VoxCarnyx

City Halls, Glasgow

Alongside world class musicianship and a breadth of programming that leaves few ears unengaged, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s 50th anniversary season has been distinguished by very thoughtful and original programming. This concert, built around the world premiere of a new choral work by Sir James MacMillan, was a stunning example of that.

MacMillan’s Composed in August – not a diary note but the real title of the Robert Burns lyric known mostly by its first line Now Westlin Winds – is an SCO commission with partner organisations in Estonia and Sweden. Once they have had their premieres, it is likely to become a very popular piece with choirs, challenging in parts but tune-filled, and unusual in being a secular work from MacMillan for these forces.

The singers have to employ a range of techniques and the excellent SCO Chorus members were as assured in their diction of the rhythmically overlapping phrases as in the wordless music at the gentle finish. The instrumental music is for the SCO’s standard set-up, with the odd extra string player, and echoes the pastoral music of the Baroque era in the strings, horns and woodwind birdsong while still bearing the clear signature of the composer. With a wealth of different music over the five stanzas, it is an exquisite piece.

The work of two Ayrshire lads was followed by a Mancunian’s impression of Orcadian celebration, with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s perennially popular An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise. There are few conductors who so obviously enjoy their work as Maxim Emelyanychev, but the young Russian was in ecstatic form here, enjoying all the theatre of the piece with foot-stomping enthusiasm. That included a tray of drams being brought on for himself and leader Stephanie Gonley as the work slides into inebriation, greeted with a hilarious massed “slanj” of hipflasks from the chorus, still seated in the choir stalls.

If the larks set up the arrival of piper Robert Jordan, in full regalia, from the back of hall to perfection, there was also a characteristic precision in every detail of their performance – especially the “tuning up” moment, which Emelyanychev surely recognised as being a gag partly at his own expense.

The programme began with a French composer’s way with Scots romanticism, Berlioz’s Rob Roy overture, which takes Burns’s tune Scots Wha Hae and finds a lot of different things to do with it. With some period instrumentation, it is a curious and fascinating response to Sir Walter Scott’s novel, full of colour and a reminder, perhaps, that the melody makes a strong claim to National Anthem status.

The overture teed-up a superb performance of the same composer’s La mort de Cleopatre with mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill on her best form. Rather than a soloist at the front of the stage she was embedded in the music, but at the same time gave an expressive reading that was straight off the opera stage. The low string pulse that sets up her welcoming of death sounded startlingly contemporary, and emblematic of how this orchestra and its associates span the centuries.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Karen Cargill by Nadine Boyd