Weber Wind Concertos by Scottish Chamber Orchestra

There are recordings that remind you why certain ensembles own certain repertoire. This is one of them.

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra has been living inside Weber’s wind concertos long enough that the music sounds less performed than inhabited — and that distinction matters more than any amount of technical polish. I caught these players in concert back in 2012, and what struck me then strikes me again here: when your soloists are principals of the orchestra rather than visiting celebrities, something shifts in the fundamental chemistry. Nobody is showing off for anybody else. The music breathes differently.

It breathes differently right from the opening bars of the Clarinet Concerto No. 1, where the strings don’t merely wait their turn — they smolder. Caged, restless, coiled. Then Maximiliano Martín enters, and that clarinet tone, honeyed and long-breathed, does something remarkable: it genuinely calms them. The opening statement has a singing quality that some clarinetists strain after and Martín simply has, an ease with the sustained line that makes the instrument’s famously awkward breaks and register shifts seem like features rather than problems.

The development section is where this rendition gets genuinely interesting. Martín seems to feel his way forward in the dark — tentative, searching — before the music ignites into rapid-fire exchange with the winds. Weber knew how to write dialogue, and these players know how to have a conversation. By the time the recapitulation arrives, carrying its undertow of unease, you feel the architecture of the whole movement as something dramatic rather than merely formal.

Breath control in the Adagio is exemplary, and I don’t use that word lightly. The horn-and-clarinet interplay is — well, magical is the lazy word, but it earns it here. The finale has the spontaneity of something that might go slightly sideways at any moment, right up to that irreverent final phrase, which lands with exactly the right wink.

The Bassoon Concerto is another matter entirely, and I mean that as high praise. Most bassoon concertos are comedies, more or less willingly. This one has genuine ceremonial weight — the opening pages are majestic without tipping into pomposity, which is harder to pull off than it sounds. When Peter Whelan finally enters, he deflects the orchestral triumphalism with something lyrical, almost tender. You might need a moment before you’re fully convinced he isn’t playing it for laughs. He isn’t.

Whelan’s fingerwork in the outer movements is formidable — Weber writes passages that seem designed to find out exactly where the limits are — but the slow movement is where he earns his keep. The long line unfolds without fuss, without the kind of expressive underlining that lesser players use to tell you this is radiant. It simply is.

The two concertinos are single-movement works, which sometimes gets them treated as lightweight. Not here. Alec Frank-Gemmill invests the Horn Concertino with a sense of drama that announces itself immediately — that opening line, floating above throbbing strings, has genuine atmosphere. The quasi-slow section moves with quiet purpose before the variations arrive, and some of those variations are genuinely surprising, the harmonic language suddenly reaching somewhere unexpected.

The SCO plays this repertoire as though they’ve earned it. They have.