldn't exist without them.
It seemed appropriate, therefore, that Nicholas McGegan and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra should preface two high Romantic programme works - the Pastoral and Weber's Konzertstück - with the fourth of Dittersdorf's experiments, depicting Andromeda's rescue by Perseus.
It proved mesmerising, although it also revealed Dittersdorf's inspiration to have been operatic as well as literary. Andromeda's opening lament, an oboe solo over churning strings, is a voiceless aria. The music for the sea monster that terrorises her is modelled on the Furies in Gluck's Orfeo. The performance was outstanding, with the SCO alert and responsive to McGegan throughout.
Weber's Konzertstück aims to do for the piano concerto what Dittersdorf did for the symphony, albeit less successfully. Weber wasn't good with plots and the narrative - about a Lady languishing for her Crusader husband - is the 19th century's equivalent of Mills and Boon. Subject and style don't gel either. The piano's flamboyance sits uneasily with the Lady's grief and the whole veers towards camp. McGegan and pianist Stephen Hough, ebullient and ferocious, went deliberately over the top with it, making it riotously entertaining.
McGegan's radicalism was best illustrated by his interpretation of the Pastoral Symphony, however. Refusing to see anything cosy in Beethoven's depiction of nature, he de-sentimentalises the work. Nature, here, is by turns beautiful and savage - a metaphysical unity in diversity in the multiple lines of the slow movement, a thing of terror in the storm which erupts with unusual violence.
Speeds throughout are swift, the tone urgent and the whole suffused with a sense of Dionysiac wildness that most commentators ascribe to Beethoven's Seventh. An outstanding achievement that will linger in the memory of those who heard it long after its final chords died away.
