BBCSSO/Brabbins/Liebeck,
City Halls, Glasgow KATE MOLLESON ***
THIS was violinist Jack Liebeck’s first concert appearance with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra but he has already recorded with the orchestra: a disc of Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy and the obscure Third Violin Concerto conducted by Martyn Brabbins was released on Hyperion earlier this year, part of the label’s Romantic Violin Concertos series.
Later this week the same team are back in the studio to record two more Bruch rarities – the Second Violin Concerto and the Konzertstück Opus 84. Both were on the programme here.
This Monday-night concert, then, served two purposes: it filled a Radio 3 Live In Concert slot and provided a rehearsal run-through ahead of the recording. Had the performance been scheduled for next week, after all the painstaking patching and repatching that happens in studio sessions, it would have sounded very different. Here, the orchestra was evidently still getting to know the Second Concerto, while Liebeck did not always find the flux and freedom Bruch’s urgent recitative passages require.
That said, he takes a fresh and uncloying approach to this potentially syrupy repertoire and he makes a beautiful violin sound – vocal and with a husky, full-bodied low register – that really suits Bruch’s generously expressive lines.
The two-movement Konzerstuck fared better than the concerto; Liebeck had to shout less to be heard and there were moments of surprising ensemble colour.
The two violin works were framed by similarly dark-hued orchestral pieces: Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture and Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture. Brabbins conducted both with punchy attack and unrolled the big tunes with easy, unfussy lyricism.