VoxCarnyx

The RSNO opens its new season next week and Keith Bruce finds the musicians’ schedule is fuller than it has ever been.

When the RSNO moved from the Henry Wood Hall to its bespoke new home next to Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Killermont Street, the most extravagant of the new facilities was the accommodation afforded the principal timpanist, then Martin Gibson. The capacious room for preparing new drum skins and its adjacent storage was swiftly dubbed “The Gibson Suite” by the violinists who shared less backstage space, ironically echoing the name of Scottish Opera’s corporate entertaining salon in the nearby Theatre Royal.

It couldn’t last, as the current holder of the timpani chair, Paul Philbert, doubtless recognises. The Gibson Suite is no more – and the percussion store is now unrecognisable as the Iain and Pamela Sinclair Control Room, a state-of-the-art recording and mixing facility that is the technical hub of the orchestra’s successful, bold and expanding venture into film and digital arts.

Named for the legacy left to the RSNO which part-funded it, the room is home to a 96-channel desk, a full wall of monitor screens offering images of the orchestra’s performance rehearsal and space (the so-called “New Auditorium”) and the film being sound-tracked, and multiple monitor speakers that relay the score being created in surround-sound. The room is “double-height”, taking up two floors of the backstage building, meaning the control room is a very rare beast indeed, certainly in Europe.

That is crucial for the work the RSNO is now doing for film, television and video games, almost all of it coming to the UK from the USA (taking advantage of tax-breaks), and increasing the earnings of RSNO staff players, guests from other orchestras and the pool of freelancers the Scottish music scene sustains and on whom it depends.

Making all this happen is a new company, Scottish Digital Arts, which describes itself as a contractor for the RSNO, and operates entirely in the commercial field, beyond the vagaries and uncertainties of arts funding. Long-standing RSNO orchestra manager Ewen McKay and Paul Talkington, whom chief executive Alistair Mackie knew as a well-connected liaison man in the film music field from his trumpet-playing days in London, are directors of the new company, and it is bringing a continuous flow of work to Scotland’s Studio, as the RSNO is justifiably proud to call the installation.

Last week I was invited to witness an afternoon session at the studio, sitting at the back of the control room and then donning headphones behind the musicians under conductor Allan Wilson, another ex-trumpeter, who has forty years’ experience on the podium for films and games.

A brief September heatwave was happening outside, but the air-conditioning issue would have been exercising Alistair Mackie anyway. Servicing the state-of-the-art technology that has been installed in the new control room with cool air is a Heath Robinson set-up that was fitted in days at a cost of around £10,000. Mackie ordered the quick fix to protect the new equipment when it became clear that the RSNO’s landlord, the City Council’s arms-length culture and sport body Glasgow Life, was unable to urgently upgrade the existing ventilation of the internal room and was looking at an eye-watering contractor’s bill for the work ten times that figure.

It is hard not to see that as sadly typical. While the control room bears the name of an RSNO benefactor, the space where the music is made – acoustically far superior to the concert hall next door – is still identified as the “new” auditorium while Glasgow Life waits for a sponsor’s name to grace it, seeking such support with no conspicuous application.

By contrast, Scottish Digital Arts must surely be in the running for some sort of business start-up success award. Although the actors’ strike in Hollywood created a hiatus in film production, the list of work that has passed through Scotland’s Studio is already highly impressive. That includes music for the Ubisoft games Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Star Wars: Outlaws and film music for MGM, Lionsgate, Sony, Paramount, Apple and Netflix. Kevin Costner, Denzel Washington and Jennifer Lopez, and composers Terence Blanchard and Lorne Balfe are names gracing recent films with RSNO soundtracks.

Sometimes the filmmakers send over a team to work in Glasgow – with all the economic benefits that brings to the city – but as often the composer, director and producers join the process remotely, watching and hearing the music take form in exactly the same way as the engineers in the control room.

That was the case for the recording I witnessed, of music by Tim Williams of a new version of the Nativity story called Mary, with Israeli actress Noa Cohen in the title role and Anthony Hopkins as Herod. Filming in Morocco finished at the start of April, and the completion of the soundtrack is one of the last elements of post-production of a project expected to go out on a well-known streaming service before Christmas.

Even with all the latest digital technology, recording music is a painstaking, meticulous process, but the professionalism of the Scottish musicians means that it can promise around seven minutes of orchestral score from a three-hour session, which is a rate of production as good as anywhere in the world. Bar by bar, the RSNO strings – supplemented by familiar faces from the SCO and Scottish Ensemble – laid down the score, with Williams giving instruction to the conductor and the engineers from California.

It was, by happy coincidence, the central event of the birth of Jesus in the stable acquiring its music as I watched. The composer’s requests were very specific, tweaking the dynamics of expression in the printed score he had delivered, and adding some bass notes where he felt he hadn’t quite achieved the effect he’d hoped.

Annotating the sheet-music in front of them as they go, the players responded with speed and precision. Williams was clearly delighted with the results: “You can’t beat that performance,” he enthused.

It is a multilayered exercise, with low strings and first violins often occupying separate tracks, and solos added on top. The RSNO’s principal cello Pei-Jee Ng had a few bars of solo overdub that amounted to half a minute of music, for which he offered subtle variations in expression before the composer and he were satisfied. In fact it was the cellist himself who insisted on a fifth take, the result earning praise from across the Pond as well as the stomping approval of his colleagues.

Escorted by studio manager Hedd Morfett-Jones into the back of the studio floor, one-ear headphones allowed me to hear the process from the musicians’ perspective. This is a very different job from playing a concert, the left ear having the time-keeping click-track, what is being recorded, plus some elements of the other sounds on the film (but not the dialogue), while the right is open to the sound in the room, of your own instrument and the instructions from the conductor.

With ten minutes of the session to go, Williams was anxious to get a couple of “passes” in the can, but there was no let-up in his specific wishes, asking the players to “lean in” to the accents in one passage, keep another section “warm and light” and another “as magical and wondrous as possible.”

This is musical multi-tasking at a high level, but it is well worth the players honing these skills. The work they are doing for films and games is beyond their RSNO contracts of 24 hours a week and a six-hour day. Mackie says there was no point in trying to renegotiate the musicians’ terms to eke out a few extra hours, such was the ambition for Scotland’s Studio and Scottish Digital Arts. So although this growing element of the RSNO’s work is bringing money to the orchestra via its new commercial offshoot, the lion’s share of it is going directly to the players.

Of course that has concomitant benefits for the orchestra, the audience and the cultural life of the nation. From being among the lowest paid of UK orchestral musicians, a back desk RSNO string player prepared to put in the extra hours on soundtrack work can be instead among the best remunerated. The orchestra can offer a very enticing package to new recruits, the quality of the ensemble is maintained and enhanced, and concertgoers hear the music they love and buy tickets for every week played as well as anywhere in the world.

A virtuous circle ensures that Scotland’s national orchestra has a global reputation that keeps Hollywood and Silicon Glen knocking on the door. From the viewpoint of a classical music aficionado in Scotland, the RSNO’s investment in tapping into that market is surely a very sound bet in the vexed, adversarial and sometimes plain toxic climate of arts funding in the 21^st century.

The RSNO season opens with Mahler’s Second Symphony under the baton of Music Director Thomas Sondergard on Friday October 4 at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall and Saturday October 5 in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.