New Auditorium, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
Later this year from 29 October and 3 November, a four-day festival in Glasgow, Nordic Music Days, will present the work of composers from the Nordic regions and Scotland, exploring close cultural connections, but just as importantly bringing us up to date with the pattern of current creative activity in these regions. With wider representation at Aberdeen’s sound festival (23-27 Oct) and a related Glasgow University-hosted conference on 29-30 Oct, the entire concentration of activity amounts to a 10-day collaborative bonanza.
It doesn’t stop there. The project’s Scottish curator, horn player and arts impresario Andy Saunders, has plans to embrace wider-linked activity in the lead-up. Last Saturday’s Nordic Music Journeys – three back-to-back hour-long concerts at the RSNO’s excellent rehearsal auditorium in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall – served as the all-important, to some extent defining, launch event.
It’s aim was to give a platform to new Swedish and Scottish music, performed respectively by Sweden’s Gageego! ensemble and Scotland’s Hebrides Ensemble, both flexible groups capable of multiple configurations, thereby ensuring varied programming. Gageego!, under its director Fredrik Burstedt, performed the two outer programmes; Hebrides took the central spot. A smattering of electro-acoustic works throughout widened the listening experience.
Nor was the event simply about performance. It was fascinating, between concerts, to participate in a peripheral speed dating session, designed to bring the composers into contact with industry colleagues and promoters, even allowing journalists like your intrepid VoxCarnyx scribblers to update themselves on the contemporary music scene in Sweden. The buzz was palpable, Saunders announcing the end of each four-minute “dating session” with an impertinent blast of his natural horn.
As for the music itself, the emphasis was on individual brevity, which naturally afforded a broad coverage of styles and approaches.
Concert 1 by Gageego! opened sotto voce, with the quiet sensuality and suppressed intimacy of Benjamin Staern’s From Hilma Scenes, before treading wilder waters with the sinewy, provocative complexities of Henrik Denerin’s Collide and acid clarity of Mika Pelo’s Abandoned, inspired by his and his son’s “urban explorations” of hauntingly abandoned city spaces still discoverable in post-unification Berlin.
Electro-acoustic contributions included Mirjam Telly’s Apparitions, rather like the restless product of an electronic toy box; and Time’s Arrow by Lars Bröndum, effectively throwback postured performance art (with the composer at the controls) in the manner of a Stockhausen tribute act.
While Gageego! allowed the composers a moment to introduce each of their pieces – some pointlessly reading what was in the programme note – Hebrides, in the central concert, were more streamlined with their delivery of the Scottish repertoire. Aileen Sweeney’s moody Siku found lone cellist and ensemble director William Conway as dimly lit as the shadowy atmospherics of Sweeney’s evocative music, segueing into the nature calls and Gaelic soundscape of Fraser MacBeath’s electronic work, Mar gum biodh an teine air do chraiceann.
Glasgow University lecturer Jane Stanley’s Lalla Rookh followed, its combination of words (a letter written in 1874 by William Thomson, Lord Kelvin to his sister Elizabeth in 1874) and natural horn (played by Saunders) evoking a lively sonic illumination to the spoken text. The earthy substantiveness of Gemma MacGregor’s Betrayal, excerpted from her 2017 St Magnus Festival opera The Story of Magnus Erlendsson, found the perfect complement in Fergus Hall’s intimately sensitised Laig Beach for solo violin.
Beyond the visceral originality of Finn O’Hare’s ääni (the most imaginative and proportionally satisfying of all the electronic works), and the desperately disturbing textures of Rylan Gleave’s Heartstrings, Oliver Searle’s skilfully woven Harbour Dreams, from his Dalriada Trio, brought this Scots-themed concert to a distinguished conclusion.
Gageego!’s closing programme furthered the Swedish cause with another cocktail of varied styles. Marie Samuelsson’s The Lion was surprisingly effervescent, like a skittish caricature of the true beast. A long-titled electronic work by Sune Mattias Emanuelsson, built around deconstructed medieval chant, seemed a little loose-limbed, unfocused in its intent. Ylva Fred’s Motor Music for piano quartet trod fertile, filigree ground and a final adrenalin rush that stopped just short of minimalist rock, against which Madelaine Isaksson’s Capsuled Time seemed powerfully ruminative and claustrophobic.
But the most interesting voice in this final programme was that of Alfred Jimenenz, whose With Voice for flute, cello and piano proved utterly compelling. Its deliberate constraint, expressive intensity and the sheer boldness of its techniques (rarely did the pianist actually use the piano keys!) was mesmerisingly original and profoundly impactful.
Ken Walton
Keep up to date with Nordic Music Days 2024 at www.nordicmusicdays.org