VoxCarnyx

RSNO Centre, Glasgow

The thought occurred at the end of this adventurous contribution to the cultural programme around COP26 that it is only in very recent times that such an event has been likely to appear on the schedule of the musicians of Scotland’s national orchestra once again. Before that old hands might wistfully recall the SNO’s Musica Nova seasons at the University of Glasgow for any point of comparison.

The architect and soloist of the programme, Moldovan violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, will return to play the Stravinsky Violin Concerto with the RSNO in February, but here she was leading a chamber ensemble of RSNO players, with a choir of singers from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland directed by Tim Dean and groups of trombone and double bass students, also from the Conservatoire.

The sequence of music Kopatchinskaja had the RSNO musicians play required a range of talents far beyond their stringed instrument skills, with a great deal of percussion and performance, bowing of wine glasses and a final, rather moving procession of metronomes and night lights, slowly silenced and extinguished.

That conclusion was perhaps the clearest evocation of the environmental crisis that inspired it. More broadly, this Dies Irae, as the violinist entitled the whole evening, was a statement of opposition to the powerful as much as faith in God or humanity. Interleaving movements from the baroque pictures of Franz Biber’s Battalia with George Crumb’s anti-Vietnam War Black Angels was a colourful enough beginning, but that was only a taste of what was to come.

Re-purposing more early music in Antonio Lotti’s Crucifixus motet and John Dowland’s Lachrimae Antiquae Novae on the way, and with those seven trombones prowling the auditorium, the culmination of the evening was Russian Galina Ustwolskaja’s Komposition No.2.

The only woman in Shostakovich’s composition class in her youth, UIstwolskaja lived until the first decade of the new millennium and wrote this, one her most extreme works, in the early 1970s, scored for eight double basses, piano and a large wooden box to be struck with hammers. Kopatchinskaja forsook her fiddle to play the latter, which had been borne onto the stage like a coffin.

The piece is subtitled Dies Irae, but Ustwolskaja’s precise relationship with the Christian faith, during and after the Soviet era, seems unclear. That we were to hear in it a premonition of the end of days was made explicit in the RCS singers following it with Gregorian chant of the Latin, and the entry of all the participants with those randomly clicking metronomes and flickering lights.

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Keith Bruce