In the early years of his career, before his appointments at Birmingham and Berlin took over, Simon Rattle worked frequently in Scotland. He was assistant at the BBC Scottish in Glasgow for a year, and he conducted a great run of Wozzeck performances for Scottish Opera at the Theatre Royal in 1983. He did also work with the SNO and SCO, and these engagements took him outside the central belt.
This programme began with a concert performance of the Weill piece and followed it with Beethoven's Third Symphony. At the time, Rattle was beginning to experiment with Beethoven on a smaller scale than usual - something which has now become commonplace, but was at the time revelatory. The Scottish edition of The Times, in previewing the tour the previous Saturday, described the programme as "an interesting juxtaposition of works", which permitted a waggish sub-editor to slip a "t" into the word Eroica. Whether this added interest increased the size of the audience is not recorded.
As for the performance of the Weill, even in concert form this made a great impact. The lynchpin of the family was the bass Terry Edwards, later to become chorus master at Covent Garden. His great height, towering over the other singers, added to the fun supplied by Weill in giving the role of Mum to a bass in the first place.
The SCO did try for a couple of years to mount a subscription season in Dundee's Bonar Hall, in the mistaken belief that the acoustically superb, but very large, Caird Hall was inappropriate. But the Bonar is acoustically and visually unsympathetic and they did not stay around long enough to attempt to build an audience.
Tour dates for Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen to be confirmed.
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