This year’s Cumnock Tryst, which runs from 1-4 October, will conclude with a major tribute to John Wallace, the trumpeter, composer and former principal of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland who died earlier this year.
“We mark his memory and his legacy for Scottish music this year in a special way”, announced Festival director James MacMillan, whose own trumpet concert, Epiclesis, was written for Wallace in 1993. “John attended last year’s Tryst festival and was looking forward to participating in this one,” he added.
Instead, the final two days of this year’s event will not only feature Wallace’s eponymous brass ensemble, The Wallace Collection, but will see them team up with The Cooperation Band in Wallace’s own arrangement of Giovanni Gabrielli’s 1615 Canzoni et Sonate. For this Venetian-style spectacular Festival finale (4 Oct) the massed players will be spread around the encircling galleries of Cumnock’s Old Church. “It will be the ultimate surround sound experience,” promises MacMillan.
On the previous day, The Wallace Collection teams up with The Cumnock Tryst Festival Chorus and local young singers in the town’s Barony Hall for an ambitious programme under the baton of Eamonn Dougan. Besides music by Vaughan Williams, John Rutter and Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds, there’s the world premiere of a new work by American composer AJ Harbison.
Thursday’s opening concert (1 Oct) showcases the talents of the young blind Scots pianist Ethan Loch, who came to prominence winning the keyboard category of the BBC Young Musician competition in 2022. He has since appeared as soloist with the RSNO, BBC SSO and Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. His recital in Cumnock’s Trinity Church features some of his own music alongside that of Gluck, Liszt, Debussy and Chopin.
Other visiting classical artists include the high-profile saxophonist Jess Gillam and virtuoso euphonium player David Childs. Both feature in the Festival’s only orchestral concert (2 Oct) by the BBC SSO: Gillam taking front stage in MacMillan’s own Saxophone Concerto; Childs in the same composer’s Where the Lugar Meets the Glaisnock, a work MacMillan describes as a “love-letter to the town where I grew up”.
Childs also teams up with pianist Christopher Williams in Trinity Church for a Saturday morning recital (3 Oct), while Gillam presents a colourful spread that afternoon with her own Jess Gillam Trio in music ranging from Corelli and Sidney Bechet to Nadi Boulanger and George Gershwin.
The overall Festival template remains familiar. The Cumnock Hour (2 Oct), in partnership with the Boswell Book Festival, sees writer and broadcaster Stephen Johnson discuss his new book – Music Lessons: Seven Composers and What They Taught Me – which explores how “dark” music helped him during difficult times. Earlier that day The Unbroken Thread showcases care and share initiatives undertaken by the Riverside Centre with pupils from Hillside School in collaboration with Drake Music Scotland and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
Artists appearing at the late night Festival Club include contemporary folk from the Hannah Rarity Trio (1 Oct), a tribute to Stéphane Grappelli by the Seonaid Aitken Quintet (2 Oct), and music theatre cabaret, CAMPS After Dark!, from Cumnock’s own theatre group.
This year’s Promenades at Dumfries House (4 Oct) are given over to local young talent, including Kilmarnock pianist Ethan Chan.
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra musicians have been rewarded for a sensational season with very good sales for the closing week of concerts, and that was especially good to see and hear in Perth, where a superb programme could be enjoyed in what is the finest acoustic in which to appreciate their playing.
Proving once again that nothing is beyond the SCO’s range, Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev’s programme bracketed two Ninth Symphonies around the singular character of Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No 1.
The piano soloist for that was Steven Osborne, a musician of similarly eclectic capabilities, but ideally matched to this mercurial work. He was teamed with the solo trumpet of Aaron Azunda Akugbo, reflecting the origins of the work as an abandoned Trumpet Concerto.
Scored for a string ensemble, and benefitting from the augmented sections required for the symphonies, it is a strange but beguiling work, incorporating quotations from Beethoven and Haydn, and hugely virtuosic for the pianist. That was the composer himself at the work’s premiere, and it is not hard to hear his day-job as a movie-theatre accompanist in much of the writing.
It was preceded by the same composer’s Symphony No 9, one of his briefest, and less frequently heard than many of his longer works. That’s a pity, because it is a very colourful piece and the Allegro first movement makes a lively concert-opener, even if its frivolity was not what Stalin expected as a celebration of victory in 1945. Emelyanychev set a pacey tempo that didn’t deny the hints of music-hall about the score and maintained a lightness of touch in the performance.
After a robust solo from guest leader Sini Simonen, the scoring moved on to feature first clarinet Maximiliano Martin and principal trumpet Peter Franks before bassoonist Cerys Amrose-Evans had the lion’s share of the limelight from the Largo into the closing Allegretto. All were on top form, and, with some terrific pizzicato passages from the low strings, the orchestration was always intriguing and beautifully clear.
That set the template for a superb account of Dvorak’s Symphony No 9 “From the New World” after the interval. If the Perth audience had been enthusiastic for music that was probably unfamiliar to many, they were about to be blown away by the interpretation of a well-loved work.
As they had been placed for the Shostakovich symphony, four basses were centre-stage, high at the back of the platform, the four horns on their right and trombones and tuba to the left. The strings were augmented to 18 violins and six each of violas and cellos. This was a big SCO, but still far short of symphony orchestra size and the winds were as usual, with oboist Katherine Bryar doubling on cor anglais for the Largo and first flute Andre Cebrian also playing piccolo.
If Shostakovich 9 is a compact symphony, albeit in five movements, here was a deliciously compact reading of Dvorak 9, the dynamic accuracy of the strings under that slow-movement cor anglais tune utterly mesmersing. Emelyanychev brought such finesse from the string players that it couldn’t help but draw as much attention as the composer’s best-known melody.
The rhythms of the Scherzo, be they Native American or Czech, were as precision-tooled and, indeed, every gleaming detail of Dvorak’s masterpiece shone as if being played for the first time in what was an unforgettable reading of an old war-horse of the repertoire.
These season-ending performances, in Perth, Edinburgh’s Usher Hall and Glasgow City Halls have been dedicated to the memory of viola section stalwart of over 30 years, Brian Schiele. In the programme, 10 of his colleagues, past and present, share memories of his character, musicality and generosity. It is another example of the SCO doing things properly, but it was the music-making of the orchestra that really did him proud.
The Royal Scottish National Orchestra has announced the appointment of its first ever female Music Director.
Lithuanian-born conductor Giedrė Šlekytė, 37, who debuted with the RSNO only last December in a critically-acclaimed performance of Mahler’s First Symphony, takes up her new position at the start of the 2027-28 Season. She will meanwhile assume the role of Music Director Designate with immediate effect.
Šlekytė succeeds Thomas Søndergård, whose successful 18-year partnership with the RSNO – leading to his appointment as Principal Guest Conductor in 2012, then as Music Director from 2018 – will nonetheless continue through his new role as Music Director Emeritus. During the 2027-28 Season Søndergård will return to lead four concert programmes.
Based in Austria, Šlekytė has enjoyed a growing reputation in the fields of both symphonic repertoire and opera. Besides guesting with such major orchestras as the Vienna Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Dallas Symphony Orchestra and Staatskapelle Berlin, she served as Principal Conductor of the Staadtheater Klagenfurt from 2016-18, and later as Principal Guest Conductor of the Bruckner Orchestra Linz from 2022-25.
In the opera world, Šlekytė has conducted productions at some of the most prestigious opera houses, including the Wiener Staatsoper, London’s Royal Opera House and the Staatsoper Berlin. She returns to Deutsche Oper Berlin to conduct a new production of Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer later this year, before undertaking Beethoven’s Leonore with MusikTheater an der Wien in early 2027.
Although still relatively unknown to Scottish audiences, Šlekytė made a powerful impression in her only appearance thus far with the RSNO, when she conducted Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto alongside her very distinctive Mahler One.
VoxCarnyx’sreview of the performance noted that “where Šlekytė had exerted an impressive command over the orchestra in the concerto, she had the field to herself for Mahler’s First Symphony and took full advantage.” It spoke too of “the clarity Šlekytė brought to this [Mahler] performance, her no-nonsense baton technique and instinctive pacing.”
Announcing Šlekytė’s appointment, RSNO Chief Executive Alistair Mackie said: “There are weeks in rehearsals when something shifts. A buzz starts, momentum builds. You can feel it coming from the musicians themselves. And when it does happen, our audiences can feel it too. That’s what happened with Giedrė.
“When she joined us last year, her musical ideas and the way she works with players spoke for themselves. Giedrė gives the orchestra room to breathe and to play. The connection – musical, cultural and personal – was there from the start. She is the right person to carry forward what Thomas has built. The foundation he created is a strong one: an orchestra that knows itself, plays with confidence, and is ready for what comes next.”
Šlekytė inherits an orchestra that, under Søndergård and in increasingly straitened fiscal times for arts companies, has enjoyed international success through major tours of the USA, Europe and (later this month) China, while at home demonstrating remarkable versatility in the range of work it has undertaken, from major focuses on Richard Strauss and Mahler to high-profile film track recordings undertaken at the RSNO’s state-of-the-art recording facilities in Scotland’s Studio.
Recognising the opportunities that affords, Šlekytė said: “It is a great joy and honour to be appointed as Music Director of the RSNO starting with the 2027:28 Season. I got to know the RSNO as an orchestra of musical excellence but also curiosity, versatility, open-mindedness and great energy.
“Lots of exciting concert programmes and recordings are in the planning, and I can’t wait to join the RSNO family, grow together and inspire the audiences in Scotland and beyond.”
If it is difficult not to miss hearing Voi che sapete and Dove sono sung in Italian, nonetheless it is pretty much inarguable that performing Marriage of Figaro in English makes it more accessible. Even with Amanda Holden’s translation of the libretto, the machinations of Figaro’s parentage and Cherubino’s infatuations are complex to follow.
Sir Thomas Allen’s production of Mozart’s 1787 hit was already very aware of the class war at the heart of the comedy of Figaro’s wedding and it is even more evident in this revival. All that hiding-in-the-same-chair nonsense in Act One becomes an obvious metaphor for the similarity in the amorous attitudes of Count Almaviva and his pretty page, one because he feels his position entitles him, the other caused by raging youthful hormones.
As Edward Jowle’s performance in the title role makes clear, cocksure Figaro is also not without his flaws, never as smart as he thinks he is and too ready to think the worst of his bride-to-be, Susanna (Ava Dodd). Bringing up the houselights for his bitter Act Four aria tries to make all the men in the audience complicit in his self-deception.
Jowle and Dodd have real chemistry together and excellent voices, and Simone McIntosh’s energetic Cherubino is another fine piece of casting, well matched with Kira Kaplan’s Barbarina when she makes her appearance.
It was hard to warm as quickly to Alexandra Lowe’s Countess and Ian Rucker’s Count, she coldly disappointed rather than nursing thwarted passion, he a little stiff and short of heft at the bottom of his range, but that feeling dissipated in the swirl of the action and the building momentum of the ensemble set-pieces.
There were some lapses in clarity in the diction of some of the other principals, particularly in the patter-pace verses, but Scottish Opera’s casting, mixing experienced hands with young talent and new faces with company stalwarts, is up to its usual high standard – and similarly tall in the case of Jowle, Rucker, and Edward Hawkins as Doctor Bartolo.
This is a superb-looking staging (designed by Simon Higlett), with snappy scene-changes and sumptuous period costuming, the one assumed by the Countess and then adopted by Susanna clearly echoing Audrey Hepburn’s in the film of My Fair Lady, with all the associated trappings of pretending to be someone you are not.
Choreography is in the reliable hands of Kally Lloyd-Jones, the chorus moving as precisely as the principals do, and demonstrating as clear a grasp of ensemble coherence.
The bed-rock of the whole production, however, is in the pit where Dane Lam conducts a very characterful orchestra, with natural trumpets and horns, 30-odd strings on sparkling form (notably leading into the septet at the end of Act Two), and the winds to his left full of fine soloists.
Singular praise, however, has to go to Toby Hession for his piano continuo, on the conductor’s right. It is full of delightful witty surprises, enlivening the recitatives and almost commentating on the action. The composer would have loved it.
Keith Bruce
Further performances in Glasgow tomorrow and 15, 17, 20 & 23 May then touring to Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Inverness.
Picture of Simone McIntosh as Cherubino by Mihaela Bodlovic
Finding soloists within its own ranks is no longer a tactic the Scottish Chamber Orchestra reserves for summer touring to Scotland’s smaller halls, although that was where principal cello Philip Higham last played the Schumann Cello Concerto with his colleagues.
In another superbly-structured programme from Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev and the SCO, Higham’s performance of a work he has securely under his fingers was preceded by the young Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage and followed after the interval by the UK premiere of Jorg Widmann’s 5 Albumblatter, the composer’s concerto-like homage to Schumann, written as a competition piece for cello students. The orchestrated version of Debussy’s gorgeously melodic Petite Suite brought the concert to a sumptuous conclusion.
In contradiction of the printed programme, it was only in the Mendelssohn that we heard natural timpani, horns, and trumpets, the latter especially effective towards the end of the piece. Emelyanychev found a very wide range of orchestral sound and intricate balance in this brief piece, that might be seen as minor Mendelssohn.
Higham may know the Schumann well, but he never succumbed to the temptation of Romantic wallowing in the music. This was a rigorous performance of a work that surely now has its proper place in the pantheon of concertos for his instrument. If the opening is structurally similar to Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, the flow of the piece is all Schumann and the finale, with the soloist’s fiendishly tricky arpeggios in dialogue with the orchestra, surely influenced the composer’s revision of the Fourth Symphony.
Schumann’s chamber music for piano and cello (his own instruments) lie behind the fun and games of Widmann’s 2022 work, also highly technically demanding, but smile-making as well. There is some deconstruction of those influences in the opening movement, amusing dialogue with the bassoons in the rhythmic Liebelei, and a fourth movement that imagines Clara and Robert doing a Bossa Nova around the ballroom. The finale is entitled Mit Humor, but that is an instruction that seemed superfluous.
Debussy’s Petite Suite began as a work for two pianos and the first two movements contain two of his best known tunes. The orchestrated version his publisher commissioned becomes richer as the four movements unfold, and, as he had with the Mendelssohn, Emelyanychev revealed the work’s riches incrementally. Like the Schumann, this is music that can become mushy, but that was never a danger here, in the conductor’s pin-sharp attention to detail. Pointillism, rather than Impressionism perhaps.
General Director Alex Reedijk is 20 years in the post as he launches Scottish Opera’s new season. He looks forward and back with Keith Bruce.
As Scottish Opera launches the programme for its 2026/27 season, there are a number of anniversaries to be acknowledged. In descending order of antiquity, they include the 200th anniversary of the death of Beethoven, the centenary of the birth of the company’s founder Sir Alexander Gibson, the 50th anniversary of the death of Benjamin Britten, the 30th anniversary of the first Scottish Opera production by Glasgow’s internationally-renowned opera director Sir David McVicar, and the 20th season of General Director Alex Reedijk.
During a long chat in his office at ScotOp HQ, Reedijk was persuaded to look at the path that brought him to that milestone, but was careful to ensure that the others were all celebrated along the way.
To begin with the season, the headline is that it contains six new productions, which is an impressive figure in comparison with recent years, and that has been achieved with clever husbanding of resources.
As already announced, it begins at the Edinburgh International Festival with Missy Mazzoli’s The Galloping Cure, reuniting the team behind the global hit Breaking the Waves.
“It is already booked to go on to Sweden, San Francisco, Canadian Opera and Adelaide,” Reedijk reveals. “It is a piece that needs to be told, and it speaks to our international standing. Missy Mazzoli is in my view the most important female opera composer in the world today, certainly in the English language.”
Co-commissioned by many of those other companies, and working again with Opera Ventures and the EIF, Reedijk is clear that only that range of partnerships make the budget the piece requires attainable.
The company will also be at the Lammermuir Festival in September as usual, a one-off programme in St Mary’s Kirk, Haddington including Britten’s Les illuminations, Phaedre, and Our Hunting Fathers.
Sir David McVicar’s Scottish Opera career began in 1996 with Mozart’s Idomeneo, and he follows up the hugely successful production of Puccini’s Il trittico with the same composer’s final masterpiece, Turandot, premiered a century ago.
The new staging, with Trine Bastrup Moller in the title role, Victor Starsky as Calaf and Hye-Youn Lee as Liu, has the same creative team as Il trittico and will use the original “Alfano One” completion, with its redemptive extra closing scene.
There are many links to other recent Scottish Opera triumphs in the company’s return to the operas of Handel in February. Alcina will be directed by Olivia Fuchs, who was responsible for last year’s acclaimed The Makropulos Affair, designed by Yannis Thavoris, who created the fine set for Jonathan Dove’s Marx in London in 2024, and lit by Jack Wiltshire, last with the company in the same year’s Albert Herring. With Dmitri Jurowski conducting, the cast includes a company debut from soprano Madeline Boreham in the title role.
The same month, and the same set and lighting, adapted by Thavoris and Wiltshire, will see performances in Glasgow and Edinburgh of Fidelio as Scottish Opera’s contribution to the Beethoven 200 season which also features Scotland’s orchestras. Directed by Ruth Knight and conducted by Kensho Watanabe, it will feature Julia Sporsen as Leonore and Thorbjorn Gulbrandsoy as Florestan.
McVicar’s new Turandot is co-produced with Irish National Opera and will go to Dublin in 2027, and Daisy Evans’ new staging of Madama Butterfly, which was seen there last year, is also a co-production and comes to Glasgow, Edinburgh, Inverness and Aberdeen in May and June next year.
Evans’ work includes Scottish Opera’s Albert Herring and the pandemic-era filmed version of Menotti’s The Telephone as well as the 2023 Edinburgh Festival success, Bluebeard’s Castle. Presenting Butterfly’s familiar plot as the recollections of Kate Pinkerton, her reading of Puccini has been highly praised.
Her design partner Kat Heath also creates the set for a new Cosi fan tutte in Glasgow and Edinburgh that will be cast from the students of the new Advanced Artist Diploma in Opera at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. A partnership between Scottish Opera and the RCS, it will sit alongside the Conservatoire’s Masters degree at the Alexander Gibson Opera School and, in Reedijk’s words, “prepare young singers for the world of work.” The Dunedin Consort’s artistic director John Butt will conduct Rebecca Meltzer’s production.
The next step for some of those young people may be as Emerging Artists with Scottish Opera, and their work always includes an extensive tour to halls and community venues in every corner of Scotland. Once Opera-Go-Round, more recently Opera Highlights, and now Opera On Your Doorstep, it undergoes a radical revision this year with a condensed version of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel hitting the road in Autumn and Spring for 34 performances.
Reedijk sees it as an important development “in the spirit of evolution.”
“I don’t know if the step away from programmes of arias is forever, but it is time for a change. Hansel and Gretel is a good title for a small scale tour, sung in English with piano accompaniment, and an opportunity to have five singers instead of four and a locally-recruited children’s chorus.
As we had already moved from arias to scenes from operas, it is good to go all the way to a full show, within our means.”
As well as the Diploma initiative with singers at the Conservatoire, the opera company is also working with other institutions of further education, including City of Glasgow College, on skills-building in other areas of the creative arts that go into producing opera. Reedijk points out that the company’s head of costume started her career as a costume trainee alongside a cohort of Emerging Artists.
That appreciation of what goes on behind the performances is unsurprising because the man celebrating his 20th season in charge of Scottish Opera began his career as a stage technician.
“I came to the UK in 1984, on the back of working in theatre and opera in New Zealand. My first job was as a stage hand at Richmond Theatre and from there I went to the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT). That led to a summer job as head of technical at Assembly Theatre in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1988 and an early introduction to Scottish Opera, because I needed a replica painting for a Fringe show and was put in touch with Kelvin Guy, head of scenic art at Scottish Opera.”
Reedijk’s work then travelled a circuit that became familiar to many working in the arts at the time. William Burdett-Coutts, who ran Assembly at the Edinburgh Fringe was also in charge of Glasgow’s Mayfest, where Reedijk became technical boss, with the same job at Wexford Opera in Ireland falling between the two in the calendar.
Return visits to New Zealand for the biennial pan-arts festival in Wellington led to working on converting a concert hall for opera productions there.
“New Zealand Opera had gone bust and the festival became the only home for opera in New Zealand, initially importing productions from Australia and then creating their own shows, the second of which was David McVicar’s Fidelio, in 1998.”
When NZ Opera was reconstituted, Reedijk was asked to run the company and he remained there until 2006 when the invitation to come to Scottish Opera arrived.
“When I started in February 2006 I never expected to be here as long, but it is a great place: big enough to do major works and small enough to be flexible and recognise that not everything has to be on a three-year cycle.”
Particularly since the arrival of Stuart Stratford as Music Director, whose previous experience also included a lot of work outside of conventional opera houses, Reedijk has overseen a company that has been open to new experiences and experimentation. That approach came into its own during the Covid pandemic when Scottish Opera was leagues ahead in terms of its response to the health emergency.
Reedijk says: “Opera is a very adaptable, robust art form and you can make it work elsewhere than the main stages. My festival technical background gave me the confidence to look at a problem like the pandemic and go for possible solutions.
“Sometimes people travel under the assumption that opera can only be done in a temple of art, but my view is that it is robust enough to be done anywhere. Storytelling through music and theatre is strong enough to be adaptable to whatever circumstances we find ourselves in.
“And the company stepped up to the challenge, during what were anxious and frightening times.”
Reedijk’s era has also seen a turn-around from Scottish Opera’s regular trips to the government with the begging bowl, as another whopping deficit threatened the company’s survival.
“Financially, my commitment when I started was that we would move from a position of entitlement to one taking responsibility for ourselves. We are charged to make the best of our circumstances and while those are challenging, it was ever thus. We have to use the resources we have available to make amazing work, and live within our means.
“My job is to hang on the legacy of what Alex Gibson set up for Scotland. It’s hard to start something, very difficult to run it, and dead easy to close it. I’m not having that happen on my watch.”
And how long has that watch to run now? As well as clocking up 20 years, Reedijk has also turned 65.
“Stuart and I have a couple of titles we want to get over the line before the close of the decade. Essential works that the company either hasn’t done in a while or not done at all.
“But I do ask myself if it is time to get out the way. Should I open the door for someone else to come in and set a different vision for the company? There are just a few more things I want to see through.”
Full details of new season at scottishopera.org.uk
Portrait of Alex Reedijk by Kirsty Anderson; Irish National Opera’s Madama Butterfly by Ros Kavanagh
It might seem nonsense to talk of an outlier in an event as experimental and diverse as conductor Ilan Volkov’s annual spring weekend of new music, Tectonics, but Saint Abdullah’s 40 minutes in the Old Fruitmarket warranted that description.
Following so recently on the BBC SSO’s evening in the Finnieston night-club SWG3 with Ayanna Witter-Johnston, here was music that might have been more at home there, but instead happened in blackout in the middle of a Sunday afternoon.
Saint Abdullah is the label used by Iranian-Canadian brothers Mohammed and Mehdi Mehrabani – although only one of them appeared to be onstage here. Their acclaimed recent collaborations have been with Brooklyn-based percussionist Jason Nazary and Irish producer Eomac (Ian McDonnell), but this intense tapestry of sound required no other ingredients.
Playing at maximum volume to begin, with industrial beat loops and what sounded not unlike a deconstructed recording of trombonist Joe Bowie’s Defunkt band, the set found gentler moments. Those included a long alto sax passage, what appeared to be an electronic concertina but resembled early Soft Machine in sound, birdsong and a chorus of children.
Most of this, obviously, was recorded and sampled, but the live ingredients were crucial to the immediacy of the music. Despite the relentlessness of some of it, you were left wanting more.
The world premiere that ended the SSO’s concert in the Grand Hall later that evening was similar in its encompassing of a great deal in a comparatively short time. Flautist and composer Nicole Mitchell’s Clues from the Rippling of Space-Time would indeed be difficult to pin to a specific date, but revealed long and deep knowledge of 20th century American music for large ensembles, both orchestral and big band, stretching from the interwar years to much more recently.
Mitchell herself was a soloist, and so too was her pianist duo partner Craig Taborn. Both altered their sounds electronically, Taborn producing a growly underscore at one point and plucking strings inside the Steinway at another, but their amplification was subtle and effective.
An equally large range of possibilities was, of course, available from the orchestra, and Mitchell seemed to exploit most of them in her half-hour piece, with some startlingly original orchestration as well as those passages echoing earlier styles. Everyone was very busy from start to finish in one of those works that it was impossible to appreciate fully on a single hearing.
It was the most successful of the programme, although Czech composer Martin Smolka’s Until time takes back its gift, the other brand-new BBC commission, was often fun. Its seven short pieces also covered the waterfront, opening with a strange diatonic scale on harp and ending with lush strings playing, seemingly oblivious to the discords elsewhere on the platform. This was investigative music, never happy to pursue a single direction, and occasionally very filmic, notably in the violins of the second piece and Lynda Cochrane’s piano in the fifth.
Noami Pinnock’s visual art-inspired I put lines down and wipe them away – a UK premiere – opened the closing concert and seemed to have taken us little further when it ended. Its restricted range was surely intended and some of its most original sounds – including a quartet of sanding blocks – were attractive, but it never became more than its limited ingredients.
In some ways the GBSR Duo’s Oliver Leith-composed good day good day bad day bad day was also a Tectonics outlier, because the piece, written specifically for – and indeed about – the couple, is now approaching a whole decade old. It followed Saint Abdullah in the Old Fruitmarket and simply listing the ingredients of George Barton’s percussion set up would be a mammoth job. His tasks began with varying the pitch of wine-glasses using immediately-discarded pipettes, featured a swanee whistle on a harmonica neck stand, and finished with a spoked wheel that could be plucked like a thumb piano or ethereally bowed.
Siwan Rhys might have been less mobile, but her keyboard skills, playing very different music on concert grand and electronic keyboard simultaneously, were extraordinary. Leith’s eight-movement journey through the banalities and anxious moments of a day was fascinating and often very beautiful.
Keith Bruce
Highlights from Tectonics will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s New Music Show on Saturdays 9 and 16 May and available on BBC Sounds for 30 days thereafter.
Pictures of Ilan Volkov and GBSR Duo at Tectonics 2026, credit BBC.
Mozart’s Requiem will forever pose the question “what if?”. If only he’d finished it, what level of masterpiece would we have been gifted? What happened is the stuff of myth, bordering on conspiracy.
In short, Mozart was dying in 1791 and desperately accepted a clandestine commission from one Count Franz Walsegg-Stuppach via a mysterious agent. The Count, notorious for exercising ridiculous vanity projects in which he passed off such purchased works as his own, faced a dilemma when Mozart inconveniently died before completion. In a bid to fulfil the contract, Mozart’s wife charged his pupil Franz Süssmayr to finish the job, which is the version most commonly heard today, and which the SCO and SCO Chorus addressed to a packed City Halls on Friday.
These are forces that know their onions when it comes to Mozart. Gregory Batsleer’s choristers are a tight, gripping ensemble, even-toned throughout with just the right amount of pizazz, their compact numbers commensurate with the sleek, steely Classical machine that is the SCO. Even with a scoring that incorporates three trombones, it was remarkable to witness the elegant agility from that trio perfectly aligned to this performance’s sophisticated containment.
From Italian conductor Riccardo Minasi came a lead that was both urgent and passionate, rarely outstepping stylistic bounds. Where there was ravishing mystery in the opening bars and in many of those reflective sections within the Sequentia, there was also a living, breathing buoyancy enlivening the fugal Kyrie, belligerent Dies Irae and soul-stirring Offertorium. Subtleties in dynamic control gave voice to the most magical pianissimos, the Chorus’ verbal projection impressive at every level, the SCO forever attentive in support.
Much was to be admired, too, in the solo vocal quartet, particularly distinguished by the cut-glass purity of tenor Julien Henric and affecting lyricism of bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch. Mezzo-soprano Hanna Hipp and soprano Louise Alder may have been less-consistently matched, not always in perfect step with the exactitude of the prevailing performance style, but both found moments of blissful magic with which to compensate. Perhaps complicit, Minasi’s gestural tendency to over-conduct led to periodic glitches in the rhythmic flow.
What was really striking about this performance, though, was the extent to which it revealed the unmistakable depth of personality in Mozart’s writing – those bits he did write – that wasn’t always as evident with Haydn in the evening’s partner work, the older composer’s war-inspired Paukenmesse.
There’s no doubting the merits of the latter, not least the quirky colouring in the closing Agnus Dei where timpanist Louise Lewis Goodwin’s wooden-sticked rat-tat-tats conjured up a valedictory martial air. The delivery – using mostly the same forces as the Mozart – was unquestionably sound and faithful to the score; it just seemed, in this case, a tad functional, like the short before the main feature, selling it more as an off-the-shelf offering from a dutiful composer than a rare masterpiece.
With the caveat that it had not occurred to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s management team (and that I have never been especially good at sums), I calculate that the SCO’s charismatic and popular Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev will become the longest serving in the orchestra’s history when he reaches the end of his latest contract extension – to 2031 “at least”.
That was the headline announcement in Chief Executive Gavin Reid’s unveiling of the orchestra’s new season before Friday’s concert – a season that will include the first four Beethoven symphonies and the composer’s Violin Concerto as the SCO’s contribution to the joint Beethoven 200 celebrations with the RSNO, BBC SSO and Scottish Opera.
Those future plans were tinged with sadness, however, as the funeral had taken place earlier in the day of Brian Schiele, a member of the viola section for more than 30 years who had resumed playing after major surgery only for his cancer to return. This season’s closing concerts next month, conducted by Emelyanychev, will be dedicated to his memory.
As it happened, this programme appropriately featured his instrument, in the hands of soloist Lawrence Power and in three of the compositions in the programme he directed. Its linking of Baroque music with more contemporary works was very much in Emelyanychev’s line, and Power’s selections made for just as interesting a listening lesson.
French Baroque pieces opened each half, Couperin’s Les barricades mysterieuses in a haunting quintet arrangement (bass clarinet, clarinet, viola, cello and bass) by Thomas Ades, and Rameau’s much more familiar Les Sauvages – which also started life on the harpsichord – performed in a style a little like that of Jordi Savall, if more “salon”.
Power followed the Couperin with part of the Suite for Viola and Small Orchestra by Vaughan Williams which references Bach and also prefigured the Rameau in its rusticity. As well as some virtuoso stuff for the viola, it has a crucial role for harp in the Moto Perpetuo, which closed Power’s selection and traveled a long way from its Baroque inspiration.
Michael Tippett’s Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli was an especially fascinating inclusion, originally commissioned by the Edinburgh International Festival and part of a programme assembled by director Ian Hunter for the summer of 1953 that was little short of astonishing. Back then, the orchestra of Italian radio had played the original Corelli from which Tippett took his ingredients for a piece performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Here it required very specific deployment of the strings on the platform, which had very audible sonic significance, and solo roles for orchestra leader Stephanie Gonley and first cello Philip Higham as well as Power.
That 1953 EIF programme also included a new Viola Concerto for Scottish violist William Primrose by Paul Racine Fricker, and this programme concluded with the Scottish premiere of Magnus Lindberg’s new Viola Concerto, dedicated to Power. If it was difficult to hear Baroque antecedents there were certainly echoes of later classical composers in a very approachable piece.
As in the Tippett, there was a lot for the orchestral violas to do as well as the soloist, who has a real showpiece cadenza towards the end of a work that follows conventional structure but with real wit, and lovely symphonic swell and coda to finish.
There’s a stimulating book by the former Glasgow University music professor Hugh Macdonald called Music in 1853 – The Biography of a Year, fascinating for the fact it applies “biography” in the lateral rather than vertical sense. Turning the axis of history on its side we perceive a vivid snapshot of music history, alerting us to an enriching concurrence of divergent musical voices, in 1853’s case primarily Brahms, Berlioz, Wagner and Liszt.
The works featured in this RSNO programme over the weekend were by no means products of a single year. But in bringing together Ravel’s saucy La valse (completed 1920), Rachmaninov’s truculent Piano Concerto No 1 (finalised 1919) and Vaughan Williams’ moodily colourful A London Symphony (original completion 1913, revised 1933) conductor John Wilson treated us to a panoply of roughly coexisting, yet divergent, styles. All three composers were born in the 1870s, lived through a turbulent period where the hegemony of Austro-German Romanticism faced challenges from new tonal frameworks and nationalist trends, each addressing the dilemma in their own way.
Ravel, of course, had French blood coursing through his veins, so the idea of celebrating a popular dance style (in this case the Viennese waltz tradition of Johann Strauss) must have been music to his Gallic ears. As Wilson’s rather enigmatic interpretation accentuated, Ravel’s approach was one of exaggerated fantasy, swirling irony and plentiful decadence.
What made it interesting was the extent to which this performance aimed to realign emphases within the scoring. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. While attempting to increase the muffled mystery of the opening, important lines were lost, as if emanating from a subterranean echo chamber. Once it found its feet, though, and aside from encouraging bombastic explosions from bass drum and timpani, Wilson secured levels of woozy intoxication that seemed closer to the meaning of the notes.
We seldom hear Rachmaninov’s First Piano Concerto, but as soloist Sir Stephen Hough’s rhetorically intense performance verified, it deserves a worthier place among the composer’s more popular concertos. With Rachmaninov the Romantic spirit is fulsomely preserved, which Hough and the RSNO immediately captured in the feisty opening bars.
As in his recent Scottish appearances – in December he gave Grieg’s famous concerto a highly-personalised going-over in the BBC SSO’s 90th Anniversary Concert – Hough loaded this performance with biting characterisation, instinctively-shaped melodic phrasing, and thunderously precise energy. There was even whimsicality in the central Andante, countering beautifully its initial mysterious charm. Rabid flippancy in the exuberant final movement added to its showpiece brilliance, but not without reflection that coloured the inevitable big tunes, or Hough’s occasional delving into the music’s fiery demons. Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat, as an encore, served its calming purpose.
Wilson seemed most naturally at home in Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No 2, its narrative of a now bygone London town – from the solemn tolling of Big Ben to winsome flower sellers and bustling streets – wrapped in the composer’s familiar modal nostalgia. Its misted opening, Wilson demanding the softest of pianissimos, set in motion a performance of searing cinematic flow and expansive vision.
The awakening surge of the ensuing Allegro; the folksy resilience of the slow movement and its soulful, valedictory viola solo (movingly articulated by section principal Tom Dunn); the jaunty Scherzo; and the harsher reality, though ultimately distant reflection, expressed in the Finale; all found effusive voice and fluid context. As with the opening, the final bass notes were a magical whisper that evaporated timelessly into the ether. A spellbinding moment.
The marketing team at the BBC Scottish will doubtless interrogate the result of this away fixture in a Glasgow Finnieston club venue looking for first-time ticket-buyers, but superficially it was difficult to see the advantages over the orchestra’s home at the City Halls and Old Fruitmarket.
In under ten days, after all, Ilan Volkov will demonstrate how that complex can be filled with new music – and its own audience – for the weekend of his annual Tectonics extravaganza. Perhaps some of those attracted to SWG3 will be tempted to that event’s more radical experimentation – and perhaps that will be a journey easier to make than one to the orchestra’s mainstream classical season.
It was also a happy coincidence that Ayanna Witter-Johnson’s concert with the SSO and pianist Fergus McCreadie occurred on the same day that Glasgow International Jazz Festival unveiled its 40th anniversary programme.
Witter-Johnson is an engaging personality, as she demonstrated at The Hub during the 2023 Edinburgh International Festival, and some of the ingredients of that performance were repeated here in what was something of a composer portrait, fronted by the woman herself.
The three movements of the Ocean Floor Suite were more thoughtfully presented this time around, prefaced by an improvisation from McCreadie and carefully narrated by the composer, whose voice and cello were otherwise accompanied by percussionists. It is a work rooted in personal experience, and so was the more surprising inclusion of songs by Glasgow-born rock and jazz bass-player and vocalist Jack Bruce earlier in the programme.
Like her, his student study was cello (at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama) and he had encouraged his daughter’s friend in her earlier years. Her reading of his Rope Ladder to the Moon, from the Songs for a Tailor album, first released more than 15 years before she was born, revealed a deep understanding of a revered classic, and it was equally fascinating to hear McCreadie bring his specific style to FM, which Bruce wrote and recorded in the early 1990s.
The evening built from a partnership with a string quartet of SSO desk principals through those selections to more substantial orchestrations of songs from Witter-Johnson’s Road Runner album, and the first half ended in a lovely Katie Chatburn arrangement of the jazz standard, Misty.
After the interval, the Ocean Floor Suite was followed by the opening movement from Witter-Johnson’s Windrush Reflections, entitled Mango Dreams and dedicated to her grandparents, with harp and bass clarinet joining the quartet, before the programme’s sole symphonic orchestral work, FAIYA!, an LSO commission that showed off her own orchestrating ability. Conductor Enyi Okpara, currently assistant conductor at the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, directed all the ensemble pieces, and he seemed less comfortable with that work, where assured opening and closing sections bracketed some rhythmic uncertainty in the middle that only the players’ professionalism kept on track.
A Chatburn arrangement of another Road Runner track, Rise Up, closed the programme, save for an encore of Witter-Johnson’s regular party-piece solo version of Sting’s Roxanne. It’s a crowd pleaser, but one this musician has long out-grown.
Keith Bruce
Concert was recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3
Picture of Fergus McCreadie and Ayanna Witter-Johnson, credit BBC
Bartók’s one-act Symbolist opera Bluebeard’s Castle has enjoyed variously fascinating manifestations in Scotland over the years, not least in a memorably insightful reimagining at the 2023 Edinburgh International Festival that presented female protagonist Judith, not in traditional Gothic horror terms, but as a sufferer of dementia and its impact on her marriage to a strained and bewildered Bluebeard. Thought-provoking theatre at its psychological best.
The fascination of Thursday’s concert performance by the BBC SSO was utterly different. The focus here was solely on the music, the sweltering interaction between the two soloists (Hungarian mezzo soprano Dorottya Láng and compatriot bass-baritone Gábor Bretz), the monumentally intense, expressive power of the orchestra, all functioning hungrily without theatrical props or movement under the direction of conductor Elim Chan.
It made for an impressive and concentrated hour’s listening. The singers were extraordinary, their natural affinity to the original Hungarian text giving visceral authenticity to their performances. In particular, Láng’s seemingly limitless power, a mezzo voice enriched by effortless consistency at every point in its extensive range, captured the inexorable mounting tension as the seven mysterious doors reveal the pain and sadness of the memories within. Add to that Bretz’s magnificently stoical Duke Bluebeard, an enigmatic feast of tortuous cruelty, surprising empathy and ultimate submission. This was perfectly compatible casting.
Chan’s vision was equally in tune, guiding a fully-stocked SSO on the most colourful and potent of journeys. From its perfectly timed interaction with the quizzical spoken prologue, through the mountainous peaks and troughs of Bartók’s thrilling orchestral landscape, and in particular the explosive catharsis symbolising the revelation behind the fifth door, this was a knock-out performance. While Chan’s gestures were incisive and clear, the resulting response was emotionally expansive and thoroughly riveting.
The first half of this afternoon programme was not as wholly successful. While Britten’s Sea Interludes from his opera Peter Grimes made sense as an appetiser to the Bartók, it did not feature the same polished delivery. There were moments that shone promisingly: the timelessness of Dawn’s opening bird calls, the jaunty pointedness greeting Sunday Morning, the shadowy reflectiveness of Moonlight and the ferocity of the Storm. But ragged edges got in the way: a rather raw-sounding first violin section, shoddy togetherness among the wind and brass, even the odd mistimed entry, all of which seemed contrary to Chan’s neat, energised lead.
Then there was some audience confusion in response to Shostakovich’s biting incidental music for Hamlet, as gathered together in his 1932 concert suite. The programme note suggested we were hearing all 13 pieces of the Op 32a Suite, while in reality we heard five excerpts compiled from the Film Suites, Op 116 and116a. Satisfyingly gutsy as these performances were – I’d love to hear this crackling music within the context of an actual Hamlet production – the final moments were greeted by a pregnant silence as the confused audience weighed up the situation.
Thursday’s concert also coincided with the SSO’s launch of its 2026-27 Season, details of which are now available on the orchestra’s website.
Ken Walton
This concert is repeated in Aberdeen tonight (Friday 17 April) and was recorded by BBC Radio 3 for future broadcast, beyond which it will be available to stream for 30 days via BBC Sounds.
What difference does a conductor make to an orchestra? There are few better opportunities to explore that question than at a major conducting competition, which partly explains a rare VoxCarnyx excursion to Manchester last week for the triennial Siemens-Hallé International Conductors Competition.
There was also a tenuous Caledonian link. Among the international field of eight who had made it to the semifinals were Claudia Fuller, a former violinist with brief shop floor orchestral experience within the RSNO, and Oliver Cope, a former postgraduate student at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland where he won the Hugh S Roberton prize for orchestral conducting. Would either, or both, make it through to last Tuesday’s grand final at the Hallé Orchestra’s Manchester home, the Bridgewater Hall?
In the event, Fuller was the only British contender to do so, pitted against Swiss-born Nina Haug and Finnish-American Aku Sorensen. Each was tasked with a performance of Bernstein’s rip-roaring Candide Overture, coupled with a symphonic work of their own choosing. After a lengthy but fascinating process Fuller came third, Sorensen emerging as the outright winner, nudging Haug into second place.
Aku Sorensen, winner of the 2026 Siemens-Hallé Conductors Competition
What does such success mean for Sorensen? He now becomes assistant conductor of the Hallé where, over the next three years, he will benefit from mentorship by the orchestra’s new principal conductor and artistic advisor Kahchun Wong, conduct five public concerts annually, serve as music director of the Hallé Youth Orchestra, and experience first hand the day-to-day planning and administrative operation of a major orchestra.
It’s a doorway to a promising future. Previous incumbents have included Scots conductor Rory Macdonald, frequent RSNO guest conductor Jonathan Heyward, and the newly appointed principal guest conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Delyana Lazarova.
While winning is clearly a significant leg-up for any budding maestro, it’s important too to remember that the Hallé will have had a vested interest in the outcome, which may have weighted the decision. They’d surely be looking for a sufficiently seasoned self-starter capable of hitting the ground running, someone with enough hardened self-belief to earn instant respect from no-nonsense professional orchestral players, someone guaranteed to demonstrate leadership and recognise the specific needs of a Youth Orchestra.
Reflecting that, the five-strong Siemens-Hallé jury included three of the orchestra’s key personnel: Kahchun Wong, chief executive David Butcher and artistic planning director Anna Hirst. They were joined by artistic director of the Siemens Arts Programme Dr Stephan Frucht and Dresden Philharmonic intendant Frauke Roth. Announcing their ultimate decision, Wong made it clear that the jury’s preference resonated with that of the orchestra. It chimed, too, with the audience vote, a secret ballot conducted online and revealed only after the event. No argument there; the outcome was unanimous. Sorensen won fair and square.
There was no denying the visible confidence he exuded, no doubt ingrained through his studies at Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy under Sakari Oramo, and his invaluable experience with some of Finland’s fine orchestras. He played safe with his symphonic option, a Brahms’ Third Symphony that charted a predictable, somewhat cliched course of sturdy tempi and heavily weathered dynamics, but hosted a brusque and engaging energy. Neither this, nor his Bernstein overture, offered the most deeply imaginative performances of the night, or the most tonally refined, but his animated stage presence clearly struck a triumphant chord.
As for Fuller, she also demonstrated a raw exuberance in her approach to the Bernstein, the downside being a lack of characterful response from the woodwind – untypical bland in execution – and unchecked dominance from the brass. She set her sights high with Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, but never really captured its poetic, expressive charm. Genuine connection with the orchestra seemed sporadic.
Compare that to Nina Haug’s compelling Bernstein, hers being a more internalised physical energy that instantly transformed the Hallé’s response. Here the rhythmic bite was visceral, excitingly focussed, yet incisively controlled. There was a resonant bloom now from the woodwind, Haug’s overall pacing and dynamic control of dynamics well judged, often electrifyingly. She followed that with Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony, for the most part a performance brimming with thoughtful nuance, though erring towards the elegiac in favour of full-on Nordic grit. For that reason she came over as perhaps the most interesting prospect among the finalists, a musician of exceptional potential, if not quite the finished article.
What we, the audience, didn’t witness were the competitors’ interactions with the orchestra in rehearsal, or their strengths and weaknesses in earlier rounds. That will have played a part in the final decision.
One of the most inventive creations during the Covid pandemic was VOPERA’s online production of Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortileges with players from the London Phil and a cast that included Karen Cargill as ‘Maman’ (review: VOPERA: L’enfant et les sortileges | VoxCarnyx).
In fact the RSNO gave the work’s Scottish premiere in 1975, 50 years after its first performance in Monte Carlo, and a further half a century later, the orchestra teamed up with the current crop of talent at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland to present a staging that not only had the perfect context in the orchestra’s season programme, but also used Glasgow’s concert hall impressively well.
To accommodate the performance behind and above them, the orchestra platform had been extended into the front few rows of the stalls, and the effect on the sound was revelatory from the first work in the concert’s first half.
That was Paul Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a wonderful piece of orchestration that didn’t need the Disney connection from Fantasia to be a well-chosen partner for the Ravel. With its brilliant use of contrabassoon and a series of other solo instrumental turns, it was ideal aural preparation for the cleverness of Ravel’s magical story.
Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which followed, was probably the main attraction for many ticket-buyers, especially as it was played by Ethan Loch, whose performance was being filmed for an upcoming documentary. Soloist and conductor Thomas Sondergard – together with first clarinet Timothy Orpen – served up a perfect Rhapsody, utterly true to its genre-spanning intentions.
However much the pianist was actually improvising his interpretation, it was distinctive and individual, and the pace never let up. Loch’s flamboyant encore of a cadenza from his own piano concerto was less to my taste, but virtuosic.
The collective endeavour behind the 45-minute opera after the interval was nothing short of magnificent. From the choir stalls, the RSNO Youth Chorus made immaculately-drilled contributions, while the RCS Chamber Choir, prepared by Andrew Nunn, sang from stage left of the central playing area. Many of them were costumed for their step-out roles alongside the soloists cast by the Conservatoire’s Head of Vocal Performance and Opera, Jane Irwin.
Mezzo Anna Stephany, as the child, was the sole professional singer, but you’d hardly have known that from the performances of the students. Singling out any individuals would be invidious because this was a terrific collective effort, and as much staging as the piece requires. Ailsa Munro’s costumes and props were witty and apposite, and the direction of Roxana Cole, well-known from her work in challenging venues with Scottish Opera, made remarkably effective use of the limited space, with RSNO first flute Katherine Bryan enthusiastically part of the young company as the instrumental voice of the Princess.
The visible “pit band” in front of them was full of such inspired solo turns, and the skills of this cohort at the Conservatoire, both as soloists and in ensemble were uniformly impressive. If there were a lot of elements for Sondergard to keep working as a team, he appeared to be having the best time doing so.
Keith Bruce
Picture of rehearsal of L’enfant et les sortileges by Hope Connachan-Holmes
Had this sweeping, eloquent SCO programme featured only Jay Capperauld’s concise new oratorio The Language of Eden, it would still have been an altogether fulfilling experience. The Ayrshire composer’s tenure as the SCO’s associate composer has been one of the most visibly creative phenomenon in Scottish classical music of late. Each collaborative project, each new work, has exhibited a significant step forward for Capperauld, whose voice and facility are now representative of a mature and fertile creativity. His premieres are now highly-anticipated, not-to-be-missed occasions.
Of course, coming in at little over half-an-hour, there was considerably more to a concert in which The Language of Eden functioned as its magnificent finale. As the orchestra’s principal guest conductor Andrew Manze explained in his introductory spiel, the theme underlying the entire evening related not just to music’s relationship with language, but its subliminal function as a language is itself.
We had Shakespeare – words from The Merchant of Venice – illuminated by Vaughan Williams in his moonlit Serenade to Music, its melting harmonies and liquid melodies gorgeously woven under Manze’s baton-less gesturing. The SCO and its mid-scale Chorus responded with sumptuous understatement which paradoxically heightened the music’s intoxicating spell.
That sense of relaxation rolled over into Elgar’s Serenade for Strings. Manze – himself a violinist – drew the loveliest of timbres and detailed tracery from the SCO strings: a wispy nonchalance in the opening Allegro; melodious charm in the Larghetto; and a luxuriant, ultimately glowing reserve in the final Allegretto.
Equally autumnal was George Butterworth’s prophetic pre-First World War settings of six poems from E A Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, presented here in a tastefully generous orchestration by baritone Roderick Williams, who also took the solo role. In songs softly lamenting the futility of young lives lost before their time – the composer himself, at 30, was a casualty of the later 1914-18 French battlefields – Butterworth’s music draws equally on folkish naivety and sophisticated imagery.
Williams’ vocal delivery was smooth, lightly-nuanced and disturbingly calm, especially powerful in its emotional restraint, whether in the quiet pastoral reflection of Loveliest of Trees, the haunting folksong of The Lads in their Hundreds, or the spectral poignance of Is My Team Ploughing?.
In the second half, Capperauld’s premiere was prefaced by an enticingly elemental performance of Haydn’s Representation of Chaos from his oratorio, The Creation. This made complete sense, given that The Language of Eden, composed to words by Uist-born poet Niall Campbell, is an imagined portrayal, amid the biblical creation story, of the birth of language.
Adam, sung by Williams, is being “sculpted” by the collective “inhabitants” of Eden, who gift him the Four Elements as engines of the environment around him, and who motivate his ability to communicate through language, not least the innate power of music.
The propulsive certainty underpinning Capperauld’s score was absolutely mind-blowing in this performance. Where a powerful aura of mystery prevailed, Manze drew also on a seething earthiness within – succinct and questioning in the opening scene-setter; atmospherically vivid and wildly animated in the dramatic depictions of Air, Earth, Fire and Water; quasi-religious as Adam became aware of the music within him; chillingly ritualistic in a fearful, ultimately thunderous portend to humanity’s approaching chaos (hideously pertinent in relation to current world affairs); and a soothing farewell steeped in idiomatic Scots flavouring.
The SCO Chorus were a vibrant presence, powerfully-voiced and physically comfortable with the marching-on-the-spot and breast-beating required of them. Williams, too, embraced his role with in-depth conviction. The SCO played its part with immaculate distinction. It was a veritable tour de force, Capperauld’s music exhilarating, often in the glittering manner of John Adams, hugely versatile in character, but most impressively contained within a singularity of purpose that had this audience on the edge of their seats.
If few complain that Beethoven wrote only one opera, Debussy’s singular contribution to the canon is a frustration. Pelleas et Melisande may be a musical masterpiece, but by way of comparison it would have been good if the composer had completed his planned As You Like It and written some music for a robust heroine like Rosalind and a confirmed cynic like Jacques.
As it is, his adaptation of Maurice Maeterlinck’s symbolist play is unique, and not only in the composer’s own catalogue. Its tale of a mysterious princess who has lost her memory as well as her crown, and is drawn into the dysfunctional family of another court by the older, greying Golaud to become the obsession of his handsome younger brother is set to a wondrous orchestral score and asks the principal singers (and the audience) to do without the arias and ensembles that are the tasty morsels of opera heritage. Debussy was following in the footsteps of Richard Wagner, specifically Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal, but forging his own individual path.
Like Scottish Opera’s Tristan earlier in the month, there is a lot to be said for a concert performance that in this case sidesteps all the symbolic water features, towers and dungeons in the story and lets the score do its work. That said, the luxury cast of singers here would grace any staged production stylishly. Bass Alasdair Miles sang the role of Arkel in David McVicar’s beautiful Scottish Opera production in 2017, Huw Montague Rendall has been acclaimed as “the Pelleas of his generation” and Sophie Bevan, who has sung Melisande in Dresden, gave a nicely nuanced reading here of what is a tricky amorphous role.
It also is not an especially showy part for a soprano. Karen Cargill, as Genevieve, had the more ear-catching music of Act 1 although Melisande’s music does perk up once she has Pelleas to sing with. Montague Rendall, who alone sang from memory, has the ideal voice for the role, which straddles tenor and baritone range, while David Stout, who sang Golaud, is a baritone of richer lower strength, exactly as his music requires. His first entry in Act 1 was immediately commanding, and he brought a fine acting game to the performance as well.
The smaller roles – Richard Morrison’s Shepherd and Doctor and young soprano Beth Stirling in the (short) trouser role of Yniold – were no less well sung, and Stirling made a memorable young lad, even if the inclusion of her superfluous Act 4 scene, which is almost always cut from staged productions, made the second half seem very long indeed.
That decision of conductor Ryan Wigglesworth was understandable – a concert performance might as well include every note in the score – but it did make this an epic Pelleas, finishing fully three and a quarter hours after it began (including the interval). The extended demise of Melisande at the end of Act 5 seemed very long indeed, exquisitely written though it is.
For all of that time, Wigglesworth’s direction was exemplary, attentive to all the details and with excellent balance, including the off-stage elements of brass, percussion and a chorus of the RCS Chamber Choir, prepared by Andrew Nunn. There was terrific playing from all the wind soloists, the harps of Helen Thomson and Sharon Griffiths, and Chris Gough’s horn section.
The BBC SSO strings were, however, the real stars of the evening, and for much of the time Wigglesworth seemed relaxed enough to enjoy their playing as much as the audience did. Brooding and intense when that was called for, and spicy in the more sensuous music, from the first violins to the basses, each section had memorable ensemble moments, and many of them.
Keith Bruce
The performance is repeated at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall on Sunday from 3pm and was recorded for future broadcast on Radio 3, after which it will be available for 30 days on BBC Sounds.
Following fairly swiftly on the recent tour of Arthur Keegan’s new companion piece to Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, together with its inspiration (review: Hebrides: Music for Time | VoxCarnyx), here was another bold programme from cellist Will Conway’s Hebrides Ensemble, built around a world premiere.
The environmental concern of that piece, Shifting Baselines, by Dave Maric, was the ostensible linking agent, but the work’s form, using a selection of recorded voices in its three movements, and the background of the composer, who played piano in the Steve Martland band, were certainly other factors.
Martland’s early solo piano piece, Kgakala (Sunrise), opened the programme, James Willshire’s performance of the picturesque score, full of technical flourishes with hints of stride left hand, suggesting some of the theatricality that would follow. The composer’s much later Reveille, for string quartet, bass, piano and tuned percussion, was just as effective at the close, as a call to arms in response to all the evidence of calamity we’d heard.
The central section of Maric’s piece uses a vox pop of people in Alyth and Perth expressing ecological concerns, while the recordings on either side were a litany of animals exterminated on a Scottish estate and a more recent official report on species threatened with extinction. The composer’s musical response – mostly written for the quartet with piano chords and snare drum rim-shots – was compelling, with very democratic sharing of the lead voice amongst the string instruments.
Three women composers added works to the programme for smaller ensembles, two of them originally heard at Aberdeenshire’s Sound festival. Georgina MacDonell Finlayson’s Silent Spring, presumably referencing Rachel Carson’s famous book, is for solo flute with tape of birdsong and spoken word, and the sound design was brilliantly mixed in this space, while flautist Cormac Henry demonstrated his extended embouchure techniques.
Aileen Sweeney’s The Wooden Web, inspired by more recent writing about the communication networks of trees, was a delight. The most traditional music-influenced work of the evening, its instruments are viola, cello and flute, with the spotlight again very equally shared, but it ended with voices when Henry’s singing was joined by the vocals of Catherine Marwood and Conway in the piece’s gentle conclusion.
Eleanor Alberga’s violin and piano sonata, The Wild Blue Yonder, dates from 1995. Alberga was born in Kingston, Jamaica but violinist David Alberman revelled in music that seemed spun from the East European gypsy dance vocabulary that colours so much classical music, becoming increasingly propulsive and vigorous before also ending in a gentler closing movement.
The outlier in the programme was George Crumb’s 1971 Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale), the theatrical piece that ended the first half and included Henry’s first vocalising. He, Willshire and Conway all donned masks (over their spectacles) as the score requires, and the lights were dimmed. The pianist spent as much time inside the instrument as on the keyboard, damping strings and introducing objects, Henry again needed his extended techniques as well as whistling, and he and Conway added some delicate percussion. It was a highly eventful eight movements, the whale song delineating periods of geological time, often expressed in very literal tick-tock fashion.
This thoughtful programme could perhaps have done with a little more detailed explanation than Conway’s brief spoken introduction and the composer’s note from Maric for his work alone, and it is not unkind to say that the stage management was fastidious rather than slick, but it was musically packed with interest. It is repeated at Kings Place in London tomorrow evening.
Was there a single soul in Saturday’s packed Perth Concert Hall who did not feel an anticipatory sense of goodwill and encouragement towards the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine? Cut down to Classical proportions for this all-Beethoven programme, and fulfilling their only Scottish date in a current UK and Ireland Tour, hopes were high for courageously impassioned music-making symbolic of their home country’s existential fight for survival.
Was that, perhaps, too much to hope for? What transpired was a series of rather routine performances from the orchestra under its chief conductor Volodymyr Sirenko, whose own loose-limbed physicality appeared to influence some of the carelessness and insipidness delivered by his players. In too many instances tutti entries were like minor car accidents, solo lines were subsumed where they needed to be heard, and a prevalent tenseness hung in the air.
Such persistent irritations masked those moments where the orchestra hinted at its true worth. The opening chords of Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture were genuinely attention-grabbing, while flickers of intense drama gave periodic colour to conversing themes and their vying sentiments. But projection of the music’s richer depths rarely rose above tepid. An ending more perfunctory than consequential voiced its own judgement.
Proof that an inspirational catalyst was sorely needed revealed itself in the form of Ukrainian pianist Mariia Pukhlianko, whose instant response to the emphatic opening E flat orchestral chord of the ‘Emperor’ Piano Concerto was one of unrelenting mission. It was an awakening moment, beyond which the pianist’s electrifying domination, heightened by fiery articulation and unremitting momentum, raised the orchestra’s game. Now there were signs of passion and self-belief, an opening movement seething with blustery rhetoric, the heavenly serenity of a slow movement touched by Pukhlianko’s lyrical sensitivity, segueing to a Finale that breezed to a resolute conclusion.
Yet for all that the spirit of this Beethoven was well-served, vexatious weaknesses prevailed. Why were key woodwind melodies subsumed beneath inessential background textures. Why have the first violins play arpeggiated accent chords rather than more affirmative divisi between desk partners when the former led to such chaotic indecision? Again, Sirenko seemed not to have dealt with important and obvious detail.
Similar issues recurred through the Seventh Symphony. But here at least there seemed to be a more convincing composure and incision (the Allegretto second movement’s graceful unfolding as convincing as the needle-sharp precision of its internal fugato), and a candid playfulness in the Scherzo. The norm is to proceed to the Finale uninterrupted with a swift attacca. Sirenko opted not to, encouraging a ripple of audience applause and a hiatus that halted the directional impetus. When it did get going, though, this spirited symphony rocked its way – despite the brass section’s untamed overindulgence – to ultimate jubilation. Even the players were now smiling.
Estonian conductor Kristiina Poska, once a regular visitor with the SCO and now a guest conductor with the RSNO, has a distinctive style as well as immaculate tailoring on the podium. She uses a baton in her left hand but just as often her rigorous time-keeping is indicated with her right: Poska may be ambidextrous, but she is never ambiguous.
The RSNO gave her an interesting challenge in the middle of her latest programme – the world premiere of Elena Langer’s The Lives of Birds, the latest of a sequence of works the orchestra has championed by the Russian-born British composer.
The concert began, however, on more familiar turf for the conductor with Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten by her compatriot Arvo Part. It is an emblematic work from the Estonian composer, instrumental but rooted in early choral music and the sound of bells.
A single tolling bell signals the dense writing of the canon for strings, and – in partnership with RSNO leader Maya Iwabuchi – Poska had the RSNO players produce an intensity of sound from the first bars that was perfect for the piece. A work of elegant simplicity, it packed a punch in this performance.
Fortunately perhaps, a brief explanation of her new work from Elena Langer separated the Part from her new piece. Like Jonathan Dove, Langer brings a fondness for the comedic to her composition, and The Lives of Birds, which imparts human characteristics to her avian subjects, is no exception.
These birds are stalked by their vision of the Grim Reaper, a white cat, and their brief existence is concerned with territorial mastery and preening in the mirror, as well, of course, as singing.
The soloist was soprano Anna Dennis, like librettist Glyn Maxwell a regular associate of the composer, and a singer whose ability to master a difficult modern score and perform its huge demands of pitch and range with something approaching effortless ease is very well known.
Dennis sang to her usual high standard, her enunciation of Maxwell’s excellent text conversationally precise, and her imparting of distinct personalities to Ashleaf, Moss and Robin Red the best the work could want.
The music itself is far from light, and as well as the work of the singer, the ingredients for the orchestra are sumptuous, filled with bird calls in the percussion as well as the winds, depictions of the landscape and the ticking of that threatening clock measuring the cycle of life.
If the narrative of those works was never obscure, that of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony has been worried over since its composition. Not by Poska and the RSNO in this performance however – what they gave us was a celebration of the score as superbly orchestrated music.
The Fourth is full of brilliantly simple ideas given the fullest possible expression, from the “fateful” minor-key fanfare with which it begins, through the lovely melodious Andantino slow movement to the demanding pizzicato Scherzo and the gloriously expressive finale.
Poska shaped that musical story superbly, and the players added the details of solo exuberance and ensemble cohesion to what was a thrilling performance.
It is customarily Pekka Kuusisto who springs the surprises on his annual visits to direct the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, but in Edinburgh on Tuesday – where his popularity with the audience assured not a seat was unsold – the crowd turned the tables.
Kuusisto’s programme also involved Dreamers’ Circus, a three-piece Nordic traditional music group who have been appearing at Glasgow’s Celtic Connections festival for over a decade but, surprisingly, were making their Edinburgh debut.
Pianist Nikolaj Busk introduced their second half opener as “a tune from Switzerland from 1532”. It turned out to be from the Geneva hymn book and known to Scots from its number in their old hymnary as The Auld Hundreth, All People That On Earth Do Dwell. The Queen’s Hall duly treated it as a Lutheran chorale and joined in, to the initial surprise, but gratification of the band.
Beethoven would have recognised the response as exactly what Bach would have expected from a church congregation, and that was fitting because the whole evening was built around Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.
The much-quoted summary of that work by Richard Wagner as “the apotheosis of the dance” is not especially useful to understanding it, and even putting that remark in the context of its entire sentence, as the programme did, doesn’t help a great deal. What Kuusisto did was to parse the symphony, preceding and interspersing its movements with music from the trio, much of it of their own composition, although traditional in style, and a fair amount of it orchestrated.
Those arrangements for the SCO to play were a million miles from Beethoven, and not only in details that meant the horn and brass players discarding their period instruments for modern ones. In style they were a little like the film scores of Bryce Dessner or Jonny Greenwood, and the most interesting of them, played before the interval and after the second movement of the Beethoven, transcended its song basis to become a fascinating contemporary passacaglia with a filigree piano figure.
When performing on their own, Dreamers’ Circus were always fascinating, Busk playing accordion as much as the Steinway, Rune Tonsgaard Sorenson the violin soloist of the night, and cittern-player Ale Carr, who played with Kuusisto and the SCO in a similar excursion on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons two years ago, doubling on fiddle himself. Small wonder the conductor felt able to concentrate on directing the orchestra, only picking up his own fiddle to join in the symphony’s boisterous stop-start rhythmic fourth movement.
And hugely exciting that last movement was, while the stop-start nature of this performance of Beethoven 7 never really impaired appreciation of the detail of Kuusisto’s individual reading of the score, full of colour with interesting pauses and tempo adjustments.
Even the separation of the end of the Scherzo from the Allegro con brio finale, which looked potentially problematic, worked, and the prefacing of the opening movement made a very different listen of its slow start before the symphony bursts into vigorous life. In this performance the slow march of the second movement was never likely to seem at all funereal.
As well as the featured soloists, plaudits should go to two of the guests in the orchestra ranks, Frenchman Yann Thenet at first oboe and American Nivanthi Karunaratne, whose playing of the demanding low line on natural horn made the third movement.
Keith Bruce
Concert repeated at GlasgowCity Halls tonight and Aberdeen Music Hall on Saturday.
