VoxCarnyx

SWG3, Glasgow

The marketing team at the BBC Scottish will doubtless interrogate the result of this away fixture in a Glasgow Finnieston club venue looking for first-time ticket-buyers, but superficially it was difficult to see the advantages over the orchestra’s home at the City Halls and Old Fruitmarket.

In under ten days, after all, Ilan Volkov will demonstrate how that complex can be filled with new music – and its own audience – for the weekend of his annual Tectonics extravaganza. Perhaps some of those attracted to SWG3 will be tempted to that event’s more radical experimentation – and perhaps that will be a journey easier to make than one to the orchestra’s mainstream classical season.

It was also a happy coincidence that Ayanna Witter-Johnson’s concert with the SSO and pianist Fergus McCreadie occurred on the same day that Glasgow International Jazz Festival unveiled its 40^th anniversary programme.

Witter-Johnson is an engaging personality, as she demonstrated at The Hub during the 2023 Edinburgh International Festival, and some of the ingredients of that performance were repeated here in what was something of a composer portrait, fronted by the woman herself.

The three movements of the Ocean Floor Suite were more thoughtfully presented this time around, prefaced by an improvisation from McCreadie and carefully narrated by the composer, whose voice and cello were otherwise accompanied by percussionists. It is a work rooted in personal experience, and so was the more surprising inclusion of songs by Glasgow-born rock and jazz bass-player and vocalist Jack Bruce earlier in the programme.

Like her, his student study was cello (at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama) and he had encouraged his daughter’s friend in her earlier years. Her reading of his Rope Ladder to the Moon, from the Songs for a Tailor album, first released more than 15 years before she was born, revealed a deep understanding of a revered classic, and it was equally fascinating to hear McCreadie bring his specific style to FM, which Bruce wrote and recorded in the early 1990s.

The evening built from a partnership with a string quartet of SSO desk principals through those selections to more substantial orchestrations of songs from Witter-Johnson’s Road Runner album, and the first half ended in a lovely Katie Chatburn arrangement of the jazz standard, Misty.

After the interval, the Ocean Floor Suite was followed by the opening movement from Witter-Johnson’s Windrush Reflections, entitled Mango Dreams and dedicated to her grandparents, with harp and bass clarinet joining the quartet, before the programme’s sole symphonic orchestral work, FAIYA!, an LSO commission that showed off her own orchestrating ability. Conductor Enyi Okpara, currently assistant conductor at the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, directed all the ensemble pieces, and he seemed less comfortable with that work, where assured opening and closing sections bracketed some rhythmic uncertainty in the middle that only the players’ professionalism kept on track.

A Chatburn arrangement of another Road Runner track, Rise Up, closed the programme, save for an encore of Witter-Johnson’s regular party-piece solo version of Sting’s Roxanne. It’s a crowd pleaser, but one this musician has long out-grown.

Keith Bruce

Concert was recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3

Picture of Fergus McCreadie and Ayanna Witter-Johnson, credit BBC