SCO: Yeol Eum Son

City Halls, Glasgow, 31/10/25

Scottish Chamber Orchestra; Andrew Manze (conductor); Yeol Eum Son (piano)

I caught the second of three performances of a Scottish Chamber Orchestra programme, conducted by Andrew Manze and featuring South Korean pianist Yeol Eum Son, on the night of 31st October in Glasgow’s City Halls.  She was the soloist in two of Mozart’s finest examples of the Piano Concerto genre: the exquisitely pastoral No.21 in C major and engagingly dramatic No.24 in C minor. Between the two concerti and before the interval, Andrew Manze introduced Webern’s 1928 Symphony with a demonstration of 12-tone theory and compositional technique before the performance of the piece.

In 2023, I reviewed two concerts of solo piano music given by Yeol Eum Son, one at the East Neuk Festival on the last day of June, the other at the Edinburgh International Festival in the Queen’s Hall in mid-August.  In both concerts, the performances of romantic and modern repertoire were stunning and engaging.  However, her East Neuk programme included two Mozart pieces, both in C minor, the Fantasia K475 and the Sonata K457.  I had issues with her Mozart and felt that an extrovert performance style that excelled in other repertoire fell short with Mozart.  Particularly in the Fantasia, dynamic contrasts lacked subtlety and did not serve the expression, failing to draw the listener into the magic of shared experience.  Opportunities to point dialogue between left and right hand were missed.  Phrasing was uniformly emphatic and metronomic and rather ‘in your face’.  So, although it is undeniable that her recordings of the complete Mozart sonatas have won praise, I was apprehensive about whether these issues might resurface in the concerti, especially the C-minor.  My worries proved entirely unfounded. 

The strings of the SCO honoured the ‘C’ with exquisitely gentle chamber stealth in the opening bars, so that, with the winds joining to turn the mood to a stylish quasi-military march, an air of subtle mischief was established.  The piano entry was suffused with winning guile, the phrasing with just enough expectant hesitancy to draw in the listener: in short, everything that had been lacking in the East Neuk was present in spades.  From there, the sense of enfolding narrative took over.  Articulation was as flawless as ever.  The dialogue with the orchestra was as chamber-informed as it always is with the SCO.  The shadows that are cast in the key exploration and moments of chromaticism of the development were shades of colour that did not ruffle the charm.  The same elegant unhurried expressiveness inhabited the cadenza and the cheeky coda.  The Andante, surely a prime candidate for the title of Mozart’s loveliest Romance, ever associated with the weepie film ‘Elvira Madigan’, opened with the gentle intimacy of muted strings, joined by unobtrusive winds to steer the harmony and prepare for the piano entry, which was delicious, with the same ear-caressing phrasing.  As in the first movement, the cloud shadows of the key changes were elegantly pointed and organically subsumed into the overall pastoral mood.  The contented calm of the brief coda was very lovely.  The playful, slightly operatic rondo finale was full of gleeful smiles and cheeky chromaticism, agile but not over-driven.  Cheeky hesitancy at the beginning of the cadenza heightened its drama, so that the mirth and charm of the coda were even more delightful.  Perfect Mozart.

Before performing Webern’s Symphony, Andrew Manze gave a genial witty demonstrated talk of the techniques of 12-tone composition.  First, 8 of the 12 violins came to the front of the stage and he got them, one tone per player, to play a major scale, ascending and descending.  He then got the four remaining violinists to come forward and occupy their correct spaces in a chromatic scale which was then played, ascending and descending.  They were then rearranged in the order of the tone row employed in Webern’s symphony, which was then played, straight.  Then retrograde, inverted and retrograde inverted were all demonstrated, first separately.  The forms were then combined in pairs to explore the effects.  Then variations were introduced, with timbre being graphically demonstrated (with different bowing and pizzicato styles), but also variations in rhythm, dynamics, octave and instrument being mentioned.  He then acknowledged that many find 12-tone music sterile and unappealing, but that he thinks that Webern is an exception.  He finished with the true story of the composer’s demise when, stepping out for a quiet cigarette on a dark night in 1945, with de-Nazification underway, a jittery American military policeman, receiving no response to a challenge, shot in the dark and killed him.  After hearing the symphony, Andrew quipped, listeners would either mourn Webern’s passing or nominate the GI for a posthumous medal.

Scored for just clarinet, bass clarinet, 2 horns, harp, and strings without basses, Webern's Symphony in just 2 movements and lasting about 9 minutes is the ultimate distillation.  A sense of cool pure Alpine air and water and uncluttered space where everything can be examined from any perspective permeates both movements.  Atmospheric and just a little surreal.  I’m not generally a fan of atonal music, but I agree with Andrew Manze: Webern is different.  Very palate-cleansing and rather uplifting.  I’ll not be recommending the purchase of any medals.

With pairs of horns and trumpets plus timpani to beef up the sound, the C-minor concerto is a very different kettle of fish.  The dark brooding opening of the first movement promises melodrama and we get it in Gothic proportions for the introduction and the piano’s entry and exposition.  There is some let up with not exactly smiles but putting on a brave major key face for a time.  But when C-minor returns, it does so with a vengeance, unremitting through the recapitulation, cadenza and coda.  Conductor, orchestra and soloist were of one mind in relating the grim narrative and making it theatrically real and compelling.  The contrasting major key slow movement, in theatrical terms, is more like an operatic soprano aria for the innocent heroine, simple and unassuming, with duet episodes with the hero (represented by the orchestral winds as a tenor).  It was very charmingly played with sweet cantabile and lovely dialogue between the piano and the winds.  Back to C-minor for the finale, a theme-and-variations, the theme with short phrases seeming to state with blunt matter-of-factness: “this is just how life is, pretty grim; better get used to it”.  The piano, in the variations, seems to say: “we’ll see about that; I’m going to push some boundaries”.  And there is lots of playfulness and even two forays into the major key among the 8 variations.  But push hard enough at the boundaries and the bars of the cage are revealed.  The theme was right after all.  We heard a fabulously dramatic reading of Mozart’s C-minor concerto.  Thoroughly excellent.