VoxCarnyx

Perth Theatre

Following fairly swiftly on the recent tour of Arthur Keegan’s new companion piece to Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, together with its inspiration (review: Hebrides: Music for Time | VoxCarnyx), here was another bold programme from cellist Will Conway’s Hebrides Ensemble, built around a world premiere.

The environmental concern of that piece, Shifting Baselines, by Dave Maric, was the ostensible linking agent, but the work’s form, using a selection of recorded voices in its three movements, and the background of the composer, who played piano in the Steve Martland band, were certainly other factors.

Martland’s early solo piano piece, Kgakala (Sunrise), opened the programme, James Willshire’s performance of the picturesque score, full of technical flourishes with hints of stride left hand, suggesting some of the theatricality that would follow. The composer’s much later Reveille, for string quartet, bass, piano and tuned percussion, was just as effective at the close, as a call to arms in response to all the evidence of calamity we’d heard.

The central section of Maric’s piece uses a vox pop of people in Alyth and Perth expressing ecological concerns, while the recordings on either side were a litany of animals exterminated on a Scottish estate and a more recent official report on species threatened with extinction. The composer’s musical response – mostly written for the quartet with piano chords and snare drum rim-shots – was compelling, with very democratic sharing of the lead voice amongst the string instruments.

Three women composers added works to the programme for smaller ensembles, two of them originally heard at Aberdeenshire’s Sound festival. Georgina MacDonell Finlayson’s Silent Spring, presumably referencing Rachel Carson’s famous book, is for solo flute with tape of birdsong and spoken word, and the sound design was brilliantly mixed in this space, while flautist Cormac Henry demonstrated his extended embouchure techniques.

Aileen Sweeney’s The Wooden Web, inspired by more recent writing about the communication networks of trees, was a delight. The most traditional music-influenced work of the evening, its instruments are viola, cello and flute, with the spotlight again very equally shared, but it ended with voices when Henry’s singing was joined by the vocals of Catherine Marwood and Conway in the piece’s gentle conclusion.

Eleanor Alberga’s violin and piano sonata, The Wild Blue Yonder, dates from 1995. Alberga was born in Kingston, Jamaica but violinist David Alberman revelled in music that seemed spun from the East European gypsy dance vocabulary that colours so much classical music, becoming increasingly propulsive and vigorous before also ending in a gentler closing movement.

The outlier in the programme was George Crumb’s 1971 Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale), the theatrical piece that ended the first half and included Henry’s first vocalising. He, Willshire and Conway all donned masks (over their spectacles) as the score requires, and the lights were dimmed. The pianist spent as much time inside the instrument as on the keyboard, damping strings and introducing objects, Henry again needed his extended techniques as well as whistling, and he and Conway added some delicate percussion. It was a highly eventful eight movements, the whale song delineating periods of geological time, often expressed in very literal tick-tock fashion.

This thoughtful programme could perhaps have done with a little more detailed explanation than Conway’s brief spoken introduction and the composer’s note from Maric for his work alone, and it is not unkind to say that the stage management was fastidious rather than slick, but it was musically packed with interest. It is repeated at Kings Place in London tomorrow evening.

Keith Bruce