Category Archives: Features

Identity Matters

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Pianist Paul Lewis returns to Edinburgh this weekend. He tells KEN WALTON why ‘just being yourself’ is the key to honest fulfilment amid the noise of social media

Mention the name Paul Lewis, and the music that immediately springs to mind are the seminal piano canons of the great Viennese classicists: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. “It’s definitely the core of my repertoire,” confirms the 53-year-old Liverpool-born pianist, though pigeon-holing him in such a way is not altogether accurate. 

“This year I’ve been playing a big new Piano Sonata by [Austrian pianist/composer] Thomas Larcher, and over the next few years I’ll be embarking on a series of recitals that cast Mozart in context with the likes of Poulenc, Debussy, Webern and Copland. ”I’m hoping the connections will be audible.” Knowing Lewis’ persuasive expressiveness and intellect, that’s a given.

That said, Lewis is in Edinburgh this weekend for an Usher Hall concert marking the only Scottish date in a five-city UK/Ireland tour with the idiosyncratic Concerto Budapest Symphony Orchestra, in which he turns his attention back to Beethoven. He’ll perform the Third Piano Concerto under the orchestra’s music director András Keller, who also conducts Tchaikovsky’s symphonic fantasy Francesca da Rimini, Liszt’s Les Preludes and Beethoven’s Symphony No 5. 

Lewis dates his early fascination with Beethoven to frequenting the local Liverpool record library as an 8-year-old. “I guess the librarian there must have had a certain influence on the recordings it stocked. There was a lot of that central Germanic repertoire, coincidentally all of Alfred Brendel’s early Beethoven recordings for VOX/Turnabout in the 1960s.”

At the time, Lewis had not yet seriously engaged with the piano – progress as a budding cellist was proving more arduous than a natural calling – and it wasn’t until he headed to Manchester and the famous Chetham’s specialist music school, that his true metier at the keyboard blossomed. “Later in my teens I turned towards the Romantic piano virtuoso repertoire, but by the time I was a student in London I was focussing again on Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert. I came back to that quite quickly.”

Then he met Alfred Brendel, and with that an opportunity to have lessons with the legend whose recordings had so influenced him as a youngster. “It was such an honour to have that access to him in the ‘90s. Every time I played to him it felt like a door opened musically speaking. He was such a powerful musical personality and had such strong convictions,” Lewis recalls.

“He was so persuasive in the way he communicated things, especially helping you think more creatively about the piano, how to treat it as anything but a piano, which was quite an eye-opener for me. It could be an orchestra, a chamber ensemble, a human voice or a single wind instrument. It was just so inspiring.”

The process was arduous but rewarding, Lewis recalls. “I found I’d play him something and it would take time for me to translate and successfully assimilate all the information. Yes, he was very prescriptive, very specific and exacting in lessons, but in the end he was really only interested in unleashing the personal conviction behind a performance, not in producing clones of himself. I soon realised the worst thing you could do is simply copy him, as all you’d end up with would be a bad version of Alfred Brendel. He wasn’t looking for that.”

Summing up the legacy of Brendel, who died earlier this year, Lewis turns again to shared enthusiasms. “He was the first person to record all of Beethoven’s piano music, and the first person to bring Schubert’s sonatas, previously neglected, into mainstream concert programmes. It’s strange to think he even introduced Liszt to Viennese audiences, a figure they traditionally turned their noses up at. Brendel persisted in what he believed was really worthwhile. Honesty and integrity were always at the centre of what he did.”

These qualities apply equally to Lewis, whose own critically-acclaimed recordings of Beethoven and Schubert, dating from over two decades ago, are already approaching the stuff of legend. What fascinates him most about these, especially the Beethoven, is how differently he views them today. “They would be very different if I recorded them now,” he confirms. “What changes over time is the balance you see between different elements of the music. Back then I get the impression I was looking more towards the lyrical quality of Beethoven, whereas these days I’d probably look towards the dramatic side. I guess you live your life and it feeds into what you do in ways you don’t necessarily understand.”

Paul Lewis and András Keller with Concerto Budapest

Lewis’ life has changed immeasurably in recent years, having shifted his family home to Norway (his wife, cellist Bjørg Lewis, is Norwegian), though maintaining a UK base in Buckinghamshire, where he and his wife jointly direct the annual chamber music festival Midsummer Music. He’s also begun to teach, having succeeded his friend, the late Lars Vogt, as a professor at the Hannover Hochschule für Musik. 

“It’s the kind of thing I’ve wanted to get more involved with in recent recent years, with young pianists, and often wondered how to do it,” he says. “This seemed like a good opportunity and something I feel I need to do responsibly, so I’m gradually building up a class one student a year and trying to be there as much as I need to be.”

Is there any particular piece of advice he’d like to offload on young pianists today? “I’ve had the career that I wanted to have, focussing early on on certain composers for maybe a year or two, Beethoven and Schubert for instance. I didn’t know it at the time, but looking back it kind of defines you as a certain type of musician and brings an identity along with it. 

“These days, with the whole noise of social media, everyone’s out there sort of shouting, so it’s even more important to find a really distinctive identity, though how one does that is another question. My advice is to just be true to the musician you are, have very strong convictions about things. It’s the only way you’re going to convince anyone else. Don’t try to be anything you’re not because you think it will bring x, y or z results in career terms. Just try and stick to your honest musical path.”

Sound advice from a musician whose own journey has been fascinating; who has proved himself to be the genuine article.

Paul Lewis performs Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto with the Concerto Budapest Symphony Orchestra at the Usher Hall on Sun 7 December. Full information at www.cultureedinburgh.com

Forgotten Concerto Reborn

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Robin McEwan tells KEN WALTON why an unperformed 1950s concerto by Ian Whyte was worth resurrecting for a BBC SSO world premiere nearly 70 years on 

The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra is celebrating its nonagenarian landmark with an official 90th Anniversary concert in December. But there’s a small part of this week’s regular Thursday Series programme (20 Nov) that celebrates a conductor and composer whose lengthy affiliation with the orchestra from its outset influenced more than most the shaping of the band we know today.

Ian Whyte was the BBC’s head of music in Scotland when the then BBC Scottish Orchestra was established in 1935, shifting to become its principal conductor from 1945 until his premature death, aged 58, in 1960. While the Scottish airwaves were awash with his compositions and arrangements throughout that epochal relationship, one piece that never saw the light of day was his Violin Concerto, written sometime in the 1950s for his friend, the Austrian-born virtuoso Max Rostal.

Seventy years on, and thanks to three decades of investigative effort by Paisley-born composer, arranger, conductor and musicologist Robin McEwan, that concerto will finally receive its world premiere by the orchestra Whyte helped create, featuring British violinist Stephanie Gonley as soloist and Martyn Brabbins as conductor.

Violinist Stephanie Gonley

The very existence of the piece was first brought to McEwan’s attention by the composer’s daughter-in-law, violinist Nan Whyte. “I was conducting a National Youth String Orchestra of Scotland (NYSOS) course in 1993, she was coaching the violins, and during a chat over some wine the conversation turned to Ian Whyte and the impact he had on the mid-20th century Scottish music scene, either through his compositions or his championing of such key symphonic composers as Sibelius,” McEwan recalls.

“My ears pricked up when she told me of a violin concerto that had never been performed. Max Rostal, who had taught Nan, had apparently played it through privately with the composer, but that was as far as things had gone. She was really keen for something to be done to finally get it performed.” At the time, McEwan was busily engaged as assistant music director with Phantom of the Opera in London, but his curiosity for the piece lingered, moving him eventually to visit the Scottish Music Archive in Glasgow and examine the manuscripts.

What he discovered was tantalisingly incomplete. “The full handwritten score was just about there, but lacking some critical information, such as a title page, detailed metronome indications of the tempi, even a clue to the date of composition,” he explains. More detailed examination revealed notes that were obscured by blotches, and what seemed like obvious omissions from the timpani part. Coupled with discrepancies between that score and Whyte’s own “sketchy” piano reduction, McEwan saw before him a daunting but worthwhile challenge.

Over the years, professional and personal constraints prevented him from allocating serious and sustained time to advancing the project. “But then came Covid and a space in my life that made that possible,” he says. 

“I started looking more deeply into the whole piece and began to appreciate Whyte’s real craft as a composer. It seemed, above all, to be very much of its time and reflective of the his particular musical passions. You sense, for instance, that same northern, Scandinavian ruggedness you find in Sibelius. Echoes of Richard Strauss and the violin concertos of Korngold and Waxman point to a lingering nostalgic Romanticism. Whyte was certainly not aligned to the 1950s European avant-garde camp of Schoenberg, Webern, Messiaen and Stockhausen,” McEwan argues.

He describes a gloominess that enshrouds the opening Allegro commodo, an intense inner struggle that lifts miraculously after a long cadenza, “like the sun illuminating a freshly cleared landscape”. After a lightly orchestrated Intermezzo, the vigorous Finale, fuelled by a spirited strathspey and reel, steers the concerto to its conclusion.

Completing an edition fit for performance was one thing, finding an orchestra wiling to take it on was quite another. The obvious first port of call was the BBC SSO, not least as Whyte’s orchestra was approaching such a significant birthday. “It took perseverance to get even a response, but with the help of Simon Webb [formerly Director of Manchester’s BBC Philharmonic, now Head of BBC Orchestras and Choirs], things finally fell into place,” explains Sheffield-based McEwan.” The resulting world premiere is in good musical company, prefaced by the work that rocketed Sir James MacMillan to national fame in 1990, The Confession of Isobel Gowdie, and followed by Rachmaninov’s ravishing Second Symphony. 

McEwan is delighted that Martyn Brabbins took such an interest in conducting the concerto. “Martyn immediately thought it was worth doing,” he recalls. And was there any advice McEwan could pass on to soloist Stephanie Gonley [best known in Scotland as co-leader of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra] that might enrich her understanding of the piece? “I just wanted to talk to her about the playing style of Max Rostal, particularly that intense rubato, the flexibility and musicianship you don’t always get with today’s players.” 

The violinist who planted the seed for completing the work in McEwan’s mind all those years ago, Nan Whyte, would have understood that connection first hand. She died in 1995.  

Does McEwan himself have any idea why the concerto was never properly completed and performed? “I think it was a combination of it being written in a hurry at a time when the composer was facing imminent death, and also that it was composed in a style that would have gone quickly out of fashion.” 

Well, fashions come and go, and as the BBC SSO celebrates its landmark birthday, it’s nothing less than fitting that we should hear for the first time a major work by the man who shaped its distinctive identity.

The BBC SSO premiere Ian Whyte’s Violin Concerto in the City Halls Glasgow on Thu 20 Nov. Full information at www.bbc.co.uk/bbcsso

All Aboard for Linlithgow

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Far from having ideas above its station, a Scots amateur string orchestra is riding the high ground with a rail-themed world premiere, musical director Bill Jones tells KEN WALTON 

Bill Jones takes great satisfaction in telling his old Edinburgh University compadre, Kathryn McDowell, that he’s the incumbent maestro of the LSO. Which he is; just not the same globally-recognised LSO that the ennobled McDowell directs. 

Whereas Dame Kathryn has steered the eminent fortunes of the London Symphony Orchestra as managing director for many years, counting Sir Simon Rattle among her notable signings, Jones, a retired prep school headmaster with a music degree and serious form as a singer and jazz musician (recently at the Cumnock Tryst), is the motivating power behind the Linlithgow String Orchestra. “Kathryn, who’s a great friend, didn’t seem particularly put out when I told her I conduct the real LSO,” he quips.

Right now, West Lothian’s own LSO is riding on a high. Set up as a community orchestra in May 2016 by local amateur enthusiasts, its 10th Anniversary Season is now underway, which the LSO’s committee reckoned might be the perfect moment to facilitate a piece specially written for the occasion. The result is Engine Shed by Edinburgh-based composer, harpist and pianist Deborah Shaw, described as “a creator of beguiling songs and compelling soundscapes”. As a performer she works under the offbeat soubriquet Aurora Engine. 

Composer Deborah Shaw

Railway trains, then, would appear to be a prominent theme here: fortuitously so, as the project – supported by Making Music’s UK-wide Adopt a Music Creator scheme – has also attracted sponsorship for the premiere from LNER as part of Railway 200, its celebration of two centuries of the modern railway. 

The world premiere of Engine Shed takes place on Sunday 9 November at St Michael’s Parish Church, Linlithgow, alongside other railway-themed performances of Edward White’s 1950s’ BBC Children’s Favourites theme tune Puffin’ Billy, Flanders and Swann’s lament to a branch line closure Slow Train (arranged and sung by Jones), even a bit of Dvorak. “He was mad about railways and apparently knew the Prague train timetable off by heart,” Jones explains as justification for including the famous Czech composer.

What it all amounts to, he insists, is a programme that the LSO’s amateur players have really warmed to, whether revelling in the tuneful comfort zone of lighter classics, or confronted by the more modernist challenges of Shaw’s sonic landscape. “What was so good about this project was that Deborah came in at the beginning of the year and got to know us,” Jones explains. “I was keen she should attend some rehearsals, see what we were like and just talk to the players and get to know them.

“She must have had the idea for a railway theme early on,” he adds. “Deborah’s nuts on trains which I suppose isn’t surprising given she grew up in Shildon, County Durham, where [Stephenson’s] Locomotive No 1 started its journey two hundred years ago. Whatever inspired her, it was a smart move, given the significance of the railway in shaping Linlithgow’s prosperity and the great local stories attached to that association.”

Known for her imaginative sonic creations, Shaw incorporates in her score archival recordings of “Twizell”, the UK’s oldest working steam engine by Robert Stephenson now cared for by Gateshead’s Tanfield Railway, the orchestral cues indicated by authentic LNER guards whistles and traditional railway hand signals. Yet her thoughts are also directed towards wider universal concerns. “It’s much more than a celebration of trains,” she writes. “I wanted my work to shine a light on the underrepresented voices in both rail and music, from women and marginalised workers to African American railroad traditions.” 

Bill Jones in jazz mode

Making Music’s Adopt a Music Creator scheme also brought Shaw into contact with an allocated mentor, in this case the multi-award winning Scottish composer and harpist Ailie Robertson. “Ailie came along to one or two rehearsals, then via Zoom we were all able to keep track on progress, checking deadlines and reviewing practical issues. But the liaison was principally between Deborah and Ailie,” says Jones.

In the end, he’s just delighted that, besides the challenge of tackling unfamiliar techniques, there are plenty good tunes to keep his players happy, including “a great Scots reel”. “It was a strange experience for us to be attempting a brand new piece, but I just said to them, ‘nobody but us knows what this actually sounds like and when you perform things like this there’s a lot of kidology involved. Just do it with a straight face!’”

Nonetheless, the whole process of seeing Engine Shed come to fruition has been an inspiring one for the 10-year-old orchestra which, itself, represents only part of Jones’ wider immersion in the town’s busy musical life. 

After retiring in 2020 from his headmaster’s post in Kent, he and his violinist wife Hilary (the orchestra’s leader) moved up to Linlithgow where his first local initiation, in the wake of Covid, was to take on the musical directorship of St Michael’s Church, not as organist, but responsible for the church choir and working with wider community music groups. “I knew the church from having recorded Robert Carver’s masses there years ago as a singer with Cappella Nova”, he recalls. 

“Eventually I was also invited to take on the string orchestra, reminding them that I was a trombonist, not a string player. That’s been such a wonderful learning experience for me. My thing with an amateur orchestra is, if we’re not smiling when we’re playing then we’re doing something wrong. I’m not one for raising my voice with players; they’re actually very busy people with their own reasons for giving up their time, whether they view it as wonderful therapy, an opportunity to play nice music, or even just a bit of social interaction. Doing this kind of community music-making has become a real passion.”

Engine Shed by Deborah Shaw is premiered by Linlithgow String Orchestra at St Michael’s Parish Church on Sunday 9 November at 7pm. Admission is free, bookable at www.linlithgowstringorchestra.uk

Global café music

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Scotland’s violin star, Nicola Benedetti, talks to Keith Bruce as she goes out on the road with a small group from this weekend.

Nicola Benedetti has hardly been idle, embracing motherhood and marriage alongside working with her educational foundation and directing Edinburgh’s festival, but she feels it is more than time to re-connect with her most loyal supporters.

“There has been a period, with all the work I have been doing for the Foundation and for the Festival, when I have not toured anything personal,” she told Vox Carnyx last week. “Most of the places I’ve played have been as a guest of an orchestra, or in my role at the Festival. So this is a bit of a reuniting with audiences that I have known for 23 or 24 years.”

She is speaking of her upcoming solo tour, which features the small group of musicians who also feature on her upcoming Decca album, Violin Café, scheduled for release on November 21.

The 14-date tour kicks off in Basingstoke on Sunday before a run of seven concerts in Scotland beginning in Dundee’s Caird Hall on October 15 and ending at Ayr Town Hall, 40 minutes down the A78 from her West Kilbride birthplace, on Halloween. More concerts across England and Ireland follow in November and December, including London’s Royal Albert Hall on November 27.

The violinist is keen to emphasise how much of a personal undertaking both the recording and the tour have been.

“I had several ideas up my sleeve about what to tour and how to tour, and two or three of them were postponed during Covid. In the past I’ve organised parts of tours myself and I wanted to do that again, in collaboration with my management, Askonas Holt, who have a fantastic touring arm to their organisation.”

In fact, she says, the intimate nature of the music came to her, if not in a dream, certainly from her subconscious mind.

“I knew I wanted to put something together around this style of repertoire, but the sound and the instrumentation actually came to me in the middle of the night and I woke up knowing how I needed to do it.

“It’s a bit of a hark back to a Mediterranean café where you might happen upon an accordionist or a guitarist and on occasion, more from the Roma tradition, a violinist too.”

The repertoire covered on the album, and to be featured on tour, is actually quite wide, including Pablo de Sarasate’s Carmen Fantasy, Manuel Ponce’s Estrelita, Peter Maxwell Davies’s Farewell to Stromness, and arrangements of Skye Boat Song and other traditional tunes by small pipes player Bridghe Chaimbeul.

It is far from all fresh territory for Benedetti, but the presentation of it by a small group in which her violin combines with the Italian accordion of Samuele Telari, Brazilian guitar of Plinio Fernandes and Welsh cellist Thomas Carrol is a new direction.

“It is a mix that includes things I haven’t played since I was 16 years old, but I wanted to do music that was light, vibrant and charming. These are pieces that you quite often learn when you are studying – they’re entertaining but rarely feature in the season repertoires of orchestras and concert halls.

“So all of the music has that sweetness to it, that bit of nostalgia, and with quite few virtuosic show-stoppers in there as well.”

The set was recorded in London’s Henry Wood Hall early this year by the same group of musicians and Jonathan Allen, a long-time Benedetti collaborator, producing.

“We’ve been talking about what would go on the album for some time and we did a bunch of little house concerts testing the repertoire, to find out what works in front of an audience.

“But I can never make decisions on anything until it is past the deadline, so I kept stringing out options until the last minute. There were definitely things that I wanted to have arranged for the group that didn’t make it.

“What that does mean is that there is a load of repertoire that isn’t on the album that we can come back to. I think the formation of those instruments works so brilliantly that we should. There’s a lot of textural interest and rhythmic flexibility, and there’s no issue with definition between the instruments, no instrument that over-powers another one. I couldn’t have asked for more in terms of how the group functions together.”

Although young strings students had the opportunity to play alongside her at the latest Benedetti Sessions tutorials by her Foundation in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall only last month, and she guested with visiting artists at the Edinburgh Festival in August, other places in her homeland haven’t heard her live in a long time.

“Half the tour is in Scotland and it is at least ten years since I’ve done as many Scottish dates” she said. “I chose all the touring venues, and they are places I’ve known since I was in my teens.

“There is so much in life now that is serious and tragic, and I hope this is an antidote to that. It’s going to give me an opportunity to stand up in front of people in an environment that is entirely presented by me, touring a beautiful collection of music around the country. I genuinely am very excited for this tour.”

Full details at http://www.nicolabenedetti.co.uk

Opposites Attract

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Director Jacopo Spirei tells KEN WALTON why his new Double Bill production for Scottish Opera, opening at Lammermuir Festival, has all the quirky trappings of a Netflix series. 

Ready for a double dose of black comedy? That’s what Scottish Opera is promising in an upcoming operatic head-to-head that packages Ravel’s waspishly satirical L’heure espagnole with the Chekhovian darkness of Walton’s The Bear. This new Double Bill production, created by Italian opera director Jacopo Spirei, takes the opening night spot (4 Sep) at this year’s Lammermuir Festival, a one-off performance in St Mary’s Church, Haddington, with later repeats in Glasgow (18 & 22 Oct) and Edinburgh (15 Nov).

Written over half a century apart – Ravel’s sensuously-scored, Spanish-flavoured one-acter was premiered in 1911; Walton’s parodic burlesque a nippy child of the mid-sixties – their mutual compatibility may not seem immediately obvious. Spirei, while absent from the initial decision to couple them, has no such qualms. “Musically there’s a good relationship, both being experiments from otherwise symphonic composers,” he argues. “And from a theatrical point of view, these are both stories of strong independent women within the context of a man’s world: women that define morals in their own very specific way. Treating them as comedies was a clever way of doing it.”

L’heure espagnole is often viewed as an Ayckbourn-style bedroom farce, a clockmaker’s lascivious wife using the convenience of her lustless husband’s clocks to conceal her multiple lovers – opera buffa reborn. The Bear occupies a darker world, the recently-widowed Popova learning of her late husband’s infidelities and mountainous debts, only to fall for the messenger, a ruthless debt collector. 

L’heure espagnole – “a world of fantasy among ticking clocks” (Photo Sally Jubb)

Spirei has previously produced both operas apart – in studio settings in Copenhagen – but never in tandem. The Bear on that occasion was paired with Bruno Maderna’s modernist 1973 chamber opera Satyricon. “That demanded a very different co-relationship which led to treating the Walton more like the Chekhov play it’s based on.”

“The trick in making it work with the Ravel is to put them in dialogue”, says Spirei. “Think of a Netflix series like Black Mirror, where similar themes are treated in completely different ways. The way I work with the designer [Kenneth MacLeod] is to emphasise the contrast. So you have one opera that is incredibly colourful and full of life, and one that moves at completely the other end, which is a funeral parlour: from colour, colour, colour to classic black comedy. In a way the humour is similar, but one is a very particular French opera, the other very English. That creates a very exciting dialogue.”

That applies equally to the music, he explains. “Walton’s is a lot more rhythmic in a way. The percussive element is much more predominant, his way of setting words is exceptional, unparalleled in the 20th century. It’s fascinating how it feels like a play, yet is an opera. And it’s very quirky, fascinatingly surreal. A bit like Fawlty Towers.

“On the other hand, a sense of orchestrated landscape distinguishes Ravel’s writing. You do feel you are suspended in a world of fantasy among ticking clocks. The way he paints the nuances, however, points to an extraordinary creative depth.”

Above all, Spirei is having fun, and Scots-based designer Kenneth MacLeod is playing along, especially where the challenge has been to create a design solution flexible enough to meet the demands both of this week’s Haddington church setting and future theatre performances. 

“To exist anywhere it sort of needed a visual environment that was valid everywhere, something universally familiar like an internet browser. We’re so used to this idea, all those streaming platforms. With the church, however, we’ve taken a slightly more site-specific approach, using the wider space to full advantage.”

The cast are up for anything, he adds, a potent mix of youth and experience. “Some are Scottish Opera Emerging Artists, some former Emerging Artists.” Then there’s Jamie MacDougall, a seasoned regular in comic roles for the company, playing duped husband Torquemada in the Ravel. “Oh my God, how can you stop him? He’s extraordinary, like a film actor,” insists Spirei.

While this production marks Spirei’s debut with Scottish Opera, it’s also a chance for the 50-year-old Italian to finally honour the memory of his close friend and mentor, Sir Graham Vick, who served as director of productions at Scottish Opera in the 1980s, creating many momentous – some highly controversial – productions in the process. 

“That’s one of the reasons I said yes to coming here,” he reveals. “I wanted to reconnect with that part of Graham’s past. For me he was a mentor as well as a teacher. I started working with him when I was 26. We worked together for a long time, then I started directing my own stuff, we became good friends and remained close till the end. He was one of these people you could exchange ideas about process, about work – a mentor in the true sense.”

Remembering Graham Vick

Vick, who went on to found the Birmingham Opera Company in 1987, establishing its award-winning policy of staging groundbreaking productions in unusual venues, died in 2021, aged 67. Did the young turk who ruffled the feathers of traditional Scots opera-goers in 1985 with his infamously lavatorial Don Giovanni temper his aesthetic in later years?

“Yes, in a way he later found a different field of research,” Spirei believes. “It was no longer about provoking audiences, more about involving the widest of audiences. His work in Birmingham, for example, oriented in that way, working with volunteers from all paths fo life. That led to a period of very aesthetic theatre in the 1990s and early 2000s, to a lot of beautiful looking shows, still always gripping and cutting, but with a slightly more pleasing edge. He just found a different path and started questioning the future of opera, how it needed to be to function within society. In that way I always found myself at home working with him.”

How confident is Spirei in opera’s future? “The art form is fine,” he insists. “Let’s face it, opera has been declared dead ever since I started in the business, yet it’s still healthy and strong, finding its way through new compositions, new repertoire. The problem is never the art form. The art form has an energy and power of its own – it just has to be released.” 

Scottish Opera presents its Ravel/Walton Double Bill at St Mary’s Church Haddington on 4 Sep as part of the Lammermuir Festival. The 2025 Festival runs from 4-15 Sep at various venues around East Lothian. Full details at www.lammermuirfestival.co.uk

(Photo Jacopo Spirei – Marco Borrelli)

The World at The Hub

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As the Aga Khan Master Musicians take up residence at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, saxophonist Basel Rajoub talks to Keith Bruce.

The Edinburgh International Festival’s busiest venue is The Hub, where above the ground floor box office is a picturesque room that has hosted the widest variety of musical experiences. It is currently hosting the Aga Khan Music Programme – very much the public face of the Aga Khan Development Network – and on Friday that season culminates in a concert by the Aga Khan Master Musicians.

It is a supergroup of what are inadequately described as “world musicians”, including pipa player Wu Man, virtuoso percussionist Abbos Kosimov, Yurdal Tokcan on oud, Feras Charestan on kanoun and saxophonist Basel Rajoub, augmented for these concerts by French mavericks Vincent Pierani on accordion and Vincent Segal in cello, both of whom then have a late night gig with Malian kora star Ballake Sissoko.

Basel Rajoub would certainly dispute any claim to personifying the Master Musicians. Each one of them is a virtuoso who brings compositions to the table that are shaped by the ensemble, with plenty of room for improvisation. Nonetheless, his story, as a displaced Syrian now resident in Geneva where the project has its home, seems central to their ethos.

Rajoub has been a member of the Master Musicians since the resident ensemble was created in 2009. His route to playing the saxophone, and the fact that he plays it in a way outside both classical and jazz traditions, is a singular story.

“I studied Western classical music in Damascus Conservatory, but I studied trumpet until I had to give it up when I took a reaction to the mouthpiece in my lips at the age of 24,” he explains. “I switched to saxophone and I favour soprano because it is near to the range of the trumpet.

“Saxophone is a quite unique instrument, connected with jazz and classical in the West but more associated with traditional music in the Middle East, used at weddings and funerals and street parties. I love the sound of it.”

It is that heritage of Middle-Eastern classical music that Rajoub brings to the Master Musicians.

“I carry the Syrian classical tradition with me, but not like the oud, which is an instrument integral to that tradition, so there is an effort in making it work. I don’t want to be a Western classical musician or a jazz musician, I want to use my knowledge of scales and microtones, and the saxophone has some limitations for expressing that.”

The point in the performances of the Master Musicians is that they find a common language although coming from completely different backgrounds.

“We change a lot, and we have a lot of African music in our performances which is a different energy. But at the same time there are two Syrians in the band, me and the kanoun player, so our influence is always there. The project is always changing, always unique and different.”

There is no bitterness in his voice when he says that his father told him not to try to return to his war-torn homeland over a decade ago.

“I left Syria before the war in 2008. I didn’t want to go into the army, and I was last there to play in the opera house in 2011 just before the war. I came from Aleppo which was one of the centres of Syrian classical music, and even though the old city – and buildings 1500 years old – have been destroyed completely, the music will still be there. There is always hope in that.”

In some concerts, Rajoub says, the Master Musicians have played with a classical Syrian singer as part of the maintenance of that tradition, but mostly the music is new and specially written. The current concerts began with a residency in Lisbon where they all had time to compose.

The rest of the time Rajoub teaches in Geneva and his fellow musicians come to give masterclasses there. On their travels, the players often visit music schools and give community performances, as they will be doing in Edinburgh.

Personally, the saxophonist says he has found a situation of musical fulfilment.

“I have the chance to meet and play with great musicians who were previously unknown to me. This feels like a life project.”

The Aga Khan Master Musicians are at The Hub, Castlehill, Edinburgh on Friday August 22 at 7pm.

Getting Physical with Gluck

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Once pipped for pop stardom, Iestyn Davies opted instead for success as a classical “yodeller”. The award-winning countertenor stars with Australian circus ensemble Circa in Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice. KEN WALTON reports.

It’s 30 years since the blistering Summer of Britpop, when Blur and Oasis led a hungry pack battling for pole position in the charts. Iestyn Davies was 15 that year, a musically-gifted pupil at the specialist Wells Cathedral School. He and three school pals – collectively the wannabe Britpop band Cage – were faced with a tempting offer to sign up for a record deal they were assured could easily lead to chart-topping success.

“Yes, the pop world lost out,” says the now 45-year-old Davies, who eschewed pop fame to become one of the world’s leading classical countertenors. He’s currently in Scotland to sing the male title role in director Yaron Lifschitz’s circus-led production of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice at the Edinburgh International Festival.

“We were huge fans of Blur then and all the other bands with one-syllable names, and were actually about to be victims of what would become a kind of Britain’s Got Talent thing, where the A&R people wanted to manufacture something cool rather than just let us do our own thing. 

“It was a big deal,” Davies recalls. “Atlantic Records, a branch of Sony, came to our school, we got selected, and against thousands of other bands got down to the last two. They said we’re really interested in you guys because you’re all really good musicians. We played songs to the A&R guy in our studio at school and he said with the right financial backing we could go to number one. Sure, we’d have made lots of money, but in the end it wasn’t for us.” In time, the constituent members of Cage went their separate ways to pursue careers in classical music.

For York-born Davies, there was an undeniable logic to his choice. By the age of eight, he’d experienced the hothouse choir school environment of the Oxbridge chapel, at St John’s College, Cambridge. It was a baptism of fire, he recalls, “a bit like being taught to swim. You’re thrown in at this early age to perform daily in this thing called choral evensong, initially imitating the boy next to you to pick things up. But the musicality I picked up there was invaluable: the ability to learn music quickly, sight read, be a good team player, be a professional musician. It’s why I’m doing what I do now.” 

It stood him in good stead when, on leaving secondary school, he took up a choral scholarship at Cambridge, studying archeology and anthropology, before honing his singing technique – he once compared the rarefied countertenor voice to “yodelling” – at the Royal Academy of Music. Prestigious awards followed in a career that has combined leading opera appearances (the New York Met and Covent Garden included) to acclaimed worldwide concert performances and prize-winning recordings. 

He’s no stranger, either, to the Edinburgh International Festival, though one previous visit lingers painfully in his memory. “I woke up the morning of a Queen’s Hall concert with absolutely no voice, nothing,” he recalls. He struggled in to the pre-concert run through, managing to squeeze out a sound. “The old chorister mentality hit in: if you can still sing a bit you’re doing it.” A friend who’d attended the same programme a few weeks earlier, and having heard the Edinburgh live broadcast, called him up to say it was even better than the York performance. “It just goes to show, you can never second guess the audience!”

Circa in Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice (Image: West Beach Studio)

Did Davies ever envisage having to perform his first ever staged production of Gluck’s seminal opera Orpheus and Eurydice engaging so physically with a fully-functioning circus troupe? That’s the challenge facing him in this week’s unconventional Gluck production, unveiled with its original cast in Brisbane in 2019, now restaged for a European premiere at Edinburgh Playhouse that draws together the original combined resources of Circa and Opera Queensland with Opera Australia, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Scottish Opera Chorus, conducted by period music specialist Laurence Cummings.

When we spoke, Davies’s only inkling of the task in hand was via a video of an earlier Australian performance. “I saw immediately how amazing Circa are. You can hear the audience gasp right at the beginning as they do this tumbling thing from a great height. What’s amazing is that their acrobatics are as fluid as dancing. The hardest thing that I have to do physically comes late in the show, when I stand on someone’s shoulders, surrounded by three or four people who are anchoring my ankles. I can tell from the performer on the video – whom I know, and who’s very athletic – that it’s a scary moment.”  

Davies has since come to realise that, for his part, the physically of his role comes mostly in a more concentrated, more conducive form. “Yes, I have to carry quite a lot of the drama in my body, but a lot of that can be done standing still,” he explains. “Until I meet Eurydice in the underworld it’s just me and the chorus, but not in dialogue. Under such prolonged spotlight you have to find ways to project energy through stillness, which in itself is such a high-pressured thing because its very easy to slip unintentionally into concert mode. 

“This is such a psychological piece – really, it’s about what’s going on in Orpheus’s head – which is what Yaron is particularly trying to demonstrate in his production,” Davies says. “I asked him why he has conflated the two female roles of Eurydice and Amore, played by the same singer [Australian soprano Samatha Clarke], and the answer I got was that Orpheus has murdered Eurydice and wakes up in this fractured state, maybe in a prison, maybe an asylum.” 

This, Davies reckons, is where the “unworldliness” of the countertenor voice can really work its magic, closer in character to the castrato that Gluck originally intended than later tendencies to cast a female mezzo soprano in the role. Think Janet Baker, for whom this became a signature role. 

“There is something disembodied about the countertenor that is close to the castrato in terms of pitch, and of course we’re seeing a man play the hero,” Davies explains. “But equally it stretches the countertenor’s capabilities beyond that of the choral world, presented with a meaty chunk of singing, on stage for an hour and a quarter. It feels very different from singing even a Handel role where you’re one of five or six characters. You’re on stage all night; that challenges you to be interesting with your voice. You can’t rely on just ethereal beauty. There has to be pain, anger, melancholy, all range of emotions. That is what Gluck is asking. That’s the challenge to me.”

Whatever the physical demands placed on him, Davies is readying himself. “I’m generally very conscious of trying to stay healthy and fit at the moment anyway,” he says. Besides addressing “the odd creak on the knee or shoulder”, that means looking good too. “I’m playing David in [Handel’s] Saul at Glyndebourne at the moment. At the beginning I’ve just defeated Goliath and the whole show opens with me covered in blood, half-naked with a sling and a shot. I’ve been going to the gym three times a week, and trying not to enjoy myself too much. It’s a real pain, but in the long run it’s good to keep on top of these things.”

As for his relationship with Gluck’s most famous opera, it is dominating his working life at the moment. Davies previously sang the Orpheus role In a 2018 Edinburgh Festival concert performance with The English Consort, later recording it with La Nuovo Musica for Pentatone. “I was originally booked to debut in this current production with Circa in Melbourne in November/December, but that was before the Edinburgh dates came up; and now, between those, in September/October I’ll be performing in a Robert Carsen production with Canadian Opera in Toronto. It’s full on up to Christmas, but I doubt I’ll be sick of it.”

Nor can he get too much of the Edinburgh Festival. “I love coming to Edinburgh. It’s the most worthwhile place to sing in Britain, a great set-up and great audiences. They let me do things I want to do.” Including, perhaps, his new circus repertoire?

Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice is at the Edinburgh Playhouse on 13, 15 & 16 August. Full information at www.eif.co.uk

Remembering Max

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The 49th St Magnus Festival takes a moment to remember co-founder Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, but will his piano measure up to the memory? Pianist Mihal Ritivoiu talks to KEN WALTON

There are many remarkable things about Orkney’s St Magnus Festival, not least the fact it happens in one of the least accessible extremities of the UK, and that this year’s Festival (20-27 June) celebrates 49 years in business. 

Equally remarkable, though, is its actual survival despite the absence of its iconic co-founder, the composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, whose death almost a decade ago marked the end of an era in which he and the event were a synonymous powerhouse. 

But give current artistic director (also a composer) Alasdair Nicolson his due. Through imaginative and enterprising programming and some canny politicking (funding is as ever the arts world’s uncomfortable necessity) he has managed to sustain a distinctive profile for St Magnus, not so much with expensive large-scale orchestral performances of old, but still with a commitment to challenging programming that views contemporary music as an equal partner within a wider, more traditional cross-genre mix. Moreover, Davies’ and his co-founders’ original vision of the local arts community practically engaging with visiting artists remains a potent motivator.

As for Davies, or Max as he was universally known, his memory lingers on in regular Festival performances of his music, but there’s one event in particular this year, albeit on the relative periphery, that promises to strike a truly visceral, if sentimental, chord. On 23 June, on the island of Sanday where the wise but sometimes waspish Davies lived, Romanian-born pianist Mihai Ritivoiu will play a recital in the local community school on Max’s own piano.

Expectations are moderate in terms of unqualified musical refinement. “I’ve been warned not to expect a perfectly regulated piano; that it will have a lot of ‘character’!”, warns 35-year-old Ritivoiu, a former “top laureate” of Romania’s George Enescu International Competition, who is now resident in London. On the other hand, his own interest in Davies’ music, heightened over two previous appearances at St Magnus Festivals, is unquestionably genuine.

“My discovery of Max’s music goes back to my first years in London, before I had ever visited or even knew about the Orkney Islands,” he recalls. “As a Musicians’ Company Young Artist, I was assigned to do a number of outreach events in schools around the city. Those were coordinated by senior members of The Musicians’ Company, which is how I got to know Neil Price.” 

Price, a retired accountant and founder/conductor of the Kirkwall-based Mayfield Singers, had just moved to London from Orkney. “As I became friends with Neil and his family, I learned of their special connection with Max. During a visit to his home, Neil gave me a copy of Max’s Farewell to Stromness saying ‘if you come to Scotland, you must play this as an encore! Everyone will recognise it and love it!’.” 

“A few weeks later I opened the score, expecting something entirely different from what is actually a piece of heartbreaking simplicity, with subtle traditional inflections. The story behind it makes it even more poignant. Far from being a sentimental farewell from a departing ferry, it marked a point in time when the very existence of Stromness was put into question by plans to mine uranium in the area.”

It won’t feature officially in the Sanday recital, which opens with the more apposite Three Sanday Places – a trilogy of locally-inspired miniatures dating from 2006 – as a scene-setter to further music by Schubert, Liszt, Debussy and Nicolson’s own Magnus IV: Orpheus in his Cottage, itself a tribute to Max and effectively the title track for the entire programme. There’s always the possibility, of course, that Ritivoiu will offer up Farewell to Stromness as a convenient encore should occasion permit.

The following day (24 June) in St Magnus Cathedral, however, it has a wholly functional role as the springboard to Ritivoiu’s second solo recital in his three-concert Festival residency. “I’ve chosen pieces with lots of colour for this programme, which I’ve called Impressions in the Mists,” he explains. “Pieces such as Liszt’s Années de Pèlerinage, Janacek’s In the Mists and Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Sonata.” He opens with Farewell to Stromness, but with a teasing twist to it. “I discovered, just tinkering on the piano, that it segues seamlessly into the Beethoven. I’ll give it a go, but if the audience want to clap in between so be it. I won’t force it on them.” 

Ritivoiu’s other Festival appearance (22 June in Stromness) is his first-time collaboration with the Resol String Quartet (pictured above), an ensemble formed in 2018 at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Together, in a programme called The Crossing Point, they perform Schumann’s E flat Piano Quintet, a work the pianist knows well. “It’s always exciting to play an old piece with new people,” he says. “It encourages so many fresh ideas.”

Ritivoiu’s three programmes represent a mere fraction of almost forty Festival events happening at St Magnus this year. Other guest artists include pianist Nikita Lukinov, riotous cross-genre duo Stevens & Pound, violinist Fenella Humphreys in an imaginative collaboration with novelist James Runcie, fast-rising choral group Echo Ensemble, and Glasgow-based Escocia Duo. 

Eccentric Australian performer and instrument maker Graeme Leak makes music from a recycled assemblage of 1970s cassettes, home organs, turntables and kitchen whisks in a show that asks the question, “Is this music, noise, or just sound?”

Folk artists range from local fiddler Jennifer Wrigley to accordionists Karen Tweed and Karen Street. The local St Magnus Festival Chorus are joined by visiting quintet Prismatic Winds for Dvorak’s Mass in D. Four literary events feature Festival Poet Niall Campbell, ocean-loving writer and historian David Gange, Shetland-born Jen Stout and Grantchester creator James Runcie. 

Ultimately, the star of any St Magnus Festival is the location itself, Mihal Ritivoiu explains. “It’s one of my favourite festivals to play in. There’s a so much happening in widely spread venues, yet at the same time nothing feels disconnected. Orkney and its festival feels very human, where everyone gets to know each other, where there’s always time for a chat with other artists, locals and visitors. It’s quite unique!”

The St Magnus Festival runs from 20-27 June. Full programme information at www.stmagnusfestival.com

Werner’s originals

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Soprano Heloise Werner talks to KEITH BRUCE about her collaboration with the Scottish Ensemble….and other plans.

There is nothing Scottish about French-born soprano, cellist and composer Heloise Werner but her career has forged strong connections with the music scene in Scotland.

The award-winning group she formed in her student years, The Hermes Experiment, was an early success of composer/entrepreneur Matthew Whiteside’s boundary-pushing concert series The Night With. . ., and the East Lothian-based Delphian label swiftly signed them up and released two albums, Here We Are and Song. As a solo artist, Werner has also made two albums for Delphian, Phrases and Close-Ups.

This year she has already worked with the BBC SSO’s  Creative Partner Ilan Volkov on the premiere of her own Siren Suite with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, and next week she has a run of six “Concerts for a Summer Night” as the guest soloist with the Scottish Ensemble, starting in Perthshire’s Rossie Byre and ending a week later at the V&A in Dundee, with stops in Strathpeffer, Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh in between.

“Scottish Ensemble contacted me out of the blue a couple of years ago,” says Werner. “I knew about them of course, and I knew two of their musicians, but I didn’t really know the group or [director] Jonathan Morton, so it was a nice invitation to receive.

“There’s no brand new world premiere in the programme,” says the singer for whom such inclusions are customary, “but there are new arrangements, including two works of mine arranged for strings and voice.”

That pairing, Unspecified Intentions and Lullaby for my Sister, end her most recent album, and the Scottish Ensemble programme also includes Barbara Strozzi’s Che si puo fare, which opens the disc. The soprano will also sing Hermes Experiment bassist Marianne Schofield’s arrangements of early 18th century French composer Julie Pinel, and Tree by Errollyn Wallen, which is also on Close-Ups and will have another incarnation as the title track of the third Hermes Experiment album.

The overlaps in Werner’s artistic practice are obvious – her co-arranger on her own compositions is fellow cellist and life partner Colin Alexander – but it is an expanding world and those partnerships are key to her busy schedule. The next phase of Hermes Experiment’s work comes as the group joins her under the management of Askonas Holt.

“With the group we have a lot of dates in the diary and it’s looking really good. It is sometimes a challenge to balance things, so that will help. We’ve been going for 10 years now, and after releasing two albums in quick succession, we needed to think about what we did next.

“Over the last few years composing has become a much bigger thing for me, and it wasn’t when I started Hermes. My work is now split about 50/50 between composing and performing and that actually makes it more flexible in terms of my schedule. If I have a lot of writing to do I can do that at any time and anywhere.”

The upcoming Hermes Experiment album will be the first to feature pieces written by members of the group, and the soprano already has her own third solo album planned out.

“For the new album I am inviting other singers so there will be five singers and three cellists, and the music will be a mix of the core quintet, cello trio and a mix of the two that will play a new work I am writing for everybody. I’ve invited my favourite singers and they are quite international, and very versatile. We’ll be doing a mixture of early madrigals, some more modern things and my own music.”

A performance of the set is already scheduled for July next year in London’s Wigmore Hall, where Werner is an Associate Artist, and the recording will follow, with release on Delphian in 2027.

Werner’s range and interest in experimental vocal techniques has invited comparisons with American composer/performers Cathy Berberian and Meredith Monk, of which the soprano is understandably wary.

“I suppose there are similarities with those amazing pioneers, and I admire all they’ve done, but I didn’t try to copy anyone. In fact, I checked them out after people made those comparisons.

“I always knew that I wanted to be a musician but it took me a while to figure out how I was going to do that. I knew I had some skills that weren’t valued in traditional settings, and I wasn’t particularly successful in auditions for parts in operas.

“So really early on I started the Hermes Experiment, and then I started composing and having a solo career. It’s been quite organic as it evolved, and I never gave up thinking that I was going to have work.

“It is still a work-in-progress, and now bigger organisations like orchestras are interested in what I do and what I offer as a package. They are interested in working with me on curating programmes or on specific concepts and it’s exciting to have reached that level now.”

This year that has included that collaboration with Volkov on her Siren Suite, for voice and chamber orchestra, which depicts five figures with an affinity for the sea. It will have a further performance at the end of November in Paris in a new arrangement for the Orchestra Philharmonique de Radio France.

Last weekend Werner unveiled yet another new project at the Glasshouse in Gateshead, working with a dozen musicians from the Royal Northern Sinfonia. The Cuckoo’s Hour included her own music alongside that of Nico Muhly, Oliver Leith, Freya Waley-Cohen, John Lely and Colin Alexander, and arranged the musicians around her like the figures on a clock.

The title piece was – of course – a world premiere, and talks are beginning about that performance being seen and heard elsewhere. The earlier partnership with Volkov naturally brings his annual Tectonics event at Glasgow City Halls to mind, a thought which Werner embraces. “He’s such a clever musician. I’d love to be involved in Tectonics.”

She is at a stage where choices have to be made, however.

“I wouldn’t take on anything that didn’t suit me and my voice. Sometimes I get asked to do things that I know I could do, but for which I wouldn’t be the best person, so I recommend someone else. I’d rather so something that suits not just my voice, but also my personality and my interests.”

Heloise Werner joins the Scottish Ensemble for Concerts for a Summer’s Night from Monday, June 9. Concerts for a Summer’s Night – Scottish Ensemble

Inspired by Adversity

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What he thought was Covid turned out to be cancer for trumpeter and composer John Wallace, but he wasn’t going to sit on his backside and do nothing, he tells KEN WALTON 

Last summer, the famously indefatigable Fife-born trumpeter and former principal of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, John Wallace, went about his normal business. For him, even in his mid-70s, that meant heading to New York with his eponymous brass ensemble, The Wallace Collection, to give a series of high-profile concerts in venues that included the city’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. It wasn’t, however, the pleasurable experience he’d anticipated. 

“The temperature soared to 105, I was feeling the jet lag more than usual, feeling my age, then we all fell ill with what was assumed to be Covid,” he recalls. When he, himself, tested negative he came home to Glasgow in time for some R&R, he and his wife’s annual road trip to France.

But that didn’t go to plan either. “I thought, I’m gonna drive, but we only got as far as Abington services before I had to pass over to my wife to drive the rest of the way. The long and short of it was, the Covid I thought I had was masking something else. After a few days in France I had this incredible headache, couldn’t sleep, and was hallucinating big time. They took me into intensive care in Toulouse Hospital and found all these things wrong with me.

“Luckily – and I’d really recommend this – we’d taken out Saga insurance who sent across a doctor to take me back to Glasgow.” That involved a high-speed ambulance dash to Toulouse Airport – “doing that on a morphine trip was one of the most exciting things I’ve done in my life” – then again from Edinburgh Airport to Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth University Hospital. “Tests there revealed I had a brain tumour, lung cancer and it was in the liver as well. Christ, I thought, that’s the kibosh on any future plans.”

Except we’re talking about John Wallace, whose glass is invariably half full. The worst part, he says, was watching all those incredible medics getting on with their jobs while he lay flat on his back. “An initial course of immunotherapy drugs failed to work, but by December they’d got something working and I’ve shown steady improvement since,” he reports, impressed by a health service that isn’t getting the greatest press at the moment. 

“I’ve been everywhere in Glasgow – the Victoria Hospital, the Queen Elizabeth, the Beatson Cancer Clinic and the Royal Infirmary for endless tests, and the Mount Florida Health Centre have chipped in too. It’s so brilliantly coordinated; when you’ve got something really wrong with you the NHS can be absolutely superb.”

“Now that I’m out, they’re even coming to my house. I’m so monitored it’s unbelievable. So I feel really quite positive at the moment, that I’ve got more life left in me. My son even got me a fancy exercise bike, so without actually going there I’m currently attempting the Spittal of Glenshee!” 

But there was one other key motivator aiding Wallace’s road to recovery – his undying passion for music. “That played a huge part in keeping me going,” he believes. “It’s amazing when time is at a premium and you don’t think you’ve got much of it left, you return to your most fruitful passions and memories.” 

At the heart of these was his life-long association with the brass band world. “It’s where I first picked up a trumpet, at the age of seven, playing in my first competition at the Usher Hall a year later in 1958. The skill of these bands shouldn’t be underrated. When I joined the LSO in 1974, Andre Previn was conducting Berlioz’s Le Corsaire at the Proms. He happened to hear the Black Dyke Mills Band play the same piece shortly after and said to us: ‘Christ, I wish we could play it as fast as that’.” 

Rather than dwell simply on memories, however, Wallace turned his thoughts to actions. What if, “while flat on my back in the Beatson”,  he was to get himself a pen, paper and laptop and busy himself with brass band arrangements he’d long wished to write but never got round to? 

“My favourite piece is Rimsky Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel”, he says. “I can remember playing it for the Douglas Fairbanks 1924 silent film The Thief of Baghdad at London’s Criterion Theatre in the early ‘80s. Douglas Fairbanks Junior was there to introduce it, showing off all his dad’s skill as an acrobat. Carl Davis did such a wonderful job of adapting the piece. Definitely one of my career highlights. 

“I’ve thought ever since that the Four Tableaux from the opera would make a great band piece – millions of bloody notes – so here was a chance to finally make it happen.  I just wrote it in my bed at the Beatson and learnt a lot more about The Golden Cockerel in the process: that it was banned in Rimsky’s lifetime, for instance, because he was taking the piss out of the Tsar. I just wish there was a Russian composer at the moment willing to take the piss out of Putin – or an American composer to take it out on Trump.” Maybe The Orange Cockerel, I suggest?

Wallace continued with his arrangements throughout his hospitalisation, adding enough music to furnish a full concert programme, Romantic Brass, this Saturday (15 February) in Sherbrooke Mosspark Parish Church by the multi-prizewinning Cooperation Band conducted by Katrina Mazella-Wheeler, proceeds of which will go to the Beatson Cancer Charity. 

It opens with another arrangement on Wallace’s wish list, that of Dvorak’s Four Legends. “I’d just been playing all Ten Legends with my daughter on piano duet and was reminded of how utterly beautiful they are. In my opinion Dvorak was a better miniaturist than symphonist,” he argues. “He wrote great symphonies, but these miniatures are fabulous.”

As, he adds, are the Cooperation Band’s amazing players, which is why Wallace has also come up with a trio of arrangements to showcase some of their star soloists. 

“Cornet player Jimmy Hayes travels up from Newcastle every rehearsal and plays like an angel, which is why I’ve transcribed for him Der Engel from Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder. For Flugelhorn player Stephanie Kennedy I’ve recast Schumann’s Ich grolle nicht from the wonderful Dichterliebe. That leaves Soprano player Gordon Kyle – he’s a maniac! – with the Caruso showstopper, Cardillo’s Core ‘ngrato. The band as a whole are a fab bunch of musicians. We’re all keen to see new stuff and push the envelope with brass bands – a fertile meeting of minds.

Will Wallace appear himself? “I looked in on the dress rehearsal, but I’m still not well enough to take part and don’t want to let anybody down by maybe having to walk off the stage flagging,” he admits. “I haven’t been able to play because of the cancer’s effect on my lungs, but the breathing’s getting better, so maybe one day soon.” With Wallace, you can never say never!

Romantic Brass, featuring the Cooperation Band and arrangements by John Wallace, is at Sherbrooke Mosspark Church, Nithsdale Road, Glasgow on Saturday 15 February at 7.30pm. Donations welcome in aid of Beatson Cancer Charity. Further information at www.thecooperationband.co.uk

Return to the pit

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Conductor Martyn Brabbins speaks to Keith Bruce as he makes his career debut in Scotland with Janacek’s The Makropulos Affair

As a mentor to young conductors at the St Magnus Festival and at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, as well as a regular guest conductor with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins is a familiar face in Scotland.

South of the border, his most recent full-time contract was as music director of English National Opera, a position from which he resigned in solidarity with his fellow musicians when ENO’s management failed to resist the imposition of strictures on its operations by the Arts Council of England.

At the end of this week, the conductor makes what may seem a belated debut at the Theatre Royal in Glasgow in charge of a main stage Scottish Opera production, directing a work that is a century old but new to him, and for which his enthusiasm is evident.

The circumstances that have allowed Brabbins to work with the company may be less than entirely happy, but England’s loss is assuredly Scotland’s gain. At the end of our conversation, the conductor alluded to the circumstances of his departure from ENO, and it was more in sorrow than anger.

“Having had that bruising end to my time at ENO, it’s wonderful to be here. Scottish Opera seems to be in a healthy way, the rehearsal process has been really smooth and I hope that ENO can get to a similar position.

“It is just not valued by the people in power in the way it should be. The more you diminish arts and culture the more you diminish society, and the arts seem very vulnerable at the moment.”

The invitation to conduct Janacek’s The Makropulos Affair may have sprung from Brabbins’ sudden availability, but it picks up threads from earlier in his career.

“In the 1990s I did a small scale Scottish Opera tour of Mozart’s Il Seraglio, which was a memorable experience. And [stage director] Olivia Fuchs and I were both assistants at ENO on Nick Hytner’s magical production of The Magic Flute, but this is the first time we’ve made a production together.”

This Makropulos Affair is a co-production with Welsh National Opera, who staged it in 2022. But as well as having a fresh cast, with only tenor Mark Le Brocq returning as Vitek, and a different baton, the opera will be sung in an English translation by David Pountney rather than in Czech.

“It’s a really well thought out, attractive and clear production of what is a rather strange piece,” says Brabbins. “Not only has it had a run with WNO in Cardiff, it went to Janacek’s hometown of Brno, and I think the staging really clarifies what is quite a weird tale of this woman who has lived to the age of 329.

“I have had the time of my life getting to know it and it’s been one of the most complex scores I’ve ever had to assimilate. That’s not because it’s complex in the way of the music of Harrison Birtwistle or Pierre Boulez, but because it has to feel very natural despite the bizarre way Janacek deals with musical pulse at times.

“His notation can be misleading until you get inside the piece. It took me a long time and it has taken the orchestra a lot of hard work to get inside the score in order to let the music speak – but I think everyone is having a good time with it.”

Oddly, perhaps, given that singing in English is an essential part of ENO’s mission, Brabbins confesses to ambivalence about the practice.

“I’ve always been in two minds about the wisdom of singing opera in translation. Personally, I don’t like to hear Italian bel canto repertoire in anything other than Italian, but with Wagner, with Mozart, and with Janacek it can work and I think it works well here. It is a bit of a labyrinthine story and doing it in English helps.

“The music is very connected to the Czech text so with David Pountney’s translation, which is very musical itself, sometimes you have to slightly adjust the rhythms so that they match English speech.”

Martyn Brabbins and Olivia Fuchs in rehearsals for The Makropulos Affair. Picture by Kirsty Anderson

The whole rehearsal process has been a journey of discovery for the conductor.

“It’s a long way from most of Janacek’s other operas. The natural world plays no part in this one while it features heavily in lots of the others.

“There’s something compelling about the main character, Emilia Marty. In terms of opera plot, very little happens. She turns up at a lawyer’s office looking for information about the elixir that has kept her alive, and it is basically a legal tale that unfolds.

“She’s a wonderful operatic diva who has had an incredible existence over her three centuries of life, but she won’t allow herself to be anything other than this cold questing being.

“Each act builds to a wonderful conclusion and the end of the opera as a whole is cataclysmically powerful, but what is unusual about the score, and a little like Wagner, is that it is one long mellifluous recitative. There is one set number in Act 2, but the rest of the piece is through-composed storytelling with no love duets or ensembles as such, like reciting a poem.

“You can’t compare Janacek’s music to anyone else. I’ve been re-reading the poems of Edwin Morgan, who I met many years ago. His poetry is similarly a completely unique take on the use of language and sometimes really quite extreme.

“He reveals things in a different light, and it’s the same with Janacek – the language is familiar, and his tonal orchestral and vocal music is very attractive, but it doesn’t take the turning one expects. That’s what has made it a real journey of discovery for me and I hope it will intoxicate our audience with its heady mixture of drama and music.”

After The Makropulos Affair, the conductor’s return to the opera pit continues at Grange Park, with his old orchestra from ENO playing for David Pountney’s production of Tchaikovsky’s story of wartime in Ukraine, Mazeppa. Brabbins then has two new orchestral appointments to take up, as Chief Conductor of Sweden’s Malmo Symphony and then as Chief Conductor of the Symphony Orchestra of India.

“Malmo is a great orchestra with a wonderful hall and enthusiastic audiences, and I’m hugely looking forward to that. The Indian orchestra is seasonal, with a nucleus of local musicians who work as a chamber orchestra. There’s a joy in the music-making there and it’s a very special environment.”

Brabbins’ describes the BBC Scottish as “a constant friend in my life” and his next project with the SSO is the regular conducting course with students from the UK and overseas in mid-June. Next month sees the release of his premiere recording of Tippett’s New Year with the orchestra, which was performed in concert last year, and reviewed on VoxCarnyx.

Scottish Opera’s The Makropulos Affair opens on Saturday February 15 for three performances at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, followed by two at Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre.

Production picture of 2022 WNO staging of The Makropulos Affair by Richard Hubert Smith

Soprano’s Valentine’s return

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Korean singer Sunyoung Seo won universal acclaim in her Scottish stage debut. She talks to Keith Bruce before concert appearances with the RSNO

Of the praise that greeted Sir David McVicar’s Scottish Opera production of Puccini’s Il Trittico two years ago, a generous proportion was accorded to Korean soprano Sunyoung Seo who made her company debut in contrasting lead roles in the first two parts of the trilogy, as Giorgetta in Il tabarro and as the titular Suor Angelica.

Her absence from the comedic third opera, Gianni Schicchi, means Scotland has heard her only in a tragic context – which this week’s Valetine’s Concerts with the RSNO in Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow might go some way to balancing.

That depends on how you regard the Wagner’s Dich, teure Halle, from Tannhauser, and the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, of course. Both are, however, celebratory pinnacles of the operatic soprano repertoire, and the latter is a work she has only recently added to her repertoire as she enters her 40s.

“I have also sung the first act of Die Walkure in concert, and Senta’s aria from The Flying Dutchman,” Sunyoung told Vox Carnyx.

“All of Wagner’s operas, with their mythological themes of salvation, their chromatic music, frequent modulations that almost feel atonal, counterpoint, and rich orchestration, have a powerful attraction. If the opportunity arises, I would love to take on other works that I have not yet performed in fully stage productions.”

Asked to identify the role that she regards most fondly, it is Dvorak’s masterpiece based on the Ondine story that she immediately names.

“Without a moment’s hesitation, it’s Rusalka. It is a work that gave me my European debut in 2011 at the Basel Theatre in Switzerland and it was also the piece that marked my professional debut in Korea in 2016. Rusalka holds a special place in my heart, like a first love.

“Given the nature of my voice, I am often cast in tragic roles. Most of the time, I play characters who either die or are involved in death. In the fall of 2023, I performed Tosca in Korea, and when I met the director, the first thing I said was, ‘I’m curious how we will kill Scarpia this time.’

“I’ve usually used a knife to kill Scarpia, but in that production, he was portrayed as a man with obsessive-compulsive disorder who covered all the furniture with thick plastic to keep it dust-free. Even the bed was covered in plastic, and I killed him by suffocating him with it, pressing it against his face.

“It’s fascinating to me that I get to live these extreme lives on stage and experience them actively. Every time I study a new piece, I find great joy in expressing and sharing the fresh, positive impressions I felt when I first encountered it.”

In those Scottish Opera roles, the soprano impressed as much in her acting as her vocal performance and she says it is her Christian faith that helps her bring a vibrancy to those dark stage moments.

“In opera, the more I identify with the situation and internalize the emotions, the more material I have to express.

“When performing the same role repeatedly, I always want to ensure that I avoid becoming mechanical and letting my emotional state become ‘numb’. For that reason, before every performance, I meditate deeply, and even on stage, I constantly pray for the presence of the Holy Spirit. I always pray that Jesus will imbue me with all the inspiration, talents, and abilities I need.”

It was the church in Korea that nurtured the young singer, long before her operatic career.

“I loved singing as a child and if guests were visiting our home or we were on family trips to the mountains or the beach during the holidays, I would often sing in front of my family. I started singing in the church choir at the age of 8.

“I was the eldest of three daughters, and my parents had no background in music, but they always encouraged and supported me. At the age of 11 I sang with the municipal children’s choir, and at 17 I began receiving professional vocal training in preparation for university entrance exams.”

Sunyoung eventually came to Europe to study at the Robert Schumann Hochschule in Dusseldorf with Professor Michaela Kramer, with whom she still works today. She continues to live in Seoul, however, and maintains strong links with Korea’s National University of the Arts where she completed her undergraduate studies.

“I began my teaching career at my alma mater at the relatively young age of 35. In my classes with students, I often feel less like I am teaching them and more like I am sharing what I’ve learned, and in many cases, I feel that I learn from them as well.

“The university boasts a high success rate in international competitions and with prestigious opera houses and orchestras around the world. Our school is a specialized arts institution consisting of six colleges: music, dance, fine arts, theatre, film, and traditional arts. Students are encouraged to experience classes from other departments, allowing many singers to gain valuable acting experience in the theatre department.”

Balancing her international career with teaching responsibilities at home means that opportunities to hear her voice in Europe can be rare. This year much of her work is in Korea and Japan, including a concert Rusalka, Mahler Symphonies No 4 and 2, a production of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw and an appearance in Tokyo as part of a celebration of 60 years of Korea-Japan diplomatic relations.

Look out for her return in 2026 though, when she makes her Netherlands debut as Suor Angelica, and it is whispered, may well be seen again in a Scottish Opera production.

The RSNO’s Valentine’s Concert, which follows Wagner with Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony, is at Dundee’s Caird Hall on February 13, Edinburgh’s Usher Hall on February 14 and Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on February 15, conducted by David Niemann.

Silent witness

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The RSNO opens its new season next week and Keith Bruce finds the musicians’ schedule is fuller than it has ever been.

When the RSNO moved from the Henry Wood Hall to its bespoke new home next to Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Killermont Street, the most extravagant of the new facilities was the accommodation afforded the principal timpanist, then Martin Gibson. The capacious room for preparing new drum skins and its adjacent storage was swiftly dubbed “The Gibson Suite” by the violinists who shared less backstage space, ironically echoing the name of Scottish Opera’s corporate entertaining salon in the nearby Theatre Royal.

It couldn’t last, as the current holder of the timpani chair, Paul Philbert, doubtless recognises. The Gibson Suite is no more – and the percussion store is now unrecognisable as the Iain and Pamela Sinclair Control Room, a state-of-the-art recording and mixing facility that is the technical hub of the orchestra’s successful, bold and expanding venture into film and digital arts.

Named for the legacy left to the RSNO which part-funded it, the room is home to a 96-channel desk, a full wall of monitor screens offering images of the orchestra’s performance rehearsal and space (the so-called “New Auditorium”) and the film being sound-tracked, and multiple monitor speakers that relay the score being created in surround-sound. The room is “double-height”, taking up two floors of the backstage building, meaning the control room is a very rare beast indeed, certainly in Europe.

That is crucial for the work the RSNO is now doing for film, television and video games, almost all of it coming to the UK from the USA (taking advantage of tax-breaks), and increasing the earnings of RSNO staff players, guests from other orchestras and the pool of freelancers the Scottish music scene sustains and on whom it depends.

Making all this happen is a new company, Scottish Digital Arts, which describes itself as a contractor for the RSNO, and operates entirely in the commercial field, beyond the vagaries and uncertainties of arts funding. Long-standing RSNO orchestra manager Ewen McKay and Paul Talkington, whom chief executive Alistair Mackie knew as a well-connected liaison man in the film music field from his trumpet-playing days in London, are directors of the new company, and it is bringing a continuous flow of work to Scotland’s Studio, as the RSNO is justifiably proud to call the installation.

Last week I was invited to witness an afternoon session at the studio, sitting at the back of the control room and then donning headphones behind the musicians under conductor Allan Wilson, another ex-trumpeter, who has forty years’ experience on the podium for films and games.

A brief September heatwave was happening outside, but the air-conditioning issue would have been exercising Alistair Mackie anyway. Servicing the state-of-the-art technology that has been installed in the new control room with cool air is a Heath Robinson set-up that was fitted in days at a cost of around £10,000. Mackie ordered the quick fix to protect the new equipment when it became clear that the RSNO’s landlord, the City Council’s arms-length culture and sport body Glasgow Life, was unable to urgently upgrade the existing ventilation of the internal room and was looking at an eye-watering contractor’s bill for the work ten times that figure.

Alistair Mackie

It is hard not to see that as sadly typical. While the control room bears the name of an RSNO benefactor, the space where the music is made – acoustically far superior to the concert hall next door – is still identified as the “new” auditorium while Glasgow Life waits for a sponsor’s name to grace it, seeking such support with no conspicuous application.

By contrast, Scottish Digital Arts must surely be in the running for some sort of business start-up success award. Although the actors’ strike in Hollywood created a hiatus in film production, the list of work that has passed through Scotland’s Studio is already highly impressive. That includes music for the Ubisoft games Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Star Wars: Outlaws and film music for MGM, Lionsgate, Sony, Paramount, Apple and Netflix. Kevin Costner, Denzel Washington and Jennifer Lopez, and composers Terence Blanchard and Lorne Balfe are names gracing recent films with RSNO soundtracks.

Sometimes the filmmakers send over a team to work in Glasgow – with all the economic benefits that brings to the city – but as often the composer, director and producers join the process remotely, watching and hearing the music take form in exactly the same way as the engineers in the control room.

That was the case for the recording I witnessed, of music by Tim Williams of a new version of the Nativity story called Mary, with Israeli actress Noa Cohen in the title role and Anthony Hopkins as Herod. Filming in Morocco finished at the start of April, and the completion of the soundtrack is one of the last elements of post-production of a project expected to go out on a well-known streaming service before Christmas.

Even with all the latest digital technology, recording music is a painstaking, meticulous process, but the professionalism of the Scottish musicians means that it can promise around seven minutes of orchestral score from a three-hour session, which is a rate of production as good as anywhere in the world. Bar by bar, the RSNO strings – supplemented by familiar faces from the SCO and Scottish Ensemble – laid down the score, with Williams giving instruction to the conductor and the engineers from California.

It was, by happy coincidence, the central event of the birth of Jesus in the stable acquiring its music as I watched. The composer’s requests were very specific, tweaking the dynamics of expression in the printed score he had delivered, and adding some bass notes where he felt he hadn’t quite achieved the effect he’d hoped.

Annotating the sheet-music in front of them as they go, the players responded with speed and precision. Williams was clearly delighted with the results: “You can’t beat that performance,” he enthused.

It is a multilayered exercise, with low strings and first violins often occupying separate tracks, and solos added on top. The RSNO’s principal cello Pei-Jee Ng had a few bars of solo overdub that amounted to half a minute of music, for which he offered subtle variations in expression before the composer and he were satisfied. In fact it was the cellist himself who insisted on a fifth take, the result earning praise from across the Pond as well as the stomping approval of his colleagues.

Escorted by studio manager Hedd Morfett-Jones into the back of the studio floor, one-ear headphones allowed me to hear the process from the musicians’ perspective. This is a very different job from playing a concert, the left ear having the time-keeping click-track, what is being recorded, plus some elements of the other sounds on the film (but not the dialogue), while the right is open to the sound in the room, of your own instrument and the instructions from the conductor.

With ten minutes of the session to go, Williams was anxious to get a couple of “passes” in the can, but there was no let-up in his specific wishes, asking the players to “lean in” to the accents in one passage, keep another section “warm and light” and another “as magical and wondrous as possible.”

This is musical multi-tasking at a high level, but it is well worth the players honing these skills. The work they are doing for films and games is beyond their RSNO contracts of 24 hours a week and a six-hour day. Mackie says there was no point in trying to renegotiate the musicians’ terms to eke out a few extra hours, such was the ambition for Scotland’s Studio and Scottish Digital Arts. So although this growing element of the RSNO’s work is bringing money to the orchestra via its new commercial offshoot, the lion’s share of it is going directly to the players.

Of course that has concomitant benefits for the orchestra, the audience and the cultural life of the nation. From being among the lowest paid of UK orchestral musicians, a back desk RSNO string player prepared to put in the extra hours on soundtrack work can be instead among the best remunerated. The orchestra can offer a very enticing package to new recruits, the quality of the ensemble is maintained and enhanced, and concertgoers hear the music they love and buy tickets for every week played as well as anywhere in the world.

A virtuous circle ensures that Scotland’s national orchestra has a global reputation that keeps Hollywood and Silicon Glen knocking on the door. From the viewpoint of a classical music aficionado in Scotland, the RSNO’s investment in tapping into that market is surely a very sound bet in the vexed, adversarial and sometimes plain toxic climate of arts funding in the 21st century.

The RSNO season opens with Mahler’s Second Symphony under the baton of Music Director Thomas Sondergard on Friday October 4 at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall and Saturday October 5 in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.

Soprano’s Folk music

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Claire Booth talks to Keith Bruce about the Helen Grime premiere she is giving with the BBC SSO this week and her brace of recordings to mark Schoenberg 150.

Predictably, the BBC SSO is selling its season-opener under the baton of Chief Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth (Thursday at Glasgow City Halls, repeated Friday at Aberdeen Music Hall) on the second half’s performance of Mahler 5 with its cheery Death in Venice Adagietto, one of classical music’s cross-over bankables.

Before audiences indulge in that familiar wallow, however, there is a rather special first half: the world premiere of a substantial new work by Helen Grime, a composer with family roots in North East Scotland and significant friendship with both the conductor and the soloist, soprano Claire Booth. It is entitled Folk, and is a four-song orchestral cycle inspired by Zoe Gilbert’s award-winning novel, and, more obliquely, the mentoring of the late composer and conductor Oliver Knussen.

“It doesn’t say ‘commissioned by Claire Booth’ on the score but the idea came from me,” the singer explains.

“Helen and I were both very close to Oliver Knussen, as was Ryan Wigglesworth. Oli was so generous in promoting other people’s work, when he died I was conscious to try and build something in the group of musicians that he has encouraged. It felt so right to try to put something together with Helen.

“I adored Zoe Gilbert’s book Folk, which is sort of a UK version of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, with a community of characters that are both real and slightly non-human. In Zoe’s novel some of the characters have come from the sea, or have wings for arms, but they are rooted in this northern community. As soon as I read it I thought I’d love to see it brought to musical life.

“I approached Helen with the book and said I’d love us to do an orchestral piece based on it. She loved the book as well, so Zoe, Helen, her publisher and I had meetings about how we might do it and who we might collaborate with. Given Helen’s own Scottish heritage and with Ryan at the BBC Scottish it felt like the right group – and it may go to Aldeburgh next year where both Ryan and I have strong affiliations.

“The strength of the commission is not only the music but also that we are all invested in it. Although he worked very hard on his own music, what Oli Knussen loved was to curate a concert of other composers’ work. Ryan and I met him at the same time and we became friendly through that. The composers that Oli enabled included both Helen and Ryan, and we are a group of like-minded souls who look at music in the same way.”

Composer Helen Grime (portrait by Benjamin Ealovega)

The outsider was quickly brought into the fold.

“Zoe was tasked with creating a libretto from her book. There were conversations about which of the characters would create an overview of the world she created. We decided on four of the stories and Zoe distilled their essence into a first person narrative.

“The first song is a right-of-passage for the boys in the community and it is a vibrant earthy start, and then there are three female characters who have their stories. It is not poetry, but is led by the drama. That’s great for a performer, because while it is lovely to put over esoteric poetry, it is always nice to come at a work from a dramatic perspective.”

Although much distanced in years and style, there is a parallel with the concert piece that has occupied much of Booth’s attention in 2024, Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, in structure and the forces onstage.

“The Grime is a substantial work of four songs of about the same duration, but it is very different from the Strauss and definitely won’t be Helen’s four last songs! It is also a large-scale work and that’s the joy – there are more similarities than differences, I think.

“There is a breadth of repertoire that informs everything I do: they might seem contrary but to combine singing the Four Last Songs with Britten or with this new work is what music-making is all about.

“The wonderful thing about doing the Strauss is that it is such a perfect reminder of the importance of singing well. It is a great challenge to the singer, and I’m thrilled that my voice has developed to the point where I can approach that piece and know I can give a strong account of it. Far from it feeling like an insurmountable Everest, it is so beautifully written that it allows you to really sing these huge sweeping melismatic lines.”

The other composer that has commanded the soprano’s attention this year is Arnold Schoenberg.

“Schoenberg 150th birthday has been an opportunity to highlight his work but I’ve sung Schoenberg almost as much as I’ve sung Birtwistle. He’s one of the composers that have accompanied me throughout my career and particularly his Pierrot Lunaire, which was why I was delighted to work on that and bring something out this year.

“I think I’m the first British artist to record it since Jane Manning’s very special recording in the 1980s and if I can do one tenth of what she did in terms of advocation of new music I’ll be delighted.

“I’ve done many performances of Pierrot Lunaire in my time, starting with working with Pierre Boulez and including working with Jane, so I feel confident in what I bring to the work.

“People rightly say there are different ways of approaching it, but there are notes on the page and there are performers who don’t sing them. We wouldn’t think of doing that with other repertoire – there should be an ease and a fluidity to Sprechgesang, but it is not ‘free’. Schoenberg complained that he never heard an accurate performance, so it mattered to him.

“The vocal line is absolutely part of the instrumental sound-world. The chord and harmonic structures have to be accurate. Then you can have all the fun you want with the characterisation, as you might do with a role like the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro.

“Ensemble 360 and I were working together towards a live show and we cohered immediately so decided to get more out it, contextualising the piece with other composers’ responses to that Pierrot figure. Instead of presenting it with another work of Second Viennese School brilliance, our disc comes with a smorgasbord of Schumann, Amy Beach, Thea Musgrave, Kowalski and Debussy.

Her other Schoenberg project continued her partnership with pianist Christopher Glynn.

“The lieder disc that I’ve done with Chris Glynn is the fourth in a series of retrospectives of composers whose vocal music is probably not the most important part of their output. We started with Percy Grainger, then Edvard Grieg, pairing his piano music with the songs, then Modest Mussorgsky, whose operas seem male-focused but whose songs often have female protagonists.

“Schoenberg would have been an obvious next step, even had it not been his anniversary. We don’t really know his lieder, and audiences and promoters alike can dismiss Schoenberg as solely somebody who wrote in a complex atonal style that they have decided is ‘difficult’.

“I believe audiences wouldn’t think it difficult because of all the other stuff we now listen to, and our disc has dirty cabaret songs, religion-inspired stuff, folk songs and highbrow art songs. The guy had such breadth, purely in his vocal writing, and there was so much we didn’t have space and time to include.

“When you think how much of the film and pop music we know could not have been written without having an understanding of atonality, there are too many promoters that don’t give audiences the opportunity to hear Schoenberg’s music. I hope this will encourage young singers to learn his songs.”

All of which has perhaps meant that Booth has been seen less on the opera stage than some of her fans might like. She was an acclaimed Rosina in the first revival of Scottish Opera’s Tom Allen-directed Barber of Seville in 2011 and has sung both soprano roles in the well-travelled Harry Fehr staging of Handel’s Orlando, first seen at the Glasgow’s Theatre Royal earlier the same year.

“Some artists spend their entire career in the opera house, and that has never been my life. I can’t complain that I’ve spent less time on the opera stage in the last few years when the three-operas-a-year that other singers will do is not for me. I wouldn’t have the breadth of projects I enjoy if I had worked in that way.

“I am so excited about collaborating on my own projects that sometimes taking a large portion of time to do an opera can be hard to make work. I haven’t taken an active step back, it’s just the way my career has gone.

“I’d love to do Shostakovich and more Janacek, and a few more Handel roles. It’s characters that attract me, like Lady Macbeth of Mstensk, and Jenufa is my desert island choice, but I’m not sure anyone is going to cast me in that so I’ll just sing it in the bathroom.”

Claire Booth sings Helen Grimes with the BBC SSO on Thursday in Glasgow and Friday in Aberdeen. Expressionist Music, with pianist Christopher Glynn, is on Orchid Classics and Portraits of Pierrot, with Ensemble 360, is on Onyx Classics.

Singing at St Mary’s

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The Edinburgh music school’s Head of Voice, Kate Aitken, tells Keith Bruce about her new vocal programmes

There was a well-placed advertisement in the programme for last week’s concerts by the RSNO in Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow, which featured Patrick Barrett’s impressive RSNO Youth Chorus singing the Scottish premiere of James Burton’s The Lost Words and adding their voices to Mendelssohn’s Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Proud parents who wish to encourage their singing offspring may well have been tempted to scan the QR code in the advert for St Mary’s Music School’s new voice training programmes for teenagers, starting in the new school year. It is an important step for the Edinburgh school that has been the foundation of an international career for many a classical instrumentalist.

Leading the new direction at St Mary’s is Kate Aitken, the Edinburgh-born mezzo who went to Lyon Opera after training at the Royal Academy in London. Having joined the school as Music Department Manager, she has been appointed Head of Voice and is overseeing the two new programmes for 13 to 15 year olds and for senior pupils between the ages of 15 and 19.

“When I joined the school in 2022 we had singing lessons – we have Margaret Aronson here, who is a legend in Scottish singing – but there was no specialist language provision or special performance classes,” she explains. “At the end of my first year it was clear that, although the singers were singing well, there was no time in the week to teach languages, performance and technique.”

Aitken looked back over her own experience, coming to the opera world through music theatre, and was determined to give the younger generation a grounding in the skills she hadn’t had the opportunity to learn.

“Fabulous singing lessons don’t necessarily make fabulous singers, because they don’t prepare you for going on to a conservatoire. I spent the first years of my undergraduate studies trying to work out how you take criticism in public without it destroying your confidence.

“My English counterparts had constantly been singing in front of other people, doing lots of masterclasses and performance classes. By comparison my singing lessons with one person in one room were very safe. There is such an advantage in feeling confident that you have all the skills, and what we weren’t offering here was the full package for a young singer, so that’s what we’re building.”

“Building” is the operative word, because necessarily Aitken’s initiatives are starting small. With the collapse of plans to relocate to the Old Royal High School on Calton Hill, St Mary’s is now looking to develop more space on its current site in the West End, and a new teaching strand also requires specialist staff resources.

“The vocal department will have two parts initially. The changing voices programme, aimed at pupils in S3 and S4, 13 to 15 years old, is all about your confidence in using your voice. Girls’ voices break too, although in a much smaller and less obvious way than boys’.

“Most young people’s early singing experience is a choral one, and what we’re doing here is starting them solo singing. It’s not about blending in with your peers, it’s about how you operate your own instrument efficiently.

“For young boys it is about keeping going through the break – we have a new teacher, Alexandra Wynne, who has worked at Birmingham Conservatoire and set up choirs in the Midlands, who specialises in that niche area of vocal development.”

Aitken herself will take charge of the senior programme in its first years, although she aspires to bring in acting and movement teachers and native-speaker language coaches in the future.

“The upper end of the vocal programme is aimed at S5 and S6 and all about prepping you for the next stage – either going down the conservatoire route and going off to university with voice as your first study. The older students will learn acting, movement and stage-craft and once a year they’ll do a programme of scenes from opera and musical theatre.

“Both programmes will have language classes – Italian, French and German – and specialist performance classes talking about how you perform as a vocalist, because that’s very different from how you perform as a violinist or as a pianist – how you interact with the audience is a very different skill.

“Singing is a universal ability, but there is a lack of wider understanding of what is required of a classical singer. It’s not just raw talent but you have to train to have the technique, just like an instrumentalist, and work on your performance skill.

“The rubbish part about being a singer is that you have to accept that some people will like your voice and some won’t, and there’s nothing you can do to change that. A violinist can change the fiddle, the strings or the bow to change their sound. A singer doesn’t have that, but every young singer can make the best of the instrument they’ve got.”

From the point of view of the St Mary’s Cathedral choristers, whose latest Delphian recording, of Stainer’s The Crucifixion, is released this month, the associated school will now offer a vocal pathway that, perhaps surprisingly, has never previously existed.

“At the moment our choristers finish at S2, either auditioning as instrumentalists or going off to schools across Edinburgh. Now they will be able to stay at the school with voice as a first study,” says Aitken. “The changing voices will have a choir, which will itself change all the time as their voice type changes, and will use music that is adaptable for that. They’ll be singing one to a part, so that although it is an ensemble, it is not a choral activity but working as a soloist within an ensemble.”

As that distinction suggests, only a select number of pupils will be part of this new initiative, but then St Mary’s is a small school of fewer than 80 pupils.

“This September I’d like to see three singers on the changing voices programme and four on the senior vocal programme, and then take on a few more in the subsequent years to reach a maximum of 12,” says Aitken. “That way we can make sure that every child gets an intensive one-on-one education. For the senior end of the school, a group of six is good for opera repertoire and allows us to be selective about who comes on the programme – it is very much for those who are driven and desperate to sing.

“What makes St Mary’s special is how flexible and adaptive we are to each student. If you are a trombonist who wants to play the sackbut, we’ll find you someone who will teach you that, so that we build a course that is what you want to learn. That’s what makes this place unique within the Scottish education system.

“It is lovely to build something that I wish that I’d had at that age, and to have such a supportive team.”

Full details at www.stmarysmusicschool.co.uk/vocalprogramme and to sign up for a “Taster Day” on May 5.

The Wallace Succession

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As he steps down as chairman of The Glasgow Barons, retirement is still a no-no for John Wallace, he tells KEN WALTON. He’s even been writing operas about Nicola Sturgeon and Joe Biden.

It’s ten years since John Wallace retired as the pugnacious principal of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Far from sailing off into the sunset, and now fast approaching his 75th birthday, the tireless Fifer – best known for his starring trumpet solo alongside Dame Kiri Te Kanawa in Handel’s Let the Bright Seraphim at the 1981 Royal Wedding – is busier than ever. “I suppose I’ve semi-retired,” he concedes. “I now watch things like Death in Paradise on telly.”

Mostly, though, he’s doing the things he enjoys doing when he wants to. Given the extent of that – chairing arts bodies and think tanks, running and performing in his longstanding brass ensemble The Wallace Collection, composing operas, masterminding school educational programmes in Fife through St Andrews University where he holds an honorary professorship – this is what most of us would consider full-time employment.

This week, he steps down after seven years as chair of Glasgow Barons, the groundbreaking music-based regeneration programme in Govan founded and run by another tireless Scot, conductor Paul MacAlindin, the centrepiece of which is the project’s eponymous orchestra. 

“Paul is a genius at getting things going among locals in this former shipbuilding town,” he says. “For a start he actually lives there, so understands the problems first hand. Besides the orchestra, which has done so much for new music and Scottish composers, the project has its own choir and goes into schools with its Baby Strings and Baby Brass programmes. Its Musicians in Exile initiative has been phenomenally successful in giving asylum seekers a sense of integration and belonging.”

On Thursday, Wallace himself will direct his farewell concert, which reflects the very essence of the Barons’ successes. It features The Wallace Collection alongside Govan’s century-old Cooperation Band in Govan Linthouse Parish Church. Included is a performance of Jay Capperauld’s As Above So Below, written for the 2017 Cumnock Tryst Festival where it was premiered by The Wallace Collection and Ayrshire’s famous Dalmellington Band. 

“The balconies in Govan are perfect for the spatial element of this piece”, says Wallace, as they will also be for Derek Bourgeois’ Concerto for Brass Quintet and Brass Band, and Wallace’s full band arrangement of Giovanni Gabrieli’s polychoral Sonata No 20. 

He’s quick to stress that far from being the end of an era, there’s an element of transition attached to his departure. One of his Wallace Collection colleagues, fellow trumpeter Bede Willliams, is to take on the vacant chair. “Like all New Zealanders, he’s very get up and go. He has a lively interest in new music and in the social benefits music can have equally for younger and older people.” Williams is also head of instrumental studies at St Andrews University.

Nor is Wallace leaving to free up time for himself. “I’ve done seven years with Govan. It needs fresh energy. Rather than do another seven I felt it was time to cast around for younger blood.” Inevitably our conversation turns to certain American politicians who refuse to give way to younger blood. “Which brings us neatly to my operas,” chortles Wallace.

He’s keen to talk about a trilogy of short operas, the last of which – So Much Hot Air…… – features a certain Joe Biden, its title taken from actual words spoken by the US President at COP26 in Glasgow. The characters also include Boris Johnson and Greta Thunberg. “Boris’s words are all his, and for Biden I’ve scored in a tenor banjo to colour his music. Greta’s the only one who talks any sense so she’s surrounded by a combination of alto flute and harp.”

As for the earlier two operas, the first, Opsnizing Dad, deals with dementia and how healthcare might look by the end of this century. “My daughter-in-law had written this short story about dementia which won a prize. I thought it would be brilliant to set it to music, full of aphorisms and really concise.” The second, They Two Fush, is altogether more satirical, dealing with the recent infamous contretemps between Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond. “It’s a rather lurid comedy set in Nicola’s living room.”

Wallace has begun a recording process with Opsnizing Dad already committed to disc on his own label, complete with two preview tracks from They Two Fish – an “independence Tango” and the closing number, “Time for a cup of Tea”. Central to his preferred casting is Scots tenor and broadcaster Jamie McDougall. “I’d always imagined these operas as small things that would suit [Glasgow’s] Òran Mór or television, and with Jamie in my mind’s eye,” Wallace explains. “He’s such a fantastic character actor.  For the COP 26 opera, McDougall is perfect for the Boris role.”

It doesn’t bother him much that live performances are proving slow to materialise. Opsnizing Dad did receive one in St Andrews, and was even nominated in 2021 for an Ivor Novello Award. “I didn’t mind being beaten in the end by Thomas Ades, who couldn’t attend the ceremony because he was conducting his own opera that night at La Scala Milan. Such is the calibre of that particular pool, Ades in his great big ocean, me in my dub in Langside.”

And that’s the thing with Wallace, whose modesty comes with good humour. “I just get on with things, and once they’re done they’re past, and it’s time to get on with something else,” he chuckles. 

Which rather undersells his lifelong contribution to British music: the ambitious Fife kid who made it to King’s College Cambridge from Buckhaven High School; the trumpeter whose stellar orchestral career spanned principalships with the LSO, Philharmonia and London Sinfonietta; whose solo career saw him premiere trumpet concertos by Arnold, Maxwell Davies, MacMillan and Muldowney; whose leadership of the RCS led on to his influential spearheading of the Music Education Partnership Group, which continues to influence political support for music tuition in schools; who late in life has returned to composition – including the completion and recording of a monumental Symphony for Brass Band he began as a student – and is just as content working with school children in Fife as performing with The Wallace Collection on the world’s stage. 

Will he ever fully retire? “I don’t think so,” he muses. “I’m like a musical lollipop man now, trying to guide kids repeatedly across the same crossing. Them getting so much joy from their music gives me satisfaction. Unless I’m happy in myself, I’m never happy. Right now, I’m happy!”

John Wallace’s Glasgow Barons’ Farewell Concert featuring the Wallace Collection and Cooperation Band is at Govan Linthouse Parish Church on Thu 29 Feb 7.30pm. Full details at www.glasgowbarons.com 

For information on CDs by The Wallace Collection, including the opera Opsnizing Dad, go to www.thewallacecollectionshop.world

Taking the long view

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As the Scottish Chamber Orchestra celebrates its 50th birthday, long-serving viola player Steve King looks back – and forward – with Keith Bruce

It is one of the mysteries of music that orchestras – in Prague and Vienna, but also in Edinburgh and Glasgow – have an identifiable sound that survives changes of personnel over the decades. It is usually assumed that curatorship of that individuality is in the hands of the players that have been there longest while conductors, even those retained on contract, come and go.

As the SCO marks the golden anniversary of its first concerts with a 50th birthday programme, Steve King has just celebrated occupying the viola number four chair for 40 of those years. Not that he is one for looking back wistfully to earlier eras.

“I love the SCO now more than I’ve ever done,” he says. “It’s a brilliant orchestra. When we have extra players they always comment on how friendly it is and how passionate everyone is about making music. With our principal conductor at the moment, Maxim [Emelyanychev], it is a real joy.”

“He’s an amazing playing musician as well as a conductor, and he never stops. Some conductors are quite precious (mentioning no names) but Maxim is just fun. He rehearses in such a way that we really understand what he is looking for, although he is always searching and never content. And that’s the way it should be, I think.

“And of course, as he develops – because he’s still very young – it becomes more interesting. Come the concert he may do things differently but because we’re so with him, it works. It’s exciting and good for the music.

“He’s doing stuff that challenges what a chamber orchestra can do. He appreciates flexibility and openness to change. I’ve seen quite a few principal conductors and hundreds of conductors over my 40 years and he’s definitely the best.”

Now that’s clear, it is possible to persuade King to reminisce a little, and two conductors of earlier in the SCO’s history rate a special mention.

“The Finnish conductor Jukka Pekka Saraste became Principal Conductor not long after I joined, and he was great. He is exactly the same age as me and we got on very well. We did a lot of good touring and recording with him.

“And my idol for many years was Charles Mackerras. We made recordings of the Mozart operas with him and then did concert performances at the Edinburgh Festival. At the beginning of a two-and-a-half week recording project he would spend  ten minutes enthusing about the piece and the original score he’d studied in Prague. He had a tough reputation but he trusted the musicians. I was so lucky to be part of all of that.”

King is from Hertfordshire and, along with his brother, who became a jazz trumpet player, first studied music on Saturday mornings at the Royal Academy in London as a teenager. When he left school he went to the Royal Northern College of Music and, although he was offered postgraduate studies and work with the Manchester Camerata, then elected to stretch his wings with a job in Reykjavik in the Iceland Symphony Orchestra.

Returning to the UK, he was a schoolteacher for a couple of years before applying and winning the job with the SCO. The chamber orchestra has always been a freelance band, however, and like many of his colleagues King has had other work alongside. He led the Quartz string quartet, which grew out of the SCO’s education work and also included Bernard Doherty, once co-leader of the BBC SSO, SCO violinist Lorna McLaren, who also clocked up 40 years before retiring in 2018, and the late Kevin McCrae, composer and SCO principal cello.

And for 24 and half years, King was Director of Music at Edinburgh’s Heriot Watt University – encouraging and developing music-making among students and staff at an institution that does not offer music as a course of study. He stood down from that post at the end of 2022 having overseen a response to the pandemic that kept an audience of two and half thousand people online engaged with one another through sharing their “musical moments”.

If that concluded his tenure at the university, he is as proud of the project with which it began, a contemporary music commissioning initiative that produced 60 pieces, from Scotland-based composers and through a competition for unpublished composers working in Scotland. The common inspiration for them all was the Inchcolm Antiphoner, a few pages of early Celtic plainchant from the abbey on the island in the Forth that King can see from his home in Dalgety Bay.

The compositions were workshopped at residential gatherings in Highland Scotland before being performed at Iona Abbey and St Giles Cathedral. That all seems to chime with the Englishman’s enthusiasm for his adopted home – as well as his Fife home, King has a long lease on a bolt-hole on Loch Shiel.

“The cottage is half way down the loch, on the water’s edge, only accessible by boat and completely off-grid. We go there for about 12 weeks of the year: it is a good place to chill, cook and write music. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea but I like the challenge of living there, and the wildlife is amazing.”

Now 67, his quartet and university post may be in the past, but King still conducts the Dunblane Chamber Orchestra, which convenes twice a year for concerts, and he has no plans to leave the SCO.

“I’m loving the SCO too much to think about retiring. If I felt that my playing started to drop a bit, I would drop out, but we’ve had members play well into their 70s. There are only four of us in the violas, so you can’t ride along, you have to be on the ball all the time.”

It is not just the prospect of more concerts with Emelyanychev that keeps him enthused.

“Our current Associate Composer, Jay Capperauld, is one of the best we’ve ever had in that post. He stands out as being exciting, and he communicates well, and it’s good to see him grow. And violinist Pekka Kuusisto is one of those guys who sees music from a different angle. We see him every year and it is something everyone looks forward to.

“I’ve seen a huge amount of change in the orchestra but some of the young players coming in these days are just stunning. We are currently looking for a number two viola and from the five or six we’ve had on trial it is going to be really difficult to choose.”

The SCO’s 50th birthday concerts are at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh on Thursday and Glasgow’s City Halls on Friday. Maxim Emelyanychev conducts Elena Langer’s suite from her opera Figaro Gets a Divorce and Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony and plays Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos alongside Dmitry Ablogin.

Picture by Christopher Bowen

Two Night Stand

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Matthew Whiteside talks to Keith Bruce about the festival of new music that has sprung from his concert season The Night With . . .

With dismal news recently about long-established events south of the border in Dartington and Cheltenham, this might not seem the most auspicious time to be launching a classical music festival, but Glasgow-domiciled Irish composer Matthew Whiteside is not a man to be looking over his shoulder at events elsewhere.

Since he arrived in the city to do a masters degree at the Royal Conservatoire, Whiteside has been an entrepreneurial force for new music in and beyond Scotland, his undergraduate student concert promotions at Queen’s in Belfast blossoming into a concert season visiting a touring circuit of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Belfast under the banner “The Night With . . .”

Next month, The Night With . . . becomes a two-day festival in Glasgow’s newest post-industrial venue, The Engine Works in Maryhill. On Thursday and Friday December 14 and 15, the two spaces on the site will have a rolling programme of 15 performances featuring five new commissions among a total of 12 world premieres.

There are in the line-up composers and performers that will be familiar to fans of The Night With . . . season concerts, but in the festival they sit alongside work by more established names both from home and abroad, Caroline Shaw, Alvin Lucier, Kaija Saariaho and Terry Riley on a list that also includes Helen Grime, Stuart MacRae, David Fennessy, Janet Beat and Claire McCue.

In part that is down to the involvement of the Hebrides Ensemble, whose Thursday concert opens the programme in the venue’s larger space.

“The Hebrides is an ensemble I’ve wanted to work with for a while,” says Whiteside, “but because of the venues I’ve used, an acoustic piano is not usually something I can programme and that’s one of their core instruments. For the festival I’m hiring a piano, so we can do that repertoire and we’ve commissioned a piece from Rylan Gleave for them to play.”

Paul McAlinden’s Govan-based Glasgow Barons are also bringing a chamber group to the party and their programme includes work by another Scotland-based Northern Irishman, Gareth Williams, as well as William Sweeney’s 1989 Sharakan for quintet and electronics.

The other large ensemble taking part is United Strings of Europe. Their Thursday night concert includes a new work written by Whiteside, teaming the strings with soprano Emily Thorner.

“United Strings of Europe is a scale of ensemble [13 players] that we couldn’t have toured with The Night With . . .,” say the composer. “Their leader and artistic director, Julian Azkoul, is first violin on my album, Entangled, and I’ve made them an arrangement of my Sixth Quartet.”

As well as Whiteside’s new work, United Strings of Europe will be playing Claude Vivier’s Zipangu and Henryk Gorecki’s Three Pieces in the Old Style at Whiteside’s instigation. “That’s a pairing that has been in my head for about 15 years,” he says.

Thorner has her own programme on the Friday, opening with a Berio Sequenza and including works composed specially for her.

Viola virtuoso and established The Night With . . . associate Garth Knox opens the event on Thursday afternoon, and he appears again on Friday in an ensemble that also includes Xania Pestova Bennett on Magnetic Resonator Piano. Her presence over the two days begins with a recital featuring two works for the instrument submitted to a call for scores from The Night With . . ., by Ollie Hawker and Rebecca Galian Costello.

“The Magnetic Resonator Piano is essentially 88 guitar e-bows that resonate all the strings of the instrument,” explains Whiteside, “so you can crescendo the piano from nothing, and have infinite sustain. It is like a crossover between a digital synth and a piano, and does things a piano shouldn’t do. It’s utterly stunning!”

As he has done with his season concerts, Whiteside will be recording everything at the festival, and a live album should appear in the Spring. Completing the synergy, one of the Friday concerts, by Ensemble 1604 and show-casing composer Timothy Cooper, is a live iteration of an upcoming studio release on TNW Records.

This side of Whiteside’s practice, as a passionate spokesperson for fairer treatment of musicians by streaming companies, as well as a self-made expert on techniques and pitfalls of selling your own music, will shortly arrive in book form.

“During the pandemic I started lecturing and giving webinars about how to self-release your music,” says Whiteside. “It’s not talked about in the classical world at all, although universities and tertiary education institutions are getting better at introducing their students to the business of music.”

“The webinars were selling out and people were really enthusiastic about the information I was giving them. There was a clear demand for more resources, like a book.

“It’s basically sharing my own experience and knowledge of releasing music. It goes into rights and registration, and distribution, but also recording sessions and the psychology of talking to performers, how to mark up a score, cover art, and the business of branding.”

If that seems like a packed 180 pages or so – and available for Christmas, the composer hopes – it is backed up by links to more information on his website. And that is not the end of Whiteside’s current entrepreneurial agenda.

“One of my other hats is as an agent for contemporary classical and avant-garde music, placing music with film and TV producers.

“I’ve gone to Los Angeles twice and had meetings with teams at Disney, Universal and Sony to tell them: ‘I’ve got all this weird stuff; the next time you’re doing a film like Shutter Island, come to me.’ It’s a long game but I’m building those relationships and that’s another side of where I’m going with TNW record label. Synchronisation could generate income in tens of thousands of dollars for composers.”

As well as taking an agent’s percentage, Whiteside is himself one of those composers and he sees none of his other work as separate from that essential self-description.

“It is not a distraction from composition, because I see it as being all part of the same thing. I write the music that I want to write, and I take any opportunities to sell it on. I just can’t be arsed waiting for gatekeepers!”

The Night With . . . festival is at Glasgow’s Engine Works on December 14 & 15.

https://thenightwith.com

Pictures: Soprano Emily Thorner and violist Garth Knox

A Canadian in Paris

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The latest Rosina in Scottish Opera’s popular Barber of Seville has been winning hearts at every performance. Simone McIntosh talks to Keith Bruce.

Scottish Opera’s revival of Sir Thomas Allen’s debut production for the company – beginning what has proved a fruitful relationship with the veteran baritone-turned-director – has won unanimous plaudits.

Revisiting his staging of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville for the second time, Allen has honed the comedic detail to perfection, with a dazzling repertoire of sight gags involving everyone on stage, and perfectly-timed delivery of the witty translation by Amanda Holden. The casting is as strong as has become almost commonplace from the company, and particular praise has been heaped upon the vivacious Rosina of Canadian mezzo Simone McIntosh.

Elsewhere on VoxCarnyx you can read Ken Walton’s review of the opening show. “She commands every scene she inhabits,” he wrote, commending “a vocal performance capable of assimilating virtuosic agility with lyrical enchantment.” Opera magazine’s Andrew Clark described her as “a classy, confident comedienne with a strong top voice, a rich lower register and an evenness in between.”

In the gap between the opening run at Glasgow’s Theatre Royal and the ongoing performances at the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh, McIntosh and her Quebecois partner were moving home, from Zurich, where she was a member of the Opernhaus Zurich Studio until earlier this year, to Paris. She still found a few minutes to tell VoxCarnyx about her career so far.

Although her biography describes her as Swiss-Canadian and she has both passports, McIntosh says she is “fully culturally Canadian.”

“I’m from Vancouver, which is a really beautiful city surrounded by lots of lovely scenery – although I didn’t realise that until I moved away! As a child I was keen on sport, but when I was ten my parents put me in choir and Saturday practice was what brought me the most joy. Near the end of high school I realised that I really liked singing and I really liked acting, but I didn’t really know what I wanted to do.

“I liked both jazz and classical, and while music theatre was on the table, it wasn’t something that I was really drawn to. Opera, which combined singing and acting, seemed like a good path at university.

“I did my undergrad in Vancouver and then auditioned for several places. McGill in Montreal was the only one that accepted me, but for me it was a perfect fit.”

In particular that meant finding the teacher with whom she still studies, and to whom she turns for advice on everything from repertoire to dealing with hay-fever.

“I found a lot of my artistic expression through the teachers that were there, but I also found the teacher that I go back to frequently, Dominique Labelle. She has had a full career herself with European tours and has faced all the challenges singers have to deal with on a day-to-day basis, so I am in touch with her regularly for practical advice.”

From McGill, McIntosh went to the Canadian Opera Company Ensemble Studio for a year and a half before a summer school led to a place on San Francisco Opera’s Adler Fellowship programme. That was a fortuitous place for a young singer to find herself during the Covid pandemic, when work for singers was hard to find.

“It was atypical, but because of Covid I was there for three years. After that I went to the Zurich Opera Studio, which was an opportunity to understand the Swiss side of me.”

But what of the Scottish side of the Swiss-Canadian? That surname certainly suggests Scots heritage.

The mezzo says her family has to go back eight generations to find someone who emigrated from Scotland to Canada, but that hasn’t stopped them taking pride in their roots.

“My grandfather was very proudly Scottish. He wore the kilt and loved bagpipe music, and honoured and cherished that part of his background. I know the family came from around Inverness so when we tour there, my aunt is coming over from Canada and she and I plan to do a clan tour.”

As well as her succession of studio placements with opera houses as a young artist, competitions have played an important role in McIntosh’s early career. It was the Concours de Montreal, where Thomas Allen was a judge, and which she won, that led to her being recommended to Scottish Opera. She was also a finalist for the Song Prize at the most recent BBC Cardiff Singer of the World, where she represented Canada.

“Throughout my life I’ve had these goals that are important, whether I hit them or not. The Montreal competition had been one of my goals since I learned what it was. It was a dream experience.

“Cardiff Singer of the World was a little more intense. I enjoyed the competition and the organisation of it – they were really lovely people – but the extra bit of pressure gave me a lot more nerves than in my home country.”

Nonetheless, McIntosh exudes the confidence of someone who knows where she is going. Guarded about her personal life, she is clear about her professional direction. As Allen told VoxCarnyx before Barber opened, after she was cast as Rosina, she expressed misgivings about the decision to switch to English for this revival.

“I could see that if we did it in English it might have better results with a mostly native-English speaking cast performing in an English-speaking country. There’s an immediacy there. And it is much more fun – how it changes every night.

“But some translations seem kitschy and not as effective as the original. It was only after we had our conversation that he sent me this translation and I thought it was very effective.”

She also arrived at the voice she uses and the roles she now wants after a journey that involved making decisions.

“I was a soprano at one point, but I really liked doing mezzo stuff and for a number of years I was in between and I didn’t know what to call myself. I had the option of training as a soprano or training as a mezzo and I ended up going to the mezzo side and I’m very grateful for that.

“I have always had the range, but the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve been able to access the low. But the top has always been there.

“In terms of repertoire, my bread and butter is always Mozart, Handel, Rossini, a little bit of French music – I love Berlioz. I also quite like singing in Czech because there are a lot of consonants and it is very expressive.

“The things that I’m doing right now are good, but I’d like to be doing more bel canto roles. I’d like to do more Rossini opera seria, and the roles he wrote for Isabella Colbran. She had exactly the voice type that I have and could sing a lot of coloratura but also had that bel canto line.”

As for forsaking her homeland to be based in Europe, McIntosh has no doubts.

“In general a lot of the work is in Europe. I felt that in North America there would be a limit to how far I could go. And since I’ve been here, the artistic vision is much more aligned with what I hope to achieve. It feels like a really good fit, it’s so diverse and I really enjoy that breadth of work.”

Scottish Opera’s The Barber of Seville is currently at Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre and tours to Eden Court, Inverness (November 16 & 18) and His Majesty’s, Aberdeen (November 23 & 25).

Pictures: Simone McIntosh as Rosina by James Glossop and at BBC Cardiff Singer of the World by Kirsten McTernan

Returning to Rossini

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Sir Thomas Allen talks to Keith Bruce about the latest revival of the Scottish Opera production that launched his directorial career in the UK

The tactic failed to prevent a famously disastrous first night, but Rossini originally named The Barber of Seville after another of the characters created by Beaumarchais, Count Almaviva, to appease fans of an earlier opera version of the play.

Reflecting the role that has attracted most attention in Sir Thomas Allen’s staging, the Scottish Opera production that is revived for a second time this month might accurately be entitled Rossini’s Rosina.

Figaro the Barber had been one of the baritone’s signature roles when Allen made his directorial debut for a professional company in the UK with the production in 2007. His first Rosina was Karen Cargill, described as “sassy, spirited and stylish” by Opera magazine, proving the mezzo “as accomplished a Rossinian as she is a natural comedienne”.

When the show was revived in 2011, Claire Booth received the plaudits as the star of the cast in the same role, while praise was also heaped on Allen’s clever handling of the detail of the convoluted plot. When it opens at Glasgow’s Theatre Royal on Tuesday October 17, this year’s Rosina is Sir Tom’s own choice of Swiss-Canadian Simone McIntosh, making her company debut after representing Canada in BBC Cardiff Singer of the World.

“I saw her when I was adjudicating a big competition in Montreal, which she won,” the director told VoxCarnyx. “I made two phone calls immediately afterwards – one to my agent suggesting they sign her up, and the other to Alex Reedijk at Scottish Opera.”

Although ScotOp’s General Director secured the mezzo’s services for the revival, there was then some hesitation on her part when it was decided to use an English translation of the libretto this time round.

Allen admits that he initially shared some of her doubts about that, but he is pleased that his Rosina decided to stay on board.

“At the start of my own career, everything I did was in English,” he notes, “but singers have bigger opportunities earlier these days and are seen in a wider field. I think she thought that learning the part in English was a waste of energy, so I had to persuade her.”

It is not hard to imagine Sir Tom being effectively persuasive, as he peppers his conversation with charming anecdotes and pin-sharp impressions, although he describes his rehearsal room technique modestly.

“The beauty of it is that you take the cast that has been put together and they bring their individual skills. Then you thrash your way through it and mould it into a cohesive whole  – you hope!”

The focus on detail that audiences have appreciated in Allen’s Scottish Opera productions suggests that his approach is perhaps a little more forensic than that.

When he talks about the switch to Amanda Holden’s libretto in English, for example, it is questions of comic timing and specific pauses in the delivery of the line that he mentions. “Translations are often funny because they have a rhyming scheme of their own,” he adds.

The acting side of a singer’s life is something about which Allen is now particularly well-qualified to speak. His next job, after the Rossini has opened for its Scottish tour, is an acting role with Opera Zuid in the Netherlands, playing Leo, the titular character in a new version of Mozart’s Der Shauspieldirektor by writer, director and singer Christopher Gillett.

It follows the acclaimed Grange Festival version of King Lear, directed by Keith Warner, that employed an entire company of opera stars, with Sir John Tomlinson as Lear, Allen as Gloucester, Susan Bullock as Goneril, Louise Alder as Cordelia and Kim Begley as the Fool. (More about that can be found in the Vox Carnyx interview with composer Nigel Osborne, who wrote the music for the production.)

“I think it worked because we were free to explore a lot of new ideas for ourselves,” Allen remembers of the Lear project. “What we as singers are not accustomed to is finding the musical line in a verse of Shakespeare, because we are usually provided with that by the composer.”

“There are always comparisons made between singing and an actor’s life, but singers wake up every day worrying about their voice. And you do that without realising the pressure for – speaking personally – 50 years, so it’s great when you stop and discover there is another way of living.”

Of course that is only partly true, because although Allen now has other strings to his bow, he is still performing on the opera stage himself, on the eve of his 80thbirthday.

“Yes, I am still singing, much to my surprise,” he says. “I had intended finishing completely at the end of 2019 but then Glyndebourne made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

That role is Baron Zeta in Lehar’s Merry Widow, which he sang alongside Renee Fleming at the Met in New York. Next summer in Sussex he reprises the Baron in a new Cal McCrystal staging, with John Wilson in the pit and Danielle de Niese in the title role.

“I’ve never gone out of my way to seek work, and when I started I wanted to sing lieder and oratorio rather than opera. I think it was the bank manager who pointed out the discrepancy in earning potential!”

The Barber of Seville opens in Glasgow on Tuesday October 17 and tours to Edinburgh, Inverness and Aberdeen until the end of November.

Picture of Sir Thomas Allen in rehearsals for The Barber of Seville by Julie Howden

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