VoxCarnyx

City Halls, Glasgow

Had this sweeping, eloquent SCO programme featured only Jay Capperauld’s concise new oratorio The Language of Eden, it would still have been an altogether fulfilling experience. The Ayrshire composer’s tenure as the SCO’s associate composer has been one of the most visibly creative phenomenon in Scottish classical music of late. Each collaborative project, each new work, has exhibited a significant step forward for Capperauld, whose voice and facility are now representative of a mature and fertile creativity. His premieres are now highly-anticipated, not-to-be-missed occasions.

Of course, coming in at little over half-an-hour, there was considerably more to a concert in which The Language of Eden functioned as its magnificent finale. As the orchestra’s principal guest conductor Andrew Manze explained in his introductory spiel, the theme underlying the entire evening related not just to music’s relationship with language, but its subliminal function as a language is itself. 

We had Shakespeare – words from The Merchant of Venice – illuminated by Vaughan Williams in his moonlit Serenade to Music, its melting harmonies and liquid melodies gorgeously woven under Manze’s baton-less gesturing. The SCO and its mid-scale Chorus responded with sumptuous understatement which paradoxically heightened the music’s intoxicating spell.

That sense of relaxation rolled over into Elgar’s Serenade for Strings. Manze – himself a violinist – drew the loveliest of timbres and detailed tracery from the SCO strings: a wispy nonchalance in the opening Allegro; melodious charm in the Larghetto; and a luxuriant, ultimately glowing reserve in the final Allegretto. 

Equally autumnal was George Butterworth’s prophetic pre-First World War settings of six poems from E A Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, presented here in a tastefully generous orchestration by baritone Roderick Williams, who also took the solo role. In songs softly lamenting the futility of young lives lost before their time – the composer himself, at 30, was a casualty of the later 1914-18 French battlefields – Butterworth’s music draws equally on folkish naivety and sophisticated imagery.

Williams’ vocal delivery was smooth, lightly-nuanced and disturbingly calm, especially powerful in its emotional restraint, whether in the quiet pastoral reflection of Loveliest of Trees, the haunting folksong of The Lads in their Hundreds, or the spectral poignance of Is My Team Ploughing?. 

In the second half, Capperauld’s premiere was prefaced by an enticingly elemental performance of Haydn’s Representation of Chaos from his oratorio, The Creation. This made complete sense, given that The Language of Eden, composed to words by Uist-born poet Niall Campbell, is an imagined portrayal, amid the biblical creation story, of the birth of language. 

Adam, sung by Williams, is being “sculpted” by the collective “inhabitants” of Eden, who gift him the Four Elements as engines of the environment around him, and who motivate his ability to communicate through language, not least the innate power of music. 

The propulsive certainty underpinning Capperauld’s score was absolutely mind-blowing in this performance. Where a powerful aura of mystery prevailed, Manze drew also on a seething earthiness within – succinct and questioning in the opening scene-setter; atmospherically vivid and wildly animated in the dramatic depictions of Air, Earth, Fire and Water; quasi-religious as Adam became aware of the music within him; chillingly ritualistic in a fearful, ultimately thunderous portend to humanity’s approaching chaos (hideously pertinent in relation to current world affairs); and a soothing farewell steeped in idiomatic Scots flavouring.

The SCO Chorus were a vibrant presence, powerfully-voiced and physically comfortable with the marching-on-the-spot and breast-beating required of them. Williams, too, embraced his role with in-depth conviction. The SCO played its part with immaculate distinction. It was a veritable tour de force, Capperauld’s music exhilarating, often in the glittering manner of John Adams, hugely versatile in character, but most impressively contained within a singularity of purpose that had this audience on the edge of their seats.

Ken Walton