VoxCarnyx

Perth Concert Hall

ALL orchestras have education and outreach departments these days, but the Scottish Chamber Orchestra was a trail-blazer with admired initiatives from its earliest days. So it is more than fitting that its 50^th anniversary season  should include another ground-breaking project.

The orchestra’s current composer-in-residence Jay Capperauld has achieved something very special with the 45 minute piece he has written for young people. Not only are the tastes of his target audience of four to eight year-olds not fully-formed, but it is also impossible to predict what music they will have been exposed to at home or at nursery and primary school.

Capperauld’s solution is to cover many possibilities. The suite of music he has written for this collaboration with story-teller and illustrator Corrina Campbell includes a little of everything. It opens with a Broadway-like overture, and includes a fair amount of jazz-inflected material, but there are also moments of Scottish traditional fiddle and ceilidh reels, a journey through the countryside with an English pastoral feel, and a drum-kit-led big band excursion. There are many clap-along moments in the score, which suited the very young audience as much as the slapstick action on stage.

Those performances are the other remarkable element of The Great Grumpy Gaboon. Aside from an effective but never intrusive voice-over by director Chris Jarvis, there are no extra performers in this SCO project. Although the bulk of the orchestra are in concert black attire, seven players, alongside conductor Gordon Bragg, are named characters in the narrative, with extravagant head-gear, props and costumes, and a very mobile approach to playing their instruments.

The title role is played by first bassoon Cerys Ambrose-Evan and that rhyming with their instruments is carried through the others, excepting her nemesis, Screature, played by bassist Nikita Naumov. If such expansive performance seems in character for some of the players, regular concertgoers will see long-serving first trumpet Peter Franks and principal flute Andre Cebrian in a new light.

There are details in the narrative that probably don’t come across as they should just yet, and the message of the story (“be kind”, basically) probably escaped a fair percentage of the audience at the first performance, but it is impossible to fault the gusto with which the musicians went about their extra-musical work, with daft dancing, silly clowning and roaming into the auditorium all part of the show.

Without a shadow of a doubt The Great Grumpy Gaboon will get slicker, and the orchestra has clearly invested in it with an eye to many future performances. What is beyond argument is that Capperauld has given the SCO a score that makes the effort completely worthwhile.

Keith Bruce