Robin Ticciati's fifth season as the Scottish Chamber Orchestra's principal conductor should have got under way with a concert performance of Béatrice et Bénédict, continuing the Berlioz cycle that has been such a feature of his tenure. That is how the season had begun in Edinburgh the previous evening, but by the time the concert reached Glasgow, Karen Cargill – who was to have sung the role of Béactrice – had succumbed to a heavy cold, and efforts to find another mezzo who could take on the role at such short notice had come to nothing.
So Ticciati conducted "highlights" from Berlioz's last opera, which here meant virtually all the musical numbers that do not involve Béatrice. A lithe, superbly played performance of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony was added to the programme as a generous makeweight, but though successful up to a point, it all inevitably felt like an awkward compromise.
The performance of Béatrice et Bénédict was always planned to be given without the dialogue that is such an integral part of Berlioz's adaptation of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing; even with all the score in place, the dramaturgy would have been under pressure. Without some of the most significant musical numbers, too, it often felt rather amorphous.
It did spark into dramatic life a few times, and the brief but vivid intervention of Lionel Lhote's Somarone, for his second-act song in praise of the wines of Sicily, gave a taste of what the evening could have been. Otherwise, though, it was much more question of admiring the soloists, the fine singing of the SCO Chorus and the deft orchestral playing more or less in vacuo. Kenneth Tarver was a wonderfully stylish Benedict; Sally Matthews dispatched Hero's aria with coloratura aplomb; Kathleen Wilkinson (Ursula), Brindley Sherratt (Don Pedro) and Ashley Riches (Claudio) supplied characterful cameos. But it was never going to be the performance everyone expected to enjoy.
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