VoxCarnyx

Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

In his early days, James MacMillan looked up to Steve Martland, a slightly older composer whose hard-edged style (and thorny politics) appealed to the young MacMillan seeking to hone his own identifiable voice in the 1980s. Fast forward forty years and the presence of a saucy new MacMillan commission within a programme designed around Martland’s belligerent Street Songs was – for those of us old enough to remember – a pertinent reminder of that influential link.

Of course, Martland is no longer with us – he died 12 years ago at the too-early age of 58 – so these performances by percussionist Colin Currie (on marimba) and The King’s Singers, signalling the start of the Edinburgh International Festival’s Queen’s Hall series, were strikingly nostalgic. 

The four songs – Poor Roger, Green Gravel, Jenny Jones and Oranges and Lemons – may not be Martland’s most consistently riveting pieces, but there’s no mistaking the combative, mischievous minimalism underpinning them that was once the feisty hallmark of the “bad boy” composer and his eponymous hi-energy band, of which Currie himself was a member.

Add to that The King’s Singers’ championing of the Street Songs (originally performed and recorded late last century with Evelyn Glennie) and Currie’s own five-year association with the legendary vocal group, and the connective potential of Saturday’s line-up was plain to see.

Poor Roger, with its multi-layered “Hippety Hops”, wasted no time in charging the atmosphere, the marimba’s muted insistence a kinetic dynamo to the Singers’ nimble acrobatics. Before the hypnotic freneticism of Green Gravel, Stanley Glasser’s Zulu-inspired Lala Mntwana offered a moment of sweetness and repose. The ensuing step back in time – to the haunting 17th century motet, Death Hath Deprived Me, of Thomas Weelkes – served its purpose in setting the mood and context for Roderick Williams’ contemporary response to that very composer, his own Death, Be Not Proud, rearranged for this programme for singers and marimba. 

This performance captured well the tempered anguish, neatly calibrated dissonance and expressive gestures of Williams’ poignant homage. Its final moments, like a ghostly reference to the original Weelkes, were strikingly reminiscent – and just as effective – as the plaintive homecoming ending achieved by Britten in his magical Lacrymae. 

The soft pop ballad Alive, by Brighton-born composer Francesca Amewudah-Rivers, offered a momentary glimpse of the old Saturday Night TV King’s Singers’ sound, itself a perfect way in to MacMillan’s A Bunch o’ Craws, a hilarious and virtuosic skit on the children’s ditty “Three Craws Sat Upon a Wa’”. With seven “craws” now in on the action (including a spoof vocal contribution from Currie) the focus was on quick fire entertainment, and a Glaswegian patois –  including the well-worn Taggart cliché “There’s been a murder!” – from the singers that would easily have passed muster in Sauchiehall Street on a Saturday night. When MacMillan lets his hair down like this he proves himself an absolute master of his craft.

The second half completed the Martland sequence – an a cappella Jenny Jones that occasional sagged intonation-wise, and the versatile play-acting of Oranges and Lemons. It also brought us the sultry, atmospheric South African story-telling of Peter Louis van Dijk’s Horizons, sung, clapped and finger-clicked to haunting effect.

Missy Mazzoli’s Year of Our Burning, written in 2021 in response to the pandemic offered another “world premiere arrangement”, which lived more for its precious moments than as a convincing whole. So, too, Bryce Dessner’s Tromp Miniature for solo marimba had more an air of background music than anything more compelling. 

Compelling is exactly what’s needed in any encore, which Joe Duddell’s arrangement of Everything Everything’s I Want A Love Like This delivered to an audience hot for more. Martland, one sensed, would no doubt have approved.

Ken Walton

(Photo: Jess Shurte Photography)