Scottish Chamber Orchestra
..coupling of a seriously good programme of 20th-century American music with a seriously good American conductor...Andrew Litton brought together the meliflous conservatism of Barber - deliciously illustrated in the famous Adagio for strings - and the pugnacious unorthodoxy of Charles Ives...Litton gave us (Scottish Chamber Orchestra) Ives's third Symphony and the Three Pieces in New England, both exuding the idiosynchratic freshness and vitality of Ives' unpredictable style. A good audience left well pleased.
— Kenneth Walton, The Scotsman
Andrew Litton..is one of the precious few conductors with a knack of introducing new music to an audience that is succinct, affable and informative...The famous Ritual Fire Dance burst into flame, though not so that [the] blaze became uncontrollable; Litton exercised discretion in his conducting, drawing on piquznt orchestral colours and sultry Spanish suggestiveness.
— Geoffrey Norris, The Daily Telegraph
When the cat's away the mice will play. And play they did, the SCO musicians — hard, brilliantly and with terrific energy and enthusiasm for American guest conductor Andrew Litton in this concert of 20th-century masterpieces. Litton shied away from wallowing in [Prokoviev's Symphony No. 1's] classical idiom. Instead, he made the harmonies dance and collide in a racy, forward-looking interpretation.
— James Allen, The Scotsman
Andrew Litton, an excellent American conductor...struck just the right balance between the stealthy, introverted side of the score (Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta) as represented in the first and third movements, and the more extroverted side, as represented in the second and fourth.
— Conrad Wilson, The Herald, Edinburgh
The atmosphere was electric as cellist Truls Mørk with conductor Andrew Litton and [the] orchestra in tremendous form unleashed Shostakovich's powerful Cello Concerto No. 1. Litton has a tremendous rapport with the orchestra, and it showed.
— Susan Nickalls, Edinburgh Evening News
Mr. Litton took the quiet opening strings (of Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta), bleak at first then romantic, put them gently onto the heat and gradually boiled up the intensity of the playing into a fierce exuberant performance that combined rhythmic surprises with startling orchestral effects.
— Alan Cooper, Press and Journal