EIF: Colin Currie Group / Gesualdo Six

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Usher Hall/Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

The BBC Proms marks the 90th birthday of American composer Steve Reich tomorrow with a late night concert that teams Owain Park’s superb vocal ensemble Gesualdo Six with the Colin Currie Group. As with the Berlin Philharmonic, whose two programmes in the Royal Albert Hall this week were earlier played at the Festival’s closing weekend, EIF can claim to have heard them first.

In the cases of Currie’s Group and Park’s choir, however, the Edinburgh performances were even more notable, with first and early performances of brand new works.

Colin Currie’s way with the works of Steve Reich have the enthusiastic approval of the composer himself, and the Usher Hall programme presented half a dozen of them in what was an important contribution to the Festival’s USA250 “All Rise” theme as well as to Reich’s birthday celebrations.

The composer’s music was being played in Lucerne the same evening, but it was Edinburgh that had the new work, a world premiere of In All Your Ways, for string quartet, pairs of pianos, flutes and clarinets and four percussionists.

It completed a programme that saw Currie mostly in the conductor’s role, although it began with Clapping Music (from distant 1972) performed by himself and Owen Gunnell, and as fine an opener as it makes an encore.

It was followed by 2020’s Two Pianos, the players being Philip Moore, perhaps best known for his two-piano partnership with Simon Crawford-Phillips, and Siwan Rhys, half of the GBSR duo with percussionist George Barton, who made a memorable contribution to this year’s Tectonics weekend in Glasgow City Hall.

Although they were necessarily at the back of the platform and almost invisible to many of the audience, the pulse they established and querulous ending of the short work set things up for the ensemble music that followed.

Radio Rewrite added Pete Wilson’s electric bass to the string quartet, single winds, piano and percussion line-up, for the most pulsating score of the programme. It becomes much sparer and slower in the two movements that draw on the early Radiohead song Everything in its Right Place, the other three referencing the same group’s later Jigsaw Falling into Place.

That source material undoubtedly brought Reich a new audience, and may well have contributed to the good attendance at the Usher Hall, but familiarity with Radiohead’s music is far from necessary to enjoyment of what is one of the composer’s most accessible pieces of music.

The two large works on either side of the interval were also Reich classics, and these performances were masterly. The mirrored set-up of Double Sextet (2007), with the two groups of piano, tuned percussion, flute, clarinet, cello and violin (the leaders being Jonathan Morton and Clio Gould) was a visual as well as aural pleasure – enhanced, perhaps coincidentally, by the precise gender-balance in this group of musicians.

The dialogue between strings and winds in the work was meticulously directed and beautifully balanced by Currie, and the two pianists put in an extraordinary shift over its 20 minutes or so.

For Quartet (2013), after the interval, they were joined by Gunnell and Currie, the latter picking up mallets for the only time of the evening. The dynamic empathy between the four, the cross-stage conversations and building intensity at the finale, marked out another brilliant example of the composer’s unique voice.

In All Your Ways turned out to be something of a departure from that, especially in its opening and closing phases. More lyrical than even the gentler moments of Double Sextet, it also seemed more wide-screen in its use of the instruments, that familiar palette of sounds used in a different way. It is another work of scale, at 20 minutes, and a further opportunity to hear it is undoubtedly necessary before it finds its proper place in the Reich canon.

Gesualdo Six (photo: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan)

The previous weekend at EIF had seen Gesualdo Six bring to the Queen’s Hall chamber music programme a performance that transcended that slot while fitting rather perfectly in the space.

Death of Gesualdo is a follow-up to Secret Byrd, which has been seen at the Lammermuir Festival and, just this year, at Perth Festival of the Arts. The six singers are once again working with Concert Theatre Works and director Bill Barclay, and on this occasion with six actors and a puppeteer.

That title undersells the narrative, which covers the composer’s entire life as well as his extraordinary demise and the most notorious incident of his existence, when he caught his first wife with her lover and murdered them both.

The soundtrack for all this is his own music, very cleverly (if arguably slightly blasphemously) re-purposed so that liturgical texts refer to his own betrayal and sacrifice. It was immaculately sung by the costumed choristers, whose blend and precision pitch were a marvel, even as they added performance skill and lighting duties to their practice.

The mime and tableau vivant of the actors was also quite compelling, modern naturalistic techniques and movement sitting alongside Victorian melodrama gestures, and the puppet of the composer as a boy, in a mix that seems to match the period of the music perfectly. It is exquisitely costumed, and staged in a way clearly designed to fit the smallest playing area.

Just as the music reflected back on itself, so the human animation found scenic echoes in the narrative of Gesualdo’s life in a production that deserves to be even more widely seen than its predecessor. It visits Snape Maltings, the Canterbury Festival and Southampton next month (Oct 18, 19 & 20) and will return to St Martin-in-the-Fields, who co-commissioned it, in March.

Keith Bruce

Pictures by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

EIF: Brendel Tribute – Osborne | Lewis

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Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

In a presentational sense, there’s a hint of convenience in the way this year’s Edinburgh International Festival has packaged three recitals by three distinctive pianists under the banner of a Tribute to Alfred Brendel. The result so far – Steven Osborne and Paul Lewis have already contributed, Pierre-Laurent Aimard is still to do so – has weighed more towards the individuality of the participants themselves than any outwardly devotional emoting.

Maybe that’s the point. Brendel – who died last year, and whose own Festival appearances are perhaps best remembered for his internalised demeanour, strict dietary repertoire choices, often unsmiling intellectual explorations – was very much his own man. Experiencing his stage appearances, largely in a fully attended Usher Hall, was like an act of reverence. He was a profoundly communicative musical personality, unshowy but utterly persuasive.

In an interview with Vox Carnyx last year, Lewis, who studied with Brendel, described him as “very prescriptive, very specific and exacting in lessons”, while realising also that “the worst thing you could do is to simply copy him, as you’ll end up with what would be a bad version of Alfred Brendel. He wasn’t looking for that.”

Which is exactly the impression gleaned from the first two of this Festival’s tribute recitals. In Lewis’ case last Thursday – a neatly symmetrical sandwich of Schubert and Chopin within outer layers of Mozart – he simply let the music do the talking, as if in a world of his own. This was the more Brendel-esque of the two, yet with the Chopin in particular Lewis’ musical originality allowed the tenderest of expression to emerge from within the precision of its execution. The Two Nocturnes, Op 32, were singingly blissful, the foregoing Polonaise No 1, Op 26, heightened by judicious panache.

Schubert’s 3 Klavierstücke, written during the composer’s wretched final year but unpublished till years after his death (thanks to Brahms), was a kaleidoscopic joy, its weightier passions (unmistakably Brahms-like) revealing a Schubert with new paths to explore, had he lived.

Lewis’ Mozart was fascinating, more so in the B flat Sonata, K333, that closed the programme. Detail was paramount in a performance that was full of surprises, unearthing lyrical nuggets often ignored within the texture, playing logically but loose with the transition between phrases, and most effectively imbuing a character on the music that filled its intrinsic simplicity with golden colours. 

The opening Mozart Sonata, K570, also in B flat, produced the one moment in the programme that seemed out of character, as if he hadn’t quite acclimatised to the room. The gnawing insistence of the cantabile lines in the opening movement was unduly intense, to some extent unrelenting, thankfully countered by a beautifully evocative slow movement and stylistically resolute finale. 

Steven Osborne “poetic thoughfulness” (photo: Ben Ealovega)

Where Lewis’ manner was wholly focussed on the practical job at hand, Osborne – who opened the series – took time, true to his personality, to address the audience with some personal reflections on Brendel, not least the latter’s ability “to play out of time, but perfectly out of time”. What followed in its own way illustrated that phenomenon, Osborne’s relaxed intimacy throwing up rhythmically flexible moments designed to titillate the brain.

He chose mainly Schubert for his programme, effectively offset by snatches of contemporary music by James MacMillan and Judith Weir. Each half culminated in a major work, the first in Schubert’s Four Impromptus, the second in his late C minor Piano Sonata. In these, Osborne’s expansive thoughts, the poetic thoughtfulness of his personality, magically shone through.

The nimble delicacy of the Impromptus, whether in the freneticism of the first or songlike enchantment of the third, were a fitting end to a sequence of performances that opened with a playful Allegretto in C minor, delighted in the fleeting iridescence of Weir’s Fragile, before returning to Schubert and Osborne’s own completion of a strapping 1816 Allegretto in C.

The second half was uniquely characterised by more of Osborne’s adaptations, this time his intuitive arrangements of two Schubert Lieder – Liebesbotschaft and Am Meer from the late song cycle Schwanegesang. Nothing was lost in the absence of the sung voice, in fact much was gained through the adept voicing of the piano adaptation, and of course Osborne’s knowing delivery. That sat well in the company of MacMillan’s Lumen Christi, a luminous and playful extension of a musical idea extracted from his large scale Symphony “Vigil” set in the style of a music box, and Weir’s Choral, for Steve, written in memory of the American pianist Steven Stucky. 

The closing Schubert Sonata aroused an increased intensity in Osborne’s playing, the opening movement robustly discursive, the Adagio a ruminative response, the final movements complementing fitful drama with swirling finality. If the spirit of Brendel remained present, the personality was all Osborne.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard performs the final Brendel Tribute recital on Wednesday.

Ken Walton 

(Photos: Ben Ealovega / Andrew Perry)

EIF: Edinburgh Festival Chorus / Sean Shibe / Brass Fanfare

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Usher Hall / Queen’s Hall

THERE is plenty in this year’s Edinburgh Festival to justify its “International” middle-name, but the home team has also played a blinder during its first ten days.

Edinburgh Festival Chorus, having partnered a soulful chamber choir for the opening concert, proved their own gospel credentials in This Shining Night, a late evening programme of often-unaccompanied singing at the Usher Hall, five days later.

Two settings of James Agee’s poem Sure on this Shining Night, by Samuel Barber and Morten Lauridsen, bracketed a programme that was prefaced by a nod to the chorus’s founder Arthur Oldham with his 1963 composition, Sacerdos et Pontifex.

There was nothing especially startling about EFC tackling those – although the Lauridsen was a lovely way to end the recital – but what came in between was more interesting.

This programme of American choral music, much of it of recent vintage, had been compiled to complement the US theme of the Festival, linked to the 250th anniversary celebrations of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and was conducted by Sofi Jeannin.

There was plenty of these singers’ gospel choir side as part of that, from Aaron Copland’s At the River, William Dawson’s Soon Ah Will Be Done and an encore of Moses Hogan’s arrangement of Deep River,  to the 21st century’s I’ve Been in the Storm So Long by Jeffrey Ames and The Road Home by Stephen Paulus.

Texts for the Psalms were the link between Caroline Shaw’s And the Swallow, which has becomes a contemporary classic, and Nico Muhly’s A Good Understanding, enlivened by Tom Hunter’s percussion as well as the Usher Hall organ, played by Imogen Morgan.

At the piano, Stuart Hope was as often required to give a starting note to the singers as provide accompaniment, but his playing was a critical ingredient of the concert’s centre-piece, Joel Thompson’s Seven Last Words of the Unarmed.

Setting the reported last utterances of seven black men who died at the hands of US authority, culminating in Eric Garner’s globally-reported “I can’t breathe”, the liturgical reference in the title gives shape to an incredibly powerful work. It included a moving solo from tenor Sam Britner, one of the this year’s cohort of EIF Rising Stars of Voice, who featured throughout the programme, and added a quartet to Reena Ismail’s When the Violin, which also had the RSNO’s Pei-Jee Ng on obligato cello.

Together, all eight of the Rising Stars performed Gabriela Lena Frank’s Chicanophobia!, a denunciation of discrimination which took an altogether different, mocking and amusing, approach to the darker side of American society.

Guitarist Sean Shibe could hardly be more local to Queen’s Hall venue – a flat just around the corner was his first family home – but the internationally-acclaimed local musician had to wait until his mid-30s to make his EIF recital debut, although he has presented innovative concerts on the Fringe.

For this programme he played only one classical instrument, but the music made a compact conversation of five centuries of composition, firstly in Spain, then after the interval in England.

We began in Seville, with two of the Fantasias composed by priest Alonso Mudarra in 1546, before leaping forward to the 20th century commercial appropriation of his influence by Rodrigo for Segovia and then to the 2025 composition Sefarad by Francisco Coll, who studied in London with Thomas Ades.

Its four movements have their roots in early music and specifically that of Sephardic Jews, to whom Coll can trace his own origins. The suite brings together previously-composed pieces with two new movements, Suegra (mother-in-law) and Hija (daughter) and those were the most compelling, although the whole piece is very fine.

Three works by John Dowland, from the end of the 16th century and start of the 17th, prefaced Forgotten Dances by Ades himself, a six-movement work that Shibe has championed and recorded. It was developed from the Habanera in Ades’ opera The Exterminating Angel to embrace tributes to earlier composers, culminating in Vesper, a reworking of Henry Purcell, which led perfectly into Shibe’s most popular encore – his own arrangement of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s Farewell to Stromness.

Brass Fanfare – Tribute to John Wallace (Photo: Ga-Ken-Wan)

Local hero John Wallace was remembered in the Usher Hall concert between those two events, entitled Brass Fanfare. That was exactly the way in which it began, with a vast ensemble of players performing Bendinelli’s Sonata No 336, as arranged by the dynamic trumpeter and former Principal of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

On stage were his own Wallace Collection group, the Cooperation Band, brass players from all of Scotland’s professional orchestras, and youngsters from the RCS Junior Conservatoire and St Andrew’s Music Participation (StAMP).

The Fifer’s own composition skills were showcased in two movements from his Symphony for Brass played by the Wallace Collection and the Cooperation Band, before the orchestral players, again conducted by Clark Rundell, gave a superb account of Elgar Howarth’s arrangement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

If it reflected Wallace’s professional career, the perfectly-titled Lament, Hope, and Stomp which followed and concluded the concert, exemplified his enthusiasm for music education and the widest possible public participation. Percussionists from East Edinburgh’s Oi Musica joined the massed brass for an exuberant finale to an excellent tribute to a very well-loved musician.

Keith Bruce

Pictures by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

EIF: Beth Taylor | JLCO & Yuja Wang

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Queen’s Hall | Usher Hall

It’s only in the past year or so that the Scottish mezzo soprano Beth Taylor has begun to make an distinct impression on her native soil. Things were already happening for her, from success as a Grand Finalist in the 2023 Cardiff Singer of the World to debut appearances at Glyndebourne and New York’s Carnegie Hall. But it was her seraphic performance last year as the Angel in Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius with the BBC SSO that had Scottish audiences sitting up and taking exceptional note.

So Last Tuesday’s Edinburgh International Festival debut was timely, a Queen’s Hall recital that demonstrated not only her engaging musicality and communicative personality, but a performer at ease in any given style with a flair for explorative repertoire and a desire to surprise.

For a start, there was initially no sign of Taylor. Pianist Hamish Brown was seated expectantly on stage, but the first sounds emanated from the rear of the hall were a distant hurdy gurdy-like drone and a disembodied voice intoning a mystical antiphon by the 12th century abbess Hildegard von Bingen. 

It was the first of many vocal “personae” Taylor would negotiate over the next couple of hours. From the unadorned purity of O Ignee Spiritus, and with Brown now called into action, she turned to the languid late-19th century Gallic signature of prolific French-Irish composer Augusta Holmès, firstly in the dense harmonies and sweeping crescendo of Pareil à la mer profound, then the Bacchanalian wildness and wit Le Vin. Sung with emotive warmth and vivid characterisation, and matched by Brown’s demonstrative pianism, Taylor extended her French selection with the dreamy sentiments of Lili Boulanger’s Reflets. 

Written especially in 2024 for Taylor, Cameron Biles-Liddell’s The Breakers conjured up sweeping images of the sea, its coupling of The Storm and Twilight playing to the singer’s extraordinary range from meaty lower tessitura to searing upper register. The same composer’s sultry arrangement of the traditional Orcadian tune The Grey Selkie o’ Sule Skerry saw Taylor transport us seamlessly to the plaintive world of Scots folksong. Dame Ethel Smyth’s Three Moods of the Sea, with their faint echoes of Elgar’s Sea Pictures, returned us to the eloquent world of art song.

The second half was no less comprehensive. Alongside such mainstream German Lieder as Fanny Hensel’s eloquently-styled Schwanenlied and Clara Schumann’s animated Lorelei, Taylor turned to the enigmatic American songwriter Connie Converse (who mysteriously disappeared in her car in 1974) and her last known work, the Cassandra Cycle – shapely unaffected storytelling sung with salon-like appeal.

As the only female member of the idiosyncratic French group Les Six, Germaine Tailleferre’s Pancarte pour une Porte d’entrée provided an off-the-wall springboard to the apogee of this consummate recital, the world premiere of Stuart MacRae’s Medusa. Theatrical, virtuosic and fired by clarity of purpose and, at times, bitter imagery, this was a performance of compelling drama, menacing energy, a kaleidoscopic tour de force for both musicians. Most of all, MacRae’s music played unstintingly to the charismatic versatility of Taylor’s ravishing voice.

Yuja Wang and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (Photo: Andrew Perry)

How versatile would superstar classical pianist Yuja Wang prove to be, taking to the Usher Hall stage with Wynton Marsalis’ Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra for the first of two Wednesday evening repeat jazz performances? The audience was clearly lapping up the prospect, a darkened Usher Hall filled to near capacity, the atmosphere welling to euphoria with each neatly delivered number, the newly-minted arrangements by JLCO band members like liquid gold, shot through with sprays of climactic glitter. 

While it was natural fertile ground for the JLCO’s breezy nonchalance, Wang’s delivery, while rhythmically ballistic and unquestionably virtuosic, often felt constrained by her studied discipline and rigid precision. That was a critical issue, given the programme’s thematic focus on the rise of keyboard virtuosity in 20th century jazz, putting Wang firmly in the spotlight. 

True, hi-octane precision is exactly what Dave Brubeck applied to the limping rhythmic gait of his own Rondo à la Turk, which Wang’s machine-like rapidity captured intellectually if not wholly in spirit. JLCO trombonist Chris Crenshaw’s judicious arrangement came into its own in the woozy seductiveness of the central blues. 

Fast forward to Duke Ellington’s time-stopping Reflections in D (arr. Joe Block) or the bossanova vibe of Oscar Peterson’s increasingly high speed L’Impossible (arr. Alexa Tarantino), and Wang revealed a more laid back, collaborative ease. Yet there was still a dry disconnect in her boogie-woogie response to Leroy Carr’s How Long Blues, and in Marsalis’ Marthaniel (from his larger work Citi Movement) the most interesting sounds came from his own JLCO, its lugubrious ensemble and liquidly nuanced solos.

It was in the likes of Cuban pianist Ernesto Lecuona’s La Camparsa (from his Danza Afro-Cubanas) and racy Gitanerías, both heavily scented in bassist Carlos Henriquez’s sensuous arrangements, then in the hair-raising panache of Art Tatum’s Crenshaw-arranged Tiger Rag and a closing rendition of Joseph Korma’s Autumn Leaves, that Wang eventually found the relaxed means to root out her inner cool. 

One practical issue rather diluted the overall impact of the show. Marsalis chose to emcee seated far back in the trumpet section. Visually alone, that was a weak move. But audibility was also problematic, Marsalis’ quick-fire delivery not always picked up clearly by the hall’s PA system. Much vital information went unheard.

Ken Walton 

(Photos: Andrew Perry)

EIF: The Galloping Cure

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Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

The first two orchestral chords in the score of Missy Mazzoli’s new opera instantly recall James Bond movies at their Sean Connery peak and Goldfinger in particular. That’s the way to grab the attention of an Edinburgh audience, and make transparent this world premiere’s appeal to a global audience.

The centre pages of the printed programme for The Galloping Cure remember Frank Dunlop, director of the Edinburgh International Festival from 1984 to 1991, who died earlier this year. That is appropriate because this new opera would have sat well in one of his festivals, happy to co-opt circus skills and other Fringe-like ingredients in the service of contemporary opera. The Galloping Cure makes a shameless appeal to the broadest possible audience with its vibrant colour palette, mix of puppetry, dancing and aerial skills, night club lighting and knowing comedy.

From those first chords it looks like a winner. The team that made it – Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek, director Tom Morris, producers Opera Ventures with Scottish Opera and its music director Stuart Stratford – and workshopped its final shape in Scottish Opera’s studios in Glasgow, is substantially the same as the one behind the production of Mazzoli’s Breaking the Waves, which premiered at EIF 2019 and has been a hit around the globe.

Although its subject matter, the opioid crisis that strangely seems to be taken more seriously in the US than in Britain, is as dark as the narrative of that earlier work, there is – initially at least – much more levity in this one, not least in the clowning comedy of soprano Catriona Hewitson and baritone Edward Jowle as pet dogs Meg and Sam, a sort of Greek chorus who look to the supertitles to translate their barking, and an actual chorus of sheep, whose dramaturgical role is a less clear.

The story, written by Karen Russell and inspired by a Franz Kafka one, is of a local doctor, Theresa Hart (sung by Daniela Mack) struggling to cope with the ills of the community, including her own daughter, Noy (Gabrielle Turgeon), and grumpy pensioner Ivona (Susan Bullock). When the carousel ride of white-suited Stetson-wearing Lucky Mack (baritone Justin Austin) appears to alleviate everyone’s pain (and the first ride is, of course, always free), Dr Hart is dubious but eventually succumbs and endorses the product.

Allegory is a tricky sell in our cynical age but at first Mazzoli and her associates seem to have achieved a balance between style and substance, combining a difficult subject and entertaining story-telling. As should always be the case with opera, the music, and particularly dynamic, colourful playing from the pit, tells much of the story, and the libretto is simple and effective.

When Mazzoli cedes part of her compositional job to dancefloor-fillers Blume and Lorna Dune (credited with “Beats”) for a rave scene at the end of Act 2, and again during Act 3, much of that impetus is dissipated, and the narrative of the third act – becoming increasing lurid and tragic – also undermines the allegorical tone of the work’s inception.

Addiction (to hobby-horses at home as well as on the roundabout) is now paid for with real body parts (eyes and knees) as the twin threats of street drugs and big pharma are linked with organ harvesting. It is tough to watch as well as being less interesting to listen to. If an extended death scene that may be meant to parallel those in some classic operas had the musical pathos of, say, La boheme, it might have seemed a good deal shorter.

No blame should attach to the performers, however, who are uniformly excellent. Leaving aside the principals from across the pond, of whom soprano Gabrielle Turgeon is the stand-out singer, the cast is full of talent that has been developed by or worked regularly with Scottish Opera in recent years. They deserve the highest praise for their input to a fascinating new work that falls at the last fence.

Further performances Tuesday August 11 and Wednesday August 12

Keith Bruce

Picture by Andrew Perry

EIF: All Rise / Passion of Mary Magdalene

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Usher Hall/Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

It is hard to imagine any previous director of the Edinburgh Festival getting away with Nicola Benedetti’s wholly admirable teacher-like approach to silencing the menace of mobile phones in the concert hall. On the opening day of EIF 2026 she twice instructed audiences to check that their devices were switched off and then paused to watch while everyone did. Audibly, the tactic worked.

The Festival’s slogan for this campaign is “Tune out the outside world” and it also spoke, with interesting ambiguity, to the music on offer that first day.

Tansy Davies composed her Passion of Mary Magdalene because she “felt it was time to listen to the voices not only left out, but taken out, of the Passion narrative.” As well as a the titular follower of Christ, sung by Anna Dennis, that included the wife of Pontius Pilate, a step-out role for mezzo Sarah Anne Champion, one of a vocal ensemble of seven behind the soloists.

Christus was sung by baritone Marcus Farnsworth, in a forceful characterisation that was very much of a piece with the work’s radical intentions. Commissioned by the Dunedin Consort with the Festival and London’s Barbican, this 80-minute work can creditably take its place alongside Sir James MacMillan’s 21st century additions to the genre Johann Sebastian Bach pioneered.

As well the singers, the Dunedin’s John Butt directed an instrumental ensemble of 15 – early instruments and gut strings, and the crucial addition of an electric guitar which added percussion effects as well as more recognisable sounds, but always at discreet volume.

With harpsichord and bass lute completing the rhythm section, the strings were often used individually as foils to the singers – notably John Crockatt’s viola partnering Farnsworth – and a five-piece wind section of bassoon, oboes and flutes-doubling -recorders added powerful colours to the score.

Davies makes huge demands of the singers, and it was not only Dennis – predictably unperturbed by the huge leaps of pitch in Mary Magdalene’s part – who produced the goods. Stratospheric soprano Ana Beard Fernandez was superb in the work’s first section, and a crucial element of the score from its opening to the end was the trio ensemble of the three women, completed by alto Rosie Parker.

The four male voices – countertenor Tom Lilburn, bass Christopher Webb and tenors Ed Woodhouse and Thomas Kelly – more often featured singly or in duet and again there was no weak link among them.

The work is filled with memorable moments; the first utterance of this Jesus is “Shut Up!” and his Palm Sunday arrival in Jerusalem comes with the clearest of sound-pictures of the donkey’s gait and braying. Much of the text is recognisable from scripture, but Davies also uses sources that didn’t make the final cut of the Bible to produce a very thought-provoking narrative from the female perspective. The teasing carnality of the institution of the Sacrament of Communion at the Last Supper, which sits at the centre of her work, may be its most controversial moment, and Dennis produced her very finest singing to make sure every nuance was revealed.

What is unarguable about this new piece, even if Davies’s music is not to everyone’s taste (although it was enthusiastically acclaimed here), is that the composer has structured her work perfectly. In seven clear sections over three distinct parts, the story-telling could not be clearer or the words and music more precisely matched.

That is not true of the first orchestral work by jazz trumpeter – and husband of Benedetti – Wynton Marsalis, which was revived as the Opening Concert in the Usher Hall and the title of which, All Rise, adopted as the label for the entire EIF 2026 programme.

Marsalis was commissioned to write his “Symphony No 1” by Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic, who premiered it in December 1999, and it has been recorded by the Los Angeles Phil and Esa Pekka Salonen, but opportunities to hear the vast 12-movement work (also in three sections in this performance) are not common.

That is most easily explained by the vast forces under the baton of conductor James Gaffigan, who is also on the podium for Marsalis’s more recent Concert for Orchestra, which receives its UK premiere from the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Proms this week.

The trumpeter was onstage as a member of the Jazz at Lincoln Centre Orchestra, which he is in the final year of four decades of leading. Around those 16 top-rank jazz players sat the RSNO, with a vast array of percussion at the back between the instrumentalists and the Edinburgh Festival Chorus joined by the soulful specialists of the Jason Max Ferdinand Singers.

At full strength, more than 200 musicians made a great gospel noise, and that blues-derived music is at the core of the work, incorporating the text of some of the Lord’s Prayer in what is often – but not always – a devotional work.

If Davies’s Passion is challenging to a conventional view of Christianity, Marsalis seems to want to place faith in the context of personal development and community cohesion in All Rise. Others may have heard it differently, and that may well be the work’s strength as well as its problem.

Perhaps, in his upcoming retirement from band-leading, Marsalis might rework parts of All Rise as orchestral suites or choral pieces that may win more performances, because many sections would certainly stand alone and the Ellington-esque Expressbrown Local (the 10th movement) was an ideal trailer for the JLCO’s concert of the Duke’s music in the same hall three days later.

Like the earlier Queen’s Hall concert, however, All Rise was full of moments that will live in the mind for many years. The soloing of the jazzers – including one from Marsalis himself – was matched by that of the RSNO front desks, even if those were not improvised, while the Festival Chorus had as much soul as the chamber choir, even if it provided the startling soloists.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Anna Dennis with Dunedin Consort by Matt Beech; Conductor James Gaffigan by Andrew Perry

Glasgow Barons Early Music Festival 2026

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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

In the Belly of the Beast

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Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow

Less is more. The truth underlying that paradox could so easily be applied to In the Belly of the Beast, a dramatic presentation by the Dunedin Consort (in collaboration with Mahogany Opera and Hera) that pulls together three Cantates Bibliques by the French Baroque composer Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, lasts around an hour, and employs merely two singers and three instrumentalists. Friday’s Glasgow performance was the penultimate in a tour that in recent weeks has taken in Edinburgh’s Assembly Roxy, the Aldeburgh Festival and Spitalfied Music Festival, ending last Saturday in Whitehaven.

A common thread are the Old Testament biblical heroes featured respectively in the three cantatas, each thrown into crisis in response to their relationships with God: Adam’s guilty disobedience; Jonah’s rebellious flight to sea; Jephthah’s foolish bargaining of his daughter’s life. And of course the music: three evocative cantatas by a composer who was exceptional for her time – the first woman composer to be performed at the Paris Opera and active during the late reign of Louis XIV. 

Where Friday’s performance especially succeeded was in revealing the wealth of imagery and emotion contained in De la Guerre’s music, especially with such minimal forces. It said much, too, of the three musicians – Liam Byrne (musical director and viola da gamba), Eric Thomas (theorbo) and Alice Earll (violin) – that they could collectively unleash an expressive range far greater than the visible sum of their parts. 

In that sense they were more than simply an effective engine room for a drama played out with sharp minimalist focus by sopranos Carolyn Sampson and Mariana Rodrigues, under the economic stage direction of Jennifer Fletcher. Sampson played a solo multi-character role in Adam, the highpoint of which was the hero’s expressive and expansive final aria acknowledging life’s brevity. At this point, and with Sampson’s soulful clarity, the exhilaration effected by De la Guerre’s evocative music made its mark.

Rodrigues’ take on Jonah offered an appropriately stormier appeal, a shriller, more animated delivery in tune with the maritime imagery, but nonetheless capable of darker reflection. Where the two sopranos came together in the opening duet to Jephthah – a moment of great rejoicing before the realisation of Jephthah’s promise to sacrifice his daughter in return for victory in battle – this production swung into overdrive. The vocal interaction was electrifying.

As a theatrical spectacle – aided by Ingrid Hu’s designs with lighting and projection by Ben Moon – simplicity and practicality were to the fore. Nothing much physically happened, but nor in the end did it need to. As ever with Dunedin, the performances were stylish and exceptional. Mention, too, is owed to Toria Banks, whose slick translations offered contemporary poetic relevance to the texts without devaluing a single note of De la Guerre’s exquisite music.

Ken Walton

(Photo: Andy Catlin)

East Neuk: Rasumovsky Day

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Kilrenny Church & Crail Church, Fife.

Saturday was Rasumovsky Day at the 21st East Neuk Festival. In three concerts, spread three hours apart over two venues, each of Beethoven’s three middle period Op 59 Quartets – a groundbreaking collection commissioned by the violin-playing Russian ambassador in Vienna, Count Rasumovsky – was rolled out by three successive ensembles. 

That each quartet had its unique proponent was itself thrilling enough. The cliff-edge lunchtime volatility of Spain’s Cuarteto Quiroga in Op 59 No 1, answered by the mid-afternoon meaty intensity of the American Calidore Quartet in No 2, then took early evening flight with the virtuosic joie de vivre of Swedish-Norwegian string quartet Opus13. 

Furthermore, each Rasumovsky was partnered by a non-Beethoven work intended to illuminate the contextual response, which the elemental theatrics of Spain’s short-lived Beethoven contemporary Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga’s Quartet No 3, the dichotomy of intellectual constructivism and expressive fluidity of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Arietta (UK premiere) and the heated, personalised Romanticism of Wilhelm Stenhammar’s A minor Quartet Op 25 respectively achieved.

Throw all that together and the result was an invigorating, at times intoxicating, complexity of stimuli that succeed superbly in attaining its goal, which was to reaffirm the extraordinary innovative advances Beethoven achieved between the masterful apprenticeship of his first Op 18 quartets (published 1801) and the assured and expansive inventiveness unveiled seven years later with the publishing of the Rasumovskys. 

In Kilrenny Church, with Arriaga’s E flat Quartet trumpeting an opening theme brazenly reminiscent of Beethoven’s Op 18 No 1 (a performance frustratingly paused midway due to unseen disruption in the church’s rear balcony), the Cuarteto Quiroga proved themselves the perfect fit for the opening F major Rasumovsky. There’s an element of danger in their demeanour, a degree of raw imperfection – almost deliberately so in some aspects of tuning – that is magically offset by a single-minded togetherness. Such conflict lent a decisive edge to the performance, the rigour of Beethoven’s opening movement deliciously countered by suave Slavonic asides, the nimbleness of the Scherzo tamed by the broad lyrical sweep of the Adagio, the final Allegro brusque and resolute. 

The action then moved to Crail Church, where the Calidore Quartet made the most of the E minor Rasumovsky’s darker hues. The fragmented rhetoric of the opening, gradually mustering an organic flow, elicited meaty ensemble playing from the Americans, a homogeneity recast as devotional calm in the sublime Molto Adagio. They were mesmerising in the off-kilter rhythms of the Scherzo with its pugnacious Russian references, imbuing the final Presto with all the jauntiness it calls for. 

In advance of that, and introduced by the composer himself with the reassurance that “my piece isn’t scary!”, Turnage’s Arietta (an ENF co-commission) opens in the same hymn-like vein as the aforementioned Molto Adagio. It is, appropriately, a homage to Beethoven, the theme of its variations being a literal inversion of the Arietta used by Beethoven in his last Piano Sonata, Op 111. Its gaunt reverence, its gathering warmth, and those hints of neo-classicism coloured by spectral links to the past, gave purpose to its presence in the programme.

The same venue, Crail Church, later welcomed the ebullient Opus13 to round off Saturday’s musical triptych. It took a moment or two for Stenhammar’s substantial A minor Quartet to truly gather momentum, but when it did the performance matured to reveal a lusty allegiance to Brahms and Dvorak, even modal echoes of Ravel and nods to Sibelius. It was hard to ignore the slow movement theme’s unmistakable similarity to  “Climb Every Mountain” from The Sound of Music, but there was much to enjoy in textures that ranged from emulating the whisper of a consort of viols to full-blown passion, and an ending that brimmed with mercurial whimsy.

Then to the last Rasumovsky, and a performance that had us clinging to the edge of our seats. It opened with bristling resolve, struck a graceful balletic note in the Andante con moto, before viewing the unruffled Minuet as an understated springboard to the final fugue, a hair-raising sprint to an explosive conclusion. The audience reacted instinctively, baying for more and receiving it in the form of a simple Swedish folk tune. 

There was an unmistakable buzz to the whole day that was hard to ignore. Chamber music’s central canon has long been a factor in defining the East Neuk Festival. But this package, in particular the thought given to cross-referenced programming and comparative selection of artists, had something very special and enlightening to offer. 

Ken Walton

(Pictured: Opus13 at Crail Church)

East Neuk’s James Oswald

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A concert in this year’s East Neuk Festival celebrates the work of Crail’s forgotten composer, writes Keith Bruce.

It is perhaps surprising that it has taken the East Neuk Festival, headquartered in the picturesque fishing village of Crail for over two decades, this long to celebrate the composer who was born there in 1710.

Local journalist Tom Davison has, however, done his memory – and the festival – proud with a new book, Thank you for the Musick: The Life and Times of James Oswald (The Hardie Press, £15), which is launched by the author on Thursday (July 2) at a concert featuring his music by harpist Karen Marchalsay (pictured) with fiddler Kathryn Nicholl and singer Chris Miles.

Oswald is far from unknown – he is included in the Grove Dictionary of Music and in John Purser’s definitive work on Scotland’s music, and his works have been recorded by Concerto Caledonia amongst others – but he is curiously uncelebrated, especially in his homeland.

His story is certainly a remarkable one. From lowly beginnings, and through troubled times, he made his name firstly in Edinburgh and then in London, and died at 59 as a composer to the Royal court and master of Knebworth in Hertfordshire, a venue more associated with summer concerts by the behemoths of rock’n’roll in recent years.

Davison packs a great deal into his 178-page biography of Oswald, and although he is fond of modestly limiting the scope of his book, and what is beyond it, it is hard to see what could have been added, or what is missed out.

On the music itself he defers to those of greater expertise, but encompasses the full range of opinion over the centuries before coming down firmly on the positive side of the argument. Just as convincingly, and probably of more interest to the general reader, he conjures up a picture of the era, the complexities of its politics and treacherous religious differences, and the fluidity of the class structure at the time, that is as compellingly readable as it is thoroughly researched.

Chapter 15, provocatively titled “Scotophobia”, should be prescribed reading for anyone interested in contemporary politics north of the border. Davison is less impressed than many by 18th century Whig parliamentarian John Wilkes, for example, but concedes his “sharp wit and neat turn of phrase”. Those qualities often distinguish Davison’s own writing, enlivening what could easily have been a dull history lesson.

His book is never that, chiefly because the reflections of our own time are too obvious to ignore. So it is a paradox that it is probably the crucial differences between then and now that account for James Oswald’s neglect.

Although he was a clearly a very original and ground-breaking musician, he worked in an era when originality was less prized, including by himself. His chief interest was in publication rather than copyright and intellectual property, so he was careless of attribution and cavalier with pseudonyms.

Davison takes a chapter to consider the possibility that Oswald composed “God Save The King”, a melody that would surely guarantee his immortality, and wisely concludes that, while the argument is strong, there is no way anyone will ever know one way or the other.

Those “definite maybes” (as one Knebworth headliner might say), all accumulate to create what is surely the fullest picture of The Life and Times of James Oswald that can be painted. With so few hard facts about the composer’s life to go on, Davison’s depth of research and stylish writing contrive to make a convincing character of a major figure and remarkable talent in the history of Scottish music.

Karen Marshalsay’s Looking for Oswald is at Crail Community Centre at 1.45pm on Thursday July 2 as part of the East Neuk Festival, which runs July 1 to 5. Tom Davison’s Thank you for the Musick: The Life and Times of James Oswald is published by The Hardie Press at £15.

RSNO / Hahn: Ode to Joy

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

What better way to whet the appetite for next season than to sign off with a blistering finale to the current one. If that was in the minds of the RSNO players on Saturday – and it certainly sounded like it – then hopes should be high for drawing in the crowds in future. And what a crowd it was. Hardly an empty seat remained in the 2000-capacity Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, the offshoot to that being the sizzling atmosphere beforehand in the foyers and bars. Atmosphere is everything.

The concert itself was a classy affair, slickly presented, in which the picturesque theatre of Mendelssohn, sophisticated couthiness of MacMillan and epic universality of Beethoven were warmly personalised at the start by deserved recognition of RSNO violinist Nigel Mason, playing in his last concert after a record 47 years with the orchestra. 

In one of the most erudite and entertaining concert introductions I’ve heard from the RSNO, principal oboist Adrian Wilson – besides linking the infinite mathematical permutations of a pack of playing cards to the spontaneous uniqueness of the concert experience – reflected on Nigel’s amiability, dedication and professionalism. A genuinely appreciative reaction from the capacity audience, and a later surprise encore (“O my luve is like a red, red rose”) sung to him by mezzo soprano Karen Cargill, said everything and more.

As for the main programme, this was also an evening that cemented the real worth of principal guest conductor Patrick Hahn. From the moment he set the Mendelssohn in motion you could sense an intoxicating combination of composure and insight. He coaxed delicious textures, filigree detail and the music’s heated swells with judicious calm, yet by force of character coloured its unpredictable waters with persuasive, exhilarating drama.

He was equally attuned to the gossamer delicacies of James MacMillan’s Three Scottish Songs, a compilation setting of words by William Soutar which the composer packaged and arranged for chamber orchestra in 2022. Featuring the strings, harp and percussion, alongside soloist Karen Cargill, the focus is very much on the latter. Cargill captured the melodies’ alluring simplicity, counterpointed by a beguiling, feathery confection of string textures, which Hahn honed to perfection. The mastery of the writing lies in its minimal precision: the naked intimacy of Scots Song (the Tryst melody that has recurred as a cipher throughout MacMillan’s canon); the growing tensions and horror of Ballad and The Children. Against the prevailing quiet, MacMillan’s use of percussion proved economic but alarming.

The climax of the evening was Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and a performance that fully recognised its sublime magnitude and rhetoric. Singing from memory, the RSNO Chorus projected magnificently in the finale’s choral setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy. Every line was distinct, every expressive manoeuvre homogeneously convincing, coupled with orchestral playing that rooted out every detailed nuance, and a thrilling vocal quartet (Eleanor Dennis, Karen Cargill, Joshua Ellicott and Andrew Hamilton) capable of holding its own against the massed forces. 

Hahn’s no-nonsense practicality was once again the defining element in reaching that point. His journey from the self-contained potency of the opening movement, through the irrepressible sparkle of the Scherzo and languishing lyricism of the Adagio was one of incessant discovery, superbly controlled yet motivated by penetrating emotional instinct. Beyond that, the crowing impact of that final sing was inevitable.

Ken Walton

(Picture of Patrick Hahn in rehearsal by RSNO/Clara Cowen)

Major Milestone for St Magnus

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With the 50th St Magnus Festival set to kick into action, director Alasdair Nicolson tells Ken Walton what it means to be ‘custodian’ of this iconic event

Personally, the news that Orkney is about to celebrate the 50th annual St Magnus Festival is troubling. I vividly remember the inaugural Festival, not because I was there or knew exactly what was going on, but because in 1977 a buzz had spread among the composition students – no doubt encouraged by their visiting professor Sir Peter Maxwell Davies – at the Manchester music college I was attending. I sensed there was something dynamic happening back in northernmost Scotland. Just how significant it was remained a mystery until I traveled to later festivals as a cub critic. But has it really been half a century?

The early years were, of course, defined by the physical presence of local resident Maxwell Davies (or “Max” as he was universally known), whose music and connections drew artists who may never otherwise have travelled to Orkney, and who considered, along with his indigenous management team, the involvement of local people to be paramount to shaping the character, ambition and success of the Festival. His persona was synonymous with this dynamic, flourishing event.

The nature of that success – from major world premieres and the bold programming of new music to local drama (the traditional Johnsmas Foy) and music projects involving school children – has been well-enough documented through the years, as have the key figures, many no longer with us, who shaped the profile of successive Festivals. 

Who can forget such noble presences as local author George Mackay Brown lurking modestly among regular audiences, or visiting luminaries happy to muck in with the mysterious bus arrangements that whisked audiences from one venue to the next. The sight of actors Timothy West and Prunella Scales settling themselves on a bus, complete with shared travel rug to warm their legs, was a tender one, especially when they alighted casually at the other end to deliver, with son Sam, a thoroughly absorbing performance of Stravinsky’s A Soldiers Tale.

Fast forward to recent years, especially following Max’s death a decade ago, and the fundamentals are the same, even if the profile has evolved to reflect a broader artistic vision, fierce economic reality (big orchestra visits are more prohibitive), increased competition (other festivals have arisen in Scotland modelled on St Magnus), even the expectations of new-generation Orcadians.

The person overseeing all this for the past 15 years is composer and Festival director Alasdair Nicolson. And as the 50th Festival approaches (19-28 June) he is doubly aware of the importance of balancing legacy with future sustainability. 

“There are folk in the Festival’s background that were significant artistically in the wider world of the arts, not just related to St Magnus or Orkney,” he says. “I suppose the two most prominent names were Max and George Mackay Brown. They still feature: they may not now be at the centre of things always, but I think that’s because we are developing as a festival; and also, because our funding and the nature of the world we inhabit these days as a public funded organisation places a lot of demands on us on what and how we need to be doing things, the issues you need to be tackling.”

The one thing forever set in stone, and what gives the Festival its unique charm, is Orkney’s physical detachment from the mainland. Nicolson, who grew up on the Inner Hebrides, fully recognises that. “It’s vital to keep in mind what works on a remote island off the north coast of Scotland, where all the things we’re experiencing in life at the moment – cost of living, cost of fuel – impacts significantly on the way we do stuff and what is is possible for us.”

Looking through the highlights for this celebratory year, possibilities are reflected in a generous weighing of ambition and practicality. A new performance space has been created at the Orkney Auction Mart, Kirkwall’s fully-functioning cattle market whose sale ring hosted a production of Carmen several years ago complete with distant bovine chorus. “This is an adjacent industrial shed, not dissimilar in size to the nearby Pickaquoy Centre,” Nicolson explains. “The thing is, we haven’t that many ‘true’ venues in Orkney, so we have to make them up!” It plays host to an opening concert by the newly-formed Festival Orchestra (19 June), a performance of Mozart’s Requiem by the Festival Chorus (21 June), the premiere of a new theatre piece with music, Jasper the Cat, by the local Assembly Project (23 June), local folk group FARA (25 June), and a Festival finale by the award-winning Co-operation Band (27 June)

While bringing major symphony orchestras is now a more taxing challenge for Nicolson – remember Isaac Stern, Andre Previn and the RPO coming to Orkney for the 10th anniversary Festival in 1986? – creating his own Festival Orchestra has proved a more practical initiative. “We’ve brought together members of the BBC SSO, SCO, LSO and Birmingham Royal Ballet, plus younger string players auditioned from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and elsewhere.” The opener in their welcome concert, conducted by Nicolson, is Maxwell Davies’ Welcome to Orkney”.

Nicolson’s creative fingerprint also features in Jasper the Cat. “It’s something I’ve been threatening to write for some time. Jasper was a well known cat in Albert Street where our office is. He even had his own Facebook page. He’d often sit in the middle of the road cleaning his bits as cats do and traffic would just have to wait. He died a couple of years ago and I thought it would be great to do something for kids. I’ve written the story and now the music – a Peter and the Wolf sort of thing. There’s even a bit for the audience to join in.”

The Wallace Collection with its late founder John Wallace (far right)

Like so many Festivals this year, Nicolson has included a major tribute to the late trumpeter and RCS principal John Wallace: a performance in St Magnus Cathedral (26 June) of The Invisible Symphony, a mammoth transcription by Wallace of Gabrieli’s antiphonal Canzoni et Sonata, performed as a surround sound spectacle by the Wallace Collection and Co-operation Band. 

“John, of course, played Max’s trumpet concerto and was involved with many other things to do with Orkney,” he recalls. “I spent many zoom calls last summer, until he  sadly passed away, working out how we could do this work. It was his absolute dream to get the Gabrieli into St Magnus Cathedral, though discovering subsequently that the Co-operation Band’s numbers had swelled significantly this year left me with the challenge of fitting them all into the venue.”

As a neat quirk, Nicolson has programmed 50 events for the 50th Festival. “Actually not quite”, he admits. “We had to drop a Johnsmas Foy [the Festival’s traditional local community theatre production] when one of its key members had to withdraw late in the process.” Nonetheless a healthy variety of presentation styles offers choice in abundance.

The Stromness chamber music series features American-Armenian viola da gamba player Lucine Musaelian (20 June), pianists Samson Tsoy (21 June) and Pavel Kolesnikov (22 June), the Fibonacci String Quartet (23 June) and the Hebrides Ensemble (24 June). A focus on Icelandic music, reflecting the country’s close historic connections with Orkney, includes: medieval poetry and song from the all-male ensemble Voces Thule (23 June)); the UK premiere of Mörsugur, a 2022 opera based on Icelandic mythology for soprano and cinematic audiovisuals; and a solo recital by Icelandic-American cellist Geirþrúður Anna Guðmundsdóttir (22 June).

There are performances too from Rory McCleery’s Marian Consort, guitarist-lutenist Jacques Carroll-Leitao, and a percussion extravaganza featuring Owen Gunnell’s O Duo with students from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. Folk music, poetry, storytelling, a special retrospective Festival exhibition widen the experience. As will the introduction this year of a celebratory Festival parade. “The whole community’s getting behind that one,” says Nicolson. 

Challenging as his role is in these tough economic times, Nicolson is optimistic that the Festival will deal with the issues and secure a future beyond the current milestone. His role, he stresses, is that of “custodian”. “In recent years we’ve faced the danger you might not get the funding you need, that Covid was so bad it killed the atmosphere as it were, yet I’m pleased to say we’re in good health, still going at 50 and still delivering stuff that others don’t, delivering new things.

“I‘ve also put things on stage that people in Orkney wouldn’t otherwise see, proud to have brought up the BBC Symphony Orchestra recently from London – it had never been before – but more importantly, to have given opportunities to younger performers before they become the ones that are everywhere. Pavel [Kolesnikov] and Samson [Tsoy] are back this year – they were with us with us before they were known. Mostly, it’s about maintaining and developing and making sure the St Magnus Festival remains lively, that it has life in it.”

Orkney’s St Magnus Festival runs from 19-28 June. Full programme details at www.stmagnusfestival.com 

Linlithgow String Orchestra

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Linlithgow Burgh Halls

The Linlithgow String Orchestra launched its 10th Anniversary Season last November with an enterprising new work – Engine Shed – by the idiosyncratic British composer Deborah Shaw. Fast forward to its Summer Concert last Sunday and, once again, the LSO was premiering a new commission, this time by the 21-year-old Kent-born composer, and recent graduate of Kings College London, Joe Cobb. Thus the Anniversary Season continued with the same sense of discovery that marked its opening.

This programme was mostly about “connections”, explained the orchestra’s unflappable conductor Bill Jones, elaborating in a colourful spoken narrative that weaved its connecting thread throughout the hour-long proceedings. Convenient historical landmarks stamped their influence: 500 years since the Battle of Linlithgow Bridge (full-bodied string arrangements of 16th century madrigals by Pierre Passereau and Anon Scots to open with); 400 years since the death of John Dowland (his The King of Denmark’s Galliard and the signature melancholy of his famous Lachrimae); and 250 years since the US Declaration of Independence (Aaron Copland’s riotous Hoedown).

Where these performances were credited with unflinching enthusiasm, at times lustily or baked with luxuriant texturing, there was also much to enjoy in the sentimental sweep of Mascagni’s much-loved Intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana. A string arrangement of William Harris’ double choir motet Faire is the Heaven may have left those who know its choral manifestation (and Edmund Spenser’s flavoursome words) a little short changed, but it served its purpose in paving the way for the wild exuberance of Copland’s Hoedown.

As for Joe Cobb, what was the connection there? Jones, it transpired, in his former professional life as head teacher at a Kent prep school, had spotted the youngster’s musical talent at an early age and was delighted to see him now on the brink of a career in composition. Cobb had responded to the LSO’s commission with Calluna (meaning “heather”), a picturesque meditation on the soft unpredictability of a moorland landscape.

Its modal opening cast an instant spell, simple and questioning, leading to a conversation of textures that combined dense post-Delian harmonies with light and airy lyricism. The ending, atmospherically whispered, made its magical point. 

In completing the official programme, Jones revealed yet another intriguing connection in anticipation of an encore especially devised in honour of Cobb, whose great uncle, it transpires, was the Paisley-born singer-songwriter Gerry Rafferty. Cobb was not only presented with an original Humblebums album (the folk rock band that featured both Rafferty and Billy Connolly), but the LSO then let rip with their own arrangement of Rafferty’s biggest hit, Baker Street, audience participation encouraged and briefly, politely, received. 

Ken Walton

RSNO / Hahn

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Although it was not excessively long, there was a lot – perhaps a little too much – in Saturday’s penultimate RSNO season concert. On the podium was Principal Guest Conductor Patrick Hahn, appointed to the orchestra two years ago, whose programmes are always characterful.

This one began with most of the stage in darkness for a movement entitled God-Music from George Crumb’s Black Angels, his anti-Vietnam War composition best known in the recording by the Kronos Quartet. With the orchestra’s percussion section in a pool of light, the evening’s soloist, cellist Kian Soltani was spotlit above them in the choir stalls for the three minutes of his aria accompagnata.

It led directly into the big opening chord of Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem, a statement of opposition to the Second World War which failed to please its commissioners but has become a concert hall favourite as the first of the composer’s few orchestral works without a soloist.

That matching of two complementary works was repeated after the interval by Hahn with Wagner’s Prelude to Act 1 of Tristan und Isolde preceding Alexander Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy, the composer’s slightly unhinged expression of extra-marital lust.

Immediately before the interval sat the work on the ticket, Elgar’s Cello Concerto, for which Soltani had been booked to make his RSNO debut. The first cello in Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra a decade ago, Soltani now has a global career as an orchestral soloist and chamber musician and his powerful yet precise performance of this most familiar of works made some passages leap into focus with startling clarity, although there may have been listeners looking for more obvious emotion in his playing.

The Adagio third movement was fulsome, and the cellist’s capacity for delicacy was nowhere clearer than in his encore of Reza Vali’s The Girl from Shiraz.

Hahn’s programming decisions around the work, while fascinating, did raise some questions about the way the music was used. If it is hard to say whether Crumb would have approved of the repurposing of his colourful way with wine glasses as a precursor to the Britten, but it seems likely that Wagner would have been less than pleased to be the hors d’oeuvre to the excesses of Scriabin.

It certainly seemed that the full passion of the RSNO strings was reserved for the closing piece, with all its echoes of Wagner and Strauss and leader Maya Iwabuchi adding perfectly measured soloing. In the Prelude to Tristan, on the other hand, the section leaders often seemed to be working hard to encourage their players to up their game. Perhaps there was an element of post-tour fatigue, given that the orchestra is newly returned from dates in China.

That said, the climaxes of the Poem of Ecstasy were epic and joyous, and Hahn paced his idiosyncratic evening with great skill, never over-directing his musicians but across all the details and urging them to full expression when it really mattered.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Kian Soltani in rehearsal by Clara Cowen/RSNO

Perth Festival: VOCES8

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St John’s Kirk, Perth

The members  of VOCES8 are too young (even sole original one, Barnaby Smith) to remember, but during their early ascendancy, The Beatles’ songwriting skills were favourably compared with those of Franz Schubert by the music critic of The Times.

So it was a nice conceit to bracket the German composer’s 1822 Schiller-setting Liebe, sung by four male voices from the octet, with a sextet version of Free As A Bird, the John Lennon song which the other Fab Four unearthed to add to the first volume of the Anthology reissues in 1995.

The segue was, however, one of only two sequences that survived from this small chamber choir’s planned programme, the other being the pairing of their equally well-known version of Kate Rusby’s Underneath the Stars and Joshua Pacey’s more recent arrangement of Danny Boy.

The recital they gave was an interesting answer to the question baritone Christopher Moore told us they are often asked: what does such a small unaccompanied group of singers do if one of their number is not in tip-top health.

Here it was one of the sopranos who took as limited a part as possible in the proceedings, and the repertoire was adjusted to take account for that. The result was an evening that leaned much more on the lighter side of the VOCES8 back catalogue.

It was a little briefer, but no less coherent, although the concert’s title, Give Me Your Stars, became a nonsense as it was taken from young composer Lucy Walker’s setting of words by American poet Sarah Teasdale, which, like Stardust by the ensemble’s composer-in-residence Taylor Scott Davis, we never heard.

But if those contemporary works written for the group were missing, the complexities of Renaissance polyphony were still there in the opening Regina Caeli by Victoria and William Byrd’s Praise our Lord, all ye Gentiles and devotional music still ended the first half with Holst’s Nunc Dimittis now preceded by Bobby McFerrin’s reworking of The 23rd Psalm and Arvo Part’s The Deer’s Cry, both masterpieces of elegant simplicity.

Apart from Eric Whitacre’s All Seems Beautiful to Me, and a very brief taste of Ward Swingle’s Bach at the start of the second half, the rest of the music was more pop, but brilliantly arranged and sung. The octet’s fondness for combining two songs in one featured in Jim Clements’ version of Bond themes For Your Eyes Only and You Only Live Twice, and Alexander L’Estrange’s of Fly Me To The Moon and Come Fly With Me.

The latter sat in the middle of the ensemble’s closing “jazz” sequence, which was really nothing of the kind as every note was precisely notated and rehearsed in the fine arrangements: of improvisation, there was none.

It is the detail of those settings that always fascinates. VOCES8 contributed their singular sound to Paul Simon’s most recent album, Seven Psalms, which explained the inclusion of Australian Naomi Crellin’s arrangement of Homeward Bound. In amongst its complexities it was still possible to hear the original harmonies of the Simon and Garfunkel hit properly given their place.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Andy Staples

Perth Festival: Secret Byrd / Ayoub Sisters

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St John’s Kirk, Perth/Perth Concert Hall

COME August, the Edinburgh International Festival will see the new collaboration by Owain Park’s precision vocal group Gesualdo Six and American director Bill Barclay’s Concert Theatre Works, Death of Gesualdo, in the Queen’s Hall.

So it was helpful that Perth Festival hosted two performances of the partnership’s previous show, Secret Byrd, created for the 400th anniversary of the death of composer William Byrd in 2023. It was also a major undertaking for director Helen Band and her volunteer board, who had to source almost all the props and staging and transform the city centre St John’s Kirk for the production – as well as masterminding the front-of-house arrangements for what was a superb promenade show.

With viol consort Fretwork providing the instrumental interludes from Byrd’s catalogue, the chief musical ingredients were the four and five-part Mass settings he wrote for clandestine services, as a Recusant Catholic himself. Hearing such powerful a cappella singing in the Kirk’s intimate acoustic was an utter joy, and – although they were referring to suitably antique-looking scores – the costumed choristers clearly know this music backwards now and blend together beautifully.

Secret Byrd is much more than a concert, the whole point being to recreate the tension and the dangers Roman Catholics faced during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, even if her majesty turned a benign blind eye to the beliefs of her favourite court composer for many years.

What was flagged as “Interruption” in the online programme, around two thirds through the sequence, could have been gunshots or just hammering at the door, but candles are extinguished and the priest bundled into hiding as the music stopped. Some of the audience members recruited to make up the table of twelve at the heart of the action look as alarmed as the performers.

The danger passed and the programme continued with counter-tenor Guy James delivering Byrd’s Elegy on the death of Thomas Tallis (Ye Sacred Muses). This immersive experience included soup and bread and a thimble-full of communion wine for all, and the musicians went about the business of bringing everyone into the story with practiced ease.

This year’s EIF programme also includes what has become a regular residency at The Hub by the Aga Khan Music Programme and its mission to share the classical music of other cultures was brought to mind by the Perth Festival’s opening day music in Perth Concert Hall from The Ayoub Sisters. Laura and Sarah may have grown up in Scotland but they use their conservatoire training on violin and cello to delve into their Egyptian and Arab heritage.

Others have gone down this road before them, notably Yo-Yo Ma with his Silk Road Project (after he had made his reputation with mainstream Western classical music), the Aga Khan Master Musicians, and even the flirtation with the sound of the souk by post-Led Zeppelin Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. The Ayoub Sisters used basic modern technology to make their less well-funded journey from a suburban Glasgow bedroom.

Their Saturday evening concert found them in the context of a quartet with the guitar of Giulio Romano Malaisi and the drum kit of Giovanni Velez – a last minute dep for their usual percussionist but you would never have known that had Laura not spilled the beans.

The crowd-pleasers were dispensed with early, culminating in a breakneck “Summer” from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, before a focus on their meticulously-sourced original repertoire, much of it taken from their self-released (post-Decca) Arabesque album.

There is a maturity to what the sisters are doing now that assuredly deserves investment – both from audiences as well as producers. This date was part of their ongoing tenth anniversary tour, so a sense of summing-up what they have done so far was appropriate. What is more exciting, however, is what they might go on to do now.

Keith Bruce

BBC SSO / Wigglesworth

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City Hall, Glasgow

ANTON Bruckner famously worried over his Symphony No 4 for many years – Sir Simon Rattle recently claimed to have found more than a dozen different versions of the work. By way of comparison, Ryan Wigglesworth reworking a piece originally commissioned by the Halle and the Bergen Phil – who gave the premiere six months before he became Chief Conductor of the BBC SSO – may just be coincidental, but there were other points of parallel.

As Bruckner symphonies are lengthy, so Wigglesworth’s Magnificat is longer than many a composer’s setting of Mary’s prayer; Sir James MacMillan’s is only a little over a third as long. At half an hour, Wigglesworth’s is a big concert piece on its own and it was programmed here as the filling in a Bruckner sandwich, preceded by and flowing from his Ave Maria, with the symphony following the interval.

This Magnificat breaks the Latin text down into five movements, which allows for a lot of exploration of texture in the orchestration but perhaps serves the totality of the poetry less well. There is, nonetheless, some lovely word-setting, both for the soprano soloist – the composer’s wife Sophie Bevan, to whom the work is dedicated – and a small chorus, the BBC Singers.

The single word of the title was thoroughly explored at the start, gently at first by Bevan before being taken up by the choir. It was in the second movement, Et exsultavit, that the soloist was able to show off her operatic power and range, while in the third she was partnered with the eleven men of the choir. The full choral ensemble had to wait until the finale and the rhythmic Sicut locutus est for its best ensemble showpiece.

Does the work lack the coherence of brevity? Perhaps. There are times when Wigglesworth’s exploration of the capabilities of his large orchestral forces seems a little “Young People’s Guide”, but there are some wonderfully original uses of combinations of instruments and textures. Musically, if not lyrically, the structure of the piece is very beguiling even if its emotional heart is not revealed until the tutti of the last section.

Bevan sang at both the Bergen Phil premiere with conductor Ed Gardner and the Halle’s first performance in Manchester three years ago, with her husband conducting, where he teamed it with Mahler, whose approach to Bruckner 4 was to cut it. Wigglesworth’s context here seemed especially apposite though, and his direction of the Bruckner symphony as good as it gets, for a symphony that is the composer’s most accessible but slightly looked down upon by serious devotees. That “Romantic” label probably doesn’t help.

To my ears the SSO strings (across all sections) and brass were the conductor’s best allies on the night. Although principal horn Chris Gough was obviously awarded the first solo bow at the curtain-call, it had not been his finest hour. The composer’s replacement Scherzo is probably his most recognisable music to many ears, and it was crisply rendered in this performance, and the Beethovian echoes in the recapitulations of the Finale were unmistakeable. The handling of the diminuendo before the third (or fourth) last climax by Wigglesworth and the SSO strings was world class.

The concert was recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on June 11 and will be available for 30 days thereafter on BBC Sounds.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Ryan Wigglesworth by Gordon Burniston

BBC SSO / Hoving

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City Halls, Glasgow

A little more than a year ago, young Finn Emilia Hoving made an instant impression conducting a demanding and colourful programme with the RSNO. Now here she was at the helm of the BBC Scottish for another testing concert of new music alongside an established repertoire favourite which was an unqualified triumph. It would be good to think that she might become a more regular feature on the podium in Scotland.

We can assume the opener was her choice. Finnish composer Outi Tarkiainen’s The Rapids of Life is a majestic piece of contemporary orchestral expressionism that has its inspiration in her own experience of giving birth and as a memorial to her illustrious kinswoman composer Kaija Saariaho, whose death occurred during the process of composition and to whom it is dedicated.

The BBC SSO co-commissioned The Rapids of Life and this was its UK premiere, for which Tarkiainen was in the audience. The audience – filling the lower level of the Grand Hall on Sunday afternoon – loved the piece, which is full of great organic swells of sound and delicious details from cello, flute and trumpet as well as contrabass clarinet, harp and celesta.

Its ten minutes or so would have been a normal serving of freshly minted music in many an orchestral programme, but it was the appetiser for the new accordion concerto written for Ryan Corbett by Jay Capperauld that followed. Almost all the work we hear from the Ayrshire composer at the moment is for and by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, where he is Associate Composer, but this piece was premiered last year by Corbett with the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland, and was richly deserving of this second hearing.

Capperauld’s fascination with the darker corners of science history are to the fore in Galvanic Dances, starting from the 18th century experiments of Luigi Galvani and the effects of electricity on moribund organic material, which also led to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

John Dowland, Tchaikovsky and Gregorian chant get the nod in a work that is quintessential Capperauld, which is to say both dramatic and often funny, albeit in a dark way. With four microphones on his instrument, the BBC were taking no chances in capturing the virtuosic work of the soloist, which will be well worth catching when the concert is broadcast.

Capperauld has written Corbett a very testing score, which he despatched, from memory, with unflustered poise. The unusualness of the accordion as a concerto instrument was immediately irrelevant, although there were bars recalling Jimmy Shand, Astor Piazzolla and Jack Emblow if you wanted to hear them. With widescreen cinematic orchestral scoring, but there were also moments that resembled American post-minimalism and Hoving clearly revelled in her job, with all the changes in tempo and dynamics of the work.

Corbett had a number of cadenzas, and one gently arpeggiating figure introduced the calmest section of the piece, although its delicacy still seemed a little sinister in the composer’s style.

Capperauld was also in the hall to be cheered to the rafters at the work’s end, and the confident swagger of his composition found an apposite echo after the interval in the “Montagues and Capulets” opening of Hoving’s selection from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet ballet music.

It was a generous one, opening and closing with pairs of movements from the composer’s Suite No. 2, bracketing five from the Suite No. 1. With minimal pauses, Hoving made the full three-quarters of an hour flow symphonically and there were too many solo turns of quality from the SSO players to name, but Gareth Brady’s tenor sax was an essential addition and punctuation from the snare drum absolutely on point.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Ryan Corbett by Andrej Grilc

RSNO / Karabits

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

UKRANIAN conductor Kirill Karabits opened his first concerts in Scotland for some years with a work that paralleled the Stravinsky classic that ended it. The classic was The Firebird, the Diaghilev-commissioned ballet music that established the composer, based on a Russian folk-tale.

Karabits has championed the work of Azerbaijan’s Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, who celebrates her 79th birthday in ten days’ time and is a leading musical voice in her homeland. Her Nagillar, premiered at the Lucerne Festival in 2002, is a musical telling of a magical adventure story from the 1001 Nights which requires an orchestra of similar size to The Firebird and also begins on the string basses, whose ensemble performance was one of the highlights of the night.

Stravinsky’s narrative is much longer and more spacious, with room for wind and brass soloists to show off their individual virtuosity, and Karabits made sure that the most propulsive music, which the composer would develop even more in The Rite of Spring, was driven and exciting.

Nagillar is just as intense and much more compact, the magic carpet of its orchestral riches keeping the tale flying from the big opening chord through to a subtler conclusion, with the strings and harp to the fore. Karabits’ enthusiasm for the piece is well-founded and it is a chunky programme-opener that the RSNO should keep in its library.

Fine though both these works were, it was Elgar’s Violin Concerto and soloist Nicola Benedetti that ensured the concert was a sell-out. Like The Firebird it also dates from 1910, but it is a peculiarity of its history since 1932, when a very young Yehudi Menuhun was the soloist, that its duration in performance is still a talking point.

Last year Christian Tetzlaff released a recording with conductor John Storgards that was as brisk as Elgar originally intended, and very different from one by Vilde Frang and Robin Ticciati from the previous year. Twenty years previously, Nigel Kennedy was also respectful of the more deliberate interpretation of Menuhin, as was – perhaps less surprisingly – Benedetti in her 2020 recording.

Karabits and she maintained that same approach live, although her playing made light of the enormous technical demands in both the first and third movements. They are the most captivating of the piece – especially the finale – and the Andante slow movement, while lyrical enough, lacks a big Elgar tune to make the whole work as popular as some of his other music.

For all its intricacies, however, the concerto does have a compelling arc to its shape, which both soloist and conductor communicated perfectly, with the RSNO responding superbly. The playing of the strings before, during and after the virtuosic third movement cadenza was instinctively complementary, and the reception unarguably as much for the music as for the star soloist.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Sally Jubb

Cumnock Tryst: Launch Recital

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Cumnock Old Church

No need to worry when one of the extraordinary Kanneh-Mason clan call off a concert engagement. Among seven talented siblings there will always be one who can step into the breach. For this occasion – the now customary annual Cumnock Tryst Launch Recital – it was down to pianist Jeneba Kanneh-Mason to fill the shoes of her cello-playing older brother Sheku, currently recovering long-term from a persistent hand injury.

The event itself served two aims: for Festival founder and artistic director Sir James MacMillan to reveal his 4-day programme for the upcoming 2026 Cumnock Tryst Festival in October (see details here); and to fulfil the Tryst’s wider policy of programming one-off concerts throughout the year. 

On Saturday, nothing whatsoever was lost by the familial substitution. In her well-balanced hour-long Cumnock programme, 23-year-old Jeneba Kanneh-Mason glided through a sequence of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and Florence Price that exhibited not only a supercharged technique, but also a deep-rooted curiosity of the music’s inner soul, its emotional and stylistic challenges, and most teasingly its intellectual surprises. 

She opened with Bach’s Partita No 5 in G. This was a performance that gripped from the moment she touched the keys, her finger work distinguished by exhilarating definition, her detailed interpretation akin to acute forensic analysis of the music’s inner workings. The directional flow over the seven movements was effortlessly compelling, the final Gigue arriving like some wild contrapuntal maelstrom. 

Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in D minor, the so-called ‘Tempest’, provided more open space for Kanneh-Mason to explore. It’s a work dating from the composer’s troubled exile in Heiligenstadt, reflected in the questioning mood and contrasting tempi of the opening movement. There was certainly a structural understanding of that in Kanneh-Mason’s considered approach, its understated nature feeding over into a slow movement filled with lyrical eloquence, yet downplaying any suggestions of unrest in the left hand’s suggestive drum rolls. If by this point the sonata felt a little like work in progress for the pianist, she redeemed herself with a Finale brisling with dramatic verve. 

Two Chopin Ballades followed: No 3 in A flat, an easeful stream of Romantically-expressed storytelling, which the pianist delivered with easeful enchantment; and No 4 in F minor, an altogether more beguiling work, which Kanneh-Mason responded to with both Siren-like allure and fiery intensity. 

She ended her recital with Fantasie Nègre No 1 in E minor by the early 20th century African-American composer Florence Price. The piece itself invokes a menagerie of influences, a heavily-used spiritual – “Sinner, Please Don’t Let This Harvest Pass” – holding its own amid a swirling sea of Liszt, Brahms, snatches of Impressionism, hints of jazz, you name it. Not the most convincing piece of music, but saved by another flawless, persuasive performance from Kanneh-Mason.

Ken Walton

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