Theatre reviewing has never been the domain of VoxCarnyx, but Martin Sherman’s new play I’ll Be Seeing You, for Pitlochry Festival Theatre, titillated our musical curiosity.
Why? It centres on the outrageously camp showmanship of pianist/entertainer Liberace, a candy floss figure described by the Daily Mirror columnist “Cassandra” in 1959 as “a quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love”. Liberace had taken the Mirror to court, falsely denying the paper’s charges of homosexuality, and won.
This deceit lies at the heart of Sherman’s fast-moving theatre piece. A young gay writer, commissioned to write a play about Liberace, and feverishly portrayed by Fra Fee, is not only consumed with hatred of the star’s disingenuous court denial, but ultimately falls prey to his acid manipulation. It delves, sometimes brutally, below the facade.
Who better to capture that edge than Simon Russell Beale, whose numerous pumped-up, attention-grabbing showbiz entrances – smoke-filled, fur-lined and massively bejewelled – give way in an instant to a much nastier piece of work. In these moments, strength lies in devious understatement.
Thankfully there’s humour too, dark and light, augmented visually by a choreographed duo of hammy hunks (Ali Watt and Adam Kashmiry), Russell Beale’s impressively flamboyant dummy keyboard syncing, and Tim Hatley’s mischievously versatile stage designs. If this production, directed jointly by Alan Cumming and Ben Occhipinti, is unruly verging on the manic, it doesn’t lack affection. The audience, encouraged to contribute, is drawn in from the word go.
For those too young to remember Liberace in person, his back story – from awkward piano-playing kid and wannabe classical virtuoso to lush caricature and top showbiz earner, ultimately succumbing to HIV and death at 67 – is neatly and swiftly inserted. His Polish-born actress mother (Anne Lacey) is thrown in for good measure.
But the music is just window dressing and the emphasis persistently returns to the Writer’s – indeed Sherman’s – angry bone of contention. For in the final moments, Sherman replaces Fee on stage as the now elderly playwright, pitifully namby-pambied by Liberace, visibly defeated.
Alexander von Zemlinsky cuts something of a phantom figure within the annals of musical history. Admired by Brahms, and as first teacher of Schoenberg, he was unquestionably well-connected and influential. As a conductor, Stravinsky rated him highly, while Mahler and the Second Viennese School were well-served by his championship.
Yet his personal life was peppered with disappointment, not least when his young student and lover Alma Schindler abandoned him for Mahler; and his music, occupying an explorative twilight zone between Mahler and the serial modernists, made less of an impact than it deserved during his lifetime, eventually winning revival performances in the 1970s, 30 years after his death.
That, and for the practical reason it calls on immense forces, is why performances of his heavy-duty Lyric Symphony are few and far between, and why its presence in the BBC SSO’s season opener on Thursday was such a landmark event.
This 50-minute extravaganza was, by his own account, Zemlinsky’s response to Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, but one that argues its own synthesis of symphony and opera against Mahler’s conflation of symphony and song cycle. Thus the highly-charged eroticism contained in its emotionally turbulent, gauchely rhetorical score, and the dizzy theatricality of the seven songs, set – unlike the beauty and melancholy of Mahler’s Chinese texts – to words by Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, performed in alternating, uninterrupted sequence by soprano and baritone soloists.
It was clear from the outset that the SSO were well up for the challenge, chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth grasping the opening flourish with fearless determination – a curt fanfare motif straight out of the old Hollywood epic manual. His musicians responded with wholesome, electrifying vigour.
What followed was unrelenting, even delirious. Where the intense heat of the orchestration fed into the more reflective moments, occasionally overwhelming the singers, both soloists – soprano Miah Persson and baritone James Atkinson – revelled in the ecstasy and torment their characters (a young girl and a prince) encounter. Persson’s purified longing for the “young Prince” in the lighter scored Mutter, Der Jung Prinz was a moment of sheer enchantment, her desperate sense of loss in the penultimate Vollende denn das Letzte Lied profoundly felt. Atkinson was every bit as versatile in his volatile journey from infatuation to accepting the inevitable. The final orchestral moments were as exhaustive as they were sublime.
It was a performance that made up for a rather disappointing, unfulfilling Beethoven Violin Concerto that preceded it. That was surprising, given the favourable memories of South Korean violinist Bomsori’s previous appearances with the SSO. There were certainly sizeable chunks in which Bomsori’s lyrical radiance sang with purity and purpose, and her virtuosity sparkled. Equally, though, she succumbed to uncharacteristic fluctuations in concentration, brief periodic episodes in which the focus in her tone became uncentred, intonation wavered and the momentum flagged.
Was it just an off moment? A dazzling encore – Fritz Kreisler’s Schön Rosmarin – revealed the Bomsori we’re much more familiar with.
Ken Walton
This concert was broadcast Live on BBC Radio 3 and is available on BBC Sounds
There are no apparent repertoire limitations for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra these days, but an all-Berlioz programme was nonetheless a bold choice by Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev to open the new season.
Augmented to 34 strings with four horns, four bassoons, nine brass and six adaptable percussionists, this was a huge SCO, but possibly a minimum with which it is possible to play this music. The joy of the performance was that it sounded as the SCO always do under Emelyanychev, full of sparkling precise detail and always dynamically flexible, turning the quietest moments into swells of sound, and back to near-silence again, in the space of a few bars.
Although it is a joy to hear a full-fat Symphonie fantastique, the light, crisp, string playing here was a revelation from the opening bars, and as much in the driving rhythm of the low strings as from the violins. It made the music live anew. The conductor’s pacing of the second movement waltz permitted no wallowing in the pauses while losing none of the essential phrasing, and the Beethoven-indebted pastoral Adagio moved incrementally from quietness to richness.
The March to the Scaffold, with the delayed gratification of the delivery of the work’s big tune, was similarly exquisitely paced, and the Dream finale – which can never make any real narrative sense – was simply an explosion of delightful music with some eye-catching channelling of Taiko drumming at the end.
There was always plenty of activity, with first oboe Clara Schweinberger leaving the platform to play her dialogue with Katherine Bryer’s cor anglais from off-stage, and off-stage brass and bells colouring the final movement.
By the second half of the concert, however, none of this perambulation of musicians was a novelty. Although it was composed first, the Symphonie fantastique was preceded by Harold in Italy, the composer’s hybrid of symphony and viola concerto that set a template for the tone poems of Liszt and Strauss.
During its opening movement, Harold in the mountains, violist Timothy Ridout strolled onto the stage to play next to his harp duet partner and then only gradually made his way to the centre of the platform. During the closing Orgy of bandits he departed into the wings on the other side, only to reappear in the balcony for his final plaintive melodious response to an echo of the March of the Pilgrims, played by a trio of cello and two of the second violins that had similarly made their way off-stage.
The dynamic ebb and flow of that second movement march was emblematic of all that was perfectly poised in Emelyanychev’s interpretation, the delicacy of the closing bars quite ethereal.
Praise should also go to the poise of the first violins and the calm efficient way they dealt with the SCO’s new leader Bogdan Bozovic breaking a string as he turned towards his section in an intense passage.
After some dextrous swapping of instruments, his own was repaired onstage by Kana Kawashima at the desk behind and returned to him before the piece ended.
A new symphony by James MacMillan sets the ball rolling on his new association with the Hallé Orchestra. It’ll be the same but different, he tells KEN WALTON
Beethoven completed nine, as did Mahler. Sibelius made it to seven, while Mozart notched up 41 to Haydn’s 106. Sir James MacMillan is just about to reveal his Sixth and insists he’s not finished yet.
We’re talking symphonies of course, and in particular this latest one from MacMillan, which has especial significance in that its world premiere in Manchester on Thursday also marks the start of his new collaboration this season with the Hallé Orchestra as featured composer. Besides such an important Hallé commission, the coming year also includes MacMillan’s powerful 2021 Christmas Oratorio (under conductor emeritus and soon-to-be-80 Sir Mark Elder) and his famously profound Easter setting from 1994 of Seven Last Words of the Cross, conducted by the composer.
MacMillan is genuinely excited on several counts, not least that he holds a deep affection for Manchester itself. “I had a real job there, one of the few I’ve ever had, lecturing at the university in the 1980s,” he recalls. Throughout the Noughties he was back in the northern metropolis as conductor-in-association with the BBC Philharmonic, succeeding Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. “I got to conduct a lot of new music there for almost a decade.” It was also a period that spawned significant commissions, not least his Third Symphony “Silence”.
Now his allegiance is to Manchester’s rival orchestra, though not on wholly unfamiliar territory. “A few years ago the Hallé asked me to write a piece for Mark Elder’s final days as chief conductor. I wrote Timotheus, Bacchus and Cecilia, which involved hundreds of performers from the whole Hallé family, three different choral groups and full orchestra. That was my introduction to the orchestra.’ From that sprung this exciting new association, which he describes as “multi-faceted”, extending from mainstream concerts to outreach involvement and recordings of his own music on the Hallé label, including the Sixth Symphony.
Has he experienced anything of Andy Burnham’s “Manchesterism”? “I don’t talk about politics anymore, but I did meet him when I was down for Timotheus,” MacMillan replies. What I will say is I was very impressed with the Hallé, who they got to go to their concerts, loads of local mayors, lots of business people. It’s obviously an operation that’s run extremely well. Manchester seemed a very musical place, a vibrant city to engage with.”
The “Hallé Family” premiered MacMillan’s Timotheus, Bacchus and Cecilia in 2024 (photo: Alex Burns)
But let’s get back to the new symphony, which MacMillan describes as very different from his last one, “Le grand Inconnu”, a choral symphony premiered at the 2019 Edinburgh International Festival by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and The Sixteen under Harry Christophers. And let’s consider MacMillan the Symphonist, a genre he perceives as mystifyingly totemic within any composer’s lifelong work. Mahler’s words to Sibelius – “a symphony must contain the whole world” – spring to mind.
“It’s very hard to define what a symphony is nowadays,” he admits. “There’s a whole range of 20th century symphonies that don’t fit any template. Lots of composers have just given up, seeing them as outdated.” MacMillan clearly hasn’t, having composed them at various staging posts in his life. “The six I’ve written are very, very different, but there’s a breadth of utterance that is big in each one, even the Second [1999], which is for chamber orchestra, yet still intensely focussed and dark.”
More importantly, he adds, there’s a fundamental distinction between the symphonies and my other orchestral works. “A tone poem like The Confession of Isobel Gowdie is not a symphony, nor is the more recent Concerto for Orchestra. I can’t quite account for it other than these pieces materialise from a different mindset. There is definitely something in that Mahlerian concept of trying to embrace something big, whether it be the world, history, the family. Musically a symphony has to be through-composed, interconnected.”
It’s no accident that his purely symphonic output is more periodic than frequent. “It’s important for me to leave sufficient time between these to allow whatever happens in, say, five or six years to go deep down subliminally into the mind and come out in a transfigured form. Speaking to young composers last week we talked a lot about aesthetic and style, how it changes over the years, creeping up on you without noticing it. That’s certainly what has happened to me. In one sense I feel as if I’m doing the same thing all the time, yet I’m kind of reinventing the wheel with every symphony, because none of them emerge the same.”
The Sixth, he explains, has a completely odd construction – “five movements, the first four of which are very short.” A glance at the score confirms their elemental brevity: the opening movement for woodwind only; the second for percussion, piano and timpani; the third for brass; and the fourth for strings and harp. “These are little aphoristic interludes, then the whole orchestra comes together for the lengthier final movement.”
So what’s it all about? “I’ve often cited Elgar’s Enigma Variations as a work that fascinates me, the way he made these musical portraits of friends, naming them only enigmatically. I’m doing something similar here. These are secret portraits of family members, now departed, that have had a big impact on me. It’s not important for me to mention who they are, just that they greatly influenced me, musically or otherwise. It’s very personal for that reason. The fifth movement has a kind of mourning aspect, much more substantial, more through-composed.”
Expect more affectionate character sketches, then, than the ones contained in MacMillan’s viperish 2004 work A Scotch Bestiary, which took vicious aim at some Scottish archetypes and figures from his more combative younger days – including the critics.
At this point in his career – he’s now 67 and enjoying a comfortable home life in rural Ayrshire – MacMillan exudes an air of calm, thoughtful reflection and gently mischievous humour, even though he’s as busy as ever juggling a never ending stream of compositional deadlines, international commitments, and directing the award winning Cumnock Tryst Festival, which he founded twelve years ago in the Ayrshire town of his birth.
Pianist Ethan Loch opens the 2026 Cumnock Tryst
He’s particularly proud of the latter, which will consume his attention after this week’s Manchester premiere. It runs from 1-4 October, opening with a recital by the blind young Scots pianist Ethan Loch, and later featuring the likes of saxophonist Jess Gillam, euphonium star David Childs, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the Cumnock Tryst Festival Chorus, and a spectacular closing concert by The Wallace Collection and The Cooperation Band paying tribute to the late John Wallace, former principal of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, which features his extravagant surround-sound reimagining of Giovanni Gabrieli’s 1615 Canzoni et Sonate,
Meanwhile the creative cogs keep turning, and the thing that is most important to MacMillan professionally, he says, is thinking time. “The piece I’m writing just now I’ve been thinking about for years, and while I’m writing that I’m thinking about the next piece, which is a double concerto for cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason and Brazilian guitarist Plínio Fernandes. My mind is obsessed with getting it right, terrified I’m getting it wrong. It’s keeping me awake at night.”
Strangely, MacMillan insists, “that’s the best way – to be obsessed with something years in advance.” Who knows, the sounds of that golden Ninth Symphony could be gestating even now!
The Hallé Orchestra opens its 2026-27 Season with the world premiere of James MacMillan’s Symphony No 6 on Thursday 24 September at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall. The concert will be recorded for future broadcast by BBC Radio 3. Full details atwww.halle.co.uk
The Cumnock Tryst Festival runs from 1-4 October at various venues in Cumnock. Full details atwww.thecumnocktryst.com
Substantially occasioned by the passing of John Wallace, inspirational trumpeter and former principal of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, 2026 has been a busy year for fans of music for brass. Lammermuir Festival’s contribution to his remembrance was exactly the sort of ambitiously mad event he would have taken part in himself.
The Walled Garden of the Amisfield estate at Haddington is vast, dates back to the 18th century and is now tended by an army of volunteers. It was the venue for this year’s Lammermuir project by Red Note Ensemble, previously responsible for music beneath the wings of the Concorde in the aircraft museum at East Fortune.
Perhaps there was a generous attitude to recruitment for 100 Tubas at Amisfield, but not far off that total of instruments was achieved, most of them tuba-shaped if not sized, and capable of producing a similar sound. The score they tackled was Anthony Braxton’s Composition No 19, written – for 100 Tubas – in the 1970s but, perhaps understandably, unheard until it was played in New York City two decades ago.
Like that one, this was a promenade performance, the audience bussed-in from central Haddington and then free to wander within the garden walls. On arrival, a rainbow enlivened the ever-present threat of rain which never materialised, but a less windy day would probably have allowed the sound to carry and bounce off the high walls more often than such echoes were detectable.
The tubas, sousaphones and smaller horns were deployed in four groups, each with their own conductor, moving about the garden. Repeating figures were swapped around the space, and there was the freedom, fairly strictly delineated, for some improvisation – embraced with more enthusiasm by some players than others.
Mostly the score is about ensemble sound, and the topography of the garden – which includes orchards, potagers, and a maze, as well as avenues of flowers – meant that the environment played an important role in how the ensembles sounded. Nonetheless, it might have been a very samey hour of music had the producers not added a quartet of trumpets, whose clarion calls separated the tuba excursions, with music by Benjamin Britten and Lewis Murphy on their stands.
100 Tubas at Amisfield convened on the penultimate day of Lammermuir, and two days earlier this year’s Glasgow Cathedral Festival commenced with Echoes in Stone and Brass, curated by the RSNO’s principal trombone Davur Juul Magnussen
To an extent Magnussen was also emcee of that hour of music in the nave of the Cathedral, his solo improvisation opening the sequence and also possibly – but very subtly – signalling its ending, but the designation “curator” was quite specific. This programme was a collective effort, and that was its great strength.
Although that beginning was one of a series of six “improvisations” through the programme, some were far from as free as jazz players would understand the term, the ten-strong Glasgow Cathedral Choir, for example, working with music written by Ailie Robertson and to a defined, if organic, structure.
Between those were a selection of specific compositions, two – on which Magnussen was joined by fellow RSNO trombonist Cillian O Ceallachain and the choir – originally commissioned for Nordic Music Days 2024 and composed by Drew Hammond (who added some organ playing) and Claire McCue, and two from the repertoire of the Rookh Quartet, playing Jan Garbarek on Wagner tubas, and Allisson Kruusmaa on French horns.
The sonic skills of Sam McErlean, contributing live electronics as well as the superb ambient mix in the space, were central to another pair of pieces, The Heavier it Rocks by Sofia Kiviniemi and the rendition of the Seikilos Epitaph, a very early piece of musical notation engraved on a pillar in ancient Greece.
Andrew Forbes, Director of Music at the cathedral, also played some organ and conducted the more formal choir music, while the closing commission, Things Must Pass by Neil Tomas Smith, added more brass from the Conservatoire, RSNO and The Cooperation Band. The reverberation with this sanctuary’s ancient walls launched the festival as only those instruments really can.
Keith Bruce
Pictures by Stuart Armitt (Amisfield) and Campbell Parker (Cathedral)
In the first phase of the Covid pandemic in 2020, when all gatherings were prohibited, Scottish Opera set the pace with its response to the emergency, and its contribution to a necessarily online version of that year’s Lammermuir Festival was a staging of Janacek’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared, filmed at the Theatre Royal with tenor Ed Lyon in the central role.
The history of this niche work at Lammermuir acquired another fascinating chapter this year when Nicky Spence stepped in to perform the song cycle at Dirleton Kirk, replacing Joshua Ellicott and hot on the heels of his show-stopping turn at the Last Night of the Proms in the Royal Albert Hall. If that contrast of venues was remarkable, the same applies to his piano partner Jeremy Denk, who is as familiar with New York’s Carnegie Hall as he now is with Lammermuir’s tour circuit of East Lothian churches.
What a dynamic duo they made, in a performance that treated Janacek’s ambiguous tale as opera-in-concert, ably assisted by mezzo-soprano Victoria Simmonds as the seductive gypsy girl Zekfa with the chorus of villagers provided by Edinburgh’s Robin Chapel choir: mezzo Susan White and sopranos Virginia Wilson and Caroline Trutz.
Their music, with close harmonies predicting the Andrews Sisters as much as they resemble Wagner’s Rhinemaidens, is one of the delights of the piece, in which the combination of the tenor and mezzo is less opera duet than intimate conversation, and years ahead of its time.
That intimacy reaches its fulfilment, as it were, in the only section of the work without libretto, a piano interlude labelled Intermezzo erotico, and Denk’s playing of it suggested a robust and passionate liaison as clearly as he had delicately depicted glow-worms and swallows earlier in the cycle.
Spence, who has been awarded for his performances of Janacek in the Czech Republic, was in masterly control of the material throughout, even as his love-struck farmer’s boy character is far from master of his own fate. Hearing his powerful voice calibrated to this small venue, with the tonal variations he has available at the top of his range, was a remarkable experience, especially delivered in such a natural and unaffected way.
The tenor had even brought along a nifty encore of a Janacek folk-song arrangement that involved the full sextet and appropriately hymned the joys of being a musician.
The scope of that choice of career had already been well established by Jeremy Denk in the first half of the concert, when he played Beethoven’s late Sonata in A-flat Major, Op 110, in the captivating way Lammermuir audiences have come to enthusiastically appreciate. The combination of lightning fingering and moments of still, subtly altered phrasing in the repetitions of the central Allegro, and the propulsive shaping of the whole work were the pianist at his finest.
The extent of the repertoire he carries in his memory-banks was illustrated by his apparently last-minute decision to precede it with Bach’s A Minor Partita, rather than the advertised Prelude and Fugue. Whether this was a nod to the broader programming of the festival – the D minor Partita for Violin had featured in Wednesday’s Scottish Ensemble concert with NYCOS singers – or just a personal whim, it was a virtuosic delight. It is certainly possible to play Bach more slowly, but few pianists can apply such finger-power at such pace, and still be clear and distinct.
For the planners of this RSNO season opener, which paired Rachmaninov’s Fourth Piano Concerto and Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, how fortuitous might it have been for history’s sake had the latter composer once conducted the former as soloist in that very same concerto?
Death got in the way, Mahler well gone by the time Rachmaninov penned his original version of the work in 1926, never mind its revised manifestation of 1941. For the record, Mahler did – in 1910 – conduct Rachmaninov as pianist/composer, in the more popular Third Piano Concerto at New York’s Carnegie Hall. By all accounts it was quite a show.
As was Saturday’s, given the spectacle of the vastly extended player numbers required for the Mahler symphony and the cornucopia of percussion additives, from shimmering cowbells to the gargantuan, cartoon-like mallet that signals the “blows of fate”. It was just a pity, due to hall’s difficulties in adding the regular stage extensions, that the orchestra was seated at ground level, limiting sight lines. Thankfully the sound quality was not affected.
That was certainly true of Russian pianist Alexander Malofeev, making his RSNO debut with a combination of electrifying virtuosity and sweeping poeticism. Where this concerto shoots off in directions that seem exploratory for Rachmaninov – harmonies that stretch tonality to the brink, melodies that wink at modernism, textures of uncharacteristic leanness – Romantic Russian blood still courses through its veins. Malofeev’s performance was as clean as it was powerful, effortlessly fiery and flamboyant in the outer movements, enchanting in the central Largo, supported crisply by conductor Thomas Søndergård and the orchestra.
The same calculated precision informed Søndergård’s vision of the Mahler, which bore a vivid transparency from the outset: neatly calibrated mood swings and tempo changes, and a perceived wish to let the often tortuous drama emerge unforced. Where that excelled was its focus on the intricacies, those jarring twists and turns that seem initially to challenge logic, yet somehow fall into place in the wider context.
Such structured discipline lent the long opening movement a sense of gravitational solidity, scintillatingly precise, if a little understated emotionally. There was a sense, too, in the Scherzo that more could have been made of its side-stepping eccentricities, its parodic grotesquerie. The Andante moderato, though, was spellbinding, an oasis of relative calm amid the surrounding sea of brutal torment. The finale, devastatingly conclusive both in its apocalyptic climaxes and ultimate descent into nothingness, was a veritable tour de force.
It was a long evening, but one that set a high bar for the season ahead. It also provided a public opportunity, right at the start, for the chief executive of the Royal Philharmonic Society, James Murphy, to present RSNO chairman Gregor Stewart with the prestigious RPS Ensemble Award, won earlier his year by the RSNO for the extent, versatility and ambition of its creative operation.
“Here is an orchestra firing on all cylinders, everything a 21st century orchestra should be,” Murphy announced, adding that the RSNO are the first symphony orchestra to win this award since 2014.
If he didn’t invent those two pillars of classical music – the string quartet in chamber music and the symphony for the orchestral repertoire – the prolific Joseph Haydn certainly developed both to the form with which we are familiar.
For the central concert of their residency at Lammermuir 2026, period ensemble Concerto Copenhagen, directed from the harpsichord by Lars Ulrik Mortensen, played three sequential symphonies from the start of the composer’s residency in the court of Prince Esterhazy, and the beginning of that process.
Haydn’s Symphonies No 6, 7, and 8, Le matin, Le midi, and Le soir, were written to be heard this way, as a sequence and by an orchestra of this size. What was missing from a performance by a full size modern “symphony orchestra”? Nothing at all, and in fact there was a huge amount to be gained from Concerto Copenhagen’s clarity, which came with plenty of volume and richness of tone.
The familiar face on the platform was flautist Katy Bircher, and she had much of the solo spotlight, from the dancing tune in the Menuet in Le matin through to the pacey theatrical La Tempesta: Presto finale of Le soir. Orchestra leader Fredrik From and first cello Judith-Maria Blomsterberg also had lively moments across all three symphonies, as did, perhaps more surprisingly, bassist Megan Adie, often in partnership with the bassoon of Kamila Marcinkowska-Prasad.
The way all of that detail emerged from the ensemble, signalled – occasionally a little eccentrically – by Mortensen, was delightful, while the particular character and pitch of their baroque instruments made it all sound as bright and fresh as it must have done 275 years ago.
Three decades further back, Johann Sebastian Bach had already written a number of cantatas although he had not yet begun the remarkable weekly series he composed for the churches in Leipzig. They incorporated Lutheran chorales for the congregation to join in, and musicologist Helga Thoene has shown that those chorales, and specifically ones for the consolation of the bereaved, lie behind the remarkable Chaconne that concludes his 1720 Partita in D Minor for solo violin, composed immediately after the death of his first wife.
In St Mary’s, Whitekirk, Scottish Ensemble leader and artistic director Jonathan Morton played the Chaconne while nine singers from the NYCOS Chamber Choir sang those chorales, conducted by Christopher Bell.
The virtuosic violin piece is a captivating listen on its own, but the addition of the voices, initially sparingly but cumulative, with the single tenor and highest sopranos making telling additions to the underscore, transformed the experience into something even greater.
The piece opened a programme, Bach and Blood, that the ensemble and choir is touring, with a London date at Milton Court on October 2. The “Blood” element is David Fennessy’s composition of that title, which uses a 12th century melody by Hildegard of Bingen, slowed down so that the Latin text becomes a series of extended vowel sounds for the singers, interspersed with breathy effects. Morton was, again, the violin soloist, but now joined by his Scottish Ensemble colleagues with the front desk players having their own conversations with him.
With bassist Diane Clark doubling on resonating wine-glasses, Fennessy’s composition is as much “about” the particular musical elements his score requires as anything else, but it was hard not to hear some consolation in the heavenly concluding bars of violin and vocals after the turbulence of what had gone before.
Between those two very complementary works, the string orchestra played Arvo Part’s Greater Antiphons, which recasts choral music from the Roman Catholic Advent liturgy as a seven-movement instrumental work. It is a piece absolutely tailor-made for this group, and was played with satisfying precision.
A year ago, baritone Roderick Williams sang Britten’s War Requiem in Hiroshima, one of a global run of performances of the work that included Tel Aviv and Kyiv, marking both 80 years of the end of World War 2 and the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death, which falls on December 6 this year.
It was the latter that received due recognition on Friday at the Lammermuir Festival, with Williams on his best form in a late night recital with pianist Christopher Glynn in Haddington’s Scottish Episcopal Church.
Ironic self-deprecation is the lingua franca of musicians, but few deploy it with the charm of this singer and his was the most personal of programmes, finding room for two settings of Blake that he wrote as a teenager to follow Britten’s Songs and Proverbs of William Blake, composed for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in the mid-1960s.
Williams, who made his own excellent recording of the cycle, knows the work inside out, and delivers the crucial proverbs with as much panache as the more familiar songs, like The Tyger and the psychological A Poison Tree. His own early works may be musically naïve in comparison but they are very lovely.
As are the four songs by Britten’s mentor Frank Bridge that followed, all from the early years of the 20th century, and appealing art songs that are often very nearly show tunes.
Britten found his own way with traditional and familiar material in the quartet Williams ended with, including The Salley Gardens and a knowingly-delivered The Foggy, Foggy Dew. Williams’ own Bach-inspired arrangement of A Red, Red Rose made a perfect encore.
The recital was presented by Lammermuir as a coda to Scottish Opera’s contribution to this year’s programme, a showcase for three Emerging Artists singing Britten with the orchestra.
These recruits to the company will all shortly be seen in the company’s touring production of Hansel and Gretel, and if their individual dramatic expressiveness in this programme is any guide, that should be well worth catching.
Conductor Douglas Boyd is possibly still remembered in his native Scotland as an oboe player, but he has been exclusively a conductor for 20 years and artistic director at Garsington Opera for much of that time, bringing a memorable Rusalka to the Edinburgh International Festival four years ago.
Directing the Orchestra of Scottish Opera, he began, appropriately, with Arvo Part’s Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten, a brief work that has exceeded its original inspiration (Part admired but never met the British composer) to become a concert hall favourite. It worked brilliantly here not just for its dedication but also its suitability to the acoustic of St Mary’s – Boyd allowing the orchestra’s carefully calibrated strings to build incrementally – and the obvious parallel Part intended with the tolling bell opening of Britten’s final composition, the Phaedra cantata he wrote for Janet Baker.
Almost a mini-opera in itself, mezzo Charlotte Clapperton projected the confessional mix of recitative and song in a committed characterisation. Britten clearly appreciated the story-telling of Robert Lowell’s English version of Racine, and that narrative directness balances the emotional torment conveyed by the music, scored by strings with percussion and harpsichord.
From forty years earlier in the composer’s career, the song cycle Our Hunting Fathers employed the fullest edition of the Orchestra of Scottish Opera, the winds (including alto saxophone) and brass essential to its effectiveness. The challenge it presented to soprano Avery Lafrentz was immense and she dealt with its tricky libretto, assembled and partly written by W H Auden, with aplomb.
There is much in this complex early work – which baffled some in 1936 – that prefigures the War Requiem, but it is structurally much less easy to decode. The scoring for the orchestra, which uses some of the sonic palette of contemporary dance bands, and the demands on the singer, grappling with overlapping texts and exclamations, are virtuosic however, and it made a terrific climax to the concert.
It was the other soprano, Charlotte Jane Kennedy, who had the programme’s most appealing and often-sung work. Les Illuminations, setting a selection of texts by Arthur Rimbaud to string orchestra accompaniment, has the undoubted advantage of being in mellifluous French and is Britten on the road to being a great opera composer.
As often heard sung by a tenor, following Peter Pears’ adoption of the work, the brightness of a soprano – and Kennedy has that quality along with power at both ends of her range – is arguably best suited to the piece, regardless of the homo-erotic message in Being beauteous.
It was noticeable, too, that Kennedy referred less to the music-stand in her performance, but then she had the work that could prove the most useful repertoire addition to a blossoming career.
Throughout this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, the BBC mobile recording van was parked in the lane behind the Queen’s Hall as always. However, listening to the morning concerts live on Radio 3 was no longer an option. If you wanted to enjoy this long-established summer season of chamber music as it happened, you had to get yourself to the Scottish capital’s southside to hear it in person.
What the BBC is doing with the recordings it makes only made that more essential. VoxCarnyx readers already know of the carefully-constructed programme with which Scots mezzo Beth Taylor made her EIF debut. When some of it appeared as part of Radio 3’s afternoon “Classical Live”, however, it was chopped up into unconnected chunks over several days.
The BBC is at it again in the afternoons this coming week, with the Pavel Haas Quartet’s programme of Martinu, Dvorak and Korngold spread over three days, and – even worse – music from the recital by violinist Vilde Frang and Friends split between Tuesday and Friday, entirely ignoring the premise of the recital.
Before the interval of that concert, Frang and pianist Olli Mustonen played Bela Bartok’s Violin Sonata No 1, a virtuosic half-hour-plus of sensational communication between two musicians at close quarters. It was full of intensity and expression, the violinist’s performance of it as finely-honed and precise as you might wish, and Mustonen vigorous (perhaps a little too much so at times) but also demonstrating dynamic delicacy in their dialogue. Hear it on Radio 3 on Tuesday 15th.
The context of the presentation of the work was crucial, however, showing how the composer’s dedication to collecting and transcribing folk melodies informed his own work. Mustonen’s solo performance of a selection of the Gyermekeknek piano pieces (For Children) was another highlight, but the pair also combined individually and together with Hungarian brothers Benjamin and Salamon Eredics, who also played as a duo, in a selection of arrangements of folk melodies, both by Bartok and of their own devising.
Some of their virtuosity on a range of instruments will be broadcast on the afternoon on Friday 18th, but there will be no sense of the purpose of the programme, or the conversation between traditional and classical music that flowed so intriguingly through the Queen’s Hall concert.
Another Queen’s Hall recital reaches the airwaves on Wednesday, when Steven Osborne’s contribution to the Festival’s tribute to Alfred Brendel is blessedly broadcast in full in the evening “Radio 3 in Concert” slot: Schubert spiced with Judith Weir and James MacMillan and again reviewed at the time on VoxCarnyx.
There are three Usher Hall concerts in the evenings during next week as well: Mahler’s Das klagende Lied from the BBC SSO under Sir Donald Runnicles, and soloists including Scots mezzo Catriona Morison, on Monday; then Coleridge-Taylor’s The Song of Hiawatha with tenor Nicky Spence following on Tuesday; and the opening concert of EIF 2026, Wynton Marsalis’s Symphony No 1 “All Rise”, played by the RSNO, on Thursday.
All three also featured the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, so listeners will have ample opportunity to appreciate the dedication and versatility of those singers. Like the visit to the Hub by the Aga Khan Music Programme and the Colin Currie Group’s concert to mark Steve Reich’s 90th, “All Rise” was filmed, but viewers will have to look beyond the BBC to catch those broadcasts.
Nicky Spence has swapped the hustle and bustle of London for quieter family life in a Renfrewshire manse, but the versatile Scots tenor is still in global demand. Coming up, the London Proms and Lammermuir Festival, and a promise to pick and choose. KEN WALTON reports
At 43, Dumfriesshire-born tenor Nicky Spence has reached a point in his busy and successful career where he can call the shots. Not in an arrogant celeb-kinda way. Spence is unquestionably at the top of his tree, larger-than-life, cuts an ostentatious profile, and just as comfortable singing the noblest of Wagner in the world’s top opera houses as camping it up in popular music theatre. But in essence he’s a genuinely nice guy, enjoying family life with his pianist husband Dylan Perez, three-year-old son Baird and the assortment of pets that roam the former Paisley manse they now call home.
The recent move to Scotland was as much about work-life balance as Spence’s yearning to reconnect with the country of his birth. The time was right, he reckoned, to get out of London where he’d been for the past 25 years. “We wanted to find a big hunky building with some space to let animals and children roam free, idealogical images of my own childhood. We’d lived in Deptford which is quite gentrified but certainly still quite stabby, so we were quite happy to leave that behind and find somewhere where Baird will hopefully be reciting some Burns poetry.”
More importantly, it’s five minutes from Glasgow Airport, which means Spence’s international commitments remain perfectly viable in terms of juggling family life. “Opera companies are really family unfriendly so you often get your schedule at 7pm for the next day, then suddenly you might have a day off, so that’s when I can whizz home being so close to the airport.”
The move also opens up greater possibilities for Spence to throw some home gigs into the globetrotting mix. Take this month alone, where on Saturday (12 Sept) he’s starring in the Last Night of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, leading the nation (broadcast live on BBC television) in Rule Britannia. Fast forward seven days (19 Sept) and he’s on a rescue mission to East Lothian’s Lammermuir Festival, standing in for an indisposed Joshua Ellicott in Janacek’s dramatic song cycle The Diary of One Who Disappeared. Moreover, it’s only a few weeks since Spence was at the Usher Hall starring in the Edinburgh International Festival’s performance of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s epic curiosity The Song of Hiawatha.
With the Montreal Symphony at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival
When we met at his home last week he’d just returned in the nick of time from a fitting for Saturday’s Proms. Are we to expect a dazzling extravaganza for that ritually outrageous Rule Britannia moment? “It’s pretty hush hush,” says Spence, who’s everyday attire leans invariably towards the colourful. “Many people have tried to wriggle information from me. I could give you an exclusive, but I won’t!”
Saturday, he discloses, will involve five costume changes. “I was looking through the annals to see how previous singers have produced a flag in the past for Rule Britannia. It’s quite hard to come up with a novel idea. There are really only so many ways you can do it………..but we’ve come up with something!”
As to his wider brief for the evening, which also features pianist Yuja Wang, Spence says it’s like a little celebration of the person chosen to sing. “So it’s going to be a bit cheeky – some of it anyway. In the first half I’m doing some very noble, operatic Czech [now revealed as the Prince’s Aria from Dvorak’s Rusalka]. But for the second half there might be some Scottish stuff – weird if there wasn’t – and maybe something dance-related as well.”
Subsequent updates to the BBC Proms website confirm a newly commissioned Scotch Snap arranged by Stuart Calvert featuring “various artists”, and “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat” from Guys and Dolls.
Where there’s capriciousness and mirth at the Last Night of the Proms, Spence’s Janacek in Haddington next week will demand (alongside mezzo soprano Victoria Simmonds and pianist Jeremy Denk) a performance soaked in theatrical intensity. It’s not a work that lies in the repertoire of many tenors, so the Festival (which began earlier this week and runs till Sunday 20 September) breathed a sigh of relief when they discovered that Spence knew, and had recorded, it and was available to step into the breach. “It’s something I’ve got in my back pocket, so I was really happy to do it,” he explains.
The Diary of One Who Disappeared is about forbidden love, a subject painfully close to Janacek, tortured in later life through his unrequited passion for a much younger woman, Kamila Stösslová. “It falls between the stools of song cycle and opera,” Spence argues. It’s got a lot of shame and vulnerability about it. Maybe that’s why I like Czech music, especially Janacek. It’s almost this kind of judgment of the outside world, which I kind of recognise from growing up in Scotland”. Suddenly our window view of the Paisley church, to which Spence’s manse was once spiritually attached, looms large. “It’s my echo chamber,” he confirms. Spence experienced his own vulnerability, deserted by his father at an early age and brought up by a doting mother.
In an operatic career that nearly never was – Spence embarked on a major, lucrative pop-classical crossover deal with Decca in his early twenties only to walk out mid-contract to return to serious opera studies – Janacek’s operas have proved a winner for him. “I’ve pretty much ticked all of them off apart from Osud,” says Spence. “I love that they’re not too operatic, but genuinely dramatic. There’s an economy, similar to Britten’s operas, that really appeals to me. I’d say to any first time opera goer, go see something like Jenufa rather than [Mozart’s] The Magic Flute, which is quite problematic in being bloody boring in the second half, all the trials and stuff, all the patriarchy shite.”
Singing Noel Coward with husband and pianist Dylan Perez (photo: Robin Clewley)
A busy schedule this season includes Janacek performances in Bamberg and at London’s Covent Garden. But what gives Spence the greatest satisfaction is that Czech directors keep calling him back. Later this autumn he’ll be in Brno to star in three Janacek productions: The Adventures of Mr Broucek, Jenufa and Sarka. “In the past I’ve even sung The Diary of One Who Disappeared in Hukvaldy where Janacek was born. So in that sense I’ve been selling ice to the eskimos.”
With Spence’s move to Scotland, however, there are clear signs he’ll be careful about what he says yes to in the pursuit of broader challenges. He recently pulled out of an engagement with Hamburg State Opera for the simple reason “I just wasn’t enjoying the ride”.
“I like to spread the joy wherever I’m going, but will probably try to be a bit more specific about it. I was president of the ISM [Independent Society of Musicians] where I learnt a lot about advocacy and governance, and that may come into play. I’d love to run a vocal department, equipping young singers with what they need to succeed. But mostly I’m keen to do more collaborating with people I really enjoy working with. It’s a daily challenge trying not to work with arseholes any more. There are still some conductors out there who act like they come from another century, That’s always interesting!”
There are, however, some operatic roles he has in his sights. “I’ve pretty much done the ones I wanted to, but I haven’t done Captain Vere in [Britten’s] Billy Budd and I think I’d make a really interesting Aschenbach in Death in Venice.” He also hopes to do more work with his husband Dylan, “if we can stop arguing about the dishwasher”. One 2027 date firmly in the duo’s diary is the May recital in Cumnock that traditionally launches the programme for that year’s Cumnock Tryst Festival.
Given his own challenging childhood, what aspirations does Spence have for young Baird? “We just want him to be a happy human being. He’s so friendly, loves dancing, and we learn so much from him all the time – such a great ballast amid the stormy seas of performing. He gives us context.”
Nicky Spence stars in this weekend’s Last Night of the Proms, broadcast live on BBC One & Two on Saturday 12 September. Full details atwww.bbc.co.uk/proms
The BBC Proms marks the 90th birthday of American composer Steve Reich tomorrow with a late night concert that teams Owain Park’s superb vocal ensemble Gesualdo Six with the Colin Currie Group. As with the Berlin Philharmonic, whose two programmes in the Royal Albert Hall this week were earlier played at the Festival’s closing weekend, EIF can claim to have heard them first.
In the cases of Currie’s Group and Park’s choir, however, the Edinburgh performances were even more notable, with first and early performances of brand new works.
Colin Currie’s way with the works of Steve Reich have the enthusiastic approval of the composer himself, and the Usher Hall programme presented half a dozen of them in what was an important contribution to the Festival’s USA250 “All Rise” theme as well as to Reich’s birthday celebrations.
The composer’s music was being played in Lucerne the same evening, but it was Edinburgh that had the new work, a world premiere of In All Your Ways, for string quartet, pairs of pianos, flutes and clarinets and four percussionists.
It completed a programme that saw Currie mostly in the conductor’s role, although it began with Clapping Music (from distant 1972) performed by himself and Owen Gunnell, and as fine an opener as it makes an encore.
It was followed by 2020’s Two Pianos, the players being Philip Moore, perhaps best known for his two-piano partnership with Simon Crawford-Phillips, and Siwan Rhys, half of the GBSR duo with percussionist George Barton, who made a memorable contribution to this year’s Tectonics weekend in Glasgow City Hall.
Although they were necessarily at the back of the platform and almost invisible to many of the audience, the pulse they established and querulous ending of the short work set things up for the ensemble music that followed.
Radio Rewrite added Pete Wilson’s electric bass to the string quartet, single winds, piano and percussion line-up, for the most pulsating score of the programme. It becomes much sparer and slower in the two movements that draw on the early Radiohead song Everything in its Right Place, the other three referencing the same group’s later Jigsaw Falling into Place.
That source material undoubtedly brought Reich a new audience, and may well have contributed to the good attendance at the Usher Hall, but familiarity with Radiohead’s music is far from necessary to enjoyment of what is one of the composer’s most accessible pieces of music.
The two large works on either side of the interval were also Reich classics, and these performances were masterly. The mirrored set-up of Double Sextet (2007), with the two groups of piano, tuned percussion, flute, clarinet, cello and violin (the leaders being Jonathan Morton and Clio Gould) was a visual as well as aural pleasure – enhanced, perhaps coincidentally, by the precise gender-balance in this group of musicians.
The dialogue between strings and winds in the work was meticulously directed and beautifully balanced by Currie, and the two pianists put in an extraordinary shift over its 20 minutes or so.
For Quartet (2013), after the interval, they were joined by Gunnell and Currie, the latter picking up mallets for the only time of the evening. The dynamic empathy between the four, the cross-stage conversations and building intensity at the finale, marked out another brilliant example of the composer’s unique voice.
In All Your Ways turned out to be something of a departure from that, especially in its opening and closing phases. More lyrical than even the gentler moments of Double Sextet, it also seemed more wide-screen in its use of the instruments, that familiar palette of sounds used in a different way. It is another work of scale, at 20 minutes, and a further opportunity to hear it is undoubtedly necessary before it finds its proper place in the Reich canon.
Gesualdo Six (photo: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan)
The previous weekend at EIF had seen Gesualdo Six bring to the Queen’s Hall chamber music programme a performance that transcended that slot while fitting rather perfectly in the space.
Death of Gesualdo is a follow-up to Secret Byrd, which has been seen at the Lammermuir Festival and, just this year, at Perth Festival of the Arts. The six singers are once again working with Concert Theatre Works and director Bill Barclay, and on this occasion with six actors and a puppeteer.
That title undersells the narrative, which covers the composer’s entire life as well as his extraordinary demise and the most notorious incident of his existence, when he caught his first wife with her lover and murdered them both.
The soundtrack for all this is his own music, very cleverly (if arguably slightly blasphemously) re-purposed so that liturgical texts refer to his own betrayal and sacrifice. It was immaculately sung by the costumed choristers, whose blend and precision pitch were a marvel, even as they added performance skill and lighting duties to their practice.
The mime and tableau vivant of the actors was also quite compelling, modern naturalistic techniques and movement sitting alongside Victorian melodrama gestures, and the puppet of the composer as a boy, in a mix that seems to match the period of the music perfectly. It is exquisitely costumed, and staged in a way clearly designed to fit the smallest playing area.
Just as the music reflected back on itself, so the human animation found scenic echoes in the narrative of Gesualdo’s life in a production that deserves to be even more widely seen than its predecessor. It visits Snape Maltings, the Canterbury Festival and Southampton next month (Oct 18, 19 & 20) and will return to St Martin-in-the-Fields, who co-commissioned it, in March.
In a presentational sense, there’s a hint of convenience in the way this year’s Edinburgh International Festival has packaged three recitals by three distinctive pianists under the banner of a Tribute to Alfred Brendel. The result so far – Steven Osborne and Paul Lewis have already contributed, Pierre-Laurent Aimard is still to do so – has weighed more towards the individuality of the participants themselves than any outwardly devotional emoting.
Maybe that’s the point. Brendel – who died last year, and whose own Festival appearances are perhaps best remembered for his internalised demeanour, strict dietary repertoire choices, often unsmiling intellectual explorations – was very much his own man. Experiencing his stage appearances, largely in a fully attended Usher Hall, was like an act of reverence. He was a profoundly communicative musical personality, unshowy but utterly persuasive.
In an interview with Vox Carnyx last year, Lewis, who studied with Brendel, described him as “very prescriptive, very specific and exacting in lessons”, while realising also that “the worst thing you could do is to simply copy him, as you’ll end up with what would be a bad version of Alfred Brendel. He wasn’t looking for that.”
Which is exactly the impression gleaned from the first two of this Festival’s tribute recitals. In Lewis’ case last Thursday – a neatly symmetrical sandwich of Schubert and Chopin within outer layers of Mozart – he simply let the music do the talking, as if in a world of his own. This was the more Brendel-esque of the two, yet with the Chopin in particular Lewis’ musical originality allowed the tenderest of expression to emerge from within the precision of its execution. The Two Nocturnes, Op 32, were singingly blissful, the foregoing Polonaise No 1, Op 26, heightened by judicious panache.
Schubert’s 3 Klavierstücke, written during the composer’s wretched final year but unpublished till years after his death (thanks to Brahms), was a kaleidoscopic joy, its weightier passions (unmistakably Brahms-like) revealing a Schubert with new paths to explore, had he lived.
Lewis’ Mozart was fascinating, more so in the B flat Sonata, K333, that closed the programme. Detail was paramount in a performance that was full of surprises, unearthing lyrical nuggets often ignored within the texture, playing logically but loose with the transition between phrases, and most effectively imbuing a character on the music that filled its intrinsic simplicity with golden colours.
The opening Mozart Sonata, K570, also in B flat, produced the one moment in the programme that seemed out of character, as if he hadn’t quite acclimatised to the room. The gnawing insistence of the cantabile lines in the opening movement was unduly intense, to some extent unrelenting, thankfully countered by a beautifully evocative slow movement and stylistically resolute finale.
Steven Osborne “poetic thoughfulness” (photo: Ben Ealovega)
Where Lewis’ manner was wholly focussed on the practical job at hand, Osborne – who opened the series – took time, true to his personality, to address the audience with some personal reflections on Brendel, not least the latter’s ability “to play out of time, but perfectly out of time”. What followed in its own way illustrated that phenomenon, Osborne’s relaxed intimacy throwing up rhythmically flexible moments designed to titillate the brain.
He chose mainly Schubert for his programme, effectively offset by snatches of contemporary music by James MacMillan and Judith Weir. Each half culminated in a major work, the first in Schubert’s Four Impromptus, the second in his late C minor Piano Sonata. In these, Osborne’s expansive thoughts, the poetic thoughtfulness of his personality, magically shone through.
The nimble delicacy of the Impromptus, whether in the freneticism of the first or songlike enchantment of the third, were a fitting end to a sequence of performances that opened with a playful Allegretto in C minor, delighted in the fleeting iridescence of Weir’s Fragile, before returning to Schubert and Osborne’s own completion of a strapping 1816 Allegretto in C.
The second half was uniquely characterised by more of Osborne’s adaptations, this time his intuitive arrangements of two Schubert Lieder – Liebesbotschaft and Am Meer from the late song cycle Schwanegesang. Nothing was lost in the absence of the sung voice, in fact much was gained through the adept voicing of the piano adaptation, and of course Osborne’s knowing delivery. That sat well in the company of MacMillan’s Lumen Christi, a luminous and playful extension of a musical idea extracted from his large scale Symphony “Vigil” set in the style of a music box, and Weir’s Choral, for Steve, written in memory of the American pianist Steven Stucky.
The closing Schubert Sonata aroused an increased intensity in Osborne’s playing, the opening movement robustly discursive, the Adagio a ruminative response, the final movements complementing fitful drama with swirling finality. If the spirit of Brendel remained present, the personality was all Osborne.
Pierre-Laurent Aimard performs the final Brendel Tribute recital on Wednesday.
THERE is plenty in this year’s Edinburgh Festival to justify its “International” middle-name, but the home team has also played a blinder during its first ten days.
Edinburgh Festival Chorus, having partnered a soulful chamber choir for the opening concert, proved their own gospel credentials in This Shining Night, a late evening programme of often-unaccompanied singing at the Usher Hall, five days later.
Two settings of James Agee’s poem Sure on this Shining Night, by Samuel Barber and Morten Lauridsen, bracketed a programme that was prefaced by a nod to the chorus’s founder Arthur Oldham with his 1963 composition, Sacerdos et Pontifex.
There was nothing especially startling about EFC tackling those – although the Lauridsen was a lovely way to end the recital – but what came in between was more interesting.
This programme of American choral music, much of it of recent vintage, had been compiled to complement the US theme of the Festival, linked to the 250th anniversary celebrations of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and was conducted by Sofi Jeannin.
There was plenty of these singers’ gospel choir side as part of that, from Aaron Copland’s At the River, William Dawson’s Soon Ah Will Be Done and an encore of Moses Hogan’s arrangement of Deep River, to the 21st century’s I’ve Been in the Storm So Long by Jeffrey Ames and The Road Home by Stephen Paulus.
Texts for the Psalms were the link between Caroline Shaw’s And the Swallow, which has becomes a contemporary classic, and Nico Muhly’s A Good Understanding, enlivened by Tom Hunter’s percussion as well as the Usher Hall organ, played by Imogen Morgan.
At the piano, Stuart Hope was as often required to give a starting note to the singers as provide accompaniment, but his playing was a critical ingredient of the concert’s centre-piece, Joel Thompson’s Seven Last Words of the Unarmed.
Setting the reported last utterances of seven black men who died at the hands of US authority, culminating in Eric Garner’s globally-reported “I can’t breathe”, the liturgical reference in the title gives shape to an incredibly powerful work. It included a moving solo from tenor Sam Britner, one of the this year’s cohort of EIF Rising Stars of Voice, who featured throughout the programme, and added a quartet to Reena Ismail’s When the Violin, which also had the RSNO’s Pei-Jee Ng on obligato cello.
Together, all eight of the Rising Stars performed Gabriela Lena Frank’s Chicanophobia!, a denunciation of discrimination which took an altogether different, mocking and amusing, approach to the darker side of American society.
Guitarist Sean Shibe could hardly be more local to Queen’s Hall venue – a flat just around the corner was his first family home – but the internationally-acclaimed local musician had to wait until his mid-30s to make his EIF recital debut, although he has presented innovative concerts on the Fringe.
For this programme he played only one classical instrument, but the music made a compact conversation of five centuries of composition, firstly in Spain, then after the interval in England.
We began in Seville, with two of the Fantasias composed by priest Alonso Mudarra in 1546, before leaping forward to the 20th century commercial appropriation of his influence by Rodrigo for Segovia and then to the 2025 composition Sefarad by Francisco Coll, who studied in London with Thomas Ades.
Its four movements have their roots in early music and specifically that of Sephardic Jews, to whom Coll can trace his own origins. The suite brings together previously-composed pieces with two new movements, Suegra (mother-in-law) and Hija (daughter) and those were the most compelling, although the whole piece is very fine.
Three works by John Dowland, from the end of the 16th century and start of the 17th, prefaced Forgotten Dances by Ades himself, a six-movement work that Shibe has championed and recorded. It was developed from the Habanera in Ades’ opera The Exterminating Angel to embrace tributes to earlier composers, culminating in Vesper, a reworking of Henry Purcell, which led perfectly into Shibe’s most popular encore – his own arrangement of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s Farewell to Stromness.
Brass Fanfare – Tribute to John Wallace (Photo: Ga-Ken-Wan)
Local hero John Wallace was remembered in the Usher Hall concert between those two events, entitled Brass Fanfare. That was exactly the way in which it began, with a vast ensemble of players performing Bendinelli’s Sonata No 336, as arranged by the dynamic trumpeter and former Principal of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
On stage were his own Wallace Collection group, the Cooperation Band, brass players from all of Scotland’s professional orchestras, and youngsters from the RCS Junior Conservatoire and St Andrew’s Music Participation (StAMP).
The Fifer’s own composition skills were showcased in two movements from his Symphony for Brass played by the Wallace Collection and the Cooperation Band, before the orchestral players, again conducted by Clark Rundell, gave a superb account of Elgar Howarth’s arrangement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
If it reflected Wallace’s professional career, the perfectly-titled Lament, Hope, and Stomp which followed and concluded the concert, exemplified his enthusiasm for music education and the widest possible public participation. Percussionists from East Edinburgh’s Oi Musica joined the massed brass for an exuberant finale to an excellent tribute to a very well-loved musician.
It’s only in the past year or so that the Scottish mezzo soprano Beth Taylor has begun to make an distinct impression on her native soil. Things were already happening for her, from success as a Grand Finalist in the 2023 Cardiff Singer of the World to debut appearances at Glyndebourne and New York’s Carnegie Hall. But it was her seraphic performance last year as the Angel in Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius with the BBC SSO that had Scottish audiences sitting up and taking exceptional note.
So Last Tuesday’s Edinburgh International Festival debut was timely, a Queen’s Hall recital that demonstrated not only her engaging musicality and communicative personality, but a performer at ease in any given style with a flair for explorative repertoire and a desire to surprise.
For a start, there was initially no sign of Taylor. Pianist Hamish Brown was seated expectantly on stage, but the first sounds emanated from the rear of the hall were a distant hurdy gurdy-like drone and a disembodied voice intoning a mystical antiphon by the 12th century abbess Hildegard von Bingen.
It was the first of many vocal “personae” Taylor would negotiate over the next couple of hours. From the unadorned purity of O Ignee Spiritus, and with Brown now called into action, she turned to the languid late-19th century Gallic signature of prolific French-Irish composer Augusta Holmès, firstly in the dense harmonies and sweeping crescendo of Pareil à la mer profound, then the Bacchanalian wildness and wit Le Vin. Sung with emotive warmth and vivid characterisation, and matched by Brown’s demonstrative pianism, Taylor extended her French selection with the dreamy sentiments of Lili Boulanger’s Reflets.
Written especially in 2024 for Taylor, Cameron Biles-Liddell’s The Breakers conjured up sweeping images of the sea, its coupling of The Storm and Twilight playing to the singer’s extraordinary range from meaty lower tessitura to searing upper register. The same composer’s sultry arrangement of the traditional Orcadian tune The Grey Selkie o’ Sule Skerry saw Taylor transport us seamlessly to the plaintive world of Scots folksong. Dame Ethel Smyth’s Three Moods of the Sea, with their faint echoes of Elgar’s Sea Pictures, returned us to the eloquent world of art song.
The second half was no less comprehensive. Alongside such mainstream German Lieder as Fanny Hensel’s eloquently-styled Schwanenlied and Clara Schumann’s animated Lorelei, Taylor turned to the enigmatic American songwriter Connie Converse (who mysteriously disappeared in her car in 1974) and her last known work, the Cassandra Cycle – shapely unaffected storytelling sung with salon-like appeal.
As the only female member of the idiosyncratic French group Les Six, Germaine Tailleferre’s Pancarte pour une Porte d’entrée provided an off-the-wall springboard to the apogee of this consummate recital, the world premiere of Stuart MacRae’s Medusa. Theatrical, virtuosic and fired by clarity of purpose and, at times, bitter imagery, this was a performance of compelling drama, menacing energy, a kaleidoscopic tour de force for both musicians. Most of all, MacRae’s music played unstintingly to the charismatic versatility of Taylor’s ravishing voice.
Yuja Wang and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (Photo: Andrew Perry)
How versatile would superstar classical pianist Yuja Wang prove to be, taking to the Usher Hall stage with Wynton Marsalis’ Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra for the first of two Wednesday evening repeat jazz performances? The audience was clearly lapping up the prospect, a darkened Usher Hall filled to near capacity, the atmosphere welling to euphoria with each neatly delivered number, the newly-minted arrangements by JLCO band members like liquid gold, shot through with sprays of climactic glitter.
While it was natural fertile ground for the JLCO’s breezy nonchalance, Wang’s delivery, while rhythmically ballistic and unquestionably virtuosic, often felt constrained by her studied discipline and rigid precision. That was a critical issue, given the programme’s thematic focus on the rise of keyboard virtuosity in 20th century jazz, putting Wang firmly in the spotlight.
True, hi-octane precision is exactly what Dave Brubeck applied to the limping rhythmic gait of his own Rondo à la Turk, which Wang’s machine-like rapidity captured intellectually if not wholly in spirit. JLCO trombonist Chris Crenshaw’s judicious arrangement came into its own in the woozy seductiveness of the central blues.
Fast forward to Duke Ellington’s time-stopping Reflections in D (arr. Joe Block) or the bossanova vibe of Oscar Peterson’s increasingly high speed L’Impossible (arr. Alexa Tarantino), and Wang revealed a more laid back, collaborative ease. Yet there was still a dry disconnect in her boogie-woogie response to Leroy Carr’s How Long Blues, and in Marsalis’ Marthaniel (from his larger work Citi Movement) the most interesting sounds came from his own JLCO, its lugubrious ensemble and liquidly nuanced solos.
It was in the likes of Cuban pianist Ernesto Lecuona’s La Camparsa (from his Danza Afro-Cubanas) and racy Gitanerías, both heavily scented in bassist Carlos Henriquez’s sensuous arrangements, then in the hair-raising panache of Art Tatum’s Crenshaw-arranged Tiger Rag and a closing rendition of Joseph Korma’s Autumn Leaves, that Wang eventually found the relaxed means to root out her inner cool.
One practical issue rather diluted the overall impact of the show. Marsalis chose to emcee seated far back in the trumpet section. Visually alone, that was a weak move. But audibility was also problematic, Marsalis’ quick-fire delivery not always picked up clearly by the hall’s PA system. Much vital information went unheard.
The first two orchestral chords in the score of Missy Mazzoli’s new opera instantly recall James Bond movies at their Sean Connery peak and Goldfinger in particular. That’s the way to grab the attention of an Edinburgh audience, and make transparent this world premiere’s appeal to a global audience.
The centre pages of the printed programme for The Galloping Cure remember Frank Dunlop, director of the Edinburgh International Festival from 1984 to 1991, who died earlier this year. That is appropriate because this new opera would have sat well in one of his festivals, happy to co-opt circus skills and other Fringe-like ingredients in the service of contemporary opera. The Galloping Cure makes a shameless appeal to the broadest possible audience with its vibrant colour palette, mix of puppetry, dancing and aerial skills, night club lighting and knowing comedy.
From those first chords it looks like a winner. The team that made it – Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek, director Tom Morris, producers Opera Ventures with Scottish Opera and its music director Stuart Stratford – and workshopped its final shape in Scottish Opera’s studios in Glasgow, is substantially the same as the one behind the production of Mazzoli’s Breaking the Waves, which premiered at EIF 2019 and has been a hit around the globe.
Although its subject matter, the opioid crisis that strangely seems to be taken more seriously in the US than in Britain, is as dark as the narrative of that earlier work, there is – initially at least – much more levity in this one, not least in the clowning comedy of soprano Catriona Hewitson and baritone Edward Jowle as pet dogs Meg and Sam, a sort of Greek chorus who look to the supertitles to translate their barking, and an actual chorus of sheep, whose dramaturgical role is a less clear.
The story, written by Karen Russell and inspired by a Franz Kafka one, is of a local doctor, Theresa Hart (sung by Daniela Mack) struggling to cope with the ills of the community, including her own daughter, Noy (Gabrielle Turgeon), and grumpy pensioner Ivona (Susan Bullock). When the carousel ride of white-suited Stetson-wearing Lucky Mack (baritone Justin Austin) appears to alleviate everyone’s pain (and the first ride is, of course, always free), Dr Hart is dubious but eventually succumbs and endorses the product.
Allegory is a tricky sell in our cynical age but at first Mazzoli and her associates seem to have achieved a balance between style and substance, combining a difficult subject and entertaining story-telling. As should always be the case with opera, the music, and particularly dynamic, colourful playing from the pit, tells much of the story, and the libretto is simple and effective.
When Mazzoli cedes part of her compositional job to dancefloor-fillers Blume and Lorna Dune (credited with “Beats”) for a rave scene at the end of Act 2, and again during Act 3, much of that impetus is dissipated, and the narrative of the third act – becoming increasing lurid and tragic – also undermines the allegorical tone of the work’s inception.
Addiction (to hobby-horses at home as well as on the roundabout) is now paid for with real body parts (eyes and knees) as the twin threats of street drugs and big pharma are linked with organ harvesting. It is tough to watch as well as being less interesting to listen to. If an extended death scene that may be meant to parallel those in some classic operas had the musical pathos of, say, La boheme, it might have seemed a good deal shorter.
No blame should attach to the performers, however, who are uniformly excellent. Leaving aside the principals from across the pond, of whom soprano Gabrielle Turgeon is the stand-out singer, the cast is full of talent that has been developed by or worked regularly with Scottish Opera in recent years. They deserve the highest praise for their input to a fascinating new work that falls at the last fence.
Further performances Tuesday August 11 and Wednesday August 12
It is hard to imagine any previous director of the Edinburgh Festival getting away with Nicola Benedetti’s wholly admirable teacher-like approach to silencing the menace of mobile phones in the concert hall. On the opening day of EIF 2026 she twice instructed audiences to check that their devices were switched off and then paused to watch while everyone did. Audibly, the tactic worked.
The Festival’s slogan for this campaign is “Tune out the outside world” and it also spoke, with interesting ambiguity, to the music on offer that first day.
Tansy Davies composed her Passion of Mary Magdalene because she “felt it was time to listen to the voices not only left out, but taken out, of the Passion narrative.” As well as a the titular follower of Christ, sung by Anna Dennis, that included the wife of Pontius Pilate, a step-out role for mezzo Sarah Anne Champion, one of a vocal ensemble of seven behind the soloists.
Christus was sung by baritone Marcus Farnsworth, in a forceful characterisation that was very much of a piece with the work’s radical intentions. Commissioned by the Dunedin Consort with the Festival and London’s Barbican, this 80-minute work can creditably take its place alongside Sir James MacMillan’s 21st century additions to the genre Johann Sebastian Bach pioneered.
As well the singers, the Dunedin’s John Butt directed an instrumental ensemble of 15 – early instruments and gut strings, and the crucial addition of an electric guitar which added percussion effects as well as more recognisable sounds, but always at discreet volume.
With harpsichord and bass lute completing the rhythm section, the strings were often used individually as foils to the singers – notably John Crockatt’s viola partnering Farnsworth – and a five-piece wind section of bassoon, oboes and flutes-doubling -recorders added powerful colours to the score.
Davies makes huge demands of the singers, and it was not only Dennis – predictably unperturbed by the huge leaps of pitch in Mary Magdalene’s part – who produced the goods. Stratospheric soprano Ana Beard Fernandez was superb in the work’s first section, and a crucial element of the score from its opening to the end was the trio ensemble of the three women, completed by alto Rosie Parker.
The four male voices – countertenor Tom Lilburn, bass Christopher Webb and tenors Ed Woodhouse and Thomas Kelly – more often featured singly or in duet and again there was no weak link among them.
The work is filled with memorable moments; the first utterance of this Jesus is “Shut Up!” and his Palm Sunday arrival in Jerusalem comes with the clearest of sound-pictures of the donkey’s gait and braying. Much of the text is recognisable from scripture, but Davies also uses sources that didn’t make the final cut of the Bible to produce a very thought-provoking narrative from the female perspective. The teasing carnality of the institution of the Sacrament of Communion at the Last Supper, which sits at the centre of her work, may be its most controversial moment, and Dennis produced her very finest singing to make sure every nuance was revealed.
What is unarguable about this new piece, even if Davies’s music is not to everyone’s taste (although it was enthusiastically acclaimed here), is that the composer has structured her work perfectly. In seven clear sections over three distinct parts, the story-telling could not be clearer or the words and music more precisely matched.
That is not true of the first orchestral work by jazz trumpeter – and husband of Benedetti – Wynton Marsalis, which was revived as the Opening Concert in the Usher Hall and the title of which, All Rise, adopted as the label for the entire EIF 2026 programme.
Marsalis was commissioned to write his “Symphony No 1” by Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic, who premiered it in December 1999, and it has been recorded by the Los Angeles Phil and Esa Pekka Salonen, but opportunities to hear the vast 12-movement work (also in three sections in this performance) are not common.
That is most easily explained by the vast forces under the baton of conductor James Gaffigan, who is also on the podium for Marsalis’s more recent Concert for Orchestra, which receives its UK premiere from the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Proms this week.
The trumpeter was onstage as a member of the Jazz at Lincoln Centre Orchestra, which he is in the final year of four decades of leading. Around those 16 top-rank jazz players sat the RSNO, with a vast array of percussion at the back between the instrumentalists and the Edinburgh Festival Chorus joined by the soulful specialists of the Jason Max Ferdinand Singers.
At full strength, more than 200 musicians made a great gospel noise, and that blues-derived music is at the core of the work, incorporating the text of some of the Lord’s Prayer in what is often – but not always – a devotional work.
If Davies’s Passion is challenging to a conventional view of Christianity, Marsalis seems to want to place faith in the context of personal development and community cohesion in All Rise. Others may have heard it differently, and that may well be the work’s strength as well as its problem.
Perhaps, in his upcoming retirement from band-leading, Marsalis might rework parts of All Rise as orchestral suites or choral pieces that may win more performances, because many sections would certainly stand alone and the Ellington-esque Expressbrown Local (the 10th movement) was an ideal trailer for the JLCO’s concert of the Duke’s music in the same hall three days later.
Like the earlier Queen’s Hall concert, however, All Rise was full of moments that will live in the mind for many years. The soloing of the jazzers – including one from Marsalis himself – was matched by that of the RSNO front desks, even if those were not improvised, while the Festival Chorus had as much soul as the chamber choir, even if it provided the startling soloists.
Keith Bruce
Picture of Anna Dennis with Dunedin Consort by Matt Beech; Conductor James Gaffigan by Andrew Perry
Three years on, the Glasgow Barons Early Music Festival can consider itself well established. More than that, it has proved itself positively viable in Govan, the feisty Clydeside town that was once a titan of British shipbuilding, now a shadow of its former industrial might, but clearly alive to new cultural initiatives. Whatever festival director Paul MacAlindin and his team are doing, this annual event has struck a vibrant note, both with outsiders and the local community. Audiences for this year’s Festival (24-26 July) matched in scale the vast interior of the central venue, Govan’s historic Old Parish Church.
Innovation and imagination played its part, especially in Friday’s opening concert, which not only introduced us to the colourful 18th century exploits and music of one Charles Macklean (died 1745), but marked the debut appearance of newly-formed early music combo The Curious Collection. The two are connected by the ensemble’s founder, violinist and director Aaron McGregor, whose research into Macklean uncovered a lifestyle befitting a racy TV period drama, from rampant womanising and shadowy disappearances across his native Scotland, Ireland and England, to appearing as organist in the famous Dublin premiere of Handel’s Messiah.
McGregor, a lecturer at Aberdeen University, was joined by soprano Mhairi Lawson, harpsichordist Will Cole and cellist Allison McGilllivray in a programme lengthily entitled “From Scots Tunes to Handel’s Messiah: the Musical Lives of Charles Macklean” but succinct in the way it summarised Macklean’s chameleon style and historical context.
The Handel connection contributed to the latter, mostly Messiah arias delivered with jewel-like intimacy by the reduced forces available, Lawson in light, precise, engaging form. Macklean’s Scottish credentials stood out in stark contrast. His own Variations on “The Black Joke”, on Purcell’s faux Scots theatre song “Twas Within a Furlong of Edinburgh Town”, on “The Birks of Invermay” (introduced by Scots contemporary James Oswald’s arrangement of the anonymous song) allowed McGregor to slip seamlessly into virtuosic Scots fiddle mode, Lawson applying the same dialectical switch in those she contributed to.
Macklean’s own versatility was revealed in the more mainstream Baroque idiom of his Violin Sonata in A minor, its Italianate demeanour prefaced by a movement from the Cello Sonata in C by Lorenzo Bocchi (a known figure in Edinburgh at the time). The Italian influence also fed through Macklean’s Variations on Corelli’s Gavotta, played with joyous precision, and again in what McGregor hailed as possibly the world premiere of Va Mancator di Fe, a fiery dramatic aria reconstructed from a sketch recently discovered in London.
Closing the programme with Handel’s Let the Bright Seraphim (from Samson) may have been something of a gamble – McGregor’s bijoux Baroque fiddle replacing the normal heraldic trumpet obligato – but in the spirit of things, and once the rescaling was attuned to, it seemed as mischievous and irreverent as the evening’s key focus. Macklean would probably have approved.
Would Bach have approved of the interpretations applied by RSNO principal cellist Pei-Jee Ng to his first three Cello Suites in Saturday’s midday recital? The talented Australian was certainly faced with a challenge from the church’s reverberant acoustics, the outcome of which was a frequent muddying of the instrument’s lower register, even leading at times to the addition of unwanted harmonic overtones.
That said, Ng’s unflinching poise and confident delivery (all of it impressively from memory) made for many satisfying moments, mostly where the mood itself was light and airy, the textures crisp and alert, and most importantly where the rhythmic spirit of the dance-styled movements were adhered to. A pattern seemed to emerge, where the respective Allemandes, Courantes and Gigues bristled with self-generating dynamism, while the more rhetorical Preludes remained unsettlingly earthbound, the Minuets periodically haltering in momentum, the Sarabandes painfully slow.
It became clear that Ng’s intention was to exaggerate the expressive range of the music, perhaps in response to acoustical provocation, but in doing so he created wave upon wave of repetitive sea swells the threatened to incur the musical equivalent of seasickness. In another venue, and with less forced indulgence, the story may have been very different.
Less is more. The truth underlying that paradox could so easily be applied to In the Belly of the Beast, a dramatic presentation by the Dunedin Consort (in collaboration with Mahogany Opera and Hera) that pulls together three Cantates Bibliques by the French Baroque composer Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, lasts around an hour, and employs merely two singers and three instrumentalists. Friday’s Glasgow performance was the penultimate in a tour that in recent weeks has taken in Edinburgh’s Assembly Roxy, the Aldeburgh Festival and Spitalfied Music Festival, ending last Saturday in Whitehaven.
A common thread are the Old Testament biblical heroes featured respectively in the three cantatas, each thrown into crisis in response to their relationships with God: Adam’s guilty disobedience; Jonah’s rebellious flight to sea; Jephthah’s foolish bargaining of his daughter’s life. And of course the music: three evocative cantatas by a composer who was exceptional for her time – the first woman composer to be performed at the Paris Opera and active during the late reign of Louis XIV.
Where Friday’s performance especially succeeded was in revealing the wealth of imagery and emotion contained in De la Guerre’s music, especially with such minimal forces. It said much, too, of the three musicians – Liam Byrne (musical director and viola da gamba), Eric Thomas (theorbo) and Alice Earll (violin) – that they could collectively unleash an expressive range far greater than the visible sum of their parts.
In that sense they were more than simply an effective engine room for a drama played out with sharp minimalist focus by sopranos Carolyn Sampson and Mariana Rodrigues, under the economic stage direction of Jennifer Fletcher. Sampson played a solo multi-character role in Adam, the highpoint of which was the hero’s expressive and expansive final aria acknowledging life’s brevity. At this point, and with Sampson’s soulful clarity, the exhilaration effected by De la Guerre’s evocative music made its mark.
Rodrigues’ take on Jonah offered an appropriately stormier appeal, a shriller, more animated delivery in tune with the maritime imagery, but nonetheless capable of darker reflection. Where the two sopranos came together in the opening duet to Jephthah – a moment of great rejoicing before the realisation of Jephthah’s promise to sacrifice his daughter in return for victory in battle – this production swung into overdrive. The vocal interaction was electrifying.
As a theatrical spectacle – aided by Ingrid Hu’s designs with lighting and projection by Ben Moon – simplicity and practicality were to the fore. Nothing much physically happened, but nor in the end did it need to. As ever with Dunedin, the performances were stylish and exceptional. Mention, too, is owed to Toria Banks, whose slick translations offered contemporary poetic relevance to the texts without devaluing a single note of De la Guerre’s exquisite music.
Saturday was Rasumovsky Day at the 21st East Neuk Festival. In three concerts, spread three hours apart over two venues, each of Beethoven’s three middle period Op 59 Quartets – a groundbreaking collection commissioned by the violin-playing Russian ambassador in Vienna, Count Rasumovsky – was rolled out by three successive ensembles.
That each quartet had its unique proponent was itself thrilling enough. The cliff-edge lunchtime volatility of Spain’s Cuarteto Quiroga in Op 59 No 1, answered by the mid-afternoon meaty intensity of the American Calidore Quartet in No 2, then took early evening flight with the virtuosic joie de vivre of Swedish-Norwegian string quartet Opus13.
Furthermore, each Rasumovsky was partnered by a non-Beethoven work intended to illuminate the contextual response, which the elemental theatrics of Spain’s short-lived Beethoven contemporary Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga’s Quartet No 3, the dichotomy of intellectual constructivism and expressive fluidity of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Arietta (UK premiere) and the heated, personalised Romanticism of Wilhelm Stenhammar’s A minor Quartet Op 25 respectively achieved.
Throw all that together and the result was an invigorating, at times intoxicating, complexity of stimuli that succeed superbly in attaining its goal, which was to reaffirm the extraordinary innovative advances Beethoven achieved between the masterful apprenticeship of his first Op 18 quartets (published 1801) and the assured and expansive inventiveness unveiled seven years later with the publishing of the Rasumovskys.
In Kilrenny Church, with Arriaga’s E flat Quartet trumpeting an opening theme brazenly reminiscent of Beethoven’s Op 18 No 1 (a performance frustratingly paused midway due to unseen disruption in the church’s rear balcony), the Cuarteto Quiroga proved themselves the perfect fit for the opening F major Rasumovsky. There’s an element of danger in their demeanour, a degree of raw imperfection – almost deliberately so in some aspects of tuning – that is magically offset by a single-minded togetherness. Such conflict lent a decisive edge to the performance, the rigour of Beethoven’s opening movement deliciously countered by suave Slavonic asides, the nimbleness of the Scherzo tamed by the broad lyrical sweep of the Adagio, the final Allegro brusque and resolute.
The action then moved to Crail Church, where the Calidore Quartet made the most of the E minor Rasumovsky’s darker hues. The fragmented rhetoric of the opening, gradually mustering an organic flow, elicited meaty ensemble playing from the Americans, a homogeneity recast as devotional calm in the sublime Molto Adagio. They were mesmerising in the off-kilter rhythms of the Scherzo with its pugnacious Russian references, imbuing the final Presto with all the jauntiness it calls for.
In advance of that, and introduced by the composer himself with the reassurance that “my piece isn’t scary!”, Turnage’s Arietta (an ENF co-commission) opens in the same hymn-like vein as the aforementioned Molto Adagio. It is, appropriately, a homage to Beethoven, the theme of its variations being a literal inversion of the Arietta used by Beethoven in his last Piano Sonata, Op 111. Its gaunt reverence, its gathering warmth, and those hints of neo-classicism coloured by spectral links to the past, gave purpose to its presence in the programme.
The same venue, Crail Church, later welcomed the ebullient Opus13 to round off Saturday’s musical triptych. It took a moment or two for Stenhammar’s substantial A minor Quartet to truly gather momentum, but when it did the performance matured to reveal a lusty allegiance to Brahms and Dvorak, even modal echoes of Ravel and nods to Sibelius. It was hard to ignore the slow movement theme’s unmistakable similarity to “Climb Every Mountain” from The Sound of Music, but there was much to enjoy in textures that ranged from emulating the whisper of a consort of viols to full-blown passion, and an ending that brimmed with mercurial whimsy.
Then to the last Rasumovsky, and a performance that had us clinging to the edge of our seats. It opened with bristling resolve, struck a graceful balletic note in the Andante con moto, before viewing the unruffled Minuet as an understated springboard to the final fugue, a hair-raising sprint to an explosive conclusion. The audience reacted instinctively, baying for more and receiving it in the form of a simple Swedish folk tune.
There was an unmistakable buzz to the whole day that was hard to ignore. Chamber music’s central canon has long been a factor in defining the East Neuk Festival. But this package, in particular the thought given to cross-referenced programming and comparative selection of artists, had something very special and enlightening to offer.
