VoxCarnyx

Govan Old Parish Church

Three years on, the Glasgow Barons Early Music Festival can consider itself well established. More than that, it has proved itself positively viable in Govan, the feisty Clydeside town that was once a titan of British shipbuilding, now a shadow of its former industrial might, but clearly alive to new cultural initiatives. Whatever festival director Paul MacAlindin and his team are doing, this annual event has struck a vibrant note, both with outsiders and the local community. Audiences for this year’s Festival (24-26 July) matched in scale the vast interior of the central venue, Govan’s historic Old Parish Church.

Innovation and imagination played its part, especially in Friday’s opening concert, which not only introduced us to the colourful 18th century exploits and music of one Charles Macklean (died 1745), but marked the debut appearance of newly-formed early music combo The Curious Collection. The two are connected by the ensemble’s founder, violinist and director Aaron McGregor, whose research into Macklean uncovered a lifestyle befitting a racy TV period drama, from rampant womanising and shadowy disappearances across his native Scotland, Ireland and England, to appearing as organist in the famous Dublin premiere of Handel’s Messiah.

McGregor, a lecturer at Aberdeen University, was joined by soprano Mhairi Lawson, harpsichordist Will Cole and cellist Allison McGilllivray in a programme lengthily entitled “From Scots Tunes to Handel’s Messiah: the Musical Lives of Charles Macklean” but succinct in the way it summarised Macklean’s chameleon style and historical context. 

The Handel connection contributed to the latter, mostly Messiah arias delivered with jewel-like intimacy by the reduced forces available, Lawson in light, precise, engaging form. Macklean’s Scottish credentials stood out in stark contrast. His own Variations on “The Black Joke”, on Purcell’s faux Scots theatre song “Twas Within a Furlong of Edinburgh Town”, on “The Birks of Invermay” (introduced by Scots contemporary James Oswald’s arrangement of the anonymous song) allowed McGregor to slip seamlessly into virtuosic Scots fiddle mode, Lawson applying the same dialectical switch in those she contributed to. 

Macklean’s own versatility was revealed in the more mainstream Baroque idiom of his Violin Sonata in A minor, its Italianate demeanour prefaced by a movement from the Cello Sonata in C by Lorenzo Bocchi (a known figure in Edinburgh at the time). The Italian influence also fed through Macklean’s Variations on Corelli’s Gavotta, played with joyous precision, and again in what McGregor hailed as possibly the world premiere of Va Mancator di Fe, a fiery dramatic aria reconstructed from a sketch recently discovered in London. 

Closing the programme with Handel’s Let the Bright Seraphim (from Samson) may have been something of a gamble – McGregor’s bijoux Baroque fiddle replacing the normal heraldic trumpet obligato – but in the spirit of things, and once the rescaling was attuned to, it seemed as mischievous and irreverent as the evening’s key focus. Macklean would probably have approved.

Would Bach have approved of the interpretations applied by RSNO principal cellist Pei-Jee Ng to his first three Cello Suites in Saturday’s midday recital? The talented Australian was certainly faced with a challenge from the church’s reverberant acoustics, the outcome of which was a frequent muddying of the instrument’s lower register, even leading at times to the addition of unwanted harmonic overtones. 

That said, Ng’s unflinching poise and confident delivery (all of it impressively from memory) made for many satisfying moments, mostly where the mood itself was light and airy, the textures crisp and alert, and most importantly where the rhythmic spirit of the dance-styled movements were adhered to. A pattern seemed to emerge, where the respective Allemandes, Courantes and Gigues bristled with self-generating dynamism, while the more rhetorical Preludes remained unsettlingly earthbound, the Minuets periodically haltering in momentum, the Sarabandes painfully slow.

It became clear that Ng’s intention was to exaggerate the expressive range of the music, perhaps in response to acoustical provocation, but in doing so he created wave upon wave of repetitive sea swells the threatened to incur the musical equivalent of seasickness. In another venue, and with less forced indulgence, the story may have been very different.

Ken Walton