Nordic Music Days: Scottish Ensemble
Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow
There were certainly a lot of well known faces from the Scottish music scene in the audience at the opening evening concert of Nordic Music Days 2024 – an event whose history stretches back into the 19th century happening in Scotland for the first time. But that did not entirely account for the size of the audience, which caught the organisers on the hop a little. It is easy to underestimate Glasgow’s enthusiasm for new music.
The limited cabaret style seating in front of the stage was filled long before curtain-up, so much of the audience had to be content to stand or sit on the raw floor of the Old Fruitmarket for what proved to be a highly diverting hour and a half’s music, with a string quintet from Jonathan Morton’s Scottish Ensemble as the house band.
They were joined by flautists Hanna Kinnunen and Maiken Mathisen Schau, bassoonist Nina Ashton and Amy Turner’s oboe for the opening work, under the baton of RSNO assistant conductor Derrick Morgan, in the only work requiring a conductor all evening.
Finnish composer Jukka Tiensuu’s Innuo set the bar high for the weekend’s music, with witty syncopated music for the strings, and scoring for the pairs of winds that gave them equally distinctive roles. It was great fun, a perfect opener, and a tough act to follow.
That task fell to Royal Conservatoire of Scotland masters student, and Glasgow University graduate, Seyoung Oh with her evocative impression of the disused Botanic Gardens rail station in the city. Amplification was important to all the music in the evening’s programme but nowhere more so than in her piece which mixed the live performance of the concentrated and intense string writing with ambient recordings and spoken word discussing Glasgow’s “period of transition”.
The balance between the elements was not perfect, but this was a first performance that demanded further outings, the Seoul-born composer bringing a forensic outside eye to the culture of the city.
A trio of Morton, Jane Atkins on viola and cellist Alison Lawrance took care of the following two works, Icelander Anna Thorvalsdottir’s Reflections and David Fennessy’s An Open Field (Come Closer, Come Closer), both demonstrating a keen sense of the place of their origin. Amplification was again crucial to the glacial pace of the former, while the Fennessy had more in the way of textural variation, its folk influences paving the way for the second premiere of the night that followed.
The composition of Qullaq – at half an hour, by far the longest work in the concert – teamed Oban fiddler Aidan O’Rourke with three singing and acting performers who are very well known in their native Greenland.
Joining O’Rourke and the Scottish Ensemble string quintet (completed by violinist Tristan Gurney and bassist Diane Clark) were Mike Fencer Thomsen, who has been described as Greenland’s Jim Morrison from his background in rock and pop, and Nive Nielsen, who leads her own group The Deer Children and has taken her songs to South by South West in Austin Texas. Hans-Henrik Suersaq Paulsen is directly descended from one the country’s most famous explorers, appeared in Borgen on television and his multi-disciplinary artistic practice extended to making the costumes for O’Rourke and the trio.
As that suggests, Qullaq was as much theatre as music. O’Rourke’s solo fiddle framed a variety of musical styles and his writing for the strings serving as an underscore to the quality vocal contributions from the Greenlanders, as well as some percussion and Nielsen’s electric rhythm guitar. Their traditional music featured as strongly as that of the Scotsman, with the text ranging from monosyllables to aphorism and one arresting section perhaps the Inuit equivalent of a field holler.
The end result was often moving, occasionally funny, and certainly made the case for all the ingredients deserving their place, moving easily between the elements in what sounded to be an overall palindromic structure.
It may have taken 130-odd years for Nordic Music Days to reach Scotland, but this collaboration surely discovered fertile ground for continued dialogue.
Keith Bruce