VoxCarnyx

St Michael’s Parish Church, Linlithgow

It’s one thing to recognise the sterling work done by the enthusiastic musicians of Linlithgow String Orchestra in maintaining, as their 10th anniversary season attests, a clearly enjoyable interest in amateur music making. It’s quite another to acknowledge their bold achievement in helping develop the creation, and ultimately the premiere, of a brand new work.

The latter reached its impressive destination on Sunday evening within the vast ecclesiastical elegance of the West Lothian town’s St Michaels’ Parish Church. Within a wider programme – everything from Orlando Gibbons to Dvorak to the old radio classic Puffin’ Billy – we witnessed the premiere performance of Deborah Shaw’s Engine Shed, a five-moment work written over the past year in direct practical collaboration with the orchestra and its musical director Bill Jones. 

As the title hints, a railway theme provided the overriding stimulus, not altogether unconnected to the generous LNER sponsorship, channeled through amateur performance network Making Music’s Adopt-a-Music-Creator initiative, that made the project possible. Linlithgow, as those who regularly pass through it on the train may not be surprised to learn, owes much of its industrial-age heritage to the railway.

This was reinforced abundantly in a performance driven largely by literal references. From the barely audible steely hiss of the opening bars (reawakening memories of Richard Rodney Bennett’s steamy soundtrack for Murder on the Orient Express) and initially passive atmospherics, grinding mechanical ostinati emerged as if to signal a benevolent threat. A Scots reel made its inevitable appearance in the ensuing tribute to the Flying Scotsman, Shaw herself (along with a young Alicia Greig on train whistle) enacting authentic railway hand signals from the locomotive’s heyday as a visual add-on.

Universal issues found voice in a movement referencing the peaks and troughs of the industry, musically evoked through a tougher sentimentality, while the brief blues-inspired Gandy Men looked to the toil of the so-called Gandy Dancers, the African Americans who sang to mitigate the hardships they encountered while maintaining the US railroads. 

Shaw left the most intriguing moment to the finale, joining the orchestra on harp and voice at the rear to intone a simple song, “Coal Dust on Powdered Lips”, as an anthem to women’s traditionally supportive, now increasingly active, role in the industry. A certain euphoric quality emerged here, a kind of mystical descant – veering along Kate Bush lines – to an otherwise earthbound sound world. Even the orchestral players found their voices, providing additional vocal backing that resonated magically and quietly in the hazy acoustics. 

There was clearly a challenge to be met in this music, Shaw grappling with the widely-varied technical expertise of the ensemble in the course of creating something exciting, imaginative and convincing. As such, the musical components were necessarily elemental, sometimes naive as a consequence, but clearly embraced by the players as a project to call their own, and in which to inject a palpable determination and pride.

Engine Shed was just part of a sequence of pieces performed with trains in mind: loosely so with Dvorak’s playful Humoresque, justified by the composer’s known obsession with railway timetables; more obviously in Flanders and Swann’s The Slow Train – a wistful lament, sung affectionately by Jones himself, to stations lost as a result of the 1960s’ Beeching cuts – and in Edward Whilte’s mirthful Puffin’ Billy.  

The concert ended with Carl Davis’ Pride and Prejudice Suite from his soundtrack to the 1990s BBC series, LSO violinist Glyn Eggar transferring to a starring role on solo piano. I’d like to say I took the train home, but late-night connections aren’t quite what they used to be.

Ken Walton