Having opened his three-concert Mozart series with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra with a couple of the composer's less familiar concertos, it was only fitting that Piotr Anderszewski concluded it with two of his blockbusters.
The popularity of the A major concerto K488 and the D minor K466 is such that the works need no introduction, yet to hear Anderszewski play them, even in the cramped confines of the Queen's Hall, was to rediscover them anew. Any sense of cosy familiarity with the first movement of K488 was dispelled by his playing, which exposed depths of subtlety far beyond the standard operatic rhetoric often discerned in this music.
Anderszewski gave as poetic an account of the slow movement as you are likely to hear, but he achieves this without taking liberties. Far from feeling self-consciously radical or overworked, there was a sense of effortless naturalism about his performance. Nor did Anderszewski shy away from the lighter aspects of the concerto, as he proved with a delicately dancing finale.
There were insights to be had in the parallel neoclassical strand that has run throughout these concerts, with Alexander Janiczek leading the SCO in Stravinsky's Pulcinella Suite and Concerto in D. The latter arguably received the more confident performance, though it still came across as a pale shadow of the genius with which Stravinsky reworks Pergolesi in the earlier suite.
The heart of the concert, however, was Anderszewski, who rounded off the Mozart concerto series with the D minor concerto. Rarely has the final transition from the mystery of D minor to the brilliance of D major seemed as unsettling.