A rewarding strand of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra's Mozart anniversary celebrations has been the programming of works by the composer's lesser-known contemporaries. Süssmayr, Hummel and Chevalier de Saint-George featured earlier in the season; in the closing concert, it was the turn of Joseph Eybler, the friend and colleague initially asked to complete the Requiem. Little of Eybler's music survives, but the Symphony in D unearthed by Andrew Manze and the SCO reveals an elegantly melodic and individual style with echoes of Mozart. A five-movement work with a central trio of minuets could easily make for dull listening; that it doesn't, says much for Eybler's skill in crafting music of distinct and contrasting character.
Eybler's decision to hand back the manuscript of the Requiem unfinished was perhaps a wise one: completing the piece certainly didn't do Süssmayr any favours. The SCO and Charles Mackerras recorded the revised and supposedly improved version by musicologist Robert Levin a few years ago, but here Manze returned to the much-maligned Süssmayr original, a choice that never seemed less than justified as he lovingly shaped the individual movements into a dramatically satisfying whole.
As an early-music specialist making his conducting debut with the SCO, Manze balanced the power of a modern chamber orchestra and 50-strong chorus with the flexibility of a period-instrument group. This isn't unusual, but it was the sensitivity to detail - the sudden celestial quiet of the Voca Me after the opening fury of the Confutatis, the increasing magnitude of each successive declamation of Sanctus - that made the performance stand out.
The SCO had a strong and well-matched quartet of soloists in soprano Emma Bell, mezzo Monica Groop, tenor Andrew Staples and baritone Stephan Loges. But the star of the concert was the SCO Chorus, which, following a lingering performance of Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus at the opening, reaffirmed itself as a great asset to the orchestra with gutsy yet disciplined and responsive singing in the Requiem.
