Joseph Swensen, principal conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, is one of music's wild boys. To say he is variable is putting it mildly. He can be exciting and maddening in equal measure, sometimes within the same concert and even, as on this occasion, within the same work.
The work in question was Schumann's Fourth Symphony. The piece itself is controversial, with opinions differing as to whether its structure is slipshod or daring. It plays as a continuous whole and rolls themes on from one section to the next: a decorative phrase almost thrown away by the violins in the slow movement forms the basis of the scherzo's trio, for instance.
Swensen opened and closed it at an uncommonly high voltage. Churning lower strings and glowering woodwind generated a tremendous sense of turbulence, while the finale, taken at breakneck speed, was an exhilarating scramble, precisely played. At the centre of the symphony, however, something slipped. The daring excitement became emphatic rigidity. The slow movement was a jerky trundle, the scherzo metronomic. The whole, despite electrifying moments, failed to cohere.
Yet we did get the best of Swensen on this occasion with a performance of the Wesendonck-Lieder before the interval. Wagner's song cycle comes from the same emotional ferment - his passion for the married Mathilde Wesendonck - that produced Tristan und Isolde, with which it shares musical material and a strange ideology that equates spiritual withdrawal with sexual oblivion. Swensen's approach was flagrantly erotic, all throbbing strings and undulating woodwind. His soloist was the glamorous Czech mezzo Dagmar Peckova, dark in tone with a voice somewhere between honey and molasses, faintly indecent in her delivery of the text. Peckova's UK appearances to date have largely consisted of indifferent performances of Mozart. Here, however, she emerged as a Wagnerian of considerable stature.
Swensen prefaced the songs with Bruckner's Adagio for Strings, a transcription, in effect, of the slow movement of his String Quartet in F. Swensen avoided extravagant lushness by deploying fewer strings than usual, and the result was austere, chaste and haunting.
