The banquet's laid, the host is absent but the guests can still relish the first-class fare in his memory. Sir Charles Mackerras was perhaps looking down happily in the company of Mozart and Dvořák as another oboist-turned-conductor like himself, Douglas Boyd, put his beloved Scottish Chamber Orchestra players buoyantly through their paces. The special late-night Prom, the second we wish he'd lived long enough to conduct, was one Mackerras had planned so carefully as a serenading double bill especially close to his heart. Our late maestro couldn't have wished for anything more blithe as a cheerful salute.
True, the Albert Hall is going to be a test of the never-more-than-13 players' ability to project their personalities and the music's charisma, especially if you're sitting half way round in the stalls or lying - as you could at this late-nighter - towards the back of the arena. I'm still not quite sure whose fault it was that Dvořák came off less well. His serenade is an early work, a footnote last night to Andris Nelsons's reputedly impetuous performance of the late New World symphony in the earlier concert.
The Czech miniatures seemed a little hazy here, not inauthentic when you think of the country's warmly reverberant Supraphon recordings, with even that excellent cellist David Watkin making little impact. There was much needed cutting edge at last from the horns for the angsty heart of an Andante which owes its syncopated accompaniment and even a little of its very romantic melodising to the truly great Adagio at the heart of Mozart's towering example. Lilting pleasure kicked in early with the genial middle sequence of the opening march, reminding us that Mahler at his most wide-eyed is Bohemian too, but I wonder whether Mackerras might not have stitched the march itself more easily into the final festivities.
Yet Boyd, talking eloquently to presenter Louise Fryer on stage between the two pieces, reminded us how both works had entered his bloodstream as former principal oboist with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, where he'd learnt so much about the Mozart under the former first violinist of the Budapest Quartet, Alexander Schneider. I remember Schneider, too, with the SCO, back in the days when Robin Miller was first oboe and Lewis Morrison, immortalised in Alexander McCall Smith's 44 Scotland Street novels, the limpid clarinettist. Christopher Cowie, with his beguiling ability to carry a phrase ineffably over the top like a great soprano, and Maximiliano Martin are very much their equals today.
They sang their hearts out in the arias of the Gran Partita, K361, tellingly defined by Boyd as an opera for wind ensemble equal to the collaborations with Da Ponte or The Magic Flute. I think he's right: who can forget the Adagio being used as an example of divine inspiration in one of the better moments of the film Amadeus? And Mozart's twentysomething genius in giving us 14-plus personable melodies in seven movements - four at the premiere, but which could you discard today? - would only be equalled by the fertility of Tchaikovsky in his tune-stacked ballets.
Tchaikovsky took a lesson from Mozart's selective instrumentation, too, though how I wish more composers had written for the liquid gold combination of two clarinets and two basset horns, those velvety tenor members of the clarinet family which had only been around for about two decades when the Serenade was composed. Their gentle weave provided pure heaven in the ensemble-within-an-ensemble of the work's first minuet trio. And if, again, I can imagine Mackerras making the Adagio breathe a little more freely at a similar brisk-ish tempo, he would surely have approved Boyd's way with the unbuttoned country-dance feel within the second minuet and the sheer hilarity of his most rumbustious finale - a jolly morning alarm call at 11.15pm.
The Czech miniatures seemed a little hazy here, not inauthentic when you think of the country's warmly reverberant Supraphon recordings, with even that excellent cellist David Watkin making little impact. There was much needed cutting edge at last from the horns for the angsty heart of an Andante which owes its syncopated accompaniment and even a little of its very romantic melodising to the truly great Adagio at the heart of Mozart's towering example. Lilting pleasure kicked in early with the genial middle sequence of the opening march, reminding us that Mahler at his most wide-eyed is Bohemian too, but I wonder whether Mackerras might not have stitched the march itself more easily into the final festivities.
Yet Boyd, talking eloquently to presenter Louise Fryer on stage between the two pieces, reminded us how both works had entered his bloodstream as former principal oboist with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, where he'd learnt so much about the Mozart under the former first violinist of the Budapest Quartet, Alexander Schneider. I remember Schneider, too, with the SCO, back in the days when Robin Miller was first oboe and Lewis Morrison, immortalised in Alexander McCall Smith's 44 Scotland Street novels, the limpid clarinettist. Christopher Cowie, with his beguiling ability to carry a phrase ineffably over the top like a great soprano, and Maximiliano Martin are very much their equals today.
They sang their hearts out in the arias of the Gran Partita, K361, tellingly defined by Boyd as an opera for wind ensemble equal to the collaborations with Da Ponte or The Magic Flute. I think he's right: who can forget the Adagio being used as an example of divine inspiration in one of the better moments of the film Amadeus? And Mozart's twentysomething genius in giving us 14-plus personable melodies in seven movements - four at the premiere, but which could you discard today? - would only be equalled by the fertility of Tchaikovsky in his tune-stacked ballets.
Tchaikovsky took a lesson from Mozart's selective instrumentation, too, though how I wish more composers had written for the liquid gold combination of two clarinets and two basset horns, those velvety tenor members of the clarinet family which had only been around for about two decades when the Serenade was composed. Their gentle weave provided pure heaven in the ensemble-within-an-ensemble of the work's first minuet trio. And if, again, I can imagine Mackerras making the Adagio breathe a little more freely at a similar brisk-ish tempo, he would surely have approved Boyd's way with the unbuttoned country-dance feel within the second minuet and the sheer hilarity of his most rumbustious finale - a jolly morning alarm call at 11.15pm.
