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Glasgow Cathedral

While the RSNO is mining a rich seam of new work with soundtracks for films and games at its state-of-the-art studio at the other end of Cathedral Street, the annual festival at Glasgow Cathedral itself has its own crucial strand of movie-related programming.

This year, in a sequence of events that were a highlight of the city’s 850^th birthday celebrations, there were two screenings of a remarkable restoration of Fritz Lang’s astonishing 1927 film Metropolis, with a new soundtrack composed by Chamber Music Scotland’s associate composer Linda Buckley and her sister Irene.

Given that Lang’s prescient science fiction includes an early exploration of cloning in the dual roles for Brigitte Helm as the saintly Maria and her robotic “Man-Machine” doppelganger, the curtain call for the Cathedral performance was perfect, with the sibling composers flanked by Irish percussionists Patrick Lynch and Patrick Nolan.

The two Patricks had added the live element to the recorded electro-acoustic score. It was a perfect combination, allowing the music to incorporate the sequenced synthesiser that modern sensibilities associate with the film’s influence as well as having the visceral impact of percussive mechanical noise. The live performance was often very subtle too, with bowed mallet instruments, miked-up scribbling on notepads, and brushes on bowls.

As the Metropolis storyline includes an assignation in a cathedral, and catacombs that might be the crypt or the nearby Necropolis, this century-old piece of cinema history was almost site-specific.

Very much more recent is Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, and Hans Zimmer’s score for that 2014 film also received a bespoke performance at the festival, making optimum use of the colours available from the cathedral’s Father Willis organ.

Organist Roger Sayer was Director of Music at Temple Church in the City of London when Zimmer and Nolan came to him to transform a sampled electronic score into a performance where pipe organ is partnered by strings and voices.

In conversation with Glasgow Cathedral’s organist and Director of Music, Andrew Forbes, Sayer’s story of that process set the stage for his own reduction of the soundtrack to a half-hour suite.

Rather than images from the film, the music was paired with projections and lighting by TrenchOne Industries which used the architecture of the building as a screen for the sort of images Interstellar’s astronauts might have seen as they traversed the solar system.

In a festival full of first performances, Roxanna Panufnik’s Cum Jubilo Organ Mass stood out as work that the event had nurtured to completion. As Cork International Film Festival had been a crucial partner in bringing the Metropolis project to Glasgow, so the Northern Ireland Organ Competition helped fulfil the GCF goal of hosting Panufnik’s complete Organ Mass.

It’s a mighty work, for which its performer, Katelyn Emerson, needed an extra pair of hands changing stops from her page-turner. With the Kyrie setting out the East/West musical dialogue that is pivotal to the work’s prayer for peace, Emerson produced her best playing for the demanding Gloria with its staccato phrases and wide tonal variations, in what is a very complex work.

The new Sanctus began much more gently, but built incrementally to its climax, while the Agnus Dei was more reflective and cautiously optimistic.

In the Lower Church on Saturday evening, the duo of Ollie Hawker and Zoe Markle presented new music for their unique combination of instruments. Markle is a singing bassist, whose solo pieces were Ben Portzen’s You, the rain and David Fennessey’s atmospheric The Room is the Resonator, originally composed for cello with the composer’s own recording of harmonium and a highlight of Ensemble Ecoute’s concerts in Scotland last autumn.

Hawker is a virtuoso on singing saw, which he combined with electronics to depict the M8 in central Glasgow, and then in duet with Markle in The loveliest thing in the world from a quiet train home. The highlight of their recital, however, was the improvisation that followed that piece, which resolved to the bassist rocking between two chords and Hawker’s saw finding a perfectly-pitched repeated three-note figure in a combination that any composer would have been delighted with.

Keith Bruce

Pictures: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Roger Sayer by Campbell Parker