‘Viola heaven’ was a display of sheer and utter brilliance

March is MacMillan Month, unofficially. That’s James MacMillan, incidentally, but why not call it so? A horn concerto was premiered a couple of weeks ago, his Stabat Mater is due to be unveiled next week and this past weekend we were treated to a performance of his viola concerto.

One audience member described Lawrence Power’s performance as “viola heaven”, and it was certainly an out-of-this-world display of sheer brilliance and technical magic. However, I wouldn’t put the work itself in the stratospheric category.

This was the other side of MacMillan, not the melodic, easy-on-the-ear horn concerto I had enjoyed. It was full of high-edge harmonies, allied with atonalism which is a combination that didn’t convince me at all. What did convince me was Power’s performance. He is the dedicatee of this work and he performed it like it was his sole possession. The word “virtuosic” falls short as MacMillan calls on an incredible range of technical challenges.

High energy semiquaver runs, top register harmonics and other solo passages mere mortals could only look at. It was one of these solo performances you’ll remember, even though the work itself isn’t all that memorable.

On stage with Power were the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Richard Farnes. Boy, weren’t they in superb form! They took everything MacMillan could throw at them, but it was their performance prior to and after the concerto where their amazing credentials stood out.

George Butterworth’s rhapsody A Shropshire Lad is a work that could easily be the composer’s epitaph. Killed in action in the Somme in 1916, his 1913 work is both elegiac and triumphant.

Equally colourful but far more expansive is Elgar’s second symphony, and the BBC SSO’s performance of this yielded, to me at least, the most potent symphonic experience of the season.