Like Mozart and Haydn, although closer to the successful marriage of the former than the matrimonial disaster of the latter, Dvorak settled for the sister. And like Wolfgang’s Constanze, Anna seems to have coped with Antonin’s initial hopes of the hand of her older sibling; perhaps the success of her husband’s Cello Concerto helped.
Its deeply moving central slow movement, is, however, an elegiac statement of lasting affection for Josefina, who was gravely ill at the time it was written. Was Steven Isserlis’s performance of it with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra as heart-rending as it can be? Not really, but the strengths of the all-Dvorak programme that launched the SCO’s new season were not always emotional ones.
Introducing the concert, the orchestra’s own first cello, Philip Higham, praised Isserlis’s peerless way with the story of the concerto. It is a narrative he’s been giving with other orchestras in France and Germany recently, and to which he’ll return in Paris next month. What lifted this telling was the partnership with the SCO, conductor Maxim Emelyanychev perfectly supportive but also characteristically imaginative in his highlighting of details of the orchestral writing.
The opening bars on the winds enticed the ear in a “once upon a time” way, and the pacing and dynamics of the opening movement were such a secure foundation that Isserlis seemed to respond with more expression as the work unfolded. It was a reading that built in impact so that the moment of wistfulness from first violin Marcus Barcham Stevens, in dialogue with the soloist near the end, was especially effective.
Emelyanychev was even more persuasive on the composer’s Eighth Symphony, its robust outer movements bracketing a memorably spacious Adagio and a sparkling triple time Allegretto. The SCO winds – especially first flute Andre Cebrian and principal clarinet Maximiliano Martin – were on stellar form from the start, and the balance the conductor achieved in Perth’s fine acoustic on the slow movement was magical while the waltz became the definitive statement of Dvorak’s skill in making orchestral music from folk ingredients.
The real indulgence of the programme was the opener, the largest forces being required for the briefest piece, the 1891 Carnival Overture. The three chaps on tambourine, triangle and cymbals deservedly took a bow for their part in the pin sharp rhythms, but the low brass and double basses made as distinctive a contribution to what was a most memorable beginning to the chamber orchestra’s new season.
Keith Bruce
The SCO’s Celebration of Dvorak is repeated on Thursday and Friday, September 26 & 27 at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall and Glasgow City Halls.
The RSNO opens its new season next week and Keith Bruce finds the musicians’ schedule is fuller than it has ever been.
When the RSNO moved from the Henry Wood Hall to its bespoke new home next to Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Killermont Street, the most extravagant of the new facilities was the accommodation afforded the principal timpanist, then Martin Gibson. The capacious room for preparing new drum skins and its adjacent storage was swiftly dubbed “The Gibson Suite” by the violinists who shared less backstage space, ironically echoing the name of Scottish Opera’s corporate entertaining salon in the nearby Theatre Royal.
It couldn’t last, as the current holder of the timpani chair, Paul Philbert, doubtless recognises. The Gibson Suite is no more – and the percussion store is now unrecognisable as the Iain and Pamela Sinclair Control Room, a state-of-the-art recording and mixing facility that is the technical hub of the orchestra’s successful, bold and expanding venture into film and digital arts.
Named for the legacy left to the RSNO which part-funded it, the room is home to a 96-channel desk, a full wall of monitor screens offering images of the orchestra’s performance rehearsal and space (the so-called “New Auditorium”) and the film being sound-tracked, and multiple monitor speakers that relay the score being created in surround-sound. The room is “double-height”, taking up two floors of the backstage building, meaning the control room is a very rare beast indeed, certainly in Europe.
That is crucial for the work the RSNO is now doing for film, television and video games, almost all of it coming to the UK from the USA (taking advantage of tax-breaks), and increasing the earnings of RSNO staff players, guests from other orchestras and the pool of freelancers the Scottish music scene sustains and on whom it depends.
Making all this happen is a new company, Scottish Digital Arts, which describes itself as a contractor for the RSNO, and operates entirely in the commercial field, beyond the vagaries and uncertainties of arts funding. Long-standing RSNO orchestra manager Ewen McKay and Paul Talkington, whom chief executive Alistair Mackie knew as a well-connected liaison man in the film music field from his trumpet-playing days in London, are directors of the new company, and it is bringing a continuous flow of work to Scotland’s Studio, as the RSNO is justifiably proud to call the installation.
Last week I was invited to witness an afternoon session at the studio, sitting at the back of the control room and then donning headphones behind the musicians under conductor Allan Wilson, another ex-trumpeter, who has forty years’ experience on the podium for films and games.
A brief September heatwave was happening outside, but the air-conditioning issue would have been exercising Alistair Mackie anyway. Servicing the state-of-the-art technology that has been installed in the new control room with cool air is a Heath Robinson set-up that was fitted in days at a cost of around £10,000. Mackie ordered the quick fix to protect the new equipment when it became clear that the RSNO’s landlord, the City Council’s arms-length culture and sport body Glasgow Life, was unable to urgently upgrade the existing ventilation of the internal room and was looking at an eye-watering contractor’s bill for the work ten times that figure.
Alistair Mackie
It is hard not to see that as sadly typical. While the control room bears the name of an RSNO benefactor, the space where the music is made – acoustically far superior to the concert hall next door – is still identified as the “new” auditorium while Glasgow Life waits for a sponsor’s name to grace it, seeking such support with no conspicuous application.
By contrast, Scottish Digital Arts must surely be in the running for some sort of business start-up success award. Although the actors’ strike in Hollywood created a hiatus in film production, the list of work that has passed through Scotland’s Studio is already highly impressive. That includes music for the Ubisoft games Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Star Wars: Outlaws and film music for MGM, Lionsgate, Sony, Paramount, Apple and Netflix. Kevin Costner, Denzel Washington and Jennifer Lopez, and composers Terence Blanchard and Lorne Balfe are names gracing recent films with RSNO soundtracks.
Sometimes the filmmakers send over a team to work in Glasgow – with all the economic benefits that brings to the city – but as often the composer, director and producers join the process remotely, watching and hearing the music take form in exactly the same way as the engineers in the control room.
That was the case for the recording I witnessed, of music by Tim Williams of a new version of the Nativity story called Mary, with Israeli actress Noa Cohen in the title role and Anthony Hopkins as Herod. Filming in Morocco finished at the start of April, and the completion of the soundtrack is one of the last elements of post-production of a project expected to go out on a well-known streaming service before Christmas.
Even with all the latest digital technology, recording music is a painstaking, meticulous process, but the professionalism of the Scottish musicians means that it can promise around seven minutes of orchestral score from a three-hour session, which is a rate of production as good as anywhere in the world. Bar by bar, the RSNO strings – supplemented by familiar faces from the SCO and Scottish Ensemble – laid down the score, with Williams giving instruction to the conductor and the engineers from California.
It was, by happy coincidence, the central event of the birth of Jesus in the stable acquiring its music as I watched. The composer’s requests were very specific, tweaking the dynamics of expression in the printed score he had delivered, and adding some bass notes where he felt he hadn’t quite achieved the effect he’d hoped.
Annotating the sheet-music in front of them as they go, the players responded with speed and precision. Williams was clearly delighted with the results: “You can’t beat that performance,” he enthused.
It is a multilayered exercise, with low strings and first violins often occupying separate tracks, and solos added on top. The RSNO’s principal cello Pei-Jee Ng had a few bars of solo overdub that amounted to half a minute of music, for which he offered subtle variations in expression before the composer and he were satisfied. In fact it was the cellist himself who insisted on a fifth take, the result earning praise from across the Pond as well as the stomping approval of his colleagues.
Escorted by studio manager Hedd Morfett-Jones into the back of the studio floor, one-ear headphones allowed me to hear the process from the musicians’ perspective. This is a very different job from playing a concert, the left ear having the time-keeping click-track, what is being recorded, plus some elements of the other sounds on the film (but not the dialogue), while the right is open to the sound in the room, of your own instrument and the instructions from the conductor.
With ten minutes of the session to go, Williams was anxious to get a couple of “passes” in the can, but there was no let-up in his specific wishes, asking the players to “lean in” to the accents in one passage, keep another section “warm and light” and another “as magical and wondrous as possible.”
This is musical multi-tasking at a high level, but it is well worth the players honing these skills. The work they are doing for films and games is beyond their RSNO contracts of 24 hours a week and a six-hour day. Mackie says there was no point in trying to renegotiate the musicians’ terms to eke out a few extra hours, such was the ambition for Scotland’s Studio and Scottish Digital Arts. So although this growing element of the RSNO’s work is bringing money to the orchestra via its new commercial offshoot, the lion’s share of it is going directly to the players.
Of course that has concomitant benefits for the orchestra, the audience and the cultural life of the nation. From being among the lowest paid of UK orchestral musicians, a back desk RSNO string player prepared to put in the extra hours on soundtrack work can be instead among the best remunerated. The orchestra can offer a very enticing package to new recruits, the quality of the ensemble is maintained and enhanced, and concertgoers hear the music they love and buy tickets for every week played as well as anywhere in the world.
A virtuous circle ensures that Scotland’s national orchestra has a global reputation that keeps Hollywood and Silicon Glen knocking on the door. From the viewpoint of a classical music aficionado in Scotland, the RSNO’s investment in tapping into that market is surely a very sound bet in the vexed, adversarial and sometimes plain toxic climate of arts funding in the 21st century.
The RSNO season opens with Mahler’s Second Symphony under the baton of Music Director Thomas Sondergard on Friday October 4 at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall and Saturday October 5 in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.
Claire Booth talks to Keith Bruce about the Helen Grime premiere she is giving with the BBC SSO this week and her brace of recordings to mark Schoenberg 150.
Predictably, the BBC SSO is selling its season-opener under the baton of Chief Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth (Thursday at Glasgow City Halls, repeated Friday at Aberdeen Music Hall) on the second half’s performance of Mahler 5 with its cheery Death in Venice Adagietto, one of classical music’s cross-over bankables.
Before audiences indulge in that familiar wallow, however, there is a rather special first half: the world premiere of a substantial new work by Helen Grime, a composer with family roots in North East Scotland and significant friendship with both the conductor and the soloist, soprano Claire Booth. It is entitled Folk, and is a four-song orchestral cycle inspired by Zoe Gilbert’s award-winning novel, and, more obliquely, the mentoring of the late composer and conductor Oliver Knussen.
“It doesn’t say ‘commissioned by Claire Booth’ on the score but the idea came from me,” the singer explains.
“Helen and I were both very close to Oliver Knussen, as was Ryan Wigglesworth. Oli was so generous in promoting other people’s work, when he died I was conscious to try and build something in the group of musicians that he has encouraged. It felt so right to try to put something together with Helen.
“I adored Zoe Gilbert’s book Folk, which is sort of a UK version of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, with a community of characters that are both real and slightly non-human. In Zoe’s novel some of the characters have come from the sea, or have wings for arms, but they are rooted in this northern community. As soon as I read it I thought I’d love to see it brought to musical life.
“I approached Helen with the book and said I’d love us to do an orchestral piece based on it. She loved the book as well, so Zoe, Helen, her publisher and I had meetings about how we might do it and who we might collaborate with. Given Helen’s own Scottish heritage and with Ryan at the BBC Scottish it felt like the right group – and it may go to Aldeburgh next year where both Ryan and I have strong affiliations.
“The strength of the commission is not only the music but also that we are all invested in it. Although he worked very hard on his own music, what Oli Knussen loved was to curate a concert of other composers’ work. Ryan and I met him at the same time and we became friendly through that. The composers that Oli enabled included both Helen and Ryan, and we are a group of like-minded souls who look at music in the same way.”
Composer Helen Grime (portrait by Benjamin Ealovega)
The outsider was quickly brought into the fold.
“Zoe was tasked with creating a libretto from her book. There were conversations about which of the characters would create an overview of the world she created. We decided on four of the stories and Zoe distilled their essence into a first person narrative.
“The first song is a right-of-passage for the boys in the community and it is a vibrant earthy start, and then there are three female characters who have their stories. It is not poetry, but is led by the drama. That’s great for a performer, because while it is lovely to put over esoteric poetry, it is always nice to come at a work from a dramatic perspective.”
Although much distanced in years and style, there is a parallel with the concert piece that has occupied much of Booth’s attention in 2024, Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, in structure and the forces onstage.
“The Grime is a substantial work of four songs of about the same duration, but it is very different from the Strauss and definitely won’t be Helen’s four last songs! It is also a large-scale work and that’s the joy – there are more similarities than differences, I think.
“There is a breadth of repertoire that informs everything I do: they might seem contrary but to combine singing the Four Last Songs with Britten or with this new work is what music-making is all about.
“The wonderful thing about doing the Strauss is that it is such a perfect reminder of the importance of singing well. It is a great challenge to the singer, and I’m thrilled that my voice has developed to the point where I can approach that piece and know I can give a strong account of it. Far from it feeling like an insurmountable Everest, it is so beautifully written that it allows you to really sing these huge sweeping melismatic lines.”
The other composer that has commanded the soprano’s attention this year is Arnold Schoenberg.
“Schoenberg 150th birthday has been an opportunity to highlight his work but I’ve sung Schoenberg almost as much as I’ve sung Birtwistle. He’s one of the composers that have accompanied me throughout my career and particularly his Pierrot Lunaire, which was why I was delighted to work on that and bring something out this year.
“I think I’m the first British artist to record it since Jane Manning’s very special recording in the 1980s and if I can do one tenth of what she did in terms of advocation of new music I’ll be delighted.
“I’ve done many performances of Pierrot Lunaire in my time, starting with working with Pierre Boulez and including working with Jane, so I feel confident in what I bring to the work.
“People rightly say there are different ways of approaching it, but there are notes on the page and there are performers who don’t sing them. We wouldn’t think of doing that with other repertoire – there should be an ease and a fluidity to Sprechgesang, but it is not ‘free’. Schoenberg complained that he never heard an accurate performance, so it mattered to him.
“The vocal line is absolutely part of the instrumental sound-world. The chord and harmonic structures have to be accurate. Then you can have all the fun you want with the characterisation, as you might do with a role like the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro.
“Ensemble 360 and I were working together towards a live show and we cohered immediately so decided to get more out it, contextualising the piece with other composers’ responses to that Pierrot figure. Instead of presenting it with another work of Second Viennese School brilliance, our disc comes with a smorgasbord of Schumann, Amy Beach, Thea Musgrave, Kowalski and Debussy.
Her other Schoenberg project continued her partnership with pianist Christopher Glynn.
“The lieder disc that I’ve done with Chris Glynn is the fourth in a series of retrospectives of composers whose vocal music is probably not the most important part of their output. We started with Percy Grainger, then Edvard Grieg, pairing his piano music with the songs, then Modest Mussorgsky, whose operas seem male-focused but whose songs often have female protagonists.
“Schoenberg would have been an obvious next step, even had it not been his anniversary. We don’t really know his lieder, and audiences and promoters alike can dismiss Schoenberg as solely somebody who wrote in a complex atonal style that they have decided is ‘difficult’.
“I believe audiences wouldn’t think it difficult because of all the other stuff we now listen to, and our disc has dirty cabaret songs, religion-inspired stuff, folk songs and highbrow art songs. The guy had such breadth, purely in his vocal writing, and there was so much we didn’t have space and time to include.
“When you think how much of the film and pop music we know could not have been written without having an understanding of atonality, there are too many promoters that don’t give audiences the opportunity to hear Schoenberg’s music. I hope this will encourage young singers to learn his songs.”
All of which has perhaps meant that Booth has been seen less on the opera stage than some of her fans might like. She was an acclaimed Rosina in the first revival of Scottish Opera’s Tom Allen-directed Barber of Seville in 2011 and has sung both soprano roles in the well-travelled Harry Fehr staging of Handel’s Orlando, first seen at the Glasgow’s Theatre Royal earlier the same year.
“Some artists spend their entire career in the opera house, and that has never been my life. I can’t complain that I’ve spent less time on the opera stage in the last few years when the three-operas-a-year that other singers will do is not for me. I wouldn’t have the breadth of projects I enjoy if I had worked in that way.
“I am so excited about collaborating on my own projects that sometimes taking a large portion of time to do an opera can be hard to make work. I haven’t taken an active step back, it’s just the way my career has gone.
“I’d love to do Shostakovich and more Janacek, and a few more Handel roles. It’s characters that attract me, like Lady Macbeth of Mstensk, and Jenufa is my desert island choice, but I’m not sure anyone is going to cast me in that so I’ll just sing it in the bathroom.”
Claire Booth sings Helen Grimes with the BBC SSO on Thursday in Glasgow and Friday in Aberdeen. Expressionist Music, with pianist Christopher Glynn, is on Orchid Classics and Portraits of Pierrot, with Ensemble 360, is on Onyx Classics.
An organisation that has never had its troubles to seek, the present difficulties of Creative Scotland may be traced to the announcement during last year’s Lammermuir Festival that the event would receive no further funding – and the festival’s robust response to that decision.
In the professional media and the free-for-all of its “social” cousin, the debate about depleted arts funding in Scotland has now become predictably polarised between those who put the blame at the door of the Scottish Government and those who condemn the quango. Meanwhile artists and arts organisations persist in producing the goods, as Lammermuir is doing.
It has some valuable friends, both in its supporters, whose lobbying produced some reversal of the Creative Scotland decision, and its creative partners.
Directly-funded Scottish Opera is one of those, and it now gives its audience elsewhere a chance to see the work it makes for Lammermuir. That means the clever production of Britten’s Albert Herring which played Haddington Corn Exchange will also be seen in repertory with Donizetti’s Don Pasquale in Glasgow and Edinburgh this autumn.
Those transfers will require some re-design because Daisy Evans’ production sat very snugly in this venue, with a 13-piece band, under conductor William Cole, playing their socks off. The ensemble cast was a little uneven individually, but terrific as a group, with some outstanding solo turns and a very accomplished performance by tenor Glen Cunningham in the title role.
What Evans’ staging demonstrated was that the social satire of Eric Crozier’s libretto still works alarmingly well almost 80 years after the work’s premiere, and in a way it might not have done two or three decades ago. It’s a shame then, that some of the business did not match the detail of the text – and Britten’s immaculately tailored music. It is easy to overlook such small anomalies in revivals of Mozart or Verdi, but it jarred here.
A Dunedin Consort visit to Crichton Collegiate Church, near Pathhead and actually in Midlothian, has become another important Lammermuir ingredient. The star vocal soloist this year was counter-tenor Alexander Chance, who is surely now at the absolute peak of his abilities.
Those who have heard Chance’s voice fill Edinburgh’s Usher Hall would know that he needed much less than full-power in this small church’s impeccable acoustic, much used for chamber recordings. In precision and detail, from the notes on the score through inspired ornamentation to perfect Latin diction, Chance was flawless on repertoire by Vivaldi and others who made their name in the Vienna of the 18th century.
He didn’t have it all his own way, however, with familiar Dunedin instrumentalists including violinists Matthew Truscott and Huw Daniel, cellist Jonathan Manson, oboist Alexandra Bellamy and Jan Waterfield on chamber organ joined by bassoonist Inga Maria Klaucke, whose circular breathing with an early instrument on a Vivaldi concerto opened a revelatory programme.
It seems remarkable now that American pianist Jeremy Denk was not very well known in the UK when he first visited Lammermuir as a bold mid-pandemic hero in 2021, because he now looks so perfectly at home in the multi-purpose arena of Dunbar Parish Church.
His solo recital there was classic Denk, a second half of Brahms and Schumann played with just the right balance of precision pianism and performative expression, preceded by a delicious smorgasbord of pieces by female composers from Clara Schumann and Louise Farrenc to Missy Mazzoli and Phyllis Chen.
Presented in pairs that matched older composers with (mostly) living ones, it was as eloquent a case for the variety of women’s musical voices as any musician has devised, and would send any players in the audience in search of the works of Cecile Chaminade, Amy Beach, Ruth Crawford Seeger and Meredith Monk.
Denk’s first appearance in Dunbar this year was a demonstration of the possibilities of the venue. It reunited him with violinist Maria Wloszczowska for all four of the sonatas of Charles Ives, to celebrate the composer’s 150th birthday.
Their performances were virtuosic and compelling, but the genius of the concert was the presence of local choir Garleton Singers, conducted by Stephen Doughty, and a wind band from East Lothian Schools and the local community. The choir, stage left, sang half a dozen hymns through the programme – melodies that appeared in different guise in the sonatas – and the instrumentalists, at the back of the space, added three John Philip Sousa marches, as played by the street bands heard by the composer, directed by his father.
The first of those was The Liberty Bell, best known in Britain as the theme tune for Monty Python’s Flying Circus. If a voice had then intoned “And now for something completely different”, it would not have been wide of the mark.
Few of us are likely to have heard Ernest Chausson’s Concert for Violin, Piano and String Quartet, a hybrid tour de force that may ostensibly look like a work for piano sextet, but manifests itself more dramatically as a kind of concerto grosso in which the solo violin and hard-working pianist function as the prime protagonists against the supportive function of the quartet.
Dunbar Parish Church was the perfect sounding board for this rare Lammermuir Festival performance, its resplendent acoustics remarkable in allowing a voluminous amplification of the string sound, yet still facilitating intricate and exuberant clarity. This was the first of two programmes by the Maxwell Quartet, joined for this particular work by Canadian violinist Diana Cohen and Israeli pianist Roman Rabinovich.
Prior to the Chausson, the first half had revealed the Maxwells in tip-top form and in two areas of performance they have made their own: Haydn quartets, and their own uniquely inspired arrangements of traditional Scots melodies.
They opened with Haydn’s Quartet in F minor, Op20 No5, its crafted subtleties never too shadowy, never too brazen, furnished with enough endearing ambivalence to capture the moodiness lurking beneath the quiet optimism. Beyond a crisp but questioning opening movement and more relaxed Menuetto, the Siciliano-like lilt of the Adagio offered some nostalgic respite before the fugal directness and contained ebullience of the finale.
Where the Haydn brought finesse, excitement, stylistic integrity and fortifying virtuosity from an ensemble currently at the height of its game, the Scots arrangements – ranging from a quirkily-scored bagpipe tune to neatly-elaborated fiddle tunes by Neil Gow and Nathaniel Gow – were as welcome for the tastefulness of their conception as the bewitching perfection of their delivery.
Then the Chausson, a lengthy but wholly satisfying glimpse into a work that surely deserves greater exposure than it has to date, and certainly throws up a realisation that this short-lived French composer had more to offer than the lazy tendency to pass him off as another French sub-Romantic touched by the influences of Massenet, Wagner and Franck.
Yes, there are hallmarks of Franck in a dramatic opening motif that dominates the soul of the massive opening movement, which these players expressed in the most thrilling fashion. But is there not also a sense, in the evocative whole tone references and gestures of expressionist excess, that Chausson, in this 1890s work, was edging into the searching sound worlds of Debussy, perhaps even early Schoenberg? Such adventurousness was certainly captured in Thursday’s performance.
It was there again in the dreaminess of the short Sicilienne, followed by a slow movement soaked in melancholy, its descending chromatic lines gnawingly tragic. The mood lifted for a whirlwind finale, the eccentric rhythms and ferocious energy carrying a full-blooded performance to its gripping end. The prominent sweetness of Cohen’s violin playing and exhaustive virtuosity of Rabinovich’s pianism integrated seamlessly with the ever-reliable joie-de-vivre of the Maxwells.
Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas is one of operatic history’s charmers: a turgid tale of woe, misdirected pride and magical deception born of the elaborate English masque tradition; some great tunes, from jaunty sailors’ dances and mood-swinging recitative to Dido’s immortal Lament; and accessible enough to be tackled by the broadest abilities.
It was an inspired choice by Pitlochry Festival Theatre and Scots Opera Project to take their hour-long Dido out of doors, stage it in the venue’s diminutive woodland amphitheatre, in a production by Scots Opera Project director and singer David Douglas that chose simplicity over spectacle and a novel Scots/Gaelic translation by Michael Dempster and Marcas Mac an Tuairneir. Hugely against this summer’s odds, the sun shone for Saturday’s lunchtime opening performance. The Gods appeared to be with us.
They give Dido a rough ride, of course, the Queen of Carthage whose misjudgment of her lover Aeneas and her false manipulation by the Witches lead to her suicide, despite the heartfelt counselling of her friend Belinda. Soprano Emma Morwood, fresh from her sparkling last-minute call-up in the Edinburgh International Festival’s recent closing performance of Capriccio, steals the show in her central role, warmly engaging, packed with expressive fluidity and sung with piercing purity.
Everything and everyone revolves around her in a production that plays safe with the confined performance space, if in turn limiting in the scope it gives the supporting Community Chorus. Colleen Nicoll’s Belinda took time to open up on Saturday, but soon evolved into a glowing portrayal, as capable of bitter anguish as of gentleness and affection. The work, itself, portrays Aenaes rather two-dimensionally, which makes any singer’s job a challenge. Colin Murray plays it coolly, if a little too much at times.
The Witches, festooned with wiry twigs like wild dryads, are on fire, inspired by Ulrika Wutscher’s sneering and enticing Sorceress. Her sidekicks, a coven extracted largely from the main chorus, amplify the menace of their hateful actions. The complete chorus, facially animated and rigidly disciplined, compensate their tonal rawness with accuracy and efficiency. The reduced score is well-served by a diminutive trio of musicians – violinist Claire Telford, cellist Peter Harvey and keyboardist/musical director Andrew Johnston – acting like a rear wheel drive from its hindmost position and remarkably stylish.
To those familiar with the synopsis, the often indistinctness of the translated text on Saturday probably mattered little. In the end, Purcell’s music and this idyllic natural setting were, like the weather, a much-welcomed ray of sunshine.
RESIDENCIES by orchestras (and opera and theatre companies) are nothing new at the Edinburgh International Festival, but they had become rarer than in the event’s earliest years because of the speed, convenience and lower cost of international travel.
Environmental concerns and accountability for carbon footprints brought the residency back to the top of the agenda, and that process was accelerated by the rethink necessary during the years of the Covid pandemic.
This year’s Festival music programme was built around a series of residencies and ended with the most varied of them all when the London’s Philharmonia arrived for a four-concert sequence at the Usher Hall and a Virtual Reality outreach project that took their work to a housing estate in Broomhouse.
That last ingredient, which also involved the Festival’s artistic director Nicola Benedetti as violin soloist, is another step on the path of sustainable musical practice that recent events and thinking are bringing about.
The technology that was installed at the Space@Broomhouse Hub during the last week of EIF 2024 is nothing new to the Philharmonia, which has been working with Virtual Reality for a decade. Some of their earlier VR films can be seen in old-fashioned 2D on the orchestra’s YouTube channel, but that cannot compare with the experience of hearing and seeing Benedetti and the Philharmonia play The Lark Ascending via a VR headset.
Recorded at Battersea Arts Centre, with the musicians, under the leadership and direction of Benjamin Marquise Gilmour, playing in-the-round, the film and soundtrack places the viewer in their midst, with 360-degree vision of the performance. It is genuinely immersive, to correctly employ a term much abused at this year’s Festival Fringe.
The perspective of the view changes during the performance, specifically geared to the role of the violin soloist during the work’s 20 minutes, but throughout a turn of the head allows the viewer to look instead at the wind players or sections of the strings. Not only is every detail of the instrumentalists’ skills visible up-close, but their interpretation of the score is minutely appreciable. Beautifully lit and perfectly recorded, this is cutting-edge technology in the service of access to artistic excellence. Parties of schoolchildren and the elderly citizens of Broomhouse were equally wowed by the experience.
In the Usher Hall, the Philharmonia’s live appearance began and ended with captivating performances of a more conventional sort. Not that conventional, however, in the case of the National Youth Choir of Scotland’s contribution to Julia Wolfe’s Fire in my Mouth.
Christopher Bell’s young singers have surely done the Bang on a Can composer a great service in showing that her moving work about the New York garment factory blaze that claimed 146 lives at the start of the 20th century can be sung and acted by non-professionals. With the Philharmonia’s Principal Guest Conductor Marin Alsop on the podium, this was a superb UK premiere of a brilliant contemporary piece, and a repetition for the orchestra’s home audience in London would be the least it deserves.
The young women of NYCOS not only dealt with the tricky rhythmic demands of the score, singing in Yiddish and Italian as well as English, but had learned a wealth of fully-costumed movement, with props, that filled the stage and stalls during a few days of rehearsal. With highly effective film content part of this project too, and the Philharmonia (with guests including the BBC SSO’s Scott Dickinson leading the violas and RSNO principal cor anglais Henry Clay) on magnificent form, it was an unforgettable concert.
The star of the Festival’s Closing Concert, where the Philharmonia was conducted by Alexander Soddy, was soprano Malin Bystrom as the Countess in Richard Strauss’s last opera Capriccio. She led a quality cast that included Dame Sarah Connolly as Clairon and featured a last minute jump-in by Emma Morwood as the Italian Singer, completing a trio of sparkling female voices.
The most animated of the men were tenor Sebastian Kohlhepp, in fine voice as composer Flamand, and baritone Bo Skovhus as the Count, but the stage was all Bystrom’s at the end. She was off-the-book for the final scene, lifting a concert performance that suffered a little from the limitations such events have.
That was none of Soddy’s doing, however. The conductor had the unenviable task of steering an event conceived as a showcase for Sir Andrew Davis, who died shortly after this year’s International Festival programme was announced. If Bystrom was the star, it was his expert guidance of singers and instrumentalists through the score that made the most of the lovely music.
Keith Bruce
Pic of Malin Bystrom, Dame Sarah Connolly and Bo Skovhus by Andrew Perry
As a constant presence in the Edinburgh International Festival, the Queen’s Hall 11am concerts have once again proved a regular comfort blanket at that brunch time of the day. But there’s a change this year that seems hard to justify, and which has lessened the completeness of the experience.
For whatever reason – and I’m guessing production and commissioning costs may be a factor – the Festival has ditched its comprehensive programme booklets and replaced them at the extreme with skimpy free leaflets. The programme listings are skeletal, any notes to clarify context are either minimal or non-existent. Okay, you can unfold it to reveal a frankly useless poster, but there has to be a happy medium where better quality information can be articulated.
So thank goodness for the music.
Tuesday was pure entertainment with a touch of class. This was Maxim Emelyanychev & Principals of the SCO, in other words conductor and players, but with the effervescent Russian maestro swapping his baton for a fortepiano. The music was exclusively Mozart – at least that’s what the meagre programme sheet told us – whereas Emelyanychev chose to insert Haydn’s acrobatic Fantasia in C where an Improvisation was indicated, albeit personalised by him turning Haydn’s “lunga” pauses into pure Victor Borge moments where endless waits – twiddling of thumbs – drew the laughter as intended.
But that was the magic of this programme, good-humoured repartee mixed with classy music-making. Emelyanychev was joined firstly by violinist Stephanie Gonley, violist Max Mandel and cellist Philip Higham in Mozart’s Piano Quartet in G minor, a work constructed around intricate interplay that was playfully realised by the ensemble: a robust opening Allegro and spring-like Rondo finale separated by one of the composer’s most heart-stopping Andantes.
Clarinettist Maximiliano Martin brought contrasted texture to the ‘Kegelstatt’ Piano Trio in E flat, a performance in which he and Mandel jostled lyrically, initially reflectively, and ultimately with heightened spirit. After the Haydn intermission came the meat of the programme, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 12, K414 – the smaller A major compared to the later K488 – in a string chamber version that expanded the original group to include violinist Marcus Barcham-Stevens and double bass Nikita Naumov.
It was a triumph of scale, the sparkling delicacy of Emelyanychev’s fortepiano an integral yet dominant answer to the intimacy of the wider ensemble – a tasteful protagonist. In truth, it was also a much more cleanly assured performance than the concert opener, in which the apparent use of gut strings required some settling in.
For the following day’s cello-piano duo recital by Sheku Kanneh-Mason and Harry Baker, the repertoire was a lighter mix, founded on the principle that Bach’s influence threaded through it, and that his influence straddled the worlds of classical and jazz. In the latter camp, Baker’s velvety jazz persona held sway, adapting the coolest of numbers by Bill Evans (Waltz for Debby – Kanneh-Mason striking up a mean walking bass), Pat Metheney (the gentle whimsy of James) and the upbeat soul of Laura Mvula’s Green Garden. Kanneh-Mason collaborated in a laid-back arrangement of La Havas’ Sour Flower.
Two Janacek works – more Baker arrangements in a steely selection of Moravian Folksongs and a straight but expansive reading of the Czech composer’s Pohádka – and the pair’s jointly composed Prelude and Fugue (a mixed success in the style of Shostakovich) completed the opening half.
Bach’s solo Cello Suite No 1 wove a binding thread through the second half, Kanneh-Mason’s warm performances (if occasionally rocked by ill-tuned double-stopping) sitting prettily with the stylistic offshoots of he and Baker’s free-flowing improvisation on Bach’s chorale “Ich ruf zu dir”, the heightened rhythmic idiosyncrasies of music from Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras No 2, and a dizzy sign-off duo arrangement of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D flat minor.
Thursday’s Lieder recital promised its own curiosity factor, the combination of Ian Bostridge and Steven Osborne in a programme that wrapped Schubert’s song cycle Schwanengesang around four miscellaneous settings of appropriate verse. It was often painful to watch. How on earth does Bostridge pull such agonised facial contortions, as if Munch’s The Scream has come horrifyingly to life? Neither Rellstab’s or Heine’s poems necessarily warrant such histrionics, yet away from the visual agony there was considerable depth and lyrical poignance in the tenor’s delivery.
Indeed, he and Osborne made a profound coupling, the Scots pianist complementing Bostridge’s intensity with deep, searching tone production and instinctive responses to the singer’s expressive freedom. From the calm of Liebesbotschaft to the literary cuckoo in the nest – the breezy closing setting of Seidl’s Die Taubenpost – it was the sense of unwavering conviction that won the day. The centrally inserted songs offered a breath of fresh air in the midst of the heat.
The librettos Lorenzo Da Ponte wrote for Mozart pose problems for modern audiences which opera directors love to wrestle with, not always to the benefit of the works or, indeed, the ticket-buyers. As SCO Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev has mischievously said, one of the benefits of concert performances is the absence of that input.
Directing Cosi fan tutte from the fortepiano, he and his cast of six absolutely top-notch soloists demonstrated that the work not only survives but thrives without the benefit of a full production. The quality singers, led by Golda Schultz as Fiordiligoi and Angela Brower as Dorabella with Christopher Maltman as superb as you’d expect in the role of Don Alfonso, could not overshadow the fact that this was musically Emelyanychev’s show.
From the distinctive pacing of the familiar overture to the oddly ambivalent sextet at the work’s close, when Da Ponte undoubtedly pulls his punches even if Mozart is still at full throttle, the conductor was all over the score. Many conductors leave star soloists to get on with it and concentrate on their orchestra in such performances, but that is not Emelyanychev’s way and he was rewarded with full engagement from his singers, playful flirting and playground joshing included.
A particular strength of Cosi is that the whole story, in all its ludicrous detail, is sung with great clarity, so the absence of full costuming and silly disguises matters not a jot if the audience is listening (and reading the surtitles). The singers did enough in the costume department, but were crucially all highly mobile. That was especially true of the clowning of Josh Lovell and Huw Montague Rendall as Ferrando and Guglielmo, but also of Maltman and especially Hera Hyesang Park as Despina, who perhaps pushed the boat out too far at times with her brusque characterisation of the mercenary chambermaid.
The singing from all six, and by the SCO Chorus in their contributions, was consistently superb. For all the animation onstage, the cast contrived to disappear into the wings to give each other full focus during many of the solo arias, while the ensembles, whether huddled together as Don Alfonso sympathises with the deserted women or scattered across the platform for the Act 1 sextet, were all excellently well balanced.
The augmented SCO was on similarly stellar form, the quality of playing undoubtedly lifting the singers to their best game. How they managed not to giggle at some of the more outrageous keyboard ornamentation Emelyanychev added to his continuo playing remains a mystery.
Taken at face value, the strap-line Nicola Benedetti has given to her second year’s programme – Rituals That Unite Us – would seem to suggest a familiarity to her offerings quite contrary to the aspirations of an exciting and inspiring International Festival.
Fortunately, there will be few among those who filled the Usher Hall on its opening weekend who knew much of what they listened to, at least in the form we heard it.
Although the historically-informed performance movement has ensured that we can now enjoy Bach’s St Matthew Passion in something close to the version heard in Leipzig in Easter 1727, it may not have come down to us at all without the input of Felix Mendelssohn a century later. In revisiting Mendelssohn’s arrangement, performed by the BBC SSO under Ryan Wigglesworth, Edinburgh Festival Chorus and the RSNO Youth Chorus and a star cast of soloists, the Festival uncovered a fascinating work.
A victim of nothing more than changing fashions, Mendelssohn’s version achieves an enormous amount on its own terms. The balance between his more substantial orchestration – including four flutes, alongside the clarinets which were yet to be invented in Bach’s day – and the large choral forces, makes a great deal of musical sense. The soloists mostly dealt well with that, only mezzo Sarah Connolly occasionally sounding a little under-powered.
The later composer scores much for a smaller chamber orchestra within the ranks in any case, while the continuo for the recitatives benefits hugely from the involvement of a handful of string players. Even the forte-piano, which sounded plain weird at the start, became an acceptable part of the mix as the work went on. And it doesn’t go on quite as much, the fewer chorales working more like punctuating interludes, and the unfolding narrative altogether more integrated.
Ed Lyon and Neal Davies were a nicely contrasting pair as Evangelist and Jesus, and tenor Laurence Kilsby took his Part 1 aria especially well, with the accompaniment of oboe and a string quintet before the choir and fuller orchestration giving it a special character. Soprano Elizabeth Watts, on top form throughout, also benefitted from the Mendelssohn arrangements, although some did seem a little too “chocolate box”.
Osvaldo Golijov’s La Pasión según San Marcos was a commission for the celebrations of the 250th anniversary of J S Bach’s death at the Millennium, and the choir which debuted and has championed it, Schola Cantorum de Venezuela, were joined by soloists also closely associated with the work. Significantly, the bulk of the vocal forces was supplied by the National Youth Choir of Scotland, beyond much debate the only “local” chorus capable of performing it with such style.
All under the authoritative baton of Joana Carneiro, the instrumentalists were strings and brass from the RSNO, guest-led by Ania Safanova with the crucial addition of jazz trumpeter Ryan Quigley, alongside Latin American percussion, guitar, piano, accordion and bass, with two male dancers also part of the eclectic mix, culminating in an explicit representation of the crucifixion.
The movement that is integral to the score extends to the choir, and NYCoS dealt with those demands as effortlessly as the visiting choristers, “off the book” for the most mobile sections.
Goilijov’s sound-world is dizzyingly expansive, but everyone onstage took its twists and turns in their stride. The ritual of this Pasión constantly challenges expectations, the darkest moments of the story often set to the most rhythmic music, and the most lyrical writing – often for female singers Luciana Souza and Sophia Burgos – sitting alongside more abstract, extended vocal sonic techniques. The composer’s musical references are just as wide, taking in Handel (Messiah’s Behold and See, from Lamentations) as well as Bach and concluding with Kaddish from his own Jewish faith.
Cantorum de Venezuela shares their diverse repetoire from sacred hymns to Latin American pop culture at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh.
On Monday there was an opportunity to hear Schola Cantorum de Venezuela in their own right, at the Queen’s Hall under the direction of Maria Guinand and Luimar Arismendi. In assembling the programme, Guinand may well have defined that “Rituals” festival strap-line better than anyone, following a contemporary Christian music first half with an even more startling sequence after the interval, mostly of Latin American music but with Canadian R Murray Schafer’s Magic Songs – five of his slyly political “Chants” – at its heart.
Part of Venezuela’s globally-influential El Sistema music education initiative, Schola Cantorum sound and perform in a style all their own. James MacMillan’s slightly over-familiar O Radiant Dawn was one of their more easy-listening offerings, but it had an original visceral edge, while the two approaches to The Lamentations of Jeremiah that bracketed it – by Ginastera and Grau – showed the range of abilities among the 17 singers: stratospheric sopranos and sonorous basses, then slides, yelps and claps.
The lighter fare of the second half, also interspersed with trickier stuff, was often very funny indeed – but once again there can have been vanishingly few among the EIF’s faithful morning recital audience who had heard a single note of it before.
Behind Govan Old, now a reliquary of engraved monuments from Glasgow’s very earliest days rather than a place of worship, where the Govan Ferry once plied, a new footbridge across the Clyde is taking shape, linking the ancient origins of the city with its trendier modern barrios of Finnieston and the West End.
That bridge is emblematic of the partnership between The Glasgow Barons, the musical initiative of Paul MacAlindin, and the University of Glasgow across the river, which nurtured many of the musicians who featured in the first festival of early music in the city for 30 years or more. The senior figure was John Butt, Gardiner Professor of Music at the university and artistic director of the Dunedin Consort, who brought a quartet – possibly the ensemble’s smallest-ever iteration – to the festival on Saturday night.
Friday evening’s programme of vocal music – to which the building is eminently well-suited – was provided by musicians who met studying at Glasgow: an octet, Cantus Firmus, and the four-piece iuchair Ensemble, whose appearance last summer in Govan had inspired this festival weekend.
Warwick Edwards and the Scottish Early Music Consort established an early music festival in Glasgow in the 1990s, but the city dropped the ball while the era went on to top the classical charts regularly and, especially in the Jonathan Mills years, move centre-stage at the Edinburgh International Festival.
Audiences at Govan Old suggested an appetite to be filled, and a varied menu was provided by this first festival. The top attraction of three chamber music concerts was the Saturday evening performance by the Dunedin: flautist Katy Bricher, violinist Huw Daniel and Lucia Capellaro on viola da gamba and cello joining Butt at the harpsichord.
In a sense, their programme was a “sampler album” of music the Consort has championed in recent years. Notably that meant the inclusion of the Violin Sonata No 1 by Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, the French composer whose Biblical cantatas featured in the Out of her Mouth concerts last summer, and Telemann’s Paris Quartet No 1, nodding towards the Leipzig 300 programme earlier this year. Music by Bach and Handel – including a lovely encore showcasing Bircher – completed the recital.
Bach was the most up-to-date of the composers in the programme by organist Andrew Forbes that followed, but his informative sequence was about how Pachelbel, Buxtehude, Sweelinck, Muffat and Scheidt were heard in more recent times – and a compelling case for the instrument in Govan Old, which has been maintained but requires a proper overhaul.
On Friday evening, the last-minute reversal of the Cantus Firmus programme was entirely to its benefit, with a fuller account of a mass by Nicolas Gombert in the first half and the mix of Mexican and Spanish renaissance polyphony after the interval, culminating in the most familiar music of Tomas Luis de Victoria.
The male voice quartet that started it all, iuchair Ensemble, delivered the earliest and most original singing, however. On the feast day of St Anne, they recreated the plainchant of the 12th century, with some ornamentation of their own – some of it composed by tenor Joshua Stutter.
Keith Bruce
Picture of Dunedin Consort by Campbell David Parker
Attendees at the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland’s Summer Concert must have wondered what on earth was going on. No sooner had the orchestra’s young musicians taken the stage and duly tuned than they were up and off again, filing into the wings. Was this a latter day Hoffnung concert? What was the joke? A ripple of quiet bemusement swept around the audience.
Then a lone cellist positioned himself centre stage, the wind and brass reappeared en masse in the choir gallery, the former struck up a winsome melody while a distant ambulant solo violin added its conversational response. Bit by bit the strings returned to the stage, striking up incrementally as if Haydn’s Farewell Symphony had shifted into reverse.
What we were experiencing was Andrea Tarrodi’s imaginative new concerto for piano trio and orchestra, Moorlands and beyond…, commissioned jointly by the Amatis Trio and NYOS, and premiered in the weekend’s concerts in Edinburgh (Friday) and Glasgow. For an organisation that has undergone something of a restructuring and repositioning in recent years, this was as firm a statement of self-belief and purpose as you’d hope to witness.
It wasn’t just the daringness of the project that struck such a positive chord, as the persuasive attitude and virile sound emanating from this orchestra. Under conductor Teresa Riveiro Böhm (an erstwhile Leverhulme Conducting Fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland), Saturday’s performances – there was also music by Grieg and Stravinsky – were remarkable for their arresting spirit and glowing confidence.
Tarrodi’s haunting score asks for nothing less. As a luscious soundscape expanded from an earlier piece, Moorlands for piano trio, and inspired by the bleak Highlands landscape the Swedish composer encountered during a Scottish road trip, it is deceptively challenging. While its motivic material may be essentially simple, the textures are picturesque, idyllic and at times mystical, a complexity of impressionist brushstrokes richly captured and, in this instance, enchantingly portrayed.
The Amatis Trio played a more integrated than prominent role, a deliberate ploy on Tarrodi’s part, yet there were star-studded moments where their cool virtuosity offered opportunity for them to emerge out of the melting pot. All in all, though, this was an impressive team effort.
Grieg’s Norwegian Dances – originally written as piano duets – offered an immediate upswing in Scandinavian tempo, grasped enthusiastically by the a rustically-charged NYOS. It wasn’t just their fiery energy that dazzled, but the supple, sometimes mischievous nuances and exquisite solo contributions encouraged by Böhm’s demonstrative lead.
The most impressive achievement came in the second half with Stravinsky’s 1947 version of Petrushka, a performance resplendent in musical characterisation, intoxicating rhythmic precision and pyrotechnic virtuosity. Even if the balance at times seemed miscalculated, there was always a palpable sense of conviction and joy to ensure this performance maintained its compulsive charm and effusive elan.
While some festivals around the UK have modelled themselves on the Aldeburgh Festival – marriages of off-the-beaten-track location, top-level programming and the kudos of having a major composer as its central icon – none can quite match the idyllic campus-style infrastructure of this 75-year-old Suffolk event, founded by the late Benjamin Britten and now part of a wider musical initiative – performance, coaching and research – that extends throughout the year.
Last week the 800-seater concert hall at the heart of the swiftly remodelled Snape Maltings complex played host to the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, signing off for its summer holidays with two magnificent programmes under chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth.
Getting there wasn’t all plain sailing. A cancelled Avanti Glasgow-to-London train left a majorly extended orchestra jostling for seats on a later service, consequently missing their planned Ipswich connection and having to purchase new tickets as a result. Not that it showed the following evening in a challenging opening programme of music by Judith Weir, Britten and Mahler.
Not even in the second half, when the alarming announcement was made that second oboist Mary James had suffered a serious accident – catching her fingers in a heavy metal door during the interval and requiring hospital treatment – and that between them principal oboist Alexandra Hilton and cor anglais player James Horan would “cover the missing notes” in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, which they did with astonishing skill.
Indeed, the Mahler turned out to be the highpoint of the evening, Wigglesworth considerably more relaxed with his orchestra than in recent months, stepping back from the fray to allow plentiful breathing space in a piece that lives by its spontaneous gestures, teasing hiatuses and poetic flavourings.
Between the playful charm of the opening movement and easeful bliss of the finale, the scherzo bristled with folk-like devilment (guest leader Roberto Ruisi’s tantalising violin solos) while the adagio’s ultimate transcendence becalmed its anguished undercurrents. Soprano Elizabeth Watts’ emergence in the final movement possessed that magical childlike fusion of fear and innocence. Most of all, there was penetrating clarity throughout this performance, the SSO sensitive to the subtleties and hitting the climaxes with sparkling elan.
We could have done with more of that in Judith Weir’s Forest, which she describes as “a modern tone poem” characterised by ever-shifting moods and colours. While the former were explicit in Wigglesworth’s free-flowing vision, there was something indistinct about the textural detail, even in this hall’s crystalline acoustics, a clear sense that keener shading between instrumental colourings might have sharpened the presentation. Was the simple Brittenesque opening not an obvious clue?
There were frustrating tendencies, too, in soloist Daniel Pioro’s account of Britten’s pre-World War II Violin Concerto. The positivity in his performance was for the most part stimulating, particularly in the blustery Scherzo, but where Pioro’s playing strayed into more roughshod territory the true spirit of the piece – even its underlying whiffs of foreboding – seemed to evaporate.
Thursday’s second SSO concert was altogether more consistent, featuring two brilliantly contrasted works: Unsuk Chin’s electrifying concerto followed by the towering grandeur of Bruckner’s Symphony No 7.
Central to the Chin was soloist Alban Gerhardt, whose performance was a triumph of the seemingly impossible. This went way beyond mere virtuosity. Gerhardt’s gymnastic fingering, his precision tuning even where the South Korean composer prescribes notes off the diatonic grid, the sheer explosive depth of his tone production, all contributed to a mesmerising display of exceptional musicianship.
Even when he burst a string mid-concerto there was no let-up. Gerhardt snatched SSO principal cello Rudi de Groote’s cello, setting off a chain reaction of instrument exchanges among the section before the orchestra picked up again from where it left off. Far from killing the enjoyment, this moment of danger simply raised the entertainment stakes in a performance excitable for its organic inevitability, charismatic delivery and breathtaking showmanship.
The Bruckner proved the perfect foil, a symphony that Wigglesworth and his orchestra performed several weeks ago in Scotland, but which here, in the lively Snape acoustics, seemed so much riper, more purposefully driven, more wholesome and convincing in its reasoning. The strings possessed a ravishing fullness, the wind and brass equal in richness.
It was forceful without the bombast, a feast of meaty colours and powerful emotion, a monstrous but stimulating edifice. Stepping out into the Suffolk countryside in the dimming midsummer light, with the River Alde meandering through the swaying reed beds, offered a welcome relaxant. A magical place.
Ken Walton
Both concerts were broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and are now available on BBC Sounds
The puzzlement of Berlioz’s Grande messe des morts, written in the 1820s in honour of French military casualties, is the vivid paradox it presents between sight and sound.
To see it performed, as RSNO audiences in Edinburgh and Glasgow did at the weekend under Thomas Søndergård’s baton, is to witness a visual feast of excess. The RSNO was effectively doubled in size, with students from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland scattered among its now gargantuan ranks. Spread above, alongside and behind the audience were the additional four brass bands effecting a captive sonic experience. Behind the orchestra, a rearguard of ten timpanists (like nodding dogs as they variously leant forward to tune their instruments), and in the choir stalls an RSNO chorus to complete the epic vision.
To hear if performed, however, is to recognise that Berlioz, with his inimitable revolutionary blue sky thinking, was not preoccupied with ear-splitting volume. Sure, there were moments on Saturday when the floor shuddered underfoot, for instance when those timpani struck fortissimo beats with fearsome unanimity, or where the multiple brass merged into one hair-raising phalanx of sound. But for much of the time, as Mahler would later do, Berlioz finds extensive inner chamber-like possibilities, even within the chorus, that play mischief with the listener’s visual expectations.
So we find right at the start of the opening Introit a slow gathering of thought, a questioning development of a succinct unison motif, a sense of symphonic unravelling that begged, and received, a probing, reserved intensity in this performance. Even the Dies Irae – a slow burner that eventually erupts with the Tuba mirum – demanded much transparent subtlety from the chorus and orchestra.
You could see on Søndergård’s face – he frequently turned round to signal to the furthest-away brass – the concentration required to hold this juggernaut together, and there were instances where this lacked his customary tidiness. Yet there was so much to savour within the bigger picture, from the wistful delicacy of Quid Sum Miser and gathering storm of the Rex Tremendae, through the seraphic haze of Quaerens Me and bucolic belligerence of the Lacrymosa, to the hearty male voice opening to the Hostias and heavenward lift of the Sanctus (featuring the brief, soulful appearance of tenor soloist Magnus Walker).
Ultimately, and summed up in the hushed acceptance of the closing bars, this was a performance that emphasised the fragility of a Requiem setting in which Berlioz takes us to the brink of protean uncertainty. Challenging but fulfilling.
This close of season programme bore its own personal tribute, to dedicated RSNO supporter and benefactor Hedley G Wright. It also marked the retirement of long-serving trombonist Lance Green, whose final concert this was after 42 years with the orchestra.
As chorus director and conductor Gregory Batsleer pointed out, the performers on stage in the restored, if slightly jaded, splendour of the Great Hall of Stirling Castle have an excellent view to the National Wallace Monument and the Ochil Hills which matched the heaven and skywards theme of most of the works he had programmed.
He conceded, however, that the audience is not in the same privileged position, so it was down to the choir to communicate that. Thankfully the SCO Chorus is capable of reaching heights other ensembles can only aspire to.
The two newest works in the programme were, perhaps, furthest from that theme as well as closest to home. Andrew Carvel is a tenor in the choir as well as a composer and wrote his setting of Psalm 150, which lists a suggested instrumentation for the Lord’s Praise, for a BBC broadcast from St Andrew’s and St George’s Church in Edinburgh. With its fluxing music, it is recognisably hymn-like, but a long way from congregational.
The SCO’s current Associate Composer, Jay Capperauld, contributed a setting of a contemporary poem by Fife-based Niall Campbell. The Night Watch is about the joyous sleeplessness of caring for a newborn, a sort of inverse lullaby which Capperauld has set to use the individual and sectional talents of the choir, especially the pure-toned sopranos.
Less than a month after the Dunedin Consort singers gave a memorable performance of Tarik O’Regan’s Scattered Rhymes, it was a joy to hear another of his choral pieces, The Ecstasies Above. Setting Edgar Allan Poe’s Israfel, which recognises the beauty of the archangel but also his otherworldliness, the piece is full of rhythmic challenges as well as shifts in dynamics. With instrumental support from a quartet of SCO players – violinists Gordon Bragg and Amira Bedrush-McDonald, violist Brian Schiele and cellist Philip Higham – those sopranos were once again on star form.
They did not have the whole show to themselves, however, and the full-voiced basses sounded remarkably Russian for John Tavener’s Syvati, the choir’s drones and Eastern intervals complemented by Higham’s cello from the minstrel’s gallery, from where he also played Tavener’s contemporaneous cello solo, Chant.
The other liturgical works in the programme were Roxanna Panufnik’s Kyrie after Byrd, inspired by the 16th century composer and less than a decade old, and the opener from James MacMillan’s Strathclyde Motets, from 2007 and ideally voiced to introduce the sound of the choir in this historic venue.
If there was an enticement for the uninitiated to buy tickets, it was in Ralph Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, regularly voted the public’s favourite classical piece. Few, however, would have heard it in this arrangement by Paul Drayton, in which Bragg’s violin had a choral accompaniment and the instrumental soloist only had our full attention in the closing bars.
Using a brutally condensed version of the George Meredith poem that inspired the composer (fewer that a tenth of the lines of verse), the score is mostly wordless and demands a broad range of techniques from both the full choir and a number of individual voices within it. Like much else in the recital, it proved a demonstration of the technical mastery of the SCO Chorus.
The format of The Fairey Band’s concert – overture, concerto, big work – was traditional, and the suspicion must be that it was a making a nice point about a brass band supplanting the usual symphony orchestra as Perth Festival’s gala closing event.
Perhaps that adventurous programming did not fill as many seats as the music deserved, but that was only a loss for those who failed to attend; the audience there had a sensational time.
The big work was Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, but not as anyone in the hall had seen it before, and as precious few will have heard it. Elgar Howarth’s arrangement of the suite for brass loses nothing of the excitement and pictorial splendour of the better known versions, especially Maurice Ravel’s. A convincing case might be made that it is every bit as good as that most familiar orchestral version, especially in the hands of a virtuosic ensemble like this one.
From the cornets to the tubas, by way of all the extra instruments beyond those we see in orchestras, there were colours and shades of timbre and tone that more than made up for the absence of strings and winds. Through the different incarnations of Promenade and the contrasting narratives of the canvases depicted, sections and individual soloists stepped into the spotlight.
Conductor Mark Heron – who was also a terrific verbal guide through the music – was on top of every detail but equally knew when, throughout the evening’s programme, there was nothing meaningful for him to add to the work of musicians playing together like a machine of meticulous engineering. As the band was born of Manchester aircraft-builder Fairey Aviation, that is only maintaining their tradition.
The visual element of the concert was a piece of hi-tech animation, created for conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and the New World Symphony Orchestra in the USA, an outfit that develops young players at the start of their career. It is clever enough to adapt to a different arrangement of the work for a radically different ensemble and even adjusts to the pace of the performance.
More to the point, it was fantastic to look at, and not just in time with the music but narratively pertinent to the score, beginning with images of people in a gallery – a trope that would go on to morph through the ages – and then employ different styles of animation to create moving pictures responding to the titles of Viktor Hartmann’s paintings that had inspired Mussorgsky.
There was a vast distance between the moody darkness of The Old Castle and the children’s cartoon for Tuileries which followed, while the Ballad of the Chicks in their Shells was simply a hoot. It was a moment of levity before the menace of Catacombs and The Hut on Chicken’s Legs gave way to the glorious climax of The Great Gate of Kiev.
Amazingly this spectacle – a world premiere in the form we enjoyed it and a first screening of the film in Europe – did not completely overshadow the rest of the concert. That overture was Hector Berlioz’s La Carnival Romain, salvaged from his opera Benvenuto Cellini as an orchestral concert piece and, arguably, further developed as a showcase for brass instruments in Frank Wright’s glorious arrangement.
The concerto was Alexander Arutiunian’s Trumpet Concerto, a virtuoso showpiece for Iain Culross, feet firmly planted and fingers a blur on the valves. If the Berlioz was a French or Italian town band writ large, Arutiunian’s mid-20th century music was global in scope, quoting Shostakovich but clearly aware of dance bands and movie scores on the other side of the Atlantic.
The Fairey Band even had a work to follow Pictures in Ray Farr’s arrangement of Bach’s best-known organ work, Toccata in D Minor. Here it was difficult not to be distracted from the brass by the precision-tooled work of the trio of percussionists, on everything from xylophone and kit to timpani and gong.
Next year marks the 300th anniversary of the first performance of the Red Priest’s most popular piece, The Four Seasons. Not only has Vivaldi’s suite launched the career of many a young virtuoso – notably Nigel Kennedy round these parts – but it spearheaded the growth of popular interest in early music.
Around the time Kennedy brought his electric violin “new” Four Seasons to Edinburgh’s Usher Hall in 2012, Polish violinist Stefan Plewniak was departing from Jordi Savall’s Le Concert de Nations to set up his own group for a performance at Krakow’s Bach Festival.
Il Giardino d’Amore has since travelled the globe and made acclaimed recordings, most recently of Gluck’s Orfeo e Eurydice with singers Jakub Jozef Orlinski, Fatima Said and Elsa Dreisig for Warner Classics, but this was the group’s Scottish debut and also – although Perth Festival made little of the fact – the premiere of Plewniak’s new project: The New 4 Seasons.
Following the calendar from Spring through to Winter, Plewniak and his dozen younger accomplices – some of them his own students from Norway – teamed Vivaldi’s evocation of the annual cycle with Astor Piazzola’s The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires from the 1960s and Max Richter’s 21st century “Re-composition” of the Venetian’s 1725 work.
The nuevo tango pieces – more individual in character – sensibly prefaced each season (thus re-ordering Piazzola’s preference), before the original and Richter’s response were combined together. With an interval between Summer and Autumn, the whole made for a satisfying evening, if one where the Perth audience seemed unsure when to applaud and sensibly just sat on their hands until the end of each half.
The other element of the presentation was visual, with a haze over the stage to diffuse the lighting plot, and projections of the natural world and dancing bodies on a screen above the players. Some of this was as inconsequential as a screensaver, but it was generally inoffensive and occasionally more interesting in its close-ups of people and time-lapse photography of germination and bloom.
Musically, although the opening resolved into the Piazzola, it began with a provocatively tentative fade-in of period-instrument rawness and that “authentic” element was never away – not least in some occasionally wayward tuning. It was balanced, however, by some lush and lovely ensemble playing with obligatos from the first cello Niamh Malloy as well as the leader and director. If Spring was a season of settling into the expanded suite, the sunny opening of Summer immediately spoke of an assemblage that actually enhanced the programme’s individual ingredients.
If that was true of the old war horse that is the Vivaldi, it was as applicable to the Richter. Although the music itself could appear as down-tempo padding, or respite for the musicians, interweaving it with its Baroque inspiration made the German composer’s intentions evident.
It made for a much more arrestingly inventive evening of music-making than, say, the concert of Italian music from Nicola Benedetti’s Baroque ensemble at the pandemic-era Edinburgh Festival.
When he spoke at the end, before an encore of Waltzing Matilda that was less cheesy than that sounds, Plewniak was engagingly enthusiastic about bringing his group to Scotland. He included a winning “four seasons in one day” gag about the local weather, and there was something of waltz king Andre Rieu’s swagger in his stage-centre soloist’s role. It is not impossible that Perth Festival may have been in on the ground floor of a very successful project with this low-key first night.
Who knows how Sibelius and Bruckner would have got on had they met in a pub? Both had issues, the former addicted to drink and riven with a sense of isolation and loneliness, the latter plagued by bouts of neurosis, depression and fears of persecution. Not a conversation you’d wish to gatecrash maybe.
Yet put their music together, as the BBC SSO did for their main season finale, and the lure is irresistible, especially when the Bruckner symphony is his epic Seventh, a passionate feast of devotion (partly to the dying Wagner), and the Sibelius is the iconic Finn’s darkness-defying Violin Concerto for which the soloist was the South Korean virtuoso Bomsori. This wasn’t the most fulfilling version of this concerto – mostly down to a frustratingly diluted orchestral wash administered under chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth – but where Bomsori seized the initiative, her passion and verve cast lingering clouds aside.
So it lived for its most liberated highlights: an opening movement teasingly vibrant either end, but losing some momentum en route where Wigglesworth’s orchestral messaging seemed to delay each motivating downbeat by the smallest fraction; a slow movement that took time to come alive and capture its aching core; and a Finale, where Bomsori and the SSO most consistently found common aim, making the stormy journey to its exhaustive cadence well worth the ride.
Wigglesworth’s fortunes were better met in the Bruckner, which he rolled out with disciplined consistency and a keen sense of how to extract that evolutionary inexorability driving the composer’s granite-like structure without ignoring the lava-like fluidity of the inner orchestral detail.
Having struck gold with its arresting signature melody, the tone was set for a performance destined to captivate. Beyond the self-contained brawn of the opening movement, the Adagio sounded its doleful elegy, characterised by the SSO’s pungent phalanx of Wagner tubas. Spirits were lifted sky high with the vying exuberance and gentler pastoralism of the Scherzo, while the Finale, with its poignant cyclic references, powered a fine performance to its resolute conclusion.
The notion of the “Auld Alliance” between Scotland and France may well persist in the minds of the programmers of classical music concerts more than it does in any other sphere, so it is probably unfair to quibble that a very broad definition of “Scottish” was required to justify the Hebrides Ensemble’s use of it to entitle its debut recital at the Perth Festival.
The three composers representing the home side were Judith Weir (born in Cambridge), Sally Beamish (London) and Lyell Cresswell (Wellington, New Zealand). France, on the other hand, fielded representatives of Le Mans, Paris, Avignon and Biarritz: Jean Francaix, Claude Debussy, Olivier Messiaen and Maurice Ravel.
It was Ravel’s septet for string quartet, flute, clarinet and harp, Introduction and Allegro, that brought together all the players of this edition of cellist William Conway’s chamber group at the end of the programme. Effectively directed from the violin by Irish Chamber Orchestra leader Katherine Hunka, it was as notable for its dynamism and pace as for its melodic riches, and the rich ensemble sound these players produced in St John’s.
The concert began with Weir’s The Bagpiper’s String Trio, also rhythmically engrossing and democratic in its use of the instruments, although it began life as a showpiece for the range of a clarinet. The playful use of Scottish country dance rhythms and evocation of the sea made it an accessible way in to a varied evening where the pieces shared interesting inspirations.
Yann Ghiro’s clarinet featured immediately afterwards, in the opening movement of Francaix’s quintet, its deliciously French way with melody prefiguring the Ravel later. In the second half, Ghiro returned to the stage alone for the Abime des oiseaux movement of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, its use of birdsong nicely following Between Earth and Sea by Sally Beamish, where that is heard from Katherine Bryan’s flute, teamed with the rich-toned viola of Jessica Beeston and Sharron Griffiths’ harp.
Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane was commissioned as a showpiece for harp, but it has equally rich ensemble writing for the string quartet, in what was the second of the French sequence leading to that Ravel finish.
Those two quintets bracketed a real rarity, Cresswell’s Variations on a Theme by Charles Ives with Conway and Bryan. The dozen treatments of Ives’ setting of Songs My Mother Taught Me, ranging from thirty seconds to less than two minutes, are fascinating explorations of the textural possibilities of the combination of flute and cello. With the RSNO’s first flute on stage, its was easy to hear why the founder of the ensemble was eager to bring the piece back in front of an audience.
Superficially, Die Zauberflote looked an odd choice for the Scots Opera Project. Although purists will always want to hear operas in their original language, the convoluted masonic nonsense of Mozart’s The Magic Flute makes singing it in English a sensible step to some clarity. For all that many people in Scotland know – and even speak – more Scots than they realise, Michael Dempster’s new version of the libretto potentially added a different hurdle for the audience.
Beyond that, on paper a Da Ponte opera like Cosi fan tutte or even Don Giovanni would appear to offer more opportunity for the sort of Scots characterisation that has made adaptations of Moliere successes in the theatre. In reality, however, this opening attraction of the 2024 Perth Festival of the Arts was ideal for the job, and that had little or nothing to do with the libretto.
When it was audible, Dr Dempster’s translation sounded just the dab, but with no surtitles (always an asset, even for operas sung in English) a great deal did not make it over the footlights and the six musicians in the pit under the musical direction of pianist Gordon Cree.
Nonetheless, the fact that this cast and chorus had learned an entirely new book spoke volumes for their commitment, and that was evident in every other facet of the production, musically and theatrically a huge success.
Multi-tasking tenor David Douglas was not only our hero Tamino but also the director and producer of the show. Setting the scene during the overture with the retro-tech assistance of an overhead projector, his prince was a patient in an asylum, tended, none too caringly, by the three nursing assistants (Rachael Brimley, Cheryl Forbes and Ulrike Wutscher) to Colleen Nicoll’s imposing matron of a Queen of the Night. The scrubs, metal trolleys and drapes, doubling as projection screens, recalled Milos Forman’s film of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and into this secure ward Douglas Nairne’s Papageno arrived as a Pest Control warden to find Catriona Clark’s Pamina held in a straitjacket and wheeled around in a skip, like a character in a Beckett play. Michael Cameron-Longden’s gentle Sarastro subsequently appeared as the trusted consultant physician in this febrile clinic.
Within such a restricted environment, the company zipped through an abbreviated version of the score, accompanied by a string quartet and Andrea Kuyper’s flute. There was quality singing from everyone onstage, including the community chorus of other inmates that arrived later, each of them demonstrating their own disturbing affliction.
With Wutscher doubling as Monostatos, and Brimley donning a few feathers to become Papagena later – in a splendidly vulgar and inventive behind-the-curtain love tryst with Papageno – a generously-cast staging demonstrated high production values (even the instrumentalists were costumed) and made effective use of the auditorium as well as the stage. There is, sadly, just one further opportunity to see it, at Sunday’s matinee performance.
