It was one of these nights when all the stars aligned. The RSNO’s new principal guest conductor Patrick Hahn proved why this orchestra was so keen to sign him up after an unplanned debut as an eleventh hour substitution last year. With him on Saturday was Ukrainian pianist Vadym Kholodenko, a Russian-trained tour de force, whose pulverising charisma set Liszt’s First Piano Concerto on fire. Then there was the RSNO itself, inspired from the outset, playing its heart out in Rachmaninov, resplendent in a programme designed to intoxicate and impress.
It opened with something of a novelty, the crisp and tantalising ambiguities of Gottfried von Einem’s Capriccio. Einem, born into a high-ranking Austrian family, moved to Berlin in the late 1930s to study with Paul Hindemith. In Capriccio, premiered in the war-stricken German capital in 1943, his mentor’s influence is palpable, as are the traits associated with sassy inter-war Berlin, hints of Brechtian cabaret spirit mixed with rollicking jazz-like tropes. Hahn elicited just enough edginess, a kind of clipped decadence, to counter the ghost of Wagner ever-lurking behind the frenzy of Einem’s austere modernism.
That, in itself, pointed the way to Kholodenko’s attention-grabbing Liszt. It was all of one mind – Hahn’s and the orchestra’s explosive opening met with the pounding venom of the pianist’s opening response, Kholodenko combining virile rhetoric and fortitude with moments of sheer eloquence and expressive fluidity. His one-to-one dialogues with members of the orchestra were like theatrical cameos, insinuating and charismatic; his encounters with the full ensemble an equal and bracing match.
In all of this, Hahn showed himself to be both at ease and in complete control, ultimate proof of that coming in Rachmaninov’s epic Second Symphony. The massive opening Largo was anything but monolithic, equal attention paid to its seismic detail as to the unifying power of its outer shell. Where the scurrying second movement Allegro Molto acted like a purifying breeze, the Largo, set in motion by sweet-scented strings and that melting clarinet solo, instilled a passion and composure creditable only to the pen of Rachmaninov. Hahn gave the Finale ample space to breath without losing the unstoppable affirmation it naturally calls for. The instantly cheering audience knew it had witnessed something special.
It is more common, fortunately, that a concert whose immediate charms are not obvious on paper turns out to have a rich subtext and surprising programmatic connections, whether or not they were intended at the event’s conception. Regrettably the opposite turned out to be the case with Thursday’s season concert by the BBC Scottish, which will be repeated at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall on Sunday afternoon.
What seemed a hit programme started well enough, with a stirring account of Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, Michael Sanderling conducting the SSO brass, horns and percussion through the disciplined explosion of the music the composer later incorporated into his Third Symphony. Rich-toned and precise here, it is irresistible as a punchy stand-alone and as fine a concert-opener as one might wish to hear, but also a difficult act to follow.
That task fell to Ethan Loch, BBC Young Musician finalist in 2022 and a now a student at Glasgow’s Royal Conservatoire. Blind from birth, Loch’s ambitions embrace composition and improvisation – both of which would be demonstrated in his encores – but his recital piece here was Chopin’s Piano Concerto No 2. Composed before his first numbered concerto, when Chopin was still (just) in his teens, it is a young man’s work, the solo part a virtuoso showpiece and the orchestral writing often thought wanting experience.
Those strengths and deficiencies need not be apparent – the recent RSNO recording with Benjamin Grosvenor under the baton of Elim Cham makes an eloquent argument for both concertos – but they were here. Sanderling gave the 20-year-old pianist the best platform by keeping the orchestra on a tight rein, but Loch’s playing, while accurate and technically secure, was often a little heavy-handed. When the left hand was steadier, in the central Larghetto especially, the increasingly elaborate right hand was more expressive, but the finale lacked the dancing sprightliness it really requires.
For all its melodic riches, there was something slightly lumpen about Sanderling’s account of Dvorak’s New World symphony as well. The SSO strings sounded thicker than usual and the conductor’s tempi seemed very deliberate. There was some fine playing from the winds – Stella McCracken’s oboe and Yann Ghiro’s clarinet in particular – but the fanfare at the start of the last movement failed to give that final theme quite the propulsion it required.
Having said all that, there were clearly many in the very full house who shared few of those reservations, and the box-office appeal of the programme will doubtless work its magic for ticket sales in Edinburgh too.
The naming of much-loved tenor soloist Nicholas Mulroy as Associate Director of Dunedin Consort may have looked like a cosy in-house appointment, but this programme, which has toured Scotland and ends the ensemble’s 2023/24 season with a concert at London’s Wigmore Hall on Wednesday, knocks any such notions into the proverbial cocked hat.
Entitled Scattered Rhymes – the name of the most substantial recent work, by composer Tarik O’Regan – it was a masterpiece of compilation, linking early and contemporary music in a deeply considered way, and often astonishing in execution.
For those who think they know what to expect from an a cappella concert by this group, there was plenty of that. It began with James MacMillan’s Behold, you are beautiful, my love, written for the wedding of the composer’s son Aidan and setting words from the Bible’s Song of Solomon, later included Palestrina and closed with Tomas Luis de Victoria setting texts from the same source. A parallel, and mirroring, stream of words came from 14th century Italian poet Petrach, the text for O’Regan and the 16th century Flemish composer Adrian Willaert.
Many a choir could tackle the MacMillan with some confidence, but elsewhere these musicians were required to produce singing of extraordinary complexity with virtuosic technique. In that, Scattered Rhymes itself was the most striking example.
A quartet of singers produced, together and sometimes individually, a hugely challenging declamation of the Italian verse, with constant changes of rhythm, dynamics and time signature, while the rest of the choir had equally varied music, setting Latin from an anonymous contemporary English poet and found in the Arundel manuscripts in the British Library. The unlikely gloss Mulroy provided – that O’Regan told him the 1971 rock song Won’t Get Fooled Again by The Who was another inspiration – turned out to be remarkably helpful in listening the work’s structure.
That was just one of many unusual and rewarding pathways the conductor’s sequence of music took us down. The world premiere of the set was Caroline Shaw’s Companion Planting, a Dunedin Consort commission from one of the most in-demand composers on the planet. Her own lyric had many similarities to the early texts in the recital, using the horticultural metaphor to compare the wonders of nature with the joys of a rewarding human relationship.
The music was as attractive as everything she writes, and used some of the techniques she has explored in her other vocal pieces in the most subtle, understated, but brilliantly effective way.
Nor were these the only highlights of the programme. Some distance from the music for which he is best known, Gavin Bryars’ Petrarch-setting A la dolce ombra is from his Fourth Book of Madrigals and not only linked precisely with the O’Regan in its text, but also explored the same metaphorical territory as the Shaw.
The other recent, and unfamiliar, treat, came from the pen of Canadian composer Stephanie Martin. Rise up my love, like the MacMillan using the Biblical source, is also full of flora and fauna and the word-setting – long, flowing lines filled with crisp ear-catching repetitions – was as fine as anything else in the programme.
If Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah has had a mixed press over the years, it’s not because the piece is second rate, but rather because it poses a musical, as well as technical, challenge to anything less than first rate choirs. This superb performance mounted by the SCO and SCO Chorus to complete its 50th Anniversary Season was living proof.
Rarely have I felt so gripped by the lengthy, yet energetically succinct, theatrical thread with which Mendelssohn depicts the turmoil of Elijah’s testing mission to return the God-forsaken idolaters of Baal to recognising their true God, with all the cataclysms that accompany it. What the composer did, in time for its Birmingham premiere in 1846, was to encapsulate this in vivid, quasi-operatic terms. On Thursday at the Usher Hall, SCO chief conductor Maxim Emelyanychev harnessed its unfaltering intensity, gleaning from his orchestra, chorus and soloists a performance that flew like “the mighty wind”.
The unorthodoxy of the opening played its own part in tilting us towards the edge of our seats – an awakening pronouncement from Elijah (baritone Roderick Williams) before the down-to-business assertion of a fugal overture whose chromatic, two-note opening motif could so easily have inspired John Williams’ Jaws theme. Then with hardly a second to catch breath, the SCO Chorus announced their own presence with an opening chorus, sung with penetrating precision, yet warmed by neatly nuanced phrasing.
Thereafter, the momentum never once flagged. The soloists, seated either side of the stage, remained alert to their cues to move to and from centre stage, and from whom some of the loveliest arias took flight.
Tenor Thomas Walker brought heartwarming purity to “If with all your heart”, soprano Carolyn Sampson imbuing “Hear ye, Israel” with sublime lustre. Anna Stéphany’s gorgeous mezzo tones sat perfectly with “Woe unto them who forsake him!”, unshaken by an errant (if perhaps timely) mobile phone. The sublime resignation in Williams’ “It is enough” gained added poignancy against the vibrato-less cellos, while Soprano II, Rowan Pierce, cut a soaring presence as The Youth, even if it that brief role remains more characterful when sung by a young treble voice.
Beyond all else, though, this was a collegiate triumph in which Emelyanychev’s vision held firm in shaping the common will. Every note had defined purpose; each paragraph in the drama bore distinctive cogency. There wasn’t a singe moment where the energy or excitement sapped. If the SCO has proved over this Anniversary Season that it’s riding on a magnificent high, this was the absolute pinnacle.
In an interview ahead of the premiere of his production of La traviata for Scottish Opera 16 years ago, David McVicar likened Verdi’s tragic fallen woman Violetta Valéry to Amy Winehouse, then still with us although well down the road to self-destruction. It was a bold assertion, given that the floorcloth of his set is clearly the tombstone of the protagonist.
With a movie about the r’n’b singer recently released, it could seem timely to revisit the comparison, but Hye-Youn Lee, the soprano leading the cast of the company’s second revival of the production, does not really give us the “I told you I was trouble” bonne vivante side of Violetta to precede the doomed tubercular tragic figure.
She sings the role beautifully, however, and her final demise was as anguished as you might wish, with pitch-perfect support from Thomas D Hopkinson as Doctor Grenvil and Heather Ireson as her maid Annina. Whether her lover Alfredo (company debutante Ji-Min Park) and his severe father Giorgio Germont (a perfectly judged performance from Philip Rhodes) achieve any redemption at the end remains unclear, but the music certainly suggests some deathbed forgiveness for Violetta and her dissolute lifestyle.
In conductor Stuart Stratford’s meticulous account of the score, that climactic moment was prefigured in the unmistakably ecclesiastical cadences that concluded the long second act. It is a masterful piece of through-composition for the three principals that may be the perfect example of opera being all about the lengthy contemplation of the consequences of actions that are themselves hurriedly despatched.
The narrative emphasis of this production, revived here by Leo Castaldi with McVicar’s input, was of a piece with the music throughout, Stratford never hogging the ball when the sequences of superb melodies gave him ample opportunity to do so. From the delicate phrasing of the overture and the ebullient dance music of the party scenes, through Alfredo’s roller-coaster journey to self-awareness and the personal angst of Violetta’s recognition of her fate, Stratford’s instrumentalists – in the pit and off-stage – played superbly.
Lee’s voice is more than equal to the huge demands of the role, and Park was her match technically, if less fluid as a performer. Any slight awkwardness, however, was bound to be exposed sitting amongst an ensemble performance that was as fine physically as it was musically. The smaller roles combining wonderfully with the chorus, this show looked more like the work of a seasoned and established company of singers than a cast brought together for these 15 performances only. A small corps of superb dancers were the icing on the cake.
Keith Bruce
Continues at the Theatre Royal to May 18 before touring to Inverness, Aberdeen and Edinburgh until June 15.
There’s always a risk with a contemporary music event like Tectonics that you can get too much of the same thing. The most refreshing aspect of Day 1 in this year’s two-day festival was the varied extent of its content.
Whether it was the passing tilt towards traditional music in the BBC SSO strings’ collaboration with two folk musicians, the club vibe of a concerto for turntables, or visceral spirituals-based improvisations of performance artist Elaine Mitchener, a “fun” side complemented the hard-edged avant-garde experimentalism more associated with this perennial event by joint creators Ilan Volkov and Alasdair Campbell.
What it avoided was any lull in momentum whatsoever, Saturday’s experience amounting to a continuous stream of mid-afternoon to late-evening performances, the sizeable cult-like audience processing seamlessly from one City Halls venue to the next.
There was a touch of the weird in the series of six improvisations – Common Sense Will Not Prevail – delivered in what seemed an ironic setting, the bijou elegance of the small Recital Room. Billed as featuring Kate Armitage & Co, its eponymous leader had called off due to illness. What remained of her “entourage” were the performers Dave Jackson, Helmut Lemke and one Miss Vymethoxy Redspiders, whose extemporised delivery – both vocalised and aided by an assortment of manipulated objects – was strangely mesmerising in its collective bizarreness.
In a similar vein, and equally ritualised, Eiko Yamada’s solo recorder (descant and tenor) improvisation – Traces of Air – seemed proportionally out of place in the main Grand Hall, its fluttering pianissimos and ephemeral multiphonics like cries of despair from a far-off world.
Yet both of these offered vivid contrast to the energised magnitude of two feisty performances in the Old Fruitmarket. Mitchener’s solo programme showed this gritty solo performer at her eye-catching best: her singular presence mid-stage within a halo of smoke and dramatic lighting hauntingly reminiscent of a Samuel Beckett scenario; her penetratingly deconstructive, electronically-enhanced musings on the spirituals Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child (Olly Wilson’s Sometimes) and Amazing Grace viscerally engaging.
As for that incursion by the SSO strings into the extended folk idiom of participating Norwegian-based fiddle-guitar duo, Sarah-Jane Summers and Juhani Silvola, they had the joint jumping with Summers’ The Spirit Multitude. In a work, directed by Volkov, that fused racy, foot-stamping reels with evocative excursions into the realms of the truly surreal, the temperature of this festival jumped to mercury-busting heights. It wouldn’t have been out of place in Glasgow’s Celtic Connections.
The main evening concert by the full SSO was equally inclusive. The first half opened with the world premiere of Marc Yeats’ spatially-conceived A Point in the Landscape, in which order is sought out of chaos. With the orchestra divided into mixed groups, on and off stage, and the process governed by the timers on the players’ own mobile phones, the effect was remarkably liberating, not to mention admirable in this conductor-less entity’s success in finishing as one.
It wasn’t a beautiful experience, a quality subsequently delivered by violinist Ilya Gingolts in his breathy, sotto voce unaccompanied performance of Salvatore Sciarrino’s solo Caprices.
But it was the 6 Scenes for Turntables and Orchestra, jointly composed by Mariam Rezaei and Matthew Shlomowitz with the former as soloist, that finally brought the house down. Rezaei’s spellbinding floor show – like a DJ on speed – elicited rhythmic bite and stratospheric sound effects that added ecstatic overlay to Shlomowitz’s free-flowing, hi-octane orchestral score. It was an exhilarating climax to an illuminating day.
It’s extraordinary what Vaughan Williams achieved with his 1950 Concerto Grosso, a work for strings conceived on several levels of player competency, from adept professionals to beginners on open strings, that somehow sounds as if no compromises have been made in achieving the ultimately wholesome, intense musical result.
It’s also remarkable that this particular assemblage of mixed-ability musicians – seasoned members of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra outnumbered by youngsters from the City of Edinburgh Council Instrumental Music Service, Glasgow CREATE and St Mary’s Music School – produced a performance that never once fell below the level of consummate artistry. “These are the future,” declared conductor Andrew Manze from his rostrum. Let’s hope our political masters were listening and provide them with one.
Then there was Manze himself, newly appointed as principal guest conductor of the SCO, and already, in his second week, proving how generous a figure he is on top of his energising musical prowess and affable communication skills.
Clearly his influence over the SCO Academy players – they and their tutors had worked together over the past two weekends rehearsing this music – was both penetrating and inspiring. From the very opening of the Concerto Grosso, a baked blanket of instantly identifiable Vaughan Williams, the quality of sound and alertness of response was magical and captivating. Beyond that curtain-raising Intrada came an edgy Burlesca Ostinato, a central Sarabande loaded with ruminating calm, a fleeting Scherzo, and a final March and Reprise whose jaunty opening bars could so easily have passed as the pawky soundtrack to an Ealing comedy.
The rest of the programme remained with Vaughan Williams but without the youngsters, now seated as observers in the choir balcony. First up was, as Classic FM would have it, everyone’s favourite VW, The Lark Ascending. Even for doubters, this was an enlightening and refreshing performance, thanks to the innate musicality of violin soloist, SCO leader Stephanie Gonley. There was nothing pressurised in her languid vision of the work, just a natural response to its poetic essence. Manze obliged accordingly, colouring its luscious orchestral textures in pastel shades, but not without reference to unexpected detail. I can’t recall ever noticing the triangle’s pertinent presence before.
In the Fifth Symphony, its flowing persona at odds with its composition during World War II, Manze’s attention to detail was again a compelling feature. Against an overriding effortlessness, driven also by the modal fluidity of Vaughan Williams’ writing, the Prelude was intensified by Manze emphasising its harmonic juxtapositions, and the Scherzo bristled with spiralling, at times ephemeral, impatience. In the Romanza, with its heart-tugging cor anglais solo, time stood magically still, before the final contentment of the Passacaglia finale and the quiet fulfilment of its closing bars.
Manze is an inspired addition to an already powerful SCO artistic team. Only good can come of it, surely.
Ken Walton
(Photo: Christopher Bowen)
This performance was recorded for the BBC’s Radio 3 in Concert Series, due for broadcast on 11 June.
The range of this year’s Perth Festival of the Arts may embrace Rory Bremner’s comedy and the funk and soul platter-spinning of Craig Charles but classical music and opera is still at its heart, with performances running right through its 11-day programme at the end of May.
The performance programme opens at Perth Theatre on the evening of Wednesday May 22 with a return visit from the Scots Opera Project, festival debutantes last year with Granville Bantock’s The Seal Woman (Perth Festival / The Seal-Woman | VoxCarnyx). This year the Project revives its Scots language version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, with a further matinee of the production the following Sunday.
Making their first appearance at the festival this year, somewhat surprisingly, are cellist Will Conway’s long established Scottish chamber group Hebrides Ensemble. Their programme visits an idea that has proved strangely popular in the post-Brexit era, celebrating the “Auld Alliance” between Scotland and France and mixing 20th century French music with the work of composers from, or at one time based in, Scotland.
The following week’s chamber music highlight is a visit from the pan-European Il Giardino d’Amore, founded and directed by Polish violinist Stefan Plewiak. Celebrating the tercentenary of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, the group will play, from memory, that Baroque favourite alongside the more recent responses to it from Astor Piazzola and Max Richter.
The Czech National Symphony Orchestra is at Perth Concert Hall on Saturday May 25 for the festival’s flagship concert. Regular touring orchestra with tenor Andrea Bocelli under the baton of its American conductor Steven Mercurio, the soloist for this concert is violinist Chloe Hanslip, playing the perennially popular Bruch Violin Concert No 1. The rest of the programme is equally box office: Smetana’s Overture to the Bartered Bride, Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.
There is a thread of brass music running through the 2024 Perth programme that may well have its roots in the enthusiasm of chairman Craig Dennis. Children’s Classic Concerts, presented as usual by the ebullient Owen Gunnell, give two performances of Big Top Brass, featuring the Thistle Brass Quintet, and the following Saturday afternoon (June 1) The Fairey Band add a live soundtrack to the Aardman animated film starring Wallace & Gromit, The Wrong Trousers.
The Fairey Band also closes the classical programme with a performance of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition in Elgar Howarth’s superb arrangement, and that comes with its own visuals in the from of animated interpretations of the music created by Ion Concert Media with USC School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles.
Nigel Short’s first-class vocal group Tenebrae is in the splendid acoustic of St John’s Kirk on Friday May 24 with a programme that teams Herbert Howell’s Requiem with a new work by Joel Thompson, A Prayer for deliverance. In the same venue the following Monday duo New Focus, pianist Euan Stevenson and saxophonist Konrad Wiszniewski, bring their clever show exploring the relationship between classical music and jazz, The Classical Connection.
Scottish Opera’s Pop-Up Opera is at St Matthew’s Church for its regular visit to the festival, with two of Derek Clark’s half hour condensed versions of classics of the repertoire, The Merry Widow and Don Giovanni, narrated by Alan Dunn.
For full details and booking information visit perthfestival.co.uk
For artists who lead a solitary existence much of the time, composers can still make the news – and the RSNO had three of those in this programme. Stravinsky’s Petrushka came between the success of the Firebird and the controversy of the Rite, Errollyn Wallen found herself in the centre of the perennial Last Night hoo-hah when she was commissioned to arrange Jerusalem for the 2020 BBC Proms, and Esa-Pekka Salonen has just made the front pages by resigning from the musical directorship of the San Francisco Symphony after a row with the board over policy and budgets.
Perhaps we may now hear more of Salonen the composer, and this concert’s conductor, Joanna Carneiro, made an eloquent case for that with her vigorous direction of his Nyx, named for a mysterious dark figure in Greek mythology, and receiving its Scottish premiere. Opening with a horn quintet fanfare and featuring two extended clarinet solos, its other singular orchestral details included quartets of flutes and piccolos, some downright sleazy string writing, and prominent roles for pianist and harp just as in the Stravinsky.
RSNO harpist Pippa Tunnell was also to the fore in the opening of Wallen’s violin concerto, rumbling strings preceding her partnership with tubular bells as soloist Philippe Quint made his first entrance with fluttering harmonics.
This was the UK premiere of a work co-commissioned by the RSNO and specifically composed for Quint, with details of his own musical life woven into it. He certainly had plenty virtuosic music to play, with few bars of respite, but it was often overshadowed by the quality of the orchestral writing in the earlier sections. Written in three distinct movements, it was the last of these that seemed the most satisfying, the soloist’s pizzicato line distinguishing him from the strings, and the brass and timpani setting up a grand chorale and a concluding sprightly dance.
If Petrushka is sometimes overshadowed by the other ballet music of Stravinsky’s early career, Carneiro and the RSNO brought their A-game to make the case for it. The conductor took a storybook approach, bringing in the soloists, of whom first flute Katherine Bryan was among the most prominent, as if ushering the characters to the front of the stage. The musicians responded in kind, relishing their moments in the spotlight, whether recurring or in crucial cameos from contrabassoon and cor anglais.
The manufacturers of conductors’ batons may be the only people upset by the appointment of Andrew Manze as Principal Guest Conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Like Maxim Emelyanychev, he often eschews their use in favour of a pair of expressive hands. Also like the SCO’s Principal Conductor, Manze started out as a Baroque specialist but now ranges across much wider repertoire, paralleling, to some extent, the orchestra’s own journey.
His first programme of a fortnight’s work with these musicians focused on Ravel, with Steven Osborne the soloist in the G Major Piano Concerto and the composer’s earlier Pavane pour une infante défunte preceding the last of Haydn’s Paris Symphonies, No 87. It began, however, with another of the French capital’s Les Six group of composer, Arthur Honegger, and his Pastorale d’été.
Composed in the Swiss Alps in the summer of 1920, it is a very lovely work for strings and just five winds – all of whom have solo spots – that deserves to be heard more often. In the context of this programme it was a substantial hors d’oeuvre to the Ravel Concerto, very different in style but sharing some of the jazz influence that was in the air at the time.
Osborne is, of course, a pianist who delights in the prediction of jazz music to be found in a late Beethoven sonata, who plays Gershwin to perfection (as the BBC Proms will hear later this year), and who chose to encore this performance with his own transcription of a piece by American jazz pianist Keith Jarrett. That said, he did not labour the bluesy ingredients of the opening movement, and its kinship with Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. In fact this was a very relaxed Osborne throughout the work, delivering the most virtuosic music with casual grace and delighting in the furious pace of the finale. The central Adagio was arguably the highlight though, the SCO wind soloists once again on top form in the duets with the pianist and Osborne himself wonderfully poised and expressive in the elegiac melody that distinguishes what would be the composer’s final big piece.
It is not, however, a tune that most people would recognise in the hum-along way they would Ravel’s earlier Pavane. As a piano piece it made the name of the young composer and its orchestrated version begins, like the Honegger, with a solo horn – beautifully played here by George Strivens.
There is something operatic about Haydn’s 87th Symphony, also heard less often, because, Manze claimed, it lacks a nickname. The work for the section principals is very characterful and it is not hard to imagine the solos as vocal ones, and the ensemble work as dances. That is only explicit in the third movement Minuet, which the conductor took at a very deliberate pace although it was still light on its feet.
On paper Haydn had looked an odd choice to end this programme. In execution, Manze and the SCO made it the perfect one.
In the second leg of its current Scottish Tour, the Colin Currie Quartet found itself pounding the beat, literally, in Auchinleck on a sunny Saturday night. Were they a delicate string quartet, the experience might have been diminished by the counterpoint of children screaming happily in the play area immediately outside the town’s amenable Boswell Centre.
But Currie’s ensemble is, as most of this East Ayrshire town will now know, an all-percussion collective with the fire power to overcome the most rumbustious opposition. No competition? Well, almost. One dramatic musical silence gave way to a shrill playground countdown, one of those lighthearted moments where chance interruptions turn to memorable highlight.
Little in this compelling programme, promoted by the Cumnock Tryst Festival as part of its extended year-round activity, proved anything less than compelling. The mere sight of these four black-shirted virtuosi – Currie himself, Owen Gunnell, Adrian Spillett and Sam Walton – huddled in successive configurations, was powerfully visceral, given the physicality involved and the heated communication between them.
The two opening pieces by American percussionist and composer Andy Akiho were from his trailblazing Seven Pillars project, their accumulating might coloured by intricate rhythmic conversations and textures tickled by the curiosities posing as instruments – empty wine bottles, a kitchen sieve and much more bric-a-brac besides. What these guys can’t do with everything but the kitchen sink simply isn’t worth talking about.
What the young Scottish composer (and accordionist) Aileen Sweeney has done with her new work Starburst is well worth mention. This was the subtlest music-making of the evening, opening with the gentle unfolding of a basic motif on delicate hand chimes, reaching its highpoint with a hypnotising rock groove, before unwinding to a hushed conclusion. It gave short shrift to the notion that all percussion playing carries a health warning.
In Dave Maric’s nature-inspired Nascent Forms for mallet instruments the emphasis on quick fire repetition was mesmerising in itself, the performance scintillating for its dextrous precision and intoxicating interaction. For their send-off, the quartet turned to four drum kits and the Reich-like adrenalin rush of Julia Wolfe’s Dark Full Ride. Yes, it veered towards the deafening at times, but with a sense too of artful exhilaration as this dazzling floor show powered towards its final emphatic thump.
Cumnock Tryst founder and artistic director also used this celebrity occasion to announce his plans for the 10th Festival Programme, which runs from 2-6 October, one day longer than previous events. Among the artists featuring will be pianist Steven Osborne, British tenor Joshua Ellicot, the excellent Maxwell Quartet, folk music from Alastair Savage and Friends and locally-based Seán Gray, and jazz from the Tommy Smith Youth Jazz Orchestra and The Euan Stevenson Trio. Local groups also feature, notably the Tryst Festival Chorus and Dalmellington Brass Band among others in a special Tenth Birthday Gala Concert.
MacMillan also announced the launch of a new Cumnock Tryst Ensemble, consisting of some of Scotland’s finest classical musicians, led by cellist, improviser and composer Christian Elliott.
Ken Walton
The Colin Currie Quartet continues its current tour in Castle Douglas (27 April) and Biggar (28 April). Details at www.colincurrie.com
Full details of this year’s 10th Cumnock Tryst Festival are available at www.thecumnocktryst.com
Although it was surely the presence of pianist Stephen Hough as soloist on Rachmaninov’s perennially popular Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, alongside an invitation to subscribers to hear about the coming season, that attracted a such good house to the Candleriggs on Thursday evening, the rare performance of Stravinsky’s 1928 The Fairy’s Kiss that took up the second half of the concert was a particular delight.
A stellar example of the contrary character of the composer, the drama of this Hans Christian Andersen-derived score might be a deal more subtle than Stravinsky’s earlier ballet music, but it is there nonetheless. Unusually for him, it does seem a little prolix, but the orchestration is as full of interest over its entire 45 minutes, and there was some especially fine playing here, particularly from the SSO winds.
Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth was clearly concerned with the arc of the whole suite, the four scenes having a quasi-symphonic structure, but there were one or two moments where the tempi wavered uncertainly. Stravinsky drew on songs and piano works by Tchaikovsky for his musical material and the work references his predecessor’s own distinctive orchestrations, but the final result, and particularly the dying fall of the last bars makes its own unique impression.
The programme had opened with a contemporary interpretation of the same writer in Hans Abrahamsen’s Three Fairy-Tale Pictures from ‘The Snow Queen’. Wigglesworth’s affiliation with the orchestra’s current Composer-in-Association produced a performance that made the most of the huge orchestra required, with singular ingredients like the four flutes all doubling on piccolos. There was something distinctly MacMillan-esque about the build-up of the work, and especially the use of brass and percussion – and Sir James was in the audience to hear it.
Characteristically, Stephen Hough brought a very thoughtful approach to the fireworks of Rachmaninov’s Paganini variations, and Wigglesworth – himself a pianist of course – was very much his ally in that. Here was an account of the work that lost none of its Romantic intensity but where as much space and attention was given to the less virtuosic music. There was marvellous cohesion in the variations of tempo and a wonderfully meaty mid-range sound from the orchestra.
It was the fine detail of the soloist’s playing that really sealed the deal, though, culminating in what was surely the least showbiz despatching of the witty final bars possible.
It would be premature, in truth ill-informed, to assess the BBC SSO’s concert-style revival of Michael Tippett’s final opera, New Year, as creating a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. For how many of us have actually witnessed this bizarre work in its fully-staged totality? Completed by the ailing septuagenarian Tippett in the late 1980s, it was only ever subject to one staged production, by Peter Hall, with performances in Houston Texas in 1989, transferring to Glyndebourne, then in a modified form by Glyndebourne Touring Opera. Since then, nothing.
What Saturday’s semi-staging by Victoria Newlyn offered was just one facet of the whole – the musical score – predicated on the fact that NMC, as partners to the event, were usefully recording it to create the first commercial recording of New Year. It will be available, rather conveniently, “early in the new year”.
The issue arising from this sharp-edged Glasgow performance, in which the SSO under Martyn Brabbins were joined by a dedicated cast and the BBC Singers, was not so much what we did hear, as what we didn’t see.
It’s a plot you need regular help with: a tale of two worlds colliding, the urban banality of “Somewhere and Today” and the utopian “Nowhere and Tomorrow” somewhere in space, constructed by Tippett in naively futuristic Wellsian terms. The literal interaction between the two sets of beings – an earthly trio rescued from dysfunction by an otherworldly trio of spaceship travellers – is puzzling enough, but not to witness the actual physicality of the substantial, presumably pivotal, dance scenes leaves the full visual impact of Tippett’s fantasy concept incomplete.
As for the music, this has to rank, if not quite the rantings of an elderly esoteric composer, as an impatiently wild and cathartic compositional exorcism. There’s no limit to the juxtapositional chaos of clashing styles – moments of gorgeous post-pastoral Englishness thrown to the wind by the intervention of crunching 20th century dissonance; the lugubrious twang of an electric guitar enlivened by the onslaught of rap and reggae; the electronic datedness – Blake’s 7-style – of the space ship sound effects; even a stirring Ne’erday chorus of Auld Lang Syne shredded by scintillatingly combatant counterpoints.
What Brabbins did so successfully was to masterfully harness such fragmentations, making energetic sense of it in the same way a good Bernstein Mass performance makes sense of its stylistic incongruences. He was abetted fully by a trusty cast. Alan Oke – a one-time regular with Scottish Opera in the 1980s – commanded a stentorian central presence as the Presenter; soprano Rhian Lois sang powerfully and alluringly as the chief protagonist Jo Ann, Ross Ramgobin somewhat gauche as her Afro-Caribbean foster brother Donny. Foster mother Susan Bickley bore a stirringly stoical countenance.
The white suited time-travellers offered a potent contrast – Roland Wood typically imposing as computer wizard Merlin; Robert Murray lustrously impassioned as space pilot Pelegrin; with their boss Rachel Nicholls’ radiant soprano powering through, exhilaratingly so. The BBC Singers contributed animated rearguard support.
For all its crazy merits though, including the nostalgic aura of what is essentially mood music and sound effects of the time, this experience constantly felt as if it were one dimension short. If New Year is already a silk purse, we need full theatrical proof. Anyone keen to test that might be tempted by Keith Warner’s new production for Birmingham Opera Company opening this July. The conductor is another SSO regular, Alpesh Chauhan.
Ken Walton
This concert was recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3, after which it will be available via BBC Sounds for 30 days
It’s hard to tell exactly what attracted such a large audience to this afternoon concert by the BBC SSO, but even if it was purely a matter of chance none will have gone away unsatisfied.
It could, of course, have been for Sean Shibe, the cool Scots-born guitarist, who complimented a recently-composed concerto for his instrument with the more famous one of Jaoquín Rodrigo, the Concierto de Aranjuez. Or it may have been the sunny coupled attractions of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol and Stravinsky’s suite The Firebird.
More surprisingly, perhaps, it might have been for Bulgarian-born conductor Delyana Lazarova, who is not yet so familiar a name here, but who certainly made a significant impact on the SSO players – eagerly responsive to her invigorating lead – and on an audience, cheering noisily in the wake of dynamic, warm-hearted performances.
Rimsky-Korsakov’s exuberant Spanish portrait provided a glittering opener, the Mediterranean ecstasy of the juicy tuttis charmingly offset by prominent solo writing, not least for violin, breezily executed by SSO leader Kanako Ito, and clarinet, Adam Lee bewitching us with beguiling virtuosity. Especially exciting was the visible, energised synergy between Lazarova and the orchestra.
In the first of the two concerto appearances, Shibe fronted a new chamber orchestra version of Turia by the Spanish trombonist-turned composer Franciso Coll. By his own admission, Coll “sees” his music in pictorial terms. “Sometimes I don’t know if I’m composing or painting, because I don’t see much difference,” he has said. The visual stimulus here is a dried-out riverbed in his native Valencia, now transformed into a verdant sea of flora and fountains.
From its wistful opening – spectral brushstrokes on guitar finding firmer footing as the orchestra’s rhythmic presence increases – a sequence of five movements capture successive musical images. Awe and mystery give way to frenetic concision, before the scene turns eerie once again. A sonorous calm envelops the penultimate movement, blown aside by the dizzy rapture of the finale. Shibe’s absorbing performance was lustrous yet breathtakingly precise.
Then, after the interval, he returned for that most famous of guitar concertos by Rodrigo, its swashbuckling opening chords signalling the radiance that was to follow. The opening movement sparkled with joie de vivre. The central Adagio, assisted by James Horan’s exotic cor anglais solo, introduced an elusive sensuality before the incisive brevity of the finale, in which Shibe’s sizzling virtuosity – strangely emphasised by a markedly stoical countenance – was spiritedly amplified by Lazarova’s sharp-witted superintendence.
She, alone, moulded the conclusive tour de force that was Stravinsky’s The Firebird, a narrative of extremes countering the fickle magic of the Firebird’s opening dance with the Russian succulence of the Round Dance, the demonic heat of the Infernal Dance with the fetching elegance of the Berceuse, and finally the purposeful triumph of a hymn-like apotheosis. Lazarova, one hopes, will be back before long.
Ken Walton
Recorded for future broadcast by BBC Radio 3, after which it will be available for 30 days on BBC Sounds.
If, as seems likely, this was her last full concert appearance before taking maternity leave, Nicola Benedetti chose an ideal work from which to take a step back, because it begged her swift return to performing.
I am sure I was not the only listener left in two minds by Mark Simpson’s Violin Concerto, co-commissioned by the RSNO, specifically written for Benedetti and twice postponed before she gave its Scottish premiere with the orchestra. The need to hear it again before coming to judgement is unarguable, because it is a packed, full-throttle piece for much of its length.
There are a lot of notes for the soloist to play, and much of it is the high-octane stuff at which Benedetti excels in established repertoire works. Her virtuosity was clearly as much of an inspiration as any external influences, and the composer’s citing of the Covid pandemic and lockdown as one such factor is not immediately obvious.
Written in five movements, but played uninterrupted, perhaps there is a catharsis in the manic second movement, but the more readily appreciable moments came later in the work. With a lot of work for a large percussion section and the brass, much of the earlier music was very loud, although the trombones and tuba were at their most interesting muted.
The concerto does calm down a little later, but still makes considerable demands of the soloist with double stopping and other virtuosic techniques even when the underscore was pared back to low strings and gong, or Pippa Tunnell’s harp. The harmonic flavour of the work draws on a wide range of ingredients, sometimes very Eastern sounding but ending in another boisterous movement that sounds very American, mixing the concert hall with the world of movie soundtrack.
Was there a discernible narrative arc to the whole piece? Further listening is required, but conductor David Afkham certainly shaped – and, crucially, balanced – the sections with great attention.
The German has been at the helm of the Spanish National Orchestra in senior posts for a decade and has extensive American experience as well. This was his RSNO debut and the Shostakovich Five he directed after the interval suggested a very useful partnership already. Under earlier chief conductors, this orchestra played more of this composer’s music than we have heard of late, but it still revels in it.
The Fifth, of course, was Shostakovich’s 1937 response to Stalin’s criticism (of the “muddle” of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk), and much has been written and said about decoding its message. Afkham’s approach to the score was refreshingly direct, quite brisk in places that give other conductors pause, and, I think, entirely free of irony. It is a pretty bleak work in places, and the slow movement had a tangible feeling of utter resignation, but the RSNO wind soloists were on stellar form and the strings magnificent in the relentless single note that brings the work to its compelling conclusion.
Keith Bruce
Picture shows the curtain call at Friday’s Usher Hall concert (credit: RSNO)
Alongside world class musicianship and a breadth of programming that leaves few ears unengaged, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s 50th anniversary season has been distinguished by very thoughtful and original programming. This concert, built around the world premiere of a new choral work by Sir James MacMillan, was a stunning example of that.
MacMillan’s Composed in August – not a diary note but the real title of the Robert Burns lyric known mostly by its first line Now Westlin Winds – is an SCO commission with partner organisations in Estonia and Sweden. Once they have had their premieres, it is likely to become a very popular piece with choirs, challenging in parts but tune-filled, and unusual in being a secular work from MacMillan for these forces.
The singers have to employ a range of techniques and the excellent SCO Chorus members were as assured in their diction of the rhythmically overlapping phrases as in the wordless music at the gentle finish. The instrumental music is for the SCO’s standard set-up, with the odd extra string player, and echoes the pastoral music of the Baroque era in the strings, horns and woodwind birdsong while still bearing the clear signature of the composer. With a wealth of different music over the five stanzas, it is an exquisite piece.
The work of two Ayrshire lads was followed by a Mancunian’s impression of Orcadian celebration, with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s perennially popular An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise. There are few conductors who so obviously enjoy their work as Maxim Emelyanychev, but the young Russian was in ecstatic form here, enjoying all the theatre of the piece with foot-stomping enthusiasm. That included a tray of drams being brought on for himself and leader Stephanie Gonley as the work slides into inebriation, greeted with a hilarious massed “slanj” of hipflasks from the chorus, still seated in the choir stalls.
If the larks set up the arrival of piper Robert Jordan, in full regalia, from the back of hall to perfection, there was also a characteristic precision in every detail of their performance – especially the “tuning up” moment, which Emelyanychev surely recognised as being a gag partly at his own expense.
The programme began with a French composer’s way with Scots romanticism, Berlioz’s Rob Roy overture, which takes Burns’s tune Scots Wha Hae and finds a lot of different things to do with it. With some period instrumentation, it is a curious and fascinating response to Sir Walter Scott’s novel, full of colour and a reminder, perhaps, that the melody makes a strong claim to National Anthem status.
The overture teed-up a superb performance of the same composer’s La mort de Cleopatre with mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill on her best form. Rather than a soloist at the front of the stage she was embedded in the music, but at the same time gave an expressive reading that was straight off the opera stage. The low string pulse that sets up her welcoming of death sounded startlingly contemporary, and emblematic of how this orchestra and its associates span the centuries.
I’ve no idea what Thursday’s live broadcast performance of Verdi’s Requiem by the BBC SSO and Edinburgh Festival Chorus sounded like over the airwaves – though it’s easy enough to find out by dialling it up on BBC Sounds – but in the flesh, in the limited acoustical sound box that is Glasgow City Halls, and untamed by production tricks, it veered close on its mightiest occasions to deafening. That won’t be the case on Sunday, when the same performers under SSO chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth repeat this showpiece work in the spaciousness of Edinburgh’s Usher Hall.
That said, reservations lay not entirely with bricks and mortar. What Wigglesworth gave us on Thursday evening was a Verdi Requiem rich in golden moments, at times particularly thought-provoking, but which was otherwise erratic in its piecing together of what is essentially fluent impassioned opera dressed in sacred concert hall formality.
The very opening was full of theatrical promise – the slow, considered cello motif faintly whispered, embracing a brooding, mysterious tone from which the opening Introit and Kyrie looked set to rise and fall with mountainous persuasion before the ensuing Dies Irae, with its savage drums, venomous energy and protracted drama.
The full-bodied Festival Chorus, trained by its director James Grossmith, was instantly impressive, wholesome and confident, wide ranging in its expressive power, diction crystal clear. Enter, too, the solo vocal quartet, notable initially for the piercing operatic tenor of Antonio Poli, to which soprano Miah Persson, mezzo soprano Alice Coote and bass William Thomas added both their corporate heft and, where it mattered, intuitive sparks of individuality. The SSO responded dutifully with supportive playing and matching sumptuousness, despite the brass being actively encouraged to overwhelm the chorus.
All this gave Wigglesworth scope to add his own thoughts – glimpses of often ignored orchestral detail he felt needed emphasis, though some were more awkwardly manufactured than naturally emergent; weighted tempi that, when judiciously applied, magically drew breath. What we didn’t always get was a sense of complete organic synergy – the SSO left ever so slightly behind the beat at times – or sufficient seamless vision to give the piece its macro-visceral grip.
The later, shorter movements produced the same peppering of delights: the soloists revelling in the transformational piety of the Offertory; an ecstatic choral Hosanna to round off the Sanctus and Benedictus (despite its exquisitely busy violin countermelody – the icing on the cake – being barely audible); the spiritual awe and intensity of the Lux Aeterna, including a dynamic floor show from the double basses whose synchronous, animated pizzicato resembled an archery display; and then the Libera Me, its gorgeous a cappella “Requiem Aeternam”, Persson soaring ethereally above, like a precious preparatory moment before the work’s exhaustive, final plea for deliverance.
If this was a performance that occasionally seemed one rehearsal short of complete readiness, Sunday afternoon’s repeat at the Usher Hall should redeem that. And there. of course, the brass can let off steam without causing any offence.
The Edinburgh music school’s Head of Voice, Kate Aitken, tells Keith Bruce about her new vocal programmes
There was a well-placed advertisement in the programme for last week’s concerts by the RSNO in Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow, which featured Patrick Barrett’s impressive RSNO Youth Chorus singing the Scottish premiere of James Burton’s The Lost Words and adding their voices to Mendelssohn’s Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Proud parents who wish to encourage their singing offspring may well have been tempted to scan the QR code in the advert for St Mary’s Music School’s new voice training programmes for teenagers, starting in the new school year. It is an important step for the Edinburgh school that has been the foundation of an international career for many a classical instrumentalist.
Leading the new direction at St Mary’s is Kate Aitken, the Edinburgh-born mezzo who went to Lyon Opera after training at the Royal Academy in London. Having joined the school as Music Department Manager, she has been appointed Head of Voice and is overseeing the two new programmes for 13 to 15 year olds and for senior pupils between the ages of 15 and 19.
“When I joined the school in 2022 we had singing lessons – we have Margaret Aronson here, who is a legend in Scottish singing – but there was no specialist language provision or special performance classes,” she explains. “At the end of my first year it was clear that, although the singers were singing well, there was no time in the week to teach languages, performance and technique.”
Aitken looked back over her own experience, coming to the opera world through music theatre, and was determined to give the younger generation a grounding in the skills she hadn’t had the opportunity to learn.
“Fabulous singing lessons don’t necessarily make fabulous singers, because they don’t prepare you for going on to a conservatoire. I spent the first years of my undergraduate studies trying to work out how you take criticism in public without it destroying your confidence.
“My English counterparts had constantly been singing in front of other people, doing lots of masterclasses and performance classes. By comparison my singing lessons with one person in one room were very safe. There is such an advantage in feeling confident that you have all the skills, and what we weren’t offering here was the full package for a young singer, so that’s what we’re building.”
“Building” is the operative word, because necessarily Aitken’s initiatives are starting small. With the collapse of plans to relocate to the Old Royal High School on Calton Hill, St Mary’s is now looking to develop more space on its current site in the West End, and a new teaching strand also requires specialist staff resources.
“The vocal department will have two parts initially. The changing voices programme, aimed at pupils in S3 and S4, 13 to 15 years old, is all about your confidence in using your voice. Girls’ voices break too, although in a much smaller and less obvious way than boys’.
“Most young people’s early singing experience is a choral one, and what we’re doing here is starting them solo singing. It’s not about blending in with your peers, it’s about how you operate your own instrument efficiently.
“For young boys it is about keeping going through the break – we have a new teacher, Alexandra Wynne, who has worked at Birmingham Conservatoire and set up choirs in the Midlands, who specialises in that niche area of vocal development.”
Aitken herself will take charge of the senior programme in its first years, although she aspires to bring in acting and movement teachers and native-speaker language coaches in the future.
“The upper end of the vocal programme is aimed at S5 and S6 and all about prepping you for the next stage – either going down the conservatoire route and going off to university with voice as your first study. The older students will learn acting, movement and stage-craft and once a year they’ll do a programme of scenes from opera and musical theatre.
“Both programmes will have language classes – Italian, French and German – and specialist performance classes talking about how you perform as a vocalist, because that’s very different from how you perform as a violinist or as a pianist – how you interact with the audience is a very different skill.
“Singing is a universal ability, but there is a lack of wider understanding of what is required of a classical singer. It’s not just raw talent but you have to train to have the technique, just like an instrumentalist, and work on your performance skill.
“The rubbish part about being a singer is that you have to accept that some people will like your voice and some won’t, and there’s nothing you can do to change that. A violinist can change the fiddle, the strings or the bow to change their sound. A singer doesn’t have that, but every young singer can make the best of the instrument they’ve got.”
From the point of view of the St Mary’s Cathedral choristers, whose latest Delphian recording, of Stainer’s The Crucifixion, is released this month, the associated school will now offer a vocal pathway that, perhaps surprisingly, has never previously existed.
“At the moment our choristers finish at S2, either auditioning as instrumentalists or going off to schools across Edinburgh. Now they will be able to stay at the school with voice as a first study,” says Aitken. “The changing voices will have a choir, which will itself change all the time as their voice type changes, and will use music that is adaptable for that. They’ll be singing one to a part, so that although it is an ensemble, it is not a choral activity but working as a soloist within an ensemble.”
As that distinction suggests, only a select number of pupils will be part of this new initiative, but then St Mary’s is a small school of fewer than 80 pupils.
“This September I’d like to see three singers on the changing voices programme and four on the senior vocal programme, and then take on a few more in the subsequent years to reach a maximum of 12,” says Aitken. “That way we can make sure that every child gets an intensive one-on-one education. For the senior end of the school, a group of six is good for opera repertoire and allows us to be selective about who comes on the programme – it is very much for those who are driven and desperate to sing.
“What makes St Mary’s special is how flexible and adaptive we are to each student. If you are a trombonist who wants to play the sackbut, we’ll find you someone who will teach you that, so that we build a course that is what you want to learn. That’s what makes this place unique within the Scottish education system.
“It is lovely to build something that I wish that I’d had at that age, and to have such a supportive team.”
It would be fruitless to pretend that the Alexander Gibson Opera School’s end-of-term production of Mozart’s pivotal early opera was not compromised by the indisposition of the tenor cast as Idomeneo.
Canadian James Schouten was onstage, and walked, mimed, and occasionally coughed, through the title role, while New Zealander Aidan Thomas Phillips sang the part from the side of the stage. Plaudits to them for their perseverance, but by the end of the night it was clearly a stretch for both, and the brave efforts of their colleagues could do nothing for the skewed balance of Act 2’s beautiful “farewell” trio and the ground-breaking quartet featuring all four main characters in Act 3.
Rehearsals had apparently been dogged by illness, but even if everyone had been well, it would be hard to enthuse about PJ Harris’s production. The imposing set, by Anna Yates, is dominated by “Neptune’s column” a lighthouse-like edifice which contains the god (sung by Joshua McCullough) and is mounted on a rocky plinth which later opens up to become the grotto/allotment of the captive Trojan princess, Ilia (Audrey Tsang). With the upper playing area being home to a collection of props – a safe, a crown, a tomahawk – that are the subject of much distracting stage business, and the restricted space below permitting only processional choreography of chorus and principals, the reason why David McVicar’s Scottish Opera production took a minimal approach to staging the same work was all too apparent. Perhaps all this opaque symbolism referenced a recently-popular fantasy TV series, but if so, so what? And, indeed, why?
Musically the performances were mostly very fine indeed. Tsang was in superb voice from the start – although her better solo music comes later in the score – and Rosie Lavery, dressed in scarlet as Elettra, Ilia’s rival for the affections of Idamante, was even more commanding vocally and the most confident performer onstage, ideally cast for the drama of her solos in Act 3. In a simpler staging, the decision to make Idamante the daughter of Idomeneo, rather than a “trouser role” in the traditional sense, might have seemed more significant, but making it almost incidental may well have been entirely deliberate. Charlotte Bateman sang well, and although her less powerful voice did not match the work of either of her suitors, the three blended beautifully.
The best ensemble work, however, came from the chorus, who also have their best music later in the work, and produced the goods in their eloquent commentary on the shenanigans of their supposed superiors. In the pit, conductor John Butt has the student orchestra as well-drilled as you would expect, while his own harpsichord playing characteristically drives the soloists’ accompagnato to fine narrative effect.
Time and Tides was no ordinary Scottish Chamber Orchestra gig, nor was it a typical SCO audience. But then, when has the versatile Finnish musical phenomenon Pekka Kuusisto – violinist, director and funky entertainer – ever made claims to doing things the traditional way? In this, the last of his current four-programme residency with the orchestra, it was anything but business as usual.
Nor were we short-changed. As well as two astonishing UK premieres – former SCO associate composer Anna Clyne’s violin concerto and a new song cycle by Helen Grime, written 2023 and 2021 respectively – Kuusisto, doubling on violin and miniature harmonium, teamed up with Scots fiddler Aidan O’Rourke to introduce some of the traditional melodies used by Clyne in her concerto. Thus, perhaps, the reason for the wider-sourced audience, one that was encouragingly young and vocal. And there was more besides.
First and foremost, this was a programme devised with arched intent. It began with a hint of provocation, the curved-ball dissonant writing of Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür as witnessed in his orchestral piece Lighthouse. Its combination of harshness, meatiness and slithery translucence, also its retro-Baroque inflexions, makes for an atmospheric gem. Under Kuusisto, and with the assured SCO strings, it had a beguiling, delirious impact.
At the other end of the evening came Einojuhani Rautavaara’s avian curiosity Cantus Arcticus, surreal in the way he overlays a luscious orchestral landscape with a cacophony of recorded birdcalls, but also a kind of traditional night cap bringing us back to earth after the concert’s central highlights.
As previously mentioned, Kuusisto’s plan was to ease us into the Clyne Concerto – Time and Tides – by way of a stylistic gear change, he and O’Rourke intimately calming the air with folk tunes from Scotland and Finland, joined ultimately by some upper string backing in close harmony. If physically it wasn’t the smoothest transition, it served its purpose, sharpening the sensitivities required to appreciate the multiplicity of Clyne’s folk-inspired creation.
Written especially for Kuusisto, his eccentricities were exploited – his knack of whistling while playing, his unlimited vocabulary of violin/non-violin skills – and built into a glittering suite of five movements that embraced everything from zany pastiche and wit to reflective soulfulness and airy pastoralism. Within this, the integrity of Clyne’s chosen folk songs – from Scotland, Finland and America – remained hauntingly intact, especially when the players added their own singing voices to the closing mix.
Helen Grimes’ It Will Be Spring Soon – optimistic texts by Philip Larkin, Sandra Cisneros and Jane Hirshfield set to luminous, opulent music – was delivered engagingly by one of its dedicatees, soprano Ruby Hughes (the other being violinist Malin Broman, whose obligato role was conveniently taken here by Kuusisto). Written with echoes of Britten, Grimes creates a magical relationship between the sprightly strings/harp scoring and the soprano’s controlled intensity.
Just how effective the foyer presence of DJ Dolphin Boy (Andy Levy) was during the interval likely depends on personal experience, but with him tucked almost anonymously into a tight corner along from the interval drinks, I’m guessing his efficient efforts may have passed some people by. Good idea; more a venue issue perhaps.
