Scottish Ensemble/Montero review – engaging, crisp Piazzolla on a crowded platform

Wigmore Hall, London
In a South Atlantic-crossing programme, Gabriela Montero and the Ensemble’s adaptable string players gave punchy accounts of the Argentinian leg of the trip

They don’t often squeeze 14 musicians onto the small Wigmore Hall platform, never mind a grand piano as well. But the string players of the Scottish Ensemble are an adaptable and up-for-it band who have played in more challenging venues than this. Nevertheless, this highly engaging concert, in which the ensemble was joined by pianist Gabriela Montero, felt at times to be at the top end of what the Wigmore’s delicate acoustic could quite take. This is a hall in which even a soloist needs to calibrate the sound with considerable care.

The programme was a there-and-back-again South Atlantic crossing. Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue, K546 lacked atmosphere, but was followed by an arrangement of Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasilieras No 5 aria for string orchestra, in which the solo part was beautifully played by the Ensemble’s director Jonathan Morton, though the version lacks the exoticism that the soprano voice famously generates in the piece. In an arrangement of the six-part Ricercar from Bach’s Musical Offering, however, the lines were beautifully delineated.

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