Taking the long view
As the Scottish Chamber Orchestra celebrates its 50th birthday, long-serving viola player Steve King looks back – and forward – with Keith Bruce
It is one of the mysteries of music that orchestras – in Prague and Vienna, but also in Edinburgh and Glasgow – have an identifiable sound that survives changes of personnel over the decades. It is usually assumed that curatorship of that individuality is in the hands of the players that have been there longest while conductors, even those retained on contract, come and go.
As the SCO marks the golden anniversary of its first concerts with a 50th birthday programme, Steve King has just celebrated occupying the viola number four chair for 40 of those years. Not that he is one for looking back wistfully to earlier eras.
“I love the SCO now more than I’ve ever done,” he says. “It’s a brilliant orchestra. When we have extra players they always comment on how friendly it is and how passionate everyone is about making music. With our principal conductor at the moment, Maxim [Emelyanychev], it is a real joy.”
“He’s an amazing playing musician as well as a conductor, and he never stops. Some conductors are quite precious (mentioning no names) but Maxim is just fun. He rehearses in such a way that we really understand what he is looking for, although he is always searching and never content. And that’s the way it should be, I think.
“And of course, as he develops – because he’s still very young – it becomes more interesting. Come the concert he may do things differently but because we’re so with him, it works. It’s exciting and good for the music.
“He’s doing stuff that challenges what a chamber orchestra can do. He appreciates flexibility and openness to change. I’ve seen quite a few principal conductors and hundreds of conductors over my 40 years and he’s definitely the best.”
Now that’s clear, it is possible to persuade King to reminisce a little, and two conductors of earlier in the SCO’s history rate a special mention.
“The Finnish conductor Jukka Pekka Saraste became Principal Conductor not long after I joined, and he was great. He is exactly the same age as me and we got on very well. We did a lot of good touring and recording with him.
“And my idol for many years was Charles Mackerras. We made recordings of the Mozart operas with him and then did concert performances at the Edinburgh Festival. At the beginning of a two-and-a-half week recording project he would spend ten minutes enthusing about the piece and the original score he’d studied in Prague. He had a tough reputation but he trusted the musicians. I was so lucky to be part of all of that.”
King is from Hertfordshire and, along with his brother, who became a jazz trumpet player, first studied music on Saturday mornings at the Royal Academy in London as a teenager. When he left school he went to the Royal Northern College of Music and, although he was offered postgraduate studies and work with the Manchester Camerata, then elected to stretch his wings with a job in Reykjavik in the Iceland Symphony Orchestra.
Returning to the UK, he was a schoolteacher for a couple of years before applying and winning the job with the SCO. The chamber orchestra has always been a freelance band, however, and like many of his colleagues King has had other work alongside. He led the Quartz string quartet, which grew out of the SCO’s education work and also included Bernard Doherty, once co-leader of the BBC SSO, SCO violinist Lorna McLaren, who also clocked up 40 years before retiring in 2018, and the late Kevin McCrae, composer and SCO principal cello.
And for 24 and half years, King was Director of Music at Edinburgh’s Heriot Watt University – encouraging and developing music-making among students and staff at an institution that does not offer music as a course of study. He stood down from that post at the end of 2022 having overseen a response to the pandemic that kept an audience of two and half thousand people online engaged with one another through sharing their “musical moments”.
If that concluded his tenure at the university, he is as proud of the project with which it began, a contemporary music commissioning initiative that produced 60 pieces, from Scotland-based composers and through a competition for unpublished composers working in Scotland. The common inspiration for them all was the Inchcolm Antiphoner, a few pages of early Celtic plainchant from the abbey on the island in the Forth that King can see from his home in Dalgety Bay.
The compositions were workshopped at residential gatherings in Highland Scotland before being performed at Iona Abbey and St Giles Cathedral. That all seems to chime with the Englishman’s enthusiasm for his adopted home – as well as his Fife home, King has a long lease on a bolt-hole on Loch Shiel.
“The cottage is half way down the loch, on the water’s edge, only accessible by boat and completely off-grid. We go there for about 12 weeks of the year: it is a good place to chill, cook and write music. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea but I like the challenge of living there, and the wildlife is amazing.”
Now 67, his quartet and university post may be in the past, but King still conducts the Dunblane Chamber Orchestra, which convenes twice a year for concerts, and he has no plans to leave the SCO.
“I’m loving the SCO too much to think about retiring. If I felt that my playing started to drop a bit, I would drop out, but we’ve had members play well into their 70s. There are only four of us in the violas, so you can’t ride along, you have to be on the ball all the time.”
It is not just the prospect of more concerts with Emelyanychev that keeps him enthused.
“Our current Associate Composer, Jay Capperauld, is one of the best we’ve ever had in that post. He stands out as being exciting, and he communicates well, and it’s good to see him grow. And violinist Pekka Kuusisto is one of those guys who sees music from a different angle. We see him every year and it is something everyone looks forward to.
“I’ve seen a huge amount of change in the orchestra but some of the young players coming in these days are just stunning. We are currently looking for a number two viola and from the five or six we’ve had on trial it is going to be really difficult to choose.”
The SCO’s 50th birthday concerts are at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh on Thursday and Glasgow’s City Halls on Friday. Maxim Emelyanychev conducts Elena Langer’s suite from her opera Figaro Gets a Divorce and Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony and plays Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos alongside Dmitry Ablogin.
Picture by Christopher Bowen