A performance that turned out to be perfectly balanced

At first glance, the programme for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in Perth’s Concert Hall on Friday night was a bit lop-sided. Five short works were balanced against the might of Beethoven’s Ninth symphony, but while the evening wore on it turned out to be a sublime piece of programming.

You would have expected the symphony to dominate but works by Palestrina, JS Bach, Gluck, Handel and Mozart more than held their own. In terms of excellence, the ethereal middle-of-audience Palestrina Sicut Cervus, sung by mini-chorus from the Royal Scottish Conservatoire Voices, was matched by a string quintet of the orchestra performing a Beethoven arrangement of a Bach fugue. Bach as you’ve never heard him before.

Communally, the Voices and the BBC SSO merged with a superb performance of Handel’s Zadok the Piest, as over-familiar a work you’ll ever get, and a magical delivery of a little-known Mozart motet, Misericorias Domini. With these melodies wafting about one’s mind, it was time to turn to the evening’s main work, the Ninth.

This was really exceptional, and one would need to invent a whole new line-up of superlatives to describe it. There are snatches here and there of brilliance in Beethoven’s other eight masterpieces, but in this work it’s a neverending succession of marvellous invention and mystical innovation.

From the opening shimmering strings to the triumphant accelerando finale, this was as electrifying a performance as one would wish for. Never did the performance flag. In fact, some of the tempi defied belief – the middle string fugue in the finals was particularly thrilling. But it was the combination of orchestra, four stellar soloists and the Conservatoire Voices in the choral sections that blew my socks off.