The Scottish Chamber Orchestra has announced details of its 2012/13 Season of concerts in Edinburgh between October 2012 and May 2013. Despite the difficult financial climate, the Orchestra is successfully maintaining its excellent standards of performance and programming; it has just completed a tour of Germany with Principal Conductor Robin Ticciati, the first SCO/Ticciati recording – of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique – is due for release in April, and its current (2011/12) Season is enjoying great success, with ticket sales up by 12% on last year’s equivalent.
Speaking about the Orchestra’s 2012/13 Season, Roy McEwan, SCO Chief Executive, said: “We may be in financially challenging times but we are also in the Year of Creative Scotland and the new SCO Season declares innovation, quality and exceptional creativity. The Season has the SCO hallmarks of a huge range of repertoire along with superb guest artists, including both regular partners and those making their SCO debut, and a sense of adventure which in recent years has beguiled our steadily growing audiences.”
Robin Ticciati enters his fourth Season as the Orchestra’s Principal Conductor, an appointment which has been extended until 2015 from an initial three year contract. Ticciati conducts six concert weeks, including the Opening Concert, the Mozart blockbuster – Così fan tutte on 4 October 2012 in the Usher Hall.
In a further five concert weeks with the Orchestra, Ticciati again demonstrates his versatility and his flair for putting together fascinating concert programmes. Early in the Season, he conducts two Beethoven Symphonies: Symphony No 3 ‘Eroica’ (11 October in the Usher Hall) which he pairs with Schumann’s Violin Concerto with soloist Veronika Eberle, a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist and Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award winner, and Symphony No 6 ‘Pastoral’ (15 November in the Usher Hall) in a concert featuring legendary pianist Maria João Pires, who performs Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 17 in G K453.
The Scottish concerts with Pires follow a major European Tour which includes concerts in Vienna, Frankfurt, Brussels and Luzern.
Ticciati celebrates the great musical city of Vienna across two weeks in March. Unusually for the SCO – or any chamber orchestra – both programmes include a work by Gustav Mahler. In the first of the concerts (7 March in The Queen’s Hall), he pairs the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony with Schubert’s Fifth Symphony.
Matthias Goerne, one of today’s most distinguished lieder singers, makes his SCO debut in these concerts performing a selection of Schubert songs orchestrated by Webern, Brahms and Reger. The following week, the Orchestra and Ticciati are joined by tenor Toby Spence and Scottish mezzo soprano Karen Cargill for Glen Cortese’s arrangement for chamber orchestra of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde.
In his final concert of the 2012/13 Season, Ticciati continues his journey with the SCO through the music of Hector Berlioz with the symphonic masterpiece Harold in Italy. Following performances in previous seasons of L’enfance du Christ and La Mort de Cléopâtre, the SCO and Ticciati opened the 2011/12 Season with Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique which was also the first work they recorded together: the recording is released on 16 April 2012 on the Linn Records label. They return to the studio in April to record a second all-Berlioz disc.
Young audiences are now encouraged to enjoy the Orchestra’s wider concert programme through the introduction of free tickets for under-16s (when accompanied by a paying adult), and the extension of £5 student tickets to all people under 26 years of age.