Prom 40: Christian Tetzlaff, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Robin Ticciati, Royal Albert Hall, London, review: A thoughtful evening of music

Robin Ticciati and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra perform Schumann’s 'Third Symphony' – the climax of a Prom also including Brahms’s 'Tragic Overture' and Thomas Larcher’s Nocturne – 'Insomnia'

Robin Ticciati and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra performing Prom 40 at the Royal Albert Hall

(Chris Christodoulou)

Schumann, Brahms and Berg: a classic Austro-German concert programme you could have heard at the Proms at any time in the last 70 years. But what vitality and lightness it had here in the hands of Robin Ticciati and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and what curious new conversations these works started when set alongside the UK premiere of Thomas Larcher’s Nocturne – Insomnia.

Authors of one of the finest Schumann symphony cycles on disc, Ticciati and the SCO brought their characterful, free-flowing Rhine to the Royal Albert Hall, sweeping the audience along in the eddying, dancing cross-currents of the Third Symphony – now glinting gold with sunlit horns, now a bubbling rush of strings. A joyous gesture of release, it was a natural counterweight to the tightly-wound grief and self-examination of Berg’s Violin Concerto.

Christian Tetzlaff’s introspective solo line may have conjured the billowing skirts and waltzes of the ballroom, but it was a vision faded into palest sepia, a remembrance tarnished by time and anger. The feminine delicacy of his tone at both the opening and the blanched, blinding ending gave us pathos but never sentimentality in a work always poised at the emotional breaking point.

Adding a 21st-century voice to the evening, Larcher’s short Nocturne looks back at the musical world of his predecessors through a new lens. An exercise in tonal composition, the work’s stubbornly scalic themes reject innovation, placing emphasis instead on texture. Itching with percussion, strings suggesting the rasp of rumpled sheets and what could be a mosquito whine, this sleepless night was a vivid, if slight, divertissement in a thoughtful evening of music.