Category Archives: Features

Don’t Kill Tradition, Build On It

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Harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani, currently in residence at the threatened Lammermuir Festival, tells KEN WALTON why tradition is as much about looking forward as looking back

Earlier this week, a shocked Lammermuir Festival revealed that Creative Scotland, after two invited re-submissions, had turned down its funding application for the 2023 programme, currently in mid-flow, leaving the future of the East Lothian festival in doubt. The news has shocked its organisers, supporters, and not least the performers who rank among the world’s topmost stars.

One of these is Iranian-American harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani, whose week-long presence as resident artist in this year’s Festival has given him an extended insight not only into what the event means in servicing Scotland’s and East Lothian’s cultural thirst, but the crucial role it plays in promoting new musical talent within a high stakes environment.

He had this to say in response to Creative Scotland’s latest act of evisceration: “At a place like Lammermuir, we are really talking about more than a series of concerts. We’re sharing as wide a range of music as can be imagined with different communities in a large region of Scotland that shows remarkable enthusiasm for it and which moreover trusts the performers. 

“And we see tribute paid to established artists alongside the crucial work that needs to be done in giving opportunities and a platform to tomorrow’s stars. In this sense, Lammermuir Festival is the very model of a modern festival.”

Esfahani, himself, is the very model of a modern pioneer. More than most, he has taken an instrument more often associated with museum status – the early music movement’s predilection for archeological scrutiny of ancient repertoire, which is fundamentally valid in itself – and thrown open the doors to the harpsichord’s relevance in a modern world. 

As such he has challenged the historical connoisseurs and is as equally comfortable performing Byrd, Scarlatti or Bach (he opened this week’s Lammermuir residency with an exhaustive performance of the Well Tempered Clavier Book II, and teams up on Sunday with the SCO in Bach’s concertos) as introducing curious audiences to contemporary harpsichord music by the likes of Andriessen, Takemitsu, Jockel and Ferrari involving electronics. 

One critic described Esfahani deservedly as “a superstar whose musicianship, imagination, virtuosity, cultural breadth and charisma far transcend the ivory tower in which the harpsichord has traditionally been placed.”

He views that “ivory tower” with some scepticism, but dismisses the notion that just because he seeks new modes of expression for the instrument he is some kind of crazy maverick. “”From the time of the harpsichord’s revival at the beginning of the 20th century, contemporary music is nothing new, so I merely see myself as continuing the tradition of that instrument. 

“Every instrument should concern itself with new music, otherwise its tradition dies. I say pointedly that what called itself the Early Music Movement actually interrupted those traditions. It’s a post-modern movement that has nothing to do with tradition.” 

The bottom line for Esfahani is simply the quality of the music. “I look for a composer who demands everything from me as a performer,” he explains. “There is harpsichord music, equally from the 17th/18th centuries, which I find takes the easy way out expressively. That’s to say it doesn’t extend one’s demands of the capabilities of the instrument. Bach or Byrd, these are composers who ask you to imagine possibilities beyond the ordinary. 

A year ago, Esfahani gave the UK premiere in Edinburgh and Glasgow of Poul Ruders’ Concerto for Harpsichord, a work exploding with inventive hues and textures, ethereally enhanced by electronic amplification. “I wanted a piece that was virtuosic, that sang, that understands that the harpsichord has an infinite range of colours,” he recalls. He got what he wanted.

His contemporary programme in St Mary’s Church Haddington earlier this week involved interaction with electronics, but what of the instrument itself? If tradition demands that the music itself must challenge the status quo, is it okay to meddle with the sacred design of the actual harpsichord?

“You just have to look at the Russell and Rodger Mirrey Collection of old instruments in Edinburgh to realise how knowledgable the older builders were about acoustics, about sound,” Esfahani argues. “Yes, it’s important we take signals from them today, but at the same time these builders were practical. Take the example of the Ruders concerto, where I used a very large, very loud instrument of mine, and you said today to, say, Ruckers or one of the great 18th century instrument makers, ‘we have this thing called the Usher Hall and have to fill the sound in there – what do we do?’

“He’d say, ‘okay we could do this or that. We have this thing called plastic, this thing called carbon fibre, let’s work with that.’ We have screws, they didn’t. Do you think they’d have objected to using screws? Often times these arguments are used in a very truant way. People say, there’s the piano; Bach would have preferred it, but we don’t know that. It’s very possible he would have, but he would have written differently for it. 

“At the end of day we can engineer, though we have to be careful. We don’t want to engineer the harpsichord out of existence.”

As for his Lammermuir residency, which continues on Friday with a recital of Bach’s English Suites before Sunday’s concerto programme as soloist/director with the SCO, it’s an experience Esfahani has found immersive and satisfying.  

“Of course I love it, in a way I assume that when I play the next concert the listeners will have heard the previous one. They get to know what I’m on about, and that conversation with them changes. During Bach’s 48 last Friday, I sensed after an hour that they were in the zone, that I could manipulate them a little bit. You have to always communicate. What’s the point if you don’t?

“Last night I though at times I can push the envelope a little bit – let’s see what we can discover together in this piece. Otherwise it just becomes an exercise in virtue. In which case, why not just stay at home and look at the score?” 

That’s something Creative Scotland might well mull over as it puts the stranglehold on yet another priceless cultural gem. 

Mahan Esfahani’s Lammermuir Festival residency continues with a Coffee Concert of Bach’s English Suites on Fri 15 Sep at Holy Trinity Church in Haddington; and ends with the SCO in Bach’s Harpsichord Concertos, Sun 17 Sep at Dunbar Parish Church, Full Festival details at www.lammermuirfestival.com

Chamber music’s full spectrum

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The pianist at the heart of Lammermuir-resident ensemble, Kaleidoscope, tells KEITH BRUCE about the music festival audiences can look forward to

Tom Poster sounded remarkably relaxed when we spoke less than a fortnight ahead of the Lammermuir residency of Kaleidoscope, the chamber collective he leads with his violinist wife Elena Urioste. The couple’s summer schedule, I suggest, does look to have been non-stop.

“That’s true,” the pianist concedes. “Elena and I just got back from a month in the States. We were in Santa Barbara and Seattle, and then in Maryland where Elena has a small festival. Then we made our Proms debut with Kaleidoscope in Truro, and now we are about to go off to France for a week with the Elias String Quartet before preparing for Lammermuir.”

A glance at his website confirms the suspicion that playing chamber music with a constantly-evolving list of different ensembles and collaborative partners means learning a huge amount of different music. Poster says that, in fact, he has eased up a bit.

“One of the changes I’ve made since becoming a parent two years ago is that I am slightly more thoughtful about not overloading myself with repertoire. There’s so much music I love that I used to try to say ‘yes’ to as much as I could, but with a two-year-old it is hard to learn quite as many notes.

“But Festivals, for pianists especially, do tend to involve a large number of notes!”

Besides playing, of course, there is also the business of keeping Kaleidoscope on the road, with 10 players making up the team staying in East Lothian.

“We have a lovely administrator who works with us on a freelance basis, otherwise I think I’d go completely mad,” says Poster, “but Elena and I do end up doing an enormous amount ourselves, partly because the repertoire and the musicians involved are so intertwined.

“We have a flexible line-up, with a slightly different group of musicians for each concert, depending on repertoire or who is around and available. We are both very passionate about the art of programming, as well as the selfish pleasure of gathering together some of our favourite musicians to play in new and different combinations.

“The Lammermuir group has a lot of our regular players: Elena and myself, Rosie Ventris (viola), Laura van der Heijden (cello), Savitri Grier (violin) – all the string team for Lammermuir are very much core players. But every one we’re bringing is an integral part of the team.”

Lammermuir audiences can also look forward to core Kaleidoscope in the music that team is playing.

“We are very lucky that James Waters and Hugh Macdonald are such wonderful and generous festival directors. They gave us free rein and that enabled us to put together what I think is a trademark Kaleidoscope programme.

“There are some justly celebrated works, like the Schubert Octet, alongside a number of pieces that we really just feel deserve to be heard far more and which we are really confident that audiences will love when they hear them, even if they haven’t heard them before.”

Monday’s opening recital includes a work that Kaleidoscope can take credit for helping down that road to familiarity.

“The Coleridge-Taylor nonet is a student piece that he wrote when he was 18 at the Royal College of Music. I came across it because we are always looking for pieces that involve as many of us as possible.

“After the pandemic, when concert halls were just beginning to re-open, John Gilhooley asked us to programme a concert at Wigmore Hall. There’s not all that much for strings, winds and piano – and selfishly I wanted to be part of the recital.

“We all fell in love with it, and recorded it for Chandos on a whole Coleridge-Taylor disc last year. It has become a real signature piece. It is such an inventive work, where he is flexing his musical muscles. It has a young man’s exuberance, trying to find as many combinations of the nine instruments as possible. It has immediate appeal and always seems to go down well with audiences.”

Other works that Kaleidoscope are bringing to East Lothian are being championed by Poster’s group in the same way.

“I can’t understand why the Reynaldo Hahn Piano Quintet is a piece that is not played all over the place. Anyone who loves the chamber music of Faure will adore it – it is one of the most sumptuous pieces of chamber music I know. Singers know his songs, but his chamber music is just as wonderful.

“And the Korngold Suite is a piece that does get played occasionally but the unusual combination of instruments means it doesn’t get heard enough. It’s a piano quartet with two violins and cello, but the pianist is only using left hand because it was written for Paul Wittgenstein.

“Elena has loved the piece for years and persuaded me to practise my left hand skills! It has so many influences, from Bach to Viennese waltz, with this sort of golden shimmer. There’s this amazing slow movement that is just so touching.

“Another thing we are really excited about is the world premiere of Nicola LeFanu’s new piece which Ben Goldscheider has commissioned – a trio for horn, violin and cello. I haven’t heard that yet so I can’t talk in detail about the music, but it’s always a special thing to be bringing new music. I have seen a bit of the score and it looks immediately appealing with wonderful textures from the three instruments.”

New music is something that Poster sees as integral to the development of Kaleidoscope in the future.

“I do a lot of arranging for the group, which is a side passion of mine. Clarinettist Mark Simpson regularly plays with us and is also a wonderful composer. He is going to write something for us and we have various other plans in the pipeline.”

The group’s fourth disc for Chandos is coming out this month. Entitled Transfigured, it has Schoenberg as its centrepiece alongside three other works from the Viennese early 20th century period, that Poster says deserve to be heard far more: Zemlinsky for soprano and string sextet, Alma Mahler songs which he has arranged for soprano and string sextet, and a Webern Piano Quintet, an early Romantic work by the composer.

Another side of Urioste and Poster’s musical life will also have an outing as a Coffee Concert on Wednesday morning in Haddington. The couple’s Juke Box videos-from-home, with Poster’s duo arrangements of light classical, pop and rock tunes became a phenomenon during the Covid pandemic.

“The success of the lockdown Juke Box project has been the biggest surprise of our musical lives so far,” says Poster. “When we originally dreamed it up it was just to keep ourselves amused, and we thought maybe our mums might watch it. But it happened to fill a need for what people were looking for at the time. Obviously we didn’t expect lockdown to go on so long, but then it has had an afterlife as a recording that has won awards, and as a live programme it is a lot of fun.

“We try to incorporate the element of public choice that was the original impetus behind it, by giving the audience a chance to vote for what they want to hear.”

It is another facet of this pianist’s enormous range of activity, often, but not always, in partnership with Urioste.

“I do still play concertos – I’m at the Royal Albert Hall for Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with the Philharmonia at the end of the month, and I’ve Grieg and Rachmaninov coming up later in the season. But concertos are really just large-scale chamber music. The collaborative aspect of music-making is where I find most joy and fulfilment. I still play some solo recitals – a few each season – but chamber music is the thing I’ve found keeps me inspired with its musical companionship bringing people together.”

Kaleidoscope plays the Lammermuir Festival on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. Elena Urioste and Tom Poster programme their Juke Box on Wednesday.

Laudonia on the road

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Soprano Susan Hamilton tells Keith Bruce how her new early music group follows in very specific musical footsteps.

Over three centuries after its first flourishing, the Grand Tour is back in fashion. At the end of September, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra opens its season with Maxim Emelyanychev’s Grand Tour, as their principal conductor takes a programme culminating in Beethoven’s Eroica to seven venues across Scotland. 

At the start of the month, however, there is another Grand Tour of Scotland and London by a new early music group, Laudonia, led by soprano Susan Hamilton. It is most appropriately named, because it celebrates the musical journey across Europe that prominent Scot Sir John Clerk of Penicuik undertook in the 1690s.

The Second Baronet of Penicuik is a crucial figure in Scots history, whose legal mind and political work put him right at the centre of events when he returned from his travels. After the collapse of the Darien Scheme in Panama threatened the economic stability of the country, he was one of the signatories of the Act of Union and one of the first Scots members of the Parliament of Great Britain, with responsibility for the financial affairs of Scotland.

He had studied law in Leiden in the Netherlands but was also a fine musician and composer and, in the last years of the 17th century, embarked on a Grand Tour that was musical in its focus and included lessons in violin and composition from no less a figure than Arcangelo Corelli.

Although much of his own work was lost in a fire that devastated Penicuik House in 1899, his emotional cantata Leo Scotiae Irritatus (The Lion of Scotland Enraged) will open the second half of the concert programme that Hamilton and her instrumental colleagues have devised for Laudonia’s first tour.

The soprano co-founded the Dunedin Consort in her twenties, but in recent years has devoted herself mostly to teaching. Now, she says, “I’ve found my wings again.”

Encouraged by her partner, Austrian arts manager Christoph Crepaz, who is Honorary Consul for his home country in Scotland, she began to assemble the ideas for Laudonia, which borrows the Roman name for the Lothians of Scotland. As with so much else, the Covid pandemic interrupted their schedule, but because the project began before Brexit it had established a foothold in both countries, and the group has already performed in Austria and at the Scottish Parliament.

This Grand Tour is Laudonia setting out its stall for the wider public for the first time, and Hamilton has assembled a stellar instrumental ensemble around her, led by Croatian early music specialist Bojan Cicic. He is joined by Aberdeen University-based Aaron McGregor on second violin, Lucia Capellaro on cello, and Mr McFall’s Chamber bassist Rick Standley on violone. With keyboard maestro John Kitchen on harpsichord and Jamie Akers playing theorbo, the other lead instrumentalist is Austrian natural trumpet player Martin Patscheider.

“I love the soprano and trumpet combination, especially in the church venues we are playing,” says Hamilton. “The obligato instrument you are singing with makes such a different to how you sing.”

There’s a certain amount of speculation about the music the travelling Scotsman could have heard in the programme she and Laudonia have put together, but it follows the route of Sir John Clerk’s youthful peregrinations across Europe, south through Germany and stopping in Vienna before a long stay in Rome, where he was taught by Corelli three times a week.

Alongside the Sonata La Follia showpiece for violin, Corelli is represented by the D Major Sonata a Quattro which adds a trumpet to the mix. The Trumpet Song from the music Daniel Purcell wrote for Thomas D’Urfey’s play Massaniello, is justified on the basis that it was spanking new in 1699 when Clerk was travelling through London on his way home.

That was where Giovanni Battista Draghi worked too, and Kitchen will play his Harpsichord Suite in A Major. If Clerk did not meet that Italian composer, it is very likely he did run into his brother Antonio, also a composer, in Vienna.

Clerk’s own memoirs recount his meetings with another Italian composer, Benardo Pasquini, in Rome and his music is included in the programme alongside that of his countrymen Antonio Cesti, with the solo cantata Non Si Parli Piu d’Amore (Let There Be No More Talk About Love), and Alessandro Melani’s Qual Mormorio Giocondo (Like the Cheerful Murmuring), again featuring trumpet obligato. Both Cesti and Melani worked at Leopold the First’s Viennese court, and Clerk records meeting the Holy Roman Emperor.

The dark horse of the pack is perhaps German composer Johann Rosenmuller, whose O felicissimus Paradysi aspectus (O Most Happy Sight of Paradise) opens the programme and also pairs the soprano voice with trumpet. Rosenmuller did not have the luxury of a Grand Tour, but instead made a Great Escape from his homeland to Italy, forced to flee when angry parents discovered the exact nature of his enthusiasm for choirboys.

Laudonia’s Grand Tour opens at Holy Trinity Church in Melrose on Friday, September 1 and continues to Edinburgh’s St Cecilia’s Hall (Saturday Sept 2), Dunkeld Cathedral (Sunday Sept 3), Inverness Cathedral (Tuesday Sept 5), Queen’s Cross Church, Aberdeen (Wednesday Sept 6) and St Mary Abbot’s Church in London’s Kensington on Friday September 8. All concerts at 7.30pm.

Three Bible Her-Stories

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Toria Banks, co-creator of concerts that rediscover a celebrated French composer, explains the Dunedin Consort’s latest programme to KEITH BRUCE

Incremental though change may often seem, the development in the breadth of repertoire concert-goers can now expect to hear is interestingly illustrated by the work recently undertaken by Edinburgh’s Dunedin Consort.

In this year’s Lammermuir Festival it is joined by soprano Nardus Williams for a concert of early music by women composers, two years after it brought to EIF the radical contemporary revision of Purcell by Errollyn Wallen, Dido’s Ghost. This from an ensemble whose reputation was founded on precision period readings of Handel and Bach.

The Dunedin is this week presenting a programme – in Findhorn, Glasgow and Edinburgh – that both excavates neglected repertoire by a woman composer from the early 18th century and premieres it in a brand new version.

Out of her Mouth is the umbrella title that has been given to three (of the 12) Biblical cantatas, mostly concerned with women in the scriptures, written by Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, who was a lauded composer in the court of France’s Sun King, Louis XIV, but whose music is very rarely performed in the 21stcentury.

The project was the brainchild of writer and director Toria Banks, whose company Hera has worked with the Dunedin and Mahogany Opera, who co-produced Dido’s Ghost, to bring it to fruition.

“We’ve been going for five years,” Banks explains, “and we programme operas by women, both current and historical and neglected. We have commissioned new work and explored repertory that is not being performed enough. Mahogany supported the development of an earlier project of ours and then came in to co-produce this after working with Dunedin on Dido’s Ghost.”

She describes the Cantates Biblique as “storytelling pieces of theatre”, their message unlimited by historical context. The chamber group onstage – harpsichord, cello and theorbo continuo with a solo violin – may be playing early 18th century music, but the staging is up-to-date.

“The set and costumes are neither lavish nor period. They are Bible stories of Judith, Rachel and Susanne, but they are very relevant, so we are telling them in an abstracted time and space, rather than in pre-Christian Israel or 18th century France when they were written.

“The music is fantastic, but what attracted me to these specific pieces by Jacquet de la Guerre rather than others was the relevance of the stories.”

The texts were written by the composer’s celebrated contemporary Antoine Houdar de la Motte, whose theatrical successes include the French play of the Portuguese story of Ines de Castro, long before Jo Clifford’s Traverse Theatre version inspired James MacMillan’s debut opera.

“I’ve written the new English version of the text,” says Banks, clearly relishing the challenge. “The libretti are very nimble for the period. In the text – and in the music – there are subtle shifts of perspective, from an ironic, distanced and slightly cynical approach to the subject matter to really hearty-rending sincerity.

“And although I wanted to bring out the female perspective of the characters more, but for a man writing in early 18th century France, there’s a real sense of interesting, well-rounded women in them.

“The technical challenge was to express all this in contemporary-sounding English, but I’ve left in some archaic touches where it feels like the character is being self-mythologising. On the one hand it is creative writing and on the other it is solving a complex puzzle.”

The question remains as to why this careful archaeology was necessary for a composer who was a favourite at court and revered beyond her death.

“In general French Baroque music is under-performed in this country,” Banks points out, “but I do think she has been more forgotten because she’s a woman. She was celebrated in her lifetime and she keeps appearing in lists of France’s ‘great composers’ through the 18th century. It’s only really post-Revolution that she disappears.

“In her lifetime she was right in the thick of it and never marginalised. She was in at the start of the fashion for French cantatas as well as at the start of the sonata as a fashionable form for instrumental music. Sometimes people try to explain her disappearance because her only opera was not a success, but that was in 1694 when almost all operas were failing.

“There is a big difference between her music then and in 1707 when she wrote the Cantates Biblique. She was a lauded young talent, but by the time she wrote these she was in her 40s and they are her mature work, with details that come from a place of confidence.”

Two female singers of comparable experience, Carolyn Sampson and Anna Dennis will sing two of the three, Judith and Susanne, while Rachel is in the hands of the younger Alys Roberts, found through an open call designed to give an opportunity to a less experienced but exciting talent as part of the project.

The composer is known to have sung the cantatas herself, and her sister was also a singer, and Banks describes the work as a gift to performers. She is understandably keen to continue the work of reintroducing Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre to modern audiences and has three more of the Biblical cantatas in mind.

“The one I’d like to do that is not expressly about a woman is Adam, which tells the story of The Fall, but does so without mentioning Eve at all. It is sung by a woman, and pins the blame for mankind’s misfortune entirely on Adam.”

Dunedin Consort’s Out of her Mouth is at Universal Hall, Findhorn on Friday, Platform, Midland Street, Glasgow on Saturday and Edinburgh’s Assembly Roxy on Sunday. Performances start at 8pm.

Pictured: Soprano Alys Mererid Roberts

Orcadian Feast

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Resourcefulness and imagination have never been so important in keeping events like the St Magnus Festival alive, its director Alasdair Nicolson tells KEN WALTON.

How many of us remember the perverse pleasure of the popular afternoon TV programme Ready, Steady Cook, where contestants challenged celebrity chefs to concoct a feast out of random ingredients purchased for a mere fiver? Despite such meagre resources, creativity and resourcefulness took flight, appetising results emerged. 

To some extent, that’s how Alasdair Nicolson has approached this year’s St Magnus Festival, the event he has directed for the past 12 years, and which is, he admits, still weathering the after-effects of Covid. “Right now, as things gradually return to normal, we’re having to be especially resourceful,” he insists. 

“There’s no overarching theme this year. The programme is more about a set of things I think are interesting, or a set of people I know – emerging artists or old friends – who are very good. Last year we were nearly back from Covid, but it was still odd. This year feels we’re getting there, still not at full capacity, but doing well with ticket sales.

A quick glance at the programme, which runs from 16-23 June, shows that the ingredients are infinitely more exciting than any arbitrary cucumber or carrot. The meat of the festival is still classical music, but complementing that are folk, ballet, theatre, poetry and visual arts events, with the traditional involvement of local performers offsetting the incoming presence of visiting artists.

As ever, Nicolson eschews the predictable. What is it with the accordion this year, I ask in relation to what seems like a veritable squeeze-box infestation, dominated by the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland’s entire Accordion Ensemble? “I’m just a lover of the accordion,” he says. “As a composer, I’ve written for it in various combinations. I also taught a composition course for accordion in Lithuania. So, personally, I have skin in the game.”

Central to this major segment of programming is Scotland’s latest accordion sensation, the young Glaswegian Ryan Corbett. Following his solo triumph last year in Orkney, and his fast-rising profile further afield, he’s here this time in two duo partnerships, one with Edinburgh-born trumpeter Aaron Akugbo, the other with his own teacher Djordje Gajic playing Stravinsky’s Petrouchka in St Magnus Cathedral.

If that isn’t quirky enough, the charismatic Ragazze Quartet from the Netherlands, known for their unconventional approach to the medium, certainly are. Nicolson encountered them while sitting in his car. “I was driving and listening to the radio when I heard them playing Schubert’s Die Winterreise and thought, this is wonderful, but it’s not supposed to be on string quartet. It worked so well in refocussing Schubert’s original [song cycle].” The Raggaze will be joined in this by baritone Maarten Koningsberger. 

In another of their three programmes, the Quartet teams up with Dutch pianist Nikola Meeuwsen in Shostakovich’s ebullient Piano Quintet. Again, the idea came to Nicolson through chance. “His parents in Holland live next door to friends of mine, who told me about him. I tried him out and realised putting him together with the other Dutch musicians made complete sense.” Meeuwsen, still only 20 and the youngest ever winner of Amsterdam’s Grachtenfestival Prize, also plays his own solo recital, the Age of Refinement, on Saturday. 

Other artists this year include: the 17th/18th century specialist ensemble Florilegium, reenacting in one of its programmes Leipzig’s legendary Coffee House concerts with music by Bach and his contemporaries; and the Scots-based Hebrides Ensemble, including an “immersive promenade concert” “Solstice of Dark and Light – Wind Water Earth Fire” in St Magnus Cathedral, combining music, art and poetry.

Atmosphere plays its part, too, in two solo performances by the young Black Isle cellist Finlay Spence: one on Hoy in which he plays Bach, Boyle, Beamish and Berio; the other on South Ronaldsay which includes the world premiere of a new commission, Fadhail, by Uist composer Padruig Morrison. 

On a larger scale, Scottish Ballet brings its steamy, critically-acclaimed production of A Streetcar Named Desire to Kirkwall’s Pickaquoy Centre. “We had to ask them to bring another show as well, given that Streetcar comes with a high guidance rating,” Nicolson explains. “Otherwise, I’d have had to field the complaints!” The solution was Nutcracker Sweets, a potpourri from past and present Scottish Ballet productions culminating in scenes from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker.

Equally exciting for Nicolson is the world premiere of Thora, David McNeish’s new play based on the mother of Magnus mentioned in the ancient sagas, directed by Gerda Stevenson. McNeish was a minister on Orkney and before that a doctor. “He worked on it originally when [Orcadian actor, theatre director and vocal coach] Kristin Linklater was still alive, and it was really meant for her,” Nicolson says. “It’s a powerful piece because it brings a woman into the Magnus story, and one who actually survived him.”

Ask the St Magnus director what makes the Festival tick today, seven years after the death of its iconic founder Sir Peter Maxwell Davies  and especially after the trials of Covid, and the answer falls somewhere between pragmatism and optimism. “If anything, we’re much more aware of how much everything costs. The challenge is to match the expectations people have from the Festival’s traditions and history against what is really possible. 

“The fact is, we’re still managing to do a largely music-based festival, trying to bring in things local people ought to see as well as setting out stuff that will bring audiences in from elsewhere. Most importantly Orkney folk themselves are still an integral element.” This year’s Johnsmas Foy – Waves and Tangles: A Countrywoman’s Diary – celebrates Orcadian poet and nature writer Bessie Skea, whose legacy was overshadowed by her more famous contemporary George Mackay Brown. The local Festival Chorus presents its own performance of Fauré’s Requiem under Hallè Chorus director Matthew Hamilton.

Times might be tougher, but with just the right ingredients and some creative flair St Magnus is making the best of uncertain times.

The 2023 St Magnus Festival on Orkney runs from 16-23 June. Full information at http://www.stmagnusfestival.co

Investigating Carmen

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The director of Scottish Opera’s new production of the perennially popular tale of murderous lust talks to Keith Bruce about his 1970s staging, and the challenges facing opera in the 21st century.

If director John Fulljames expresses himself in the rehearsal room with the clarity he brings to addressing the existential questions currently facing his artform, it is no wonder his stage story-telling results in popular and successful productions.

“Opera is not fundamentally elitist at all. Opera plays to very large audiences; it is a large scale, popular artform.

“The reality of bringing hundreds of artists and technicians together is that it is an expensive artform, not per head for everybody involved, but just in total. For that reason the funding of opera has long been a controversial topic. That’s not a new question.”

Fulljames last worked with Scottish Opera on the revival of John Adams’s Nixon in China, a co-production with Royal Danish Opera, where he was Director for five years, and Teatro Real in Madrid, where the production ended its run at the start of this month.

“The current debate is particularly interesting for me, coming back from working in Europe and seeing the centrality of opera and music to the cultural landscape there, and also the willingness of society to invest in those things.

“The consequence, in somewhere like Denmark, of sustained investment is an extraordinary strength of audience. Copenhagen is not a big city, but we were selling 120,000 opera tickets a year and something like three-quarters of the Danish population will visit at some point in their lifetime. That sort of level of cultural engagement is the result of years of consistent investment.”

If that is not replicated in the United Kingdom, Fulljames believes he and colleagues need to step up.

“We are living in a time of extraordinary pressure on public finance, and some of that is self-manufactured and some of that is to do with political choices. We have failed to make the case why artforms like opera are necessary to everyone for the health of society. 

“One of the interesting things about the debates of the last month is that the arguments making the case have become more honed, and there has been a level of passion and commitment that hasn’t always been articulated before.”

Fulljames returns to work in Scotland having moved to a new post in Oxford, heading up the university’s Humanities Cultural Programme, based at a new multi-disciplinary arts centre.

“I’m setting up a new cultural programme in the university which will be based in the Schwarzman Centre with a new concert hall, a couple of theatres, an exhibition space and a cinema. It is a multi-artform building, opening in summer 2025, that is intended as a place where the university and the city and the region can meet.

“That connects to my interest in commissioning and incubating new work and developing new ideas in the arts. I’ve always been interested in how opera finds new energy through collaboration with other art forms. Opera is a meeting-place artform and the more open and inclusive we can be about that, the healthier the artform is.”

Nixon in China belatedly found itself at the centre of a row about exactly that when it was nominated for a Sky Arts award and objections were raised about the low representation of east Asian singers in the cast. Scottish Opera swiftly excused itself from the competition, apologising for any offence caused.

Fulljames is quite happy to address the issue and put his own considered perspective on the row.

“There is an enormous issue of diverse employment and representation onstage and Nixon in China was a tiny part of a much broader conversation. It blew up more than a year after the show opened, so for the company and its audience it was about something that was in the past.

“When we made the production, we went out of our way to think very carefully about representation onstage, but however carefully you think, you are always happy to be challenged about whether you could have approached something with even more care. The intervention came quite late, but it was a contribution to an important conversation.

“We had made a context for the production so that the Scottish Opera Chorus were not Chinese people but archivists, like a branch of the United Nations. But it is important that you have as many perspectives in the conversation from the outset, and clearly that is not something that we achieved sufficiently with Nixon.”

It bears pointing out, perhaps, that the lack of a Sky Arts award has been little hindrance to the revival of a modern opera that – like Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar – was deservingly in need of one.

“The show has been a big success in Madrid,” Fulljames confirms, “and it’s amazing how many shows Scottish Opera has around the world at the moment, including Ainamadar and Pelleas in the States – it is quite an export business.”

Part of those overseas success stories are based on partnerships with other companies. Unlike them, Carmen is entirely Scottish Opera’s own production, and touring more widely on its home turf. That is something of which its director is very appreciative.

“Carmen is an opportunity to work for a bigger audience – Scottish Opera is doing 15 performances, going to more venues than any of the other shows which I’ve made for the company.

“We are setting it in the 1970s, which was a really interesting time in Spanish history, post-Franco and before democracy was established. One of the themes of the piece is the search for freedom, both personally for Carmen and broader than that, between the smugglers and the corrupt civil guard.”

That updating is only part of what will be a new version of the familiar story, for which Fulljames and translator Christopher Cowell have gone back to the Prosper Merimee novella on which the opera’s libretto was based.

“Chris Cowell had previously translated Carmen for English National Opera and he has produced a new set of dialogues that take the content of the original opera libretto and gives them a structure that is much more akin to the novella. In the novel the narrator meets Don Jose when he is on death row for the murder of Carmen, so the story is relayed from his perspective, and he tries to justify himself through the way he structures the story.

“The libretto basically stuck with that perspective without acknowledging it as such, which is one of the reasons the piece is challenging in the way it sees Carmen, and her exoticisation as a corrupting seductress.”

By re-introducing an on-stage narrator, in the form of actor Carmen Pieraccini as a female detective investigating Carmen’s murder, the production aims to make clear exactly how and when the title character is being subjected to the ‘male gaze’.

“The original narrator is a travelling gentleman who encounters Jose, but we talked about the emergence in the 1970s of the female detective, when police forces across Europe began to admit women. It was another reason for setting it in the period.”

Fulljames also thinks that Cowell’s revised book for the show improves the drama.

“In the original score the dialogues were really important. The balance between text and music was very different from how we usually encounter the piece now. Because we are a little bit embarrassed by the dialogues, they have often been cut to the bone so a page becomes a single line and the drama doesn’t quite hang together. It becomes a ‘number’ opera – we think we know the story and just rush to the next big tune.

“One of the challenges of ‘number’ operas, with text in between, is to get the text working really well so it has the quality of spoken theatre. Carmen is a piece in which there are many editorial choices about things like which second verses to do, and we are making decisions that balance with the amount of dialogue we have.

“There’s more dialogue than in some productions but less than others – it’s about having the right dialogue. And having a fantastic actor like Carmen Pieraccini in the midst of that really helps bring it to life as a piece of theatre.”

As far as the director is concerned, that can only help the music.

“What’s striking about the music is how wide-ranging and diverse it is. On the one hand there are some really dark verismo duets and then there’s the song-based music of Carmen, and the opera-comique choruses that have more levity and lightness.

“So one of the challenges of the piece is how you sew together these languages, covering the gamut from broader entertainment to something tragic and dark. The dialogue is key, because it is the glue that holds the tonal range together.”

At the same time, the introduction of a female detective gives the opportunity to expose that ‘male gaze’ to some interrogation – and Fulljames believes Bizet would have appreciated that.

“If we say this is a narrative as told by Jose – his construction on events – it is helpful for that to be challenged from a female perspective.

“How many female collaborators did Bizet have in his artistic life? That’s an interesting question. Did he hear any female voices as stage directors, designers, or conductors? The answer to that is surely ‘no’.

“I like to think that if he came to a production of Carmen today and there was a female conductor, he would rapidly get over his astonishment and enjoy that quality of the music-making.”

Carmen opens at Theatre Royal, Glasgow on Friday and tours to Eden Court, Inverness, His Majesty’s, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre. Full details at scottishopera.org.uk

Picture by Sally Jubb of John Fulljames in rehearsals with Assistant Director Roxana Haines and Movement Director Jenny Ogilvie

Concerto partners

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Cellist Laura van der Heijden and composer Cheryl Frances-Hoad tell Keith Bruce how a Scottish world premiere came about

A very busy and multi-faceted musician, cellist Laura van der Heijden is not an especially regular visitor to Scotland, but she is the soloist with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in the next few weeks, oddly with both conducting Wigglesworths, Mark and Ryan, on the podiums.

The 2012 BBC Young Musician winner when she was just 15, Van der Heijden is playing Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No 2 with the SCO this week in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen, and then returns in the third week of May to premiere a new cello concerto written for her by Cheryl Frances-Hoad, one of Ryan Wigglesworth’s first commissions as Chief Conductor of the SSO.

“I am in panic learning mode at the moment!” she told VoxCarnyx. “It’s my first time with the Shostakovich as well and I wonder if there will be more flexibility with Cheryl’s piece, while with the Shostakovich everything is on the page. But then I have never played Shostakovich 2 with an orchestra either – so all will be revealed in the coming days!

“It was the SCO who suggested the Shostakovich and I have always wanted to learn and play it, so I said ‘yes’. There is so much dialogue between the orchestra part and the cello part – there are some of the coolest classical music moments in that piece.”

With composer Frances-Hoad also part of our on-line conversation, it is clear that the new bespoke concerto holds as much exciting promise for the soloist. The BBC commission will be heard in Glasgow’s City Halls, replaced in the SSO’s Aberdeen concert by the Walton concerto that was her victory piece in 2012. When both are broadcast, listeners may spot some shared vocabulary.

“I love the opening of the Walton concerto and that shimmering sound and that’s something that comes up in Cheryl’s piece. I also mentioned the Martinu cello concerto to her and the brass stabs that I love in that piece – and we’ve definitely got brass stabs in hers too. Those are textures that I really enjoy and both of those appear in the concerto.

“But I haven’t heard it live yet, and I think there’s a lot that I am going to be surprised by. There’s no way of experiencing what it will really be like before I meet with the orchestra – playing it through with the piano is not the same.”

The Frances-Hoad concerto has come together with such easy synchronicity, both player and composer seem mildly astonished.

“We only started talking about it in Spring of last year,” says Frances-Hoad, “so it’s amazing because these things usually take ages.

“Laura sent me a message saying she was interested in me writing a concerto for her and I was overjoyed as I have always really enjoyed her playing.

“We had some discussions and then Ryan Wigglesworth rang me and said he was interested in commissioning me to write a concerto for Laura and the BBC Scottish, so instead of having to raise funding, Ryan made it all fit magically into place.”

“I might have mentioned to him that I’d like to have something by you,” adds Van der Heijden, “but it did seem as if the BBC commission was unconnected with that.

“It’s the first time I’ve ever been involved in the process of commissioning a piece and although I’ve done other new works, this feels like a new adventure. We had quite a few conversations, but I knew Cheryl’s music speaks to me and my playing style and it would be something I could connect to.

“We spoke about some ideas behind the piece and that we’d like it to be inspired by the environment and be a celebration of nature, rather than some sort of climate crisis appeal. But that’s just the inspiration behind the music, and it doesn’t need any programme.”

For Frances-Hoad, who began her musical life as a cellist at the Yehudi Menuhin School, the big work is an important milestone in her composing career.

“When I was 14 or 15 I wrote a 15 minute cello concertina and that was what won me a BBC Young Composer Award in 1996. In 2013 I then wrote a piece called Catharsis for wind quintet, string quintet and solo cello. It was a cello concerto in ambition, but I haven’t written a proper cello concerto until now.

“I recently had an amazing year as a Visiting Fellow in Creative Arts at Merton College, Oxford – which extended to 20 months because of Covid – where I had a studio and made friends with people from different areas of study and wrote a lot of pieces inspire by stuff they told me about – it was just a really productive, wonderful time.

“So I asked one of the biologists for ideas when I was writing the cello concerto, and he told me about this phenomenon of algae in the ocean that feeds off sunlight and carbon and blooms and grows incredibly fast, making beautifully patterns in the sea.

“What I love doing as a composer is learning about things like that because it makes my mind work in a different way. In the second movement, the harmonies are my response to the life-cycle of the algae.

“It’s a mind-gym that means I come up with ideas that I wouldn’t have done. The piece is a celebration of the beauty and wonder of nature, rather than bashing heads together about the importance of its preservation.

“But at the same time I was always thinking about writing a proper cello concerto, and about the balance in the orchestration. I wanted it to be a fulfilling piece to play with a proper slow movement where you can really appreciate the soloist’s musicianship, and show-off the talents of the soloist.”

Laura van der Heijden plays Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No 2 in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall this evening with the SCO under Mark Wigglesworth. The concert is repeated at Glasgow City Halls on Friday and Aberdeen Music Hall on Saturday.

Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s Cello Concerto has its World Premiere at Glasgow City Halls on Thursday May 18. Soloist Laura van der Heijden plays the Walton Cello Concerto in Aberdeen Music Hall with Ryan Wigglesworth and the BBC SSO the following day.

Fortune Favours the Finn

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Finnish conductor Eva Ollikainen’s recent RSNO debut nearly didn’t happen, but she’s anticipating a smoother return to Scotland this week with her Iceland orchestra. KEN WALTON reports

These days, fortunes can turn on a sixpence. Last November, Finnish conductor Eva Ollikainen suddenly had to cancel her planned debut with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra when her son developed symptoms of Covid. “I was on the train to the airport when I checked the test results. They were positive. I had no option but to turn round and go home,” she recalls. 

As luck would have it, the following week found the RSNO facing yet another last-minute cancellation, this time by its principal guest conductor Elim Chan. Ollikainen was now free and able to travel. “You’d never have known it was anything but planned,” wrote VoxCarnyx’s Keith Bruce in his enthusiastic appraisal of the hastily rescheduled debut. “It was great fun. I was so glad they asked me,” was the 41-year-old conductor’s own cheery verdict.

This weekend, she makes a welcome return to Scotland with her own orchestra, the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, as part of its current UK tour. They’ll perform music by Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky and Anna Thorvaldsdottir on Sunday at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall, with guest soloist Sir Stephen Hough in a repeat of the work he played only two months ago with the BBC SSO, Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2.

Ollikainen succeeded Yan Pascal Tortelier to become the ISO’s first female chief conductor in 2020, only months after her predecessor had presided over the orchestra’s last Edinburgh visit. With Covid raging it wasn’t the best time to cement a new creative relationship, but Ollikainen reckons it had its positive spin-offs. “It made us a very tight team instantly. Circumstances were what they were, and we had to be super-flexible and super-fast in response.” 

“One of the pros in being such a small country, and with us being Iceland’s only full-time professional orchestra, is that we negotiated directly with the government on what we were allowed to do at any given time, and with great success,” she says. “While the rest of society was only allowed to meet 20 people at a time, we could divide the stage in such a manner that brought 60 musicians together at a time. These groups of 20, three different sections, didn’t actually meet each other backstage. It was the same for the audience. We managed to have more audience than was actually allowed and we did everything very quickly.”

Other than that, she insists, getting to know the players and their ways has just been “really quite ordinary work”. “All orchestras undergo different moments of their development, but basically concentrate on the same things. We’re talking about sound quality, ensemble playing, about how much we dare, in the heat of a concert, leave space for certain emotion or how low we dare go with a dynamic. Some things are carefully rehearsed, but live performance still needs to have a fresh feeling to it.”

These are, of course, the issues that exemplify the chemistry of an orchestra and its conductor, and it’s a balance that will surely play a part in defining the success of Sunday’s Edinburgh programme, which pits the familiar sounds of two Russian warhorses (the Tchaikovsky is his well-worn Fifth Symphony) against the fresh Icelandic modernism of Thorvaldsdottir, the orchestra’s composer-in-residence, whose music RSNO regulars may just recognise. 

Thorvaldsdottir’s Metacosmos – a work written for the New York Philharmonic in 2018, which the composer herself likens to “a speculative metaphor of falling into a black hole” – was programmed as part of Ollikainen’s cancelled November RSNO debut. Rather than ditch it, her last-minute replacement, the versatile American conductor Jonathan Stockhammer, chose to go ahead, revealing a restless soundscape characterised by mystical turbulence. 

“Anna has written a lot, not just for us alone, but as co-commissions which we are a fundamental part of – keen to be among the first to perform her music,” Ollikainen explains. “She has also started a composition academy for young composers, like a workshop where young Icelandic composers can show her their scores, get advice, and eventually have them played and recorded for archive by the orchestra. Next season, we’re having a big ‘Anna’ festival.”

Ollikainen is not the first Finn to exert her influence on the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. Back in the 1990s, prior to his triumphant reign at the BBC SSO, Osmo Vänskä made his indelible mark as chief conductor. I asked her why Finland seems to breed so many top-ranking conductors. “There’s essentially one answer to that, Jorma Panula,” she responds, referring to her own teacher, the legend synonymous with single-handedly creating a world-leading conducting course at the Sibelius Academy that also spawned the likes of Esa-Pekka Salonen, Sakari Oramo, Jukka-Pekka Saraste and Susanna Mälkki. 

“Central to his method is an an understanding that what really matters in conducting is the personality,” Ollikainen believes. “He doesn’t try to castrate people’s personalities, but encourages them to be themselves, to believe in their own musical ideas. He’s very successful in helping you find you own path.”

With her contract now extended to 2026, does Ollikainen ever envisage the kind of legacy she’d eventually like to leave behind? “I can’t change, and don’t want to change, the personality of the orchestra. Every conductor has to realise, even if staying over a long period of say 17 years, that that is still going to be a drop in the ocean as far as history goes. You can leave something, a little bit, and the tree will have grown a little bit in one direction. Someone else will come along and make their own small changes. It’s an organic process.”

One area that does exercise Ollikainen’s thoughts, especially as a woman operating at the top of a once entirely male-dominated profession, is the need to focus on diversity, particularly in the repertoire she hopes to explore. “When I studied music history at the Sibelius Academy, if you even just spoke about female composers, Hildegard von Bingen was mentioned, then the next stop was Kaija Saariaho. That’s a gap of 800 years. There’s a great chunk of knowledge we need to fill.” 

She adds a word of caution, however. “That has to be done sensibly, not as a panic reaction. The most important thing is that we have equal opportunities for composers today.”

Eva Ollikainen conducts the Iceland Symphony Orchestra at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh, on Sunday 23 April, 3pm. Full details at www.usherhall.co.uk

(Pictures: Nikolaj Lund)

Playing hard

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As she prepares for Scottish Opera’s new production of Puccini’s Il trittico, mezzo Karen Cargill talks to Keith Bruce

Sir David McVicar’s new production of Puccini’s problematic late-career triple-bill Il trittico will, Scottish Opera has said, address the difficulties inherent in staging its three contrasting stories in a single evening with adaptable staging and an ensemble cast.

The success or otherwise of the approach will become clear at the Theatre Royal on Saturday, but the presence in the company of Scotland’s star mezzo-soprano, Karen Cargill, already signals a departure from the plan.

Cargill will be seen only in the central – and most problematic – of the three pieces, singing La Principessa in Suor Angelica, the thoroughly nasty regal aunt of the titular heroine. While the first story, Il tabarro (The Cloak), is a dramatic dark tale of love and murder on a barge, and the last, Gianni Schicchi, a fun comedy that is often seen as a stand-alone, the sentimental convent-set all-female Sister Angelica is about unmarried pregnancy, suicide and redemption.

It is possible to draw interesting parallels with the composer’s own life from the original story by librettist Giovacchino Forzano (who also wrote Schicchi), but the fact that the venerable Kobbe Opera Guide devotes just a single paragraph to Suor Angelica while finding two pages of things to say about the other two parts of Il trittico speaks of the way the middle tale is often regarded.

Unsurprisingly, Cargill thinks that McVicar’s version will sort any problems. Her own casting certainly bodes well, as it builds on her acclaimed performance as Mere Marie in Poulenc’s Dialogues de Carmelites at the New York Met. In fact she will return to that role in a new production by Barry Kosky this summer, the first time Glyndebourne has tackled the work.

“The Principessa is an extraordinary character because she is so hard, which is a treat to play, because I don’t get to play many characters like that.

“She is a little like Mere Marie in Carmelites, who is someone who has a strong belief system – the Word of God is everything and it dictates how she reacts and communicates. Mere Marie is often seen as a real baddy, but I don’t think she is in the way the Principessa in Suor Angelica is.”

The scene between The Princess and her niece is the dramatic heart of the tale. Arriving to have Angelica renounce her claim on the family fortune, she brutally tells her that the baby she gave up is dead. Patricia Bardon tried to soften the delivery of the crucial line in a touring Opera North staging a few years ago, but that will not be the way Cargill delivers it for McVicar.

“It is a test not to show compassion, because Sunyoung Seo, who is playing Angelica, is so gorgeous and so immersed in the whole thing. The aria I have is angular but dramatic, so it has that romantic Puccini language but with a hardness there.

“I’ve seen so many of David McVicar’s shows over the years, and I always thought that it was the type of story-telling that I want to do. That’s the beauty of this job, that you get to play complex characters who are not one-dimensional.”

As for the contention that Suor Angelica is the sentimental weak link in Il trittico, Cargill is having none of it.

“This production is emotionally direct and truthful. The thing with David’s work is that all the characters are recognisably human. It’s emotional but not sentimental – it’s direct.

“I don’t know why it is less admired because I think it is an extraordinary piece. I think people will fall in love with it, because of how it is done.”

The production is part of  a busy year for the mezzo, who recently seemed to be taking a step back from her performing schedule when she accepted a post as Interim Head of Vocal Studies at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

“There’s been quite a bit of travel recently, just when you’d got used to being at home, for the first time in 20 years.

“Once this closes I go to Brazil for Bluebeard’s Castle with Sir Richard Armstrong and the Sao Paulo State Symphony. I am going a few days early rather than just turn up and sing, so I’m in Brazil for ten days.

“Then there’s an SCO tour of Berlioz’s Les nuits d’ete [St Andrews, Edinburgh and Glasgow], before a  teaching residency and a concert at Sir James MacMillan’s Cumnock Tryst. I drive to Glyndebourne the day after that and start on the Monday.

“I couldn’t give the Head of Vocal Studies job the full energy that I wanted to give it, and sing at the same time. I would have had to have stopped singing, and that’s my addiction. But I still want to work with young singers and share real information.

“So I’m no longer head of department but still an Associate Artist, so this year I work with third and fourth year undergraduates. It’s about eight visits across the year, and I am taking two sopranos, a mezzo, two tenors and a baritone to Drumlanrig Castle at the end of next month, at the end of which they perform at the Tryst.

“I encourage students to listen as widely as they can but also not to become locked in to what someone else does. That emotional freedom and curiosity about how to perform a piece is important. Music is about joy and communication and you must not lose the ability to play around with that.”

Recently signed to the big international agency Askonas Holt, Cargill happily lists works (the Trojans by Berlioz and any number of Verdi roles) and theatres (La Scala, Milan and Sydney Opera House) that she hopes lie in her future.

“If it happens, great, but if it doesn’t that’s OK. You have to be realistic. I’ve never had a set path of things I want to accomplish. I’d love to sing Carmen but I don’t think it will ever come my way.”

Puccini’s hard, bad Princess is what obsesses her at the moment, and she is excited about revisiting the Poulenc, a work she first sang as a student in Glasgow.

“It is the most extraordinary music. There is a constant sense of unease, you never get to relax in Carmelites. The Kosky production could be radical and I’m up for that – we should all be challenged every day.”

Scottish Opera’s Il trittico opens at Glasgow’s Theatre Royal on Saturday March 11 for three performances, followed by two at Edinburgh’s Festival  Theatre. Full details scottishopera.org.uk

A trad New Year

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The conductors of Handel’s Messiah in Glasgow and Edinburgh on January 2 talk to Keith Bruce

As young musicians they came to Handel’s masterwork as a trumpet player and a flautist, but this year James MacMillan and Nicholas McGegan are on the podium for the New Year concerts of Messiah in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall and Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. For one it is a conducting debut, while the other has been part of the revolution in historically-informed performances of the work for more than four decades.

“I went to performances of it as a boy in Cumnock,” remembers MacMillan. “The local choral union was the Kyle Choral Union and they used to put on performances of Messiah and other oratorios. In fact one of my earliest trumpet memories is of playing third trumpet in a performance of Handel’s Judas Maccabeus in New Cumnock when I was 12 or 13 with the Kyle Choral Union. So they performed Messiah as well, with amateur players from around Ayrshire.”

McGegan recalls playing flute in the Prout orchestration of the work when he was at high school in Nottingham, and then being disappointed to find out that Handel had not written flute parts at all.

He was at the harpsichord when he played it in a seminal performance at Westminster Abbey in 1979, under the baton of Christopher Hogwood with his Academy of Ancient Music.

“It was about zero degrees and I was wearing fingerless Bob Cratchit gloves, and soprano Emma Kirkby had thermal underwear underneath her Laura Ashley dress.”

Understandably, however, McGegan recalls that era as a thrilling time when baroque repertoire was being re-thought.

“I ran intro Chris Hogwood at Cambridge in 1970. He was living at the top of a house owned by Sir Nicholas Shackleton, whose collection of wind instruments is now at Edinburgh University. I was loaned an 18th century flute and I went to the library and got hold of a treatise to learn how to play it, so I ended up playing second flute on the first recording of the Academy of Ancient Music.

“It was an exciting time; Trevor Pinnock was also around and a lot of this music was being done for the first time in many years. I was a slightly junior member of the team: Chris and Trevor and John Eliot Gardiner were all about ten years older than me. I played the harpsichord for them and, when necessary, the flute, and I was part of the project.”

It was in the USA that McGegan graduated to conducting the work, in the middle of the following decade.

“I remember directing my first Messiah absolutely to the day. It was December 1986 with the St Louis Symphony and the soprano, as she was then, was the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and it was her first Messiah too. She was a remarkable artist and in 91 I was able to record it with her.”

This year McGegan is once again at the helm of the RSNO and RSNO Chorus, with soloists soprano Mhairi Lawson, counter-tenor William Towers, tenor Jamie MacDougall and bass-baritone Stephen Loges. On the same afternoon, composer James MacMillan conducts the work for the first time for Edinburgh Royal Choral Union, where Catriona Hewitson, Catherine Backhouse, Kieran White and Paul Grant are the soloists.

“I sang bits of it later in my student years,” says MacMillan, “but a lot of the music I sang at school and university was earlier and I never sang the big choral union sort of pieces. So preparing for this performance there has been a lot that felt like seeing and hearing it for the first time.

“Some of the arias I really didn’t know and the breadth that Messiah travels over its three parts is incredible, not just from Christmas to the Crucifixion but as a piece of music drama. It really takes you on a journey with a whole range of emotions and moods. I can see now why it established itself as a deeply loved masterpiece.

“The hinterland now is the difference of approach from the big choral union tradition to what the early music world has brought to it, with smaller choirs and a tighter, more authentic instrumental approach.

“All that has to be taken on board and that might be the reason why I’ve never conducted it before, because there is a specialism and scholarship to Baroque and Pre-Baroque music that puts barriers up for the rest of us. My choral music was earlier, unaccompanied music, but most of the orchestral music I’ve conducted in the last 20-odd years or so is later, so coming to Messiah for the first time is a new thing for me.”

At the same time, MacMillan’s own composing life has moved from smaller, unaccompanied motets toward exactly the shape of work that Handel undertook after his operas.

“In recent times I’ve written a lot of big oratorios – the Christmas Oratorio, the St John Passion and the St Luke Passion – and I suppose they acknowledge the historical hinterland of Handel’s oratorios and Bach’s cantatas and passions – it’s all there in the mix. You grow up with this music and it leaves an indelible mark, sometimes subliminally, on a composer’s mind.”

The Covid pandemic had yet to silence choirs around the world when McGegan last conducted in Glasgow, where he thinks he counts as a local boy because of his years as Principal Guest Conductor at Scottish Opera, and the flat he still has in the city’s west end.

“New Year 2020 was the last time I was with the RSNO, just before the pandemic, so a lot of the same people will be playing in the orchestra and I hope some of the audience will be the same too.

“What I do is bring my own orchestra parts, with my bowings, the dynamics and articulation written in. I’ve worked with nearly all the soloists before, either in Messiah or other projects – people like Jamie MacDougall and I go way back, Will Towers and I have done opera together as well as Messiah – so it is like organising a dinner party for friends.

“I first came to Glasgow in 1991 and did The Magic Flute with Scottish Opera two years running. My father was an Edinburgh boy and I had a clutch of rather terrifying great aunts in Morningside, who were horrified that I wanted to work there!

“I had the best time at Scottish Opera, I always enjoyed it. I’ll be 73 next month, but I hope I’ve still got a few Figaros left in me. I did Figaro, Giovanni and Cosi at Scottish Opera and loved every second of it.”

MacMillan may be making his Messiah debut in Edinburgh next week, but he has other concerts of the work upcoming.

“This time is very experimental for me, but I get to do it again a couple of times in December next year in Australia. I have been asked to conduct it with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in the week before my Christmas Oratorio. I think they thought if they were having me for one week they might as well have me for two!

“So it is something that will grow as I get to do it a few times. Keeping the pace lively is important and that is something we have all learned from the early music revolution. I’ve taken a couple of rehearsals now and I’ve been delighted how chorusmaster Michael Bawtree has trained the choir. It is very lithe and very light on its feet.

“I’ll bring a composer’s inside view to the process, and whether that’s valuable is for others to decide! I haven’t had a conducting lesson in my life, but I did have a consultation with Sir Colin Davis, who said that I should keep doing what I do, because there is something about a composer’s perspective that is unique. He thought that a contemporary composer’s view of the music of the past is valuable, and I was always encouraged by that.

“And the more I have lived with Messiah, I think there has to be a sense of through-composed travelling and of drama in the performance. I am wondering about whether some of the stopping and starting is really necessary and I might want to push on, so there’s not much hanging about between arias and choruses, and a non-stop feel to where the music is going.”

It is the non-stop sequence of performances of Messiah that McGegan identifies as one of its unique characteristics.

“It is one of the very few pieces I know that has been in more or less continuous performance since it was written. I know some musicologists would disagree, but I just see the basic story of the prophecies surrounding the birth of Christ, Christ’s life and passion and the resurrection, with the basic tenets of the religion without delving too deeply into the tricky stuff.

“It’s unusual for Handel because nearly all his oratorios have people singing roles. Jesus does not appear as a singing role and in some ways I think that makes it easier for everybody. It is not a portrait of Jesus, it is a portrait of the idea of the religion.

“Handel’s librettist, Charles Jennens, chose the texts very carefully to find the words that were easiest to sing and Handel sets those words very carefully. Handel is a master of writing for choirs, but the choruses are actually much more difficult than people who don’t sing realise. It is a masterpiece of very varied choral writing. That’s why people love it so.”

MacMillan also notes the way the work appeals as much to those of no faith as to the devout.

“When Messiah was first performed in the 1700s, I wonder what kind of mood there would have been in the hall. Would people want to applaud?

“How secular was it? How sacred was it? It seems to be a hybrid form that brought together the sacred and the secular in the world of music.”

The Edinburgh Royal Choral Union Messiah begins at noon in the Usher Hall, Edinburgh on January 2. The RSNO and RSNO Chorus perform the work from 3pmon the same day at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.

Conversation Pieces

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Uniquely-talented cellist Su-a Lee shares the limelight in Dialogues, her debut album. Going solo isn’t really her thing, she tells KEN WALTON

The last time I spoke to Scottish Chamber Orchestra cellist Su-a Lee, she had just videoed herself playing alone in a beautiful Speyside forest, surrounded by birds who flocked to her musical soliloquising like those to Snow White in the animated Disney film. 

The idea was to emulate the famous “nightingale duet” of 1924, when Elgar’s cellist friend Beatrice Harrison achieved a similar avian response in her Surrey garden, in what was to become one of the BBC’s earliest outside broadcasts. Lee loved the idea, which was to be her uniquely moving contribution to the award-winning Scotsman Sessions, a series launched during lockdown to give a much-needed performance platform to Scots-based musicians.

That same creative originality and that same idyllic part of the world (Lee has, post-Covid, married the partner she spent most of lockdown with in Speyside, folk musician Hamish Napier), were instrumental in inspiring her debut solo album, due for release this week on her own Sky Child Records label. Dialogues, as its title suggests, is not actually a solo album at all; nor – and this won’t surprise anyone familiar with Lee’s eclectic musical penchant – is it genre specific.

In terms of the former, going it alone has never appealed to the colourful but unassuming cellist, despite her 30-year prominence among the front ranks of the SCO and her flamboyant presence as a founder member of the quirky Mr McFall’s Chamber, where her expertise famously extends to solo virtuosity on the musical saw, and musical tastes flit between the earthy sensuality of Argentine tango and the experimental genre-mix of King Crimson.

Dialogues is a free-riding collaboration on an intimate scale. Other than the final solo track, Lee shares the limelight with a progression of friends in music that evolved organically during the recording process itself and reflects the various specialisms, mainly folk-rooted, of collaborators that include accordionist Phil Cunningham, singer Julie Fowlis, Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto, harpist Maeve Gilchrist and even husband Hamish, who played a key role in encouraging the project. 

The solo route was never on the cards, insists the South Korea-born cellist, who’s early studies took her to Manchester’s Chetham’s School as a talented teenager and to the hotbed of New York and its prestigious Julliard School as an undergraduate, before settling in Edinburgh in the early 1990s. 

“It really isn’t a thing I’m interested in doing,” she explains. “One of the very first things I was asked to do in lockdown was a solo concert for Chamber Music Scotland online. At first I thought, I’m not going to do that, that’s really not my thing. But actually a lot of people had been asking in the past few years if I would do village concerts and I thought maybe I should, because it’s easy to go out on your own and you don’t have to arrange for anyone else to do stuff. Then I thought perhaps I could just get Hamish involved. We were locked down together, so maybe we could share the programmes, and that’s how things progressed. 

Su-a Lee with folk musician husband Hamish Napier

“As for the solo album, that was definitely Hamish’s idea. I was dead against it, and certainly had no interest in writing music, no desire to create a band. But after giving it careful thought, I warmed to the idea of something certainly small and intimate, maybe duos or trios. Would it be classical? I was like no, there were already far too many amazing cellists out there recording all that stuff, but maybe folk would work. The next step was to see if anyone was up for playing with me as an equal voice.”

Unsurprisingly they were, and a process of developing individual tracks – “each a project on its own” – eventually grew into the final product. “I remember sneaking in a studio session just as things were opening up with the lovely Pekka – he had been recording with us at the SCO, so we snuck off at the end of one of the SCO recordings to put this together. It was slightly terrifying for me, time being limited and precious, but that in itself made it so instantly creative, like grabbing a moment.”

Each “moment” produced its own challenges. When it came to working with Caithness composer and pianist James Ross for the track Stroma, the creative process was done remotely by email. “James sent me the original melody, then I would do some improvisations and send them back giving him options to choose where the music would go next. He’d send it back again and we’d morph things. It just went back and forth until we were happy with the final results.” 

The same happened with cellist Natalie Haas, who was based in Montreal at the time. “Because we played the same instrument, the main thing was working out how to avoid getting in each other’s way in terms of register,” Lee recalls. “By the time she finally came over to Scotland for a weekend, we clicked instantly, playing together for hours. It felt like a real dialogue.” Thus emerged the hypnotically side-stepping Waltzska for Su-a.

Now that it’s all over, Lee muses on the impact lockdown in Speyside had on nurturing her album. “That environment definitely had a huge effect,” she says. It allowed time and space for ideas to percolate, for me to work in a very different way than before. It felt very new, and gave me me the luxury of not having to be anywhere else, not squeezing things between deadlines. It was a real gift to be surrounded by nature, not ever having really experienced that before. I’d always lived inner city – New York in Manhattan, the centre of Edinburgh. 

The Highlands remain a bolt hole, where she and her equally busy husband spend time together as much as they can. “I do still have my flat in Edinburgh, where most of my playing work is based, but for me personally things have definitely changed. It’s a matter of negotiating how much time we spend with each other. 

“I’m managing to get a bit more of a balance, but it takes thought, preplanning and commitment. You have to say no to a lot more things, and I am in the process of doing exactly that, coming off various boards, so I can find some time just to switch off. Good stuff doesn’t happen, creativity doesn’t happen, when you’re constantly having to catch up with yourself. The mind does a wonderful thing, though, when you are doing nothing. You start to muse, you start to think.

Does she think there might be another album? She offers a definitive no, but only a fool would dismiss the possibility. “I won’t be doing it again … in a hurry,” she adds. That doesn’t sound like the door being completely slammed shut. Does it?

Dialogues is released on 2 December, available on CD and digital download. Full information at www.sualee.com

(Top picture: Elly Lucas)

Opera’s life of Lorca

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Polymath David Henry Hwang is the librettist of Osvaldo Golijov’s hit contemporary opera Ainadamar, having its UK staged premiere from Scottish Opera. He talks to KEITH BRUCE.

There are few artists in any field anywhere in the world with quite the diverse, and conspicuously successful, CV of David Henry Hwang. As a creator of original works of his own he is primarily a playwright, but his global fame rests as much on his role as a librettist in the world of opera and musicals.

Scottish audiences were introduced to him in 1989, when his first collaboration with composer Philip Glass, 1000 Airplanes on the Roof, visited Glasgow’s Mayfest in the run up to the city’s profile-changing year as European City of Culture. Fresh from its premier performances in a Vienna aircraft hangar and a Berlin ice-rink, it received mixed reviews, but impressed enough folk to have a local revival by Paragon Ensemble at the Tron Theatre in 2003.

That same year Hwang was working with Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov on a commission for the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Tanglewood summer residency. Created in just a few months, Ainadamar explored the life and work of Spanish writer Federico Garcia Lorca, as remembered by his muse, Catalan performer Margarita Zirgu.

It was only after considerable reworking, and the input of director Peter Sellars for a Sante Fe Opera production two years later, that Ainadamar found its finished form and became a success.

“One of the differences between the Boston production and the Santa Fe production was learning more about Lorca’s life,” Hwang remembers now. He also credits the composer with being adaptable in a way that he recognised from the world of theatre but encounters less often in opera.

“On Broadway there may be six weeks of previews during which you can make changes, but that is not the opera composer’s way of working. Osvaldo was very comfortable making changes – we are both very flexible people and made an unusual team.”

The score the Argentinian created was, the librettist contends, years ahead of its time.

“We did get on well, but that doesn’t always mean that a composer’s music speaks to me the way Osvaldo’s does. He was breaking boundaries and doing things that hadn’t been done before.

“Osvaldo integrates other voices seamlessly, drawing from different musical styles and using electronic sounds. At that point it was not something that people were generally doing in opera.

“It’s beautiful and fun to listen to. The arias and the trio at the end are gorgeous and you can kinda dance to it! I still enjoy listening to Ainadamar.”

Ainadamar Rehearsals, Scottish Opera. Picture by Julie Howden.

It is also true that the story chimed with a direction that Hwang’s own work had already embarked on in plays and would go on to explore more thoroughly. His background as an Asian American runs through early work F.O.B. (Fresh Off the Boat), his breakthrough play M Butterfly, which deconstructed Puccini and has had a new incarnation as an opera at Santa Fe this year, and more recent Broadway hits Yellow Face and Soft Power, which mined his own life and included characters called “DHH”.

“There is a parallel in that I have brought different cultural voices into my plays. With Osvaldo I got to play in this other sandbox, with Spanish and Moorish influences and duende and Roma voices, and it was a great world to be in.

“When we first met, we started by kicking around different subjects because we had to create the thing really quickly. One of the things that attracted me, when Osvaldo pitched the Lorca story, was that Lorca to some extent predicted his own demise. As artists you sometimes reach into yourself and pull something out and that thing ends up manifesting itself in your life.

“Writers generally write autobiographical characters, they just don’t often name them after themselves. Ultimately you have to do the thing that you are interested in and believe in and let the chips fall where they may. In general I have had more success with things that are personal and idiosyncratic.”

Hwang is speaking particularly of his own work, and he draws a careful distinction between that and his work with composers.

“I work in a lot of genres, and in each there is someone who is the primary artistic voice driving the project forward and the other artists are supporting that vision.

“If I write a play, I am the primary artist, but in opera it is the composer because the work will rise and fall on how the music is perceived and evaluated. That isn’t to say that the libretto isn’t important, because it affects the perception of the music, but fundamentally it is about the music.

“I am also very economical with words, and that is the discipline for the librettist. There have been a couple of times when I have adapted my plays into operas and you have to lose about 50 to 60 per cents of the words in a play to make an opera.”

The new opera of M Butterfly has music by Huang Ruo, but David Henry Hwang’s most regular composing partner has continued to be Glass, including the New York Metropolitan Opera commission The Voyage, The Sound of a Voice, based on two of Hwang’s plays, and most recently Circus Days and Nights, using the poems of Robert Lax, for Malmo Opera.

“Philip is very easy to work with,” says Hwang. “We come up with an idea together, and I’ll write a story outline – although in the case of The Voyage at the Met the outline was Philip’s – and then he assumes that the librettist’s job is to write the words and his is to write the music.”

An impressive list of other composers clearly find Hwang an agreeable collaborator  too. They range from Unsuk Chin (2007’s Alice in Wonderland) and Howard Shore (2008’s The Fly, based on the film by David Cronenberg, who made a movie of M Butterfly) to Elton John, Phil Collins and Prince – Hwang co-wrote the least salacious song on the late funk musician’s 1994 album, Come.

He still proudly lists that last surprise on his comprehensive and varied CV.

“I’m pretty eclectic and I don’t really make a distinction between high culture and writing a Disney musical,” he says. “The primary distinction is always whether I am in charge or am I helping someone else realise their vision.

“When I was a kid, the two pop stars that meant the most to me were Prince and David Bowie, so the fact that I got to write a song with Prince and it ended up on an album is just the coolest thing!”

Ainadamar has three performances at Glasgow’s Theatre Royal from Saturday October 29 and three at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh from November 8. Full details at scottishopera.org.uk

A composer’s champions

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The piano music of Troon’s Douglas Munn has a showcase at the end of Cumnock Tryst 2022. KEITH BRUCE talks to his widow, Clare.

That Ayrshire man Douglas Munn’s legacy in his professional field of mathematics is secure seems in little doubt. As Dr W D Munn he held professorships at the Universities of Stirling and Glasgow and he was still publishing internationally-admired work in his particular algebraic specialism well beyond retirement.

In his latter years, however, Munn was as concerned with the after-life of the fruits of his skill as a composer of piano music, revising – and in some cases completing – work he had written in his teens and very early twenties.

Since his death in 2008, Munn the musician has been fortunate to be championed by three loyal women: his widow Clare, his sister Lesley, and Latvian pianist Arta Arnicane, whom he and Clare met at the 2001 Scottish International Piano Competition and went on to assist with accommodation and practice facilities through her studies at the Royal Scottish Conservatoire (then the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama).

This weekend that work reaches a moment of posthumous celebration, appropriately near to his Troon home, when Arnicane plays Munn’s music in Dumfries House on the final day of Sir James MacMillan’s Cumnock Tryst festival. The recital follows the release of an album she recorded at home in Riga which collects his complete catalogue for solo piano, handily clocking in at just under an hour of music and released on Toccata Classics.

Clare still lives in the Munn family home in Troon, and when we spoke earlier this week, I interrupted her playing the piano – “winding down”, she said, from the stress of emptying the couple’s Glasgow flat before it is sold.

“There was never a day went past without us playing the piano, either separately or together. The maths conferences used to have a lot of musicians and we played together at those,” she said.

“We also played at the university club, including many of the most famous pieces in the piano duet repertoire. I especially remember pieces by Debussy and Lutoslawski. I’ve still got my family Steinway, which belonged to my Cambridge grandparents and it still sounds pretty good. It’s been well looked after.”

It was, as is perhaps abundantly clear, music that brought the couple together.

“We were married for nearly 30 years,” Clare explains, “and we met through music in Salzburg, at a summer school organised by Glasgow University’s Extra-Mural Department. I had graduated from the Royal Academy of Music and was a young music teacher in London, and I went there with a flatmate on holiday and met Douglas.

“I think I quite impressed him, because the first time he invited me to Scotland I climbed to the top of Ben Nevis.”

That was in the 1960s, and it was the start of a slow-blooming relationship.

“It was a long distance romance,” laughs Clare. “I lived in Australia for 11 years, where I was teaching, and Douglas came out and lectured there. I think we did surprise everybody when we eventually got married in Sydney in 1980 and Douglas persuaded me to come back to Scotland.”

Portrait of Munn by his mother Elizabeth

“Douglas’s mother was a teacher and had brought up her children after the death of their father at the end of the Second World War. She and her husband were both accomplished artists and members of the Paisley Art Institute.

“My father sang in the King’s College Chapel and my mother trained as a pianist and I had musical siblings – my younger sister was a violinist in the BBC Symphony Orchestra.”

Steeped in music as Clare and Douglas Munn were, they were supporters of Scotland’s orchestras and opera company, and of the conservatoire. Douglas was the Glasgow University representative there as well as serving on the board of St Mary’s Music School in Edinburgh.

“We bought a flat in the West End of Glasgow and used it while my husband was teaching at the university and I was a piano and a violin teacher,” said Clare.

During that time the couple met composer James MacMillan and his wife – a long friendship that links the early years of both marriages to this weekend’s event. They also got to know composer Eddie McGuire.

“It was Eddie who encouraged Douglas to dig out his music and have it stored at the Scottish Music Centre. That spurred Douglas on to start the revisions.

“The first little Prelude was written in 1944 [when Munn was just 15], and he continued to compose and play through his student years until the mathematics took over, although I do remember him finishing off the Sonatina and singing the tunes from it in the mid-80s.”

Given her teaching background, there was also encouragement of young musicians. The Ayrshire String Orchestra that plays in Dumfries House following Arnicane’s recital on Sunday includes a couple of Clare’s former pupils.

It was the commitment to young talent that introduced the couple to the Latvian pianist.

“Arta came to Glasgow to take part in the Scottish Piano Competition, when John Lill was on the panel,” said Clare. “We heard her play a Chopin study quite remarkably well, and Douglas said: ‘That girl is extremely good.’ I invited her to come and play in the flat and then we were able to offer her some accommodation when she was in between competitions.”

The Munns were in time invited to Arnicane’s wedding in Riga to Florian, who is a German cellist. They perform as a duo and now live in Zurich, where they have two sons, and the pianist has not stopped championing the music of Douglas Munn, including it in her solo recitals.

The recording of the complete Munn canon was made in 2019 in the studio of Riga Radio in Latvia, and the Toccata release comes with a fulsome booklet including notes by the pianist herself, a Maths colleague of the composer, David Easdown, and Munn’s sister Lesley Duncan, a journalist at The Herald. Crowning the package is the cover portrait of her son by his mother Elizabeth.

Arta Arnicane (pictured at top) plays Douglas Munn, Debussy and Martinu at Dumfries House, Cumnock at 2pm and 4pm on Sunday October 2 as part of Cumnock Tryst.

The Carnyx Speaks

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John Kenny resurrects not one but three iron age Carnyces at this year’s Cumnock Tryst. KEN WALTON finds out more from the man who brought the awesome instrument back to life, and previews the local aspects of a very Ayshire festival.

Ever wondered what the bestial image on the VoxCarnyx masthead is? Those in the know, or inquisitive enough to have looked it up, will recognise it as the topmost section of the carnyx, an instrument dating back to the iron age, fragments of which were first discovered buried under a Banffshire farm in 1816. 

The fearsome bronze head, with hinged jaw and sprung wooden tongue, appeared to be the bell of a 2000-year-old brass instrument. It took till the1990s to put the theory to the test, when trombonist John Kenny, encouraged by Scots composer and music historian John Purser,  joined an archeological project aimed at reconstructing the carnyx both visually and as a functioning musical instrument. 

With support from the National Museum of Scotland and metal craftsman John Creed, the eventual first sight and sound of the reconstructed carnyx – an awesome man-sized construction comprising a lengthy blow tube, imposing boar’s head and named the Deskford Carnyx after the parish in which the original was found – was at the National Museum’s reopening ceremony in 2011. “We didn’t know what we were going to come out with,” Kenny recalls, fearful that such a beautiful object might simply sound like “a rather inert tube”. “It turned out to be magnificent,” he says. 

So much so, that the world now has more magnificent specimens, and for the first time in 2000 years three carnyces will perform together this weekend at James MacMillan’s Cumnock Tryst festival. Saturday’s programme in St John’s Church, Ancient Voices, features Kenny’s ensemble Dragon Voices and a sequence of works by Kenny himself, 20th century French film composer Francis Chagrin, and a brand new work by Purser, whose poetry also weaves a narrative throughout the entire concert..

“We start with modern brass instruments, then work right back to the earliest proven examples we have of human beings creating musical sounds using lip vibration,” Kenny explains. Besides the trio of carnyces, Dragon Voices – an ensemble also consisting of Kenny’s son Patrick and former pupil Ian Sayer – perform on ancient sea horns. “In the iron age, Celtic craftsmen led the world in the art of making giant horns or trumpets out of beaten bronze and they were of extraordinary quality,” he adds.  

Purser’s new work, Gundestrup Rituals aims to illustrate their uniqueness and is based on images found on the Gundestrup Cauldron, a richly decorated silver vessel discovered in a Danish peat bog and dating from the early iron age. Included among these is a powerful representation of three carnyces being played at once. 

The carnyx players on the Gundestrup Cauldron (National Museum of Denmark)

For those who imagine the sound of the carnyx to echo its warlike appearance, be prepared for a surprise. “They will be amazed at the extraordinary versatility of the instrument,” promises Kenny. “Yes, the traditional idea of it as a war horn is true. It can be very violent and powerful with a massive range of five octaves, depending on the ability of the performer. But it is also capable of a huge dynamic range, coloured by the strange combination of its unique harmonic series and resultant vibrations.” 

The biggest revelation for Kenny in exploring its possibilities was to discover how quietly and uniquely mysterious it could sound. “Using modern brass players’ techniques actually resulted in quite a boring sound,’ he explains. “On modern brass instruments, we try to make uniform sound, and also tend to work in groups dedicated to our ideas of melody and harmony. These are very modern ideas in terms of the organisation of musical sound. 

“So we had to discard those standard techniques in order to explore the natural potential of the instrument. As a musician and composer it was for me a Tabula Rasa moment, working with a blank page, a bit like that sudden moment in the14th century when artists, working also as alchemists, discovered how to make oil paintings. Here, with the carnyx, was another extraordinary moment working with new colours.”

Such possibilities, and the fact the original carnyces appeared to have been “ritually dismembered” before burial, led Kenny to believe the symbolism of the carnyx was just as likely to be as sacral as it was bellicose. “It’s actually much more effective when played gently and quietly.” Ancient Voices sets out to illustrate that infinite diversity.

Dragon Voices with the three carnyx reconstructions by John Creed. Image: Ali Watt

The clash of sounds ancient and modern pervades much of the classical content of this 2022 Cumnock Tryst, which runs Thursday 29 September to Sunday 2 October. The Kings Singers (Fri 30 Sept at Trinity Church) celebrate a vast international lineage of a cappella choral writing that stretches from English Renaissance giant William Byrd to the whimsical Lobster Quadrille of György Ligeti, by way of Vaughan Williams and original Kings Singer, Bob Chilcott. There’s music, too, by MacMillan himself and a lighter-hearted send off of close-harmony Disney numbers.

On Sunday (Dumfries House, 2pm & 4pm) Latvian pianist Arta Arnicane unveils an Ayrshire curiosity, the piano music of Douglas Munn, an eminent Mathematician who lived in Troon until his death in 2008, and whose compositions – recently released on CD – are both skilful and charming.

If imported professional artists represent a smaller proportion of the line up this year, that, says MacMillan, is deliberate.  “That trend has certainly grown over the years. It’s always been part of the Festival’s raison d’être to encourage a sense of ownership and deep involvement by local community groups, and to get them involved with the visiting professionals in different ways.”

Thus the combined involvement of local amateur dramatic group CAMPS and Strings N Things with BBC SSO musicians (Merchant City Brass) in Saturday’s A Musical Celebration of the Coalfields in Cumnock Town Hall; or Friday’s compositional collaboration between Drake Music Scotland, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland singers and local pupils from Hillside School in Blue Sky Counterpoint at the new Barony Campus.

Even the big festival finale on Sunday evening at Dumfries House – billed as the Scott Riddox Memorial Concert in memory of the locally-known singer – is an entirely local showcase with big ambitions. After individual contributions from the Ayrshire Symphony Orchestra under conductor John Wilson, The Festival Chorus and CAMPS, all the ensembles will come together under MacMillan’s baton for a performance of Gavin Bryars’ iconic Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet.

The 2022 Cumnock Tryst runs 29 Sept to 2 Oct at various venues in Cumnock. Full details at www.thecumnocktryst.com

Top picture: Jane Salmon

Toi, Toi, Tay!

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A new opera festival launches this weekend in Dundee. KEN WALTON reveals the plot

Is there really room for another classical music festival in Scotland? The people of Dundee certainly think so. From Thursday to Sunday this weekend (22-25 Sept) the first ever Opera Festival Scotland gets underway in the feisty Tayside city with performances of Verdi’s Aida and Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, a visit by Scottish Opera’s Highlights Tour, and a supporting programme of lectures, masterclasses and singing competitions.  

Nobody is keener for it to work than locally-born events guru and festival organiser Michael Jamieson, whose brainchild it is, and who has fought against the odds to make this inaugural event happen. “It’s not been without its challenges,” he freely admits. “Firstly we had to be taken seriously, decide on exactly what would happen, then Covid came and we had to move the Festival back a year.”

Even now, he and his organising colleagues have had to deal with the hiatus around national mourning for the late Queen, and the general nervousness of the paying public at a time of economic hardship. “The cost of living crisis is probably our biggest immediate challenge. People are not confident in parting with their money right now,” he says. Nonetheless, optimism is not in short supply.

That’s as much to do with the inclusive nature of a programme designed to involve local opera enthusiasts as it is with the organisers’ prudence and realism in engaging affordable artists, focusing limited funds on where they will make the most impact, and in establishing creative collaborations with key professional bodies. “Those collaborations came remarkably easily,” says Jamieson, who has secured support from Scottish Opera, English National Opera, Perth Festival and the RSNO. 

The centrepiece, Friday’s concert performance of Aida at the Caird Hall, is all about involvement. Yes, the Festival has imported experienced singers to fill the key roles, but to make this the extravaganza Jamieson wants it to be, the hordes of soldiers, priests, prisoners and slaves will be eager and enthusiastic Dundonians. 

“We wanted to involve as many amateur singers as possible from local communities,” Jamieson explains. “Dundee and the surrounding areas are full of small groups who want to do big operas but just don’t have the resources. Different events are forever competing with each other, so we though, let’s do it differently, do something big where they can all join in on neutral ground.” Friday’s performance will be directed by local music teacher and conductor Ralph Jamieson. “Yes, we’re related,” admits Michael.

As for the fully-professional performance activity, Scottish Opera has chosen to open its latest country-wide Opera Highlights Tour in the city’s Marryat Hall. The same venue hosts Opera Bohemia in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro on Saturday. 

Another highlight has to be the presence of internationally-renowned, Glasgow-born soprano Janis Kelly, once a regular star with Scottish Opera, now chair of vocal performance at the Royal College of Music. 

A number of the Opera Festival Scotland events revolve around her presence. On Sunday morning she conducts a masterclass at Dundee High School, sharing her musical knowledge and experience to two upcoming sopranos, Scots-born Rosha Fitzhowle and London-based Jila Mariko. 

Kelly will also chair the judging panel that afternoon in another key Festival event at the Caird Hall, the Young Artists Singing Competition. She’ll be joined by fellow judges Julia Lagahuzere (founder and general director of Opera for Peace), veteran mezzo-soprano Linda Ormiston, and the heads of casting for Scottish Opera and ENO. “We had over 100 applications from around the UK,” says Jamieson. The winner, chosen from four finalists who will perform with the RSNO, will receive the Opera Festival Scotland Trophy, £1500 career grant, a lunchtime recital promoted by ENO, and a masterclass with Bollywood playback singer Kamal Khan, courtesy of Opera for Peace.

Other Festival events include a Non-professional Singing Competition, and two keynote lectures: one on the History of Opera Performance in Scotland by Fife-based Iain Fraser, co-creator of the website Opera Scotland; and Julia Lagahuzere, focusing on the artist as a world ambassador and their place in society. One further event at Dundee’s V&A, presented by experts Megan Baker and Raymond Uphill-Wood, offers a workshop on Costume and Make-Up Design. The Festival has also been active in local schools in the run up to the inaugural event, introducing opera to children at both primary and secondary level. Pupils have also been offered free admission to Festival events.

Jamieson’s future ambition for Opera Festival Scotland is that it should operate on a two-year cycle. “That depends on what happens this weekend,” he says guardedly. “If it’s something Dundee wants we’ll do everything we can to make it a regular fixture in the Scottish cultural calendar. The first indication it is will be the audience figures and feedback from this event. We’ll see how it goes.”

Opera Festival Scotland runs 22-25 September in Dundee. Full details at www.operafestivalscotland.co.uk

Simply the Best

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Choir supremo Christopher Bell tells KEN WALTON about the exciting new NYCOS initiative he’s launching at the Lammermuir Festival 

No sooner has the buzz of the Edinburgh International Festival dissipated than the Lammermuir Festival bursts into action with a programme of equal calibre. From 8-19 September all the big Classical Music action is in East Lothian, opening on Thursday with the compelling pianism of Jeremy Denk in Dunbar, and an operatic rarity – Massenet’s Thérèse – courtesy of Scottish Opera in St Mary’s Church, Haddington.

Elsewhere over the next 12 days regular morning coffee concerts include a series of song recitals by various star vocalists partnered with pianist Malcom Martineau; the chamber music programme ranges from string quartets Quatuor Mosaïques and Quatuor Agate to such invigorating couplings as cellist Laura van der Heijden and pianist Tom Poster; larger scale events extend from Bach cantata performances by the Marian Consort and Spiritato to orchestra programmes by the RSNO, SCO, Royal Northern Sinfonia, and the BBC SSO.

Among this cornucopia of delights, however, there’s one event that deserves special mention. It’s at Loretto School Chapel this Sunday (11 Sep), and it might take a second glance at the billing to appreciate that this isn’t just by any old National Youth Choir of Scotland (NYCOS) ensemble, but a brand new initiative that its artistic director Christopher Bell expects will personify excellence. Bell makes no apology for the selectivity of its 24 members. “They have to be at the top of their game to be chosen,” he says.

This is NYCOS’ “First XV”, singers taken from the current flagship National Youth Choir who are deemed the star players. Bell recognises that such a strategy goes against the inclusive brigade who’s view is you shouldn’t be leaving people out. “I’m quite surprised that 25 years on from founding NYCOS I’m still making the argument that to get the vey best results you have to have the very best singers,” he says. 

His methods are tried and tested. The current lead ensembles – which also include the National Girls and National Boys Choirs – have performed at the highest level, from the BBC Proms and Edinburgh Festival to highly-acclaimed appearances in the USA. They have even been the choir of choice for Sir John Eliot Gardner and his Orchestra Révolutionnaire et Romantique. 

To get them to that level, Bell’s preferred model is pyramidal. At its base are the 14 regional choirs that eventually feed the national ones. But there are also parallel strands that address inclusivity. “Everybody at school should experience singing, which is why we run a programme of general access educational work where we’ll do singing days and teach teachers through workshops. Alongside that there’s the progressively-structured choir activity. 

“But it’s like when a school wants a winning football team. Yes, everyone’s done PE, but you want the players that will get the ball in the net. When it comes to choosing a choir, particularly when it’s outside school, you want the best singers.”

One of the express aims of the new Chamber Choir is to tackle some of the most testing and varied repertoire. Sunday’s recital will include Britten’s slightly mad cantata Rejoice in the Lamb, James MacMillan’s Culham Motets and Jonathan Dove’s Passing of the Year. “Jonathan’s piece is really brilliant, very thoughtful, but joyful too,” he explains. “It’s about the arc of the year expressing the arc of life in symbolic terms. The funeral march near the end will break your heart.”

For this, Bell has been very specific in the voices he has recruited. They have to suit the repertoire of a given programme. “But it will be horses for courses,” he adds. “”It won’t necessarily be the same 24 people all the time. If we decide to do a more operatic programme, we choose the right voices. For a more churchy programme, a kind of Tenebrae meets Tallis Scholars, again we choose the best voices for the job. I even reserve the right, if there isn’t the right level within the group, to bring some NYCOS alumni back to ensure it’s of a decent level.”

“There’s capacity for the new choir to do really hard music, for us to make recordings of very different repertoire. This concert is the official launch of that idea: an idea we put to the Leverhulme Trust who came up with a very nice amount of money, which means that for the next three years we will be able to do it.”

The Chamber Choir sneaked in a soft launch recently in St Andrews and will do the same in Helensburgh this Saturday. But Sunday is the big moment when Bell introduces his newest choral initiative to a discriminating Lammermuir Festival audience. Thereafter it has a Scottish tour planned and recordings that include one for the BBC. “What we are not looking to do is crash in on already existing ensembles,” Bell stresses. “We’re looking to find maybe a niche, one that gives the really experienced NYCOS singers a chance to do yet more detailed and high level work, and not to stand on anyone’s toes!”. 

The new NYCOS Chamber Choir launches at the Lammermuir Festival on 11 Sep (3pm) in Loretto School Chapel, Musselburgh. The Festival runs in venues around East Lothian from 8-19 Sep. Full details on www.lammermuirfestival.co.uk

Festival favourites return

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Conductor Semyon Bychkov and members of the Czech Philharmonic talked to Keith Bruce ahead of their Edinburgh Festival concerts

Between the Philharmonia at its start and the Philadelphia when it ends, the 75th Edinburgh International Festival has another orchestral residency when the Czech Philharmonic plays two concerts under the baton of its Chief conductor and Music Director Semyon Bychkov.

The relationship between the Czech orchestra and the Festival is an important one, with regular visits over the years under many of the great conductors with whom it has been associated. Almost always the concerts have included Czech repertoire by Smetana, Janacek and Dvorak, often alongside the music of Gustav Mahler.

In 1969 the recently-appointed Vaclav Neumann was on the podium, returning in 1983 in partnership with Jiri Belohlavek for a concert featuring the piano duo of Katia and Marielle Labeque. Belohlavek conducted two of the three concerts in 1991, but Janacek’s epic Glagolitic Mass was under the baton of Sir Charles Mackerras. That same team returned at the end of the 1998 festival and in 2000 played two Usher Hall concerts and in the pit at the Playhouse for Jiri Kylian’s Nederlands Dans Theater.

The story actually goes back to the years of the Festival’s founding, when the Czech Phil’s conductor Rafael Kubelik, who had maintained a defiant attitude to the Nazis during the Second World War, decided he could not live under another tyrannical regime following the Communist coup and used the opportunity of conducting a Glyndebourne production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the King’s Theatre in 1948 to defect.

The orchestra will this year play the music of their homeland on Saturday, with the Labeque sisters once again the soloists in a programme that also includes the Glagolitic Mass with the Edinburgh Festival Chorus. On Sunday we will hear Mahler’s Symphony No 7, a work the orchestra premiered in Prague in 1908, under the baton of the composer. Conducting both concerts this weekend is their Music Director since 2018, Semyon Bychkov, who is married to Marielle Labeque and a Russian who swiftly and eloquently condemned the invasion of Ukraine at a time when others were equivocal.

In common with many public buildings in Prague, the Czech Phil’s concert hall, the Rudolfinum, displays the colours of the Ukraine flag in solidarity with the people there. This is no distant conflict for the people of the Czech Republic, and the orchestra’s Chief Conductor was an important voice at the start of the war, issuing a statement headlined “Silence in the face of evil becomes its accomplice”.

In April of this year, on the morning after a filled Rudolfinum heard a concert of a contemporary symphony by English composer Julian Anderson, Prague Panoramas, a Mozart Piano Concerto played by Vikingur Olafsson and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Bychkov was happy to talk about both the current situation, his relationship with the land of his birth, and the recent history of an orchestra with which he clearly enjoys a fond relationship.

Resident in France, he was settled into a late freelance career and not minded to seek a contractual post with any orchestra when he was approached by the musicians, following the death of Belohlavek. “I couldn’t refuse 124 orphans,” he says, smiling.

“The pandemic took away many of our plans, including an invitation to Edinburgh in 2020, and also a visit to Moscow to perform there. That was before this tragedy started and now there is no discussion of that, either possible or desired.”

Concerts in the Russian capital would have been a major event for the orchestra and for its Chief Conductor, who was a prize-winning young talent in St Petersburg before leaving for a career in the West.

“I left because I wanted to be free to live the way I wanted to live, free to think the way I want, free to express myself the way I want, and free to make music that is important to me, or not to make it because it is not important to me,” he says, before acknowledging another side to his decision.

“Antisemitism exists everywhere, the difference there was that it was institutionalised within the state. I saw my father suffer from that, before I was given opportunities that were amazing and without precedent. But 50 years later my answer, and my decision, hasn’t changed.”

“A country that refuses to recognise the dark pages of its history and accept the necessity to atone for them will never be able to come out of enslavement to those dark pages. Russia lost 27 million people during World War Two, but more in the gulags of Lenin and Stalin – yet people there are nostalgic for Stalin.”

Semyon Bychkov conducts Czech Phil in Prague’s Rudolfinum

Bychkov conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the 2019 Festival, in a concert that included Mahler 4, and he was on his first big European tour post-pandemic with the Czech orchestra when the Ukrainian invasion happened. It changed the dynamic of the dates, he says, with London’s Barbican and concerts in Berlin and Vienna quickly selling out.

There can be little argument that it is in the company of the orchestras of those cities that the Prague orchestra belongs. Some of the musicians in the Czech Philharmonic are long-served enough to have played under Neumann and under Mackerras in Edinburgh.

Oboist Ivan Sequardt says: “Touring is an essential part of our work. We love the Rudolfinum, but there are halls that are better suited for bigger pieces: Leipzig Gewandhaus, Birmingham Symphony Hall and the halls in Yokohama and Tokyo in Japan. Our home venue has limited space and some compositions need to be played elsewhere.”

Just the same, Sequardt is not entirely delighted to be taking Mahler 7 to the Festival. “Agencies want it because it was premiered here in Prague, which is a shame. It is a great piece up to the last movement, which is too long and full of unnatural and pointless repetitions. Maestro Neumann was right to cross out some of those as a favour to the audience. I like Symphonies 5, 4, and 1 much better.”

The orchestra is getting to know them all again, because it is in the midst of recording the whole cycle for Pentatone, following the success of an acclaimed 7-disc set of the music of Tchaikovsky. Symphony No 4 was released in April and 1, 2, 5 and 9 are already “in the can”.

For Bychkov, Mahler was an obvious choice.

“Mahler is viewed as an Austrian composer because his later years were spent in Vienna, although he was born in this country and his DNA is the DNA of the Czech Phil. During the pandemic, Simon Rattle came to work with the orchestra and described it as ‘the perfect Mahler orchestra’”, he says with pride.

“When I first arrived, the agreement we made was for me to spend 16 weeks of the year with the orchestra, but it has never been less than 20. I am here not because I must but because I want to. Music is existential for the Czech people, as we see in the audience as well as the orchestra.”

“We really appreciate collaboration, and conductors who treat us a partners,” says Sequardt. His colleague Jaroslav Pondelicek from the viola section adds that the orchestra is more flexible than it used to be in its accommodation of the desires of conductors.

“The Czech Phil sound is very tender and transparent,” says Pondelicek, “and Bychkov has added more passion and energy, especially to the strings.”

In the recording studio, he says, the conductor always wants long takes of whole movements but will not hesitate to ask for them again if he is not happy.

“His preparation is fantastic, with great detail. He wants the best result possible and it is great value for us that he will not be satisfied if we play less than our best.”

With a Japanese flautist and a Spanish double bass player, there is evidence of international recruitment within the ranks of the Czech Phil, but it is much less than we are familiar with in the UK.

The players see that as a strength, and so does the conductor.

“All but two are Czech, so there is a continuity in the way the musicians think about phrasing. We want to preserve that because it makes the orchestra unique. And the orchestra is on the young side but very mixed age-wise, which is lucky because it cannot be arranged – it is an natural process of regeneration,” says Bychkov.

70 years old this year, Bychkov has conducted many of the world’s finest orchestras, across North America and Europe and speaks from vast experience.

“If an orchestra is not loved there is nothing you can do about it,” he says. “But this orchestra is loved, first of all by its home audience – and we feel it every time we come onstage by the way they greet us and how they listen – and it is loved elsewhere as well, and that helps. Not everyone has this privilege.”

Czech Philharmonic and Semyon Bychkov are at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh, on August 20 and 21 as part of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival. eif.co.uk

Boyd is Back in Town

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Douglas Boyd makes a rare return to his native Scotland conducting Garsington Opera’s Rusalka at the Edinburgh International Festival. He talks to KEN WALTON

Since turning exclusively to conducting 16 years ago, the former oboist, Glasgow-born Douglas Boyd, has forged a solid reputation among fellow musicians as an out-and-out enthusiast. They warm to his lack of airs and graces, no doubt informed by his first-hand understanding of how orchestral players respond and operate. His own playing career took the now 63-year-old from principal oboe and founding member of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe to recitalist in such auspicious venues as New York’s Carnegie Hall.

When he eventually laid down the double reed in favour of a single baton, he had already successfully tested the water as music director of Manchester Camerata. He has since held leading conducting positions with the Orchester Musikkollegium Winterthur, the Paris Chamber Orchestra, and in the US the St Paul Chamber Orchestra and Colorado Symphony Orchestra.

But it’s in his capacity as artistic director of Garsington Opera, a post he has held for the last ten years, that Boyd will star in the opening few days of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival. On Saturday, the Buckingham-based company brings its recent new production of Dvorak’s fairy-tale opera Rusalka to the Edinburgh Festival Theatre, where it plays – with the Philharmonia Orchestra in the pit, Welsh soprano Natalya Romaniw in the title role, and circus artists adding to the spectacle – for three performances.

Boyd is delighted to be returning to Scotland. “It means a lot to be back,” he says. “I hardly ever perform there, but have been recently, working with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra during the pandemic and more recently doing an utterly inspiring project with junior students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.” 

Already, this new Rusalka has attracted rosy comment. Reviewers of last month’s Garsington opening were intrigued by the action-packed staging directed by Jack Furness – who next week will escape Edinburgh to launch his new outdoor production of Bernstein’s Candide in Glasgow for Scottish Opera – and who were especially won over by Boyd’s luxurious realisation of one of Dvorak’s most impressive operatic scores.

“I think it’s one of the great fin de siècle masterpieces,” claims the conductor. “I feel I’m conducting the best music that’s ever been written. We tend to focus on one single aria, the Song to the Moon, but in the broader sense it’s the way Dvorak paints this fantastic text, not only in the vocal line, but throughout the orchestral score.  It’s all very Wagnerian, he adds, “where every emotion and symbol is painted in sound.” 

Rusalka review at Garsington Opera at Wormsley, Buckinghamshire, composed by Antonin Dvorak, conducted by Douglas Boyd and starring Natalya Romaniw
Natalya Romaniw in Garsington Opera’s Rusalka

While it’s a fairy tale, it’s very much the adult variety, he argues. “You have to remember that the concept of fairly tales nowadays has been so Disneyfied and made into a children’s genre, whereas if you go back to the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen, it’s actually about our deepest fears as people, which starts in childhood and continues through adulthood. Grimms’ tales can be really horrific and scary; there’s an element of that in Rusalka as well.”

Indeed so. Dvorak’s librettist Jaroslav Kvapil fashioned Rusalka on Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. Rusalka, a water nymph, wishes to become a human in order to capture the love of a Prince. The witch, Jezibaba, obliges, but with conditions: Rusalka must remain mute and the Prince must remain true to her. A Foreign Princess plots against them, the Prince rejects Rusalka, then repents. But the curse holds and a desperate kiss leads to the Prince’s death. Rusalka disappears into the watery depths.

It’s possible, says Boyd, to sense that foreboding in the orchestral score well before tragedy reveals its hand on stage. “As in Wagner, there are leitmotifs for each character, like the Rusalka theme at the beginning which is so incredibly beautiful, but when it comes back at the very end of Act 3, it does so as a funeral march. The truth is it’s been a funeral march the whole time, but it takes you until then to finally make that realisation.”

The story in this production is expressed in the original Czech, which Boyd and Furness both see as essential in reflecting the perfect symbiosis of Kvapil’s text and Dvorak’s music. “As long as you’ve got the supertitles in front of you, you get the best of both words. With a good translation you’re not excluding the audience, you’re embracing them, bringing them in. However, the stresses of the Czech language are so intrinsic to Dvorak’s music. The danger sometimes of singing it in English is it can get quite eggy, like trying to fit a square into a circle.”

But there’s always plenty to feast the eyes on in a production that aims to highlight the opera’s to-ing and fro-ing between the world of nymphs and the human world. “We’ve got aerialists [drilled by circus choreographer Lina Johansson] and pretty spectacular things going on on stage which is actually true to this halfway house,” says Boyd. Their presence has also enabled the production to fill Dvorak’s extended orchestral passages with additional representational movement.

For Boyd, the experience has cemented his view that Dvorak’s legacy as as opera composer has been unjustly underappreciated. “I think we tend to fixate on his instrumental output, on the last couple of symphonies, the chamber music, the Cello Concerto,” he argues. “But I think Rusalka is the product of a composer absolutely at the peak of his powers.” 

Garsington Opera’s Rusalka is at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre. 6, 8 & 9 August. http://www.eif.co.uk/events/rusalka

Ready to Rubble

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Composer Gareth Williams talks to KEITH BRUCE about his new work for Scottish Opera’s Young Company

There will come a time when new work in the arts does not carry some legacy of the pandemic, but it has not arrived just yet.

For composer Gareth Williams, who – as he puts it himself – “emerged from lockdown with a baby”, it was a time of personal as well as professional challenges. If fatherhood has dictated that he still doesn’t get out as much, the lengthy gestation period of the latest of his stage works for Scottish Opera meant that it has gone through a number of versions on the way to the performances in the company’s Elmbank Crescent HQ at the end of this month.

Rubble is the third collaboration between Williams and librettist Johnny McKnight for Scottish Opera, following The Last One Out in 2012 and Hand for an Opera Highlights tour. The initial proposal to Director of Outreach and Education Jane Davidson came from Williams, drawing on a celebrated Graham Greene story from the middle of the last century, The Destructors.

“I said I wanted to write something with young people and in The Destructors they are fishy characters that don’t conform to society’s rules, and I really liked that about them. I wanted an edge about them, and some bite, and I wanted to work with Johnny. So we handed it over to him and after it had been through his mind the Graham Greene is long gone, and what has emerged is something very dark and menacing as well, but more contemporary.

“We had a libretto reading in February 2020 and I remember it very clearly as on the way home I crashed my car because I was so pre-occupied. It is a really troublesome, challenging story. Johnny is someone who throws the gauntlet down to you and you have to take it somewhere else.”

What McKnight came back with was a scenario of young people who have been let down by the care system picking through the fragments of their lives in the rubble of an abandoned children’s home. Parallels with some harrowing recent court cases and public inquiries may well be self-evident in a black comedy that Scottish Opera is describing as challenging. The performance of the cast of 17-23 year olds is not recommended for those under 14.

Although the creative team was in place, with staff director Roxana Haines and young company artistic director Chris Gray conducting, events conspired to put obstacles on the road to Rubble’s production.

“Rubble is kind of haunted by Covid,” says Williams. “I had to stay away from wind and brass instruments, so it is written for piano, two percussionists, accordion and single strings. But part of my want from the very start was to write for a chorus, about 30 strong, singing together for as much of the opera as possible. That felt quite affirmative with the young people.

“The initial idea was that there would be lots of opportunities for workshops, and because of the pandemic that didn’t happen. So we have all had to live with this opera a lot longer.

“We didn’t know when it was going to happen, so it became a process of eternal tinkering. At one point it might have been an outdoor show so I started to arrange it in that direction, and then it came back to being indoor so that changed it again.”

There were positives about the extra time gifted to the team, however.

“It was the most open casting call. Before we made a final decision on voice types we allowed the young people to go for any of the main characters, so it is very non-gendered. That left it for me to do a bit of sculpting at the end, but it was a good call.

“And because I didn’t have access to the chorus, I wrote as a singer-songwriter at the piano and sang some of the arias and made demos and sent them to the director and conductor. So they already know this piece inside out, because of that extra year.”

Williams had plenty of experience in that singer-songwriter role because of the other project that has occupied a lot of his time recently: Songs From The Last Page.

Working with Chamber Music Scotland, Williams has created an ever-growing suite of new songs that draw their texts from the last pages of books, most of them Scottish and running from classics like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island through to contemporary writers like Ali Smith and Andrew Greig. Arranged for himself at the keyboard with cello and violin, Williams has brought onboard guest singers to supplement his own vocals. Following a show by the trio at Glasgow’s Aye Write literary festival, the next two performances will include Deirdre Graham, at her home in Skye, and Lori Watson, in Portobello.

“We have a run of gigs in the autumn,” says Williams, “including Wigtown, Aberdeen and Blairgowrie, and then we are back in Glasgow, at Partick Bowling Club, in December.”

The set list has its staples, but Williams is constantly adding to the catalogue.

“Somebody asked me to do an Alexander McCall Smith one, so I did that – I am just kind of responding and keeping loose with it. It has become this weird hobby. I just can’t stop doing them and there is an inexhaustible supply of ideas – there are plenty of good last lines!”

Songs From The Last Page has remained mostly based on adult books, despite the composer’s best efforts following the birth of his son.

“There have been a couple of books I was told I couldn’t have; the publisher just said no. I wasn’t allowed the last line of The Gruffalo or Winnie the Pooh – anything with a big corporate image attached was a no-no.

“But many living authors have been really generous, and it is good to have things like Treasure Island in there too – things that are out of copyright. I am going to record some of them this autumn and see if it might make an album, in the hope that we might persuade international book festivals to book us next year.”

Also grabbing a slice of his time are the Grammy Awards, after Williams was proposed as a voting member of The Recording Academy by fellow composer Craig Armstrong, and duly appointed. “The first round of deliberations starts this month and I am really keen to try and become more involved and learn how it works.”

He has other projects in the pipeline, but the final weeks of rehearsal of Rubble – about the full plot of which Williams is very tight-lipped – and the still-new experience of being a father are top of the agenda.

“Parenthood takes up a lot of your blue-sky thinking time, it turns out – I am a slave to this little sleepless god. And writing that piece about vulnerable young people and becoming a dad at the same time weighed on me in a very interesting way.”

Rubble has four performances in Scottish Opera’s Elmbank Crescent home, at 2pm and 7pm on July 30 and 31. For future performances of Songs From The Last Page, see chambermusicscotland.com

Rehearsal pictures of Gareth Williams and Johnny McKnight and the Scottish Opera Young Company by Sally Jubb

Juggling high and low art

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Sean Gandini, founder of Gandini Juggling, talks to KEITH BRUCE about his company’s first appearance at the East Neuk Festival

As many have observed, the pandemic and lockdown restrictions played havoc with perceptions of the passage of time, so that memories of events past can seem more distant or more recent than expected.

Five years ago, in the Dreel Halls in Anstruther, two young musicians played the work of composer Steve Reich in a concert that was to prove more the start of a journey for one than the other, although both have maintained a strong connection with the East Neuk Festival and are part of the 2022 programme.

Guitarist Sean Shibe unveiled elements of his softLOUD project that would go on to wow the Edinburgh Fringe and win him the first of a sequence of awards in its recorded form. Clarinettist Julian Bliss, on the other hand, took a different path by forming a jazz septet. The George Gershwin music he subsequently performed at ENF recently won huge acclaim at London’s Wigmore Hall, and the group brings a new programme of show tunes, entitled Hooray for Holywood, to Anstruther Town Hall on Friday July 1.

Shibe returns this year in the company of violinist Benjamin Baker, both of them former beneficiaries of East Neuk Retreats that enabled the focus on new directions in their music. This year Baker and Shibe are working with ENF debutantes Gandini Juggling on Light the Lights, a son et lumiere combination of music and movement that is another new direction for the festival.

While artistic director Svend Brown has built rewarding loyalties with chamber musicians and ensembles that are the heart of the East Neuk Festival, he has included various non-classical ingredients in the recipe over the years. Visual art, from sand sculpture to film-making, has often been present, while a flirtation with literary events came and went, possibly because of the boom in book festivals at other picturesque locations in Scotland.

This year, as well as jazz and movie music, there is choreography, both from the Daniel Martinez Flamenco Company, who are in the Anstruther venue the evening after Bliss, and from the Gandinis, whose back catalogue has paired their juggling skills with contemporary dance – especially the work of the late Pina Bausch – as well as Indian classical dance and ballet.

Five years ago in Gandini Juggling history, Sean Gandini received a Herald Archangel Award from the Glasgow-based newspaper for his decades of contribution to Edinburgh’s August festivities, and the Angel-winning shows he had brought to the capital. At the time, his group had also recently made a ground-breaking contribution to Phelim McDermott’s acclaimed production of the Philip Glass opera Ahknaten which earned it a Grammy award at the Metropolitan Opera and an Olivier award for English National Opera in London.

Sean Gandini receiving Herald Archangel from Fringe chief executive Shona McCarthy in 2017

When he and I speak, he has just returned from a revival of Ahknaten in New York, and ENO will re-stage the work at the Coliseum next spring. He is now in France, where Lyon’s Les Nuits de Fourviere festival is presenting both parts of the Bausch-influenced shows, Smashed and Smashed 2, together for the first time.

“That is happening at the same time as the Scottish performance which is a much more musical affair,” says Gandini. “We have split the team in two, because we live in an age of extremes and we are now weirdly busy after the pandemic – and one thing we have learned to do is work remotely!” With German juggler Doreen Grossman in charge of realising the ENF project, after Gandini has edited the shape of it via online rehearsals, Light the Lights will premiere at The Bowhouse near St Monans the day before the Gandinis open in Lyon.

“They have had Pina Bausch’s company many times and we will be performing the shows back-to-back at night in a square in front of the opera house where she used to perform.”

The music of Steve Reich is to the fore once more in the East Neuk show, alongside that of Bach, and Grossman will be programming the illuminated juggling to synchronise with the score.

“Light the Lights is a one-off commission, although we have worked before with these light-emitting clubs that are programmed to change colour in time with the music.” Gandini explains.

“It includes Reich’s work with phasing that accelerates a bit of material so that you end up staggered in timing. That is something that is of great interest to us, especially coming straight after working on the Glass. They are so similar and yet so different, those two composers.

“There was dialogue, but it was the Festival that suggested the choice of music and I hope that the show will have a further life, because that is the way that we work. At least elements of it will certainly return because we are working more with live music, and that is so special.”

Beyond any debate is the way that Gandini Juggling has taken the discipline at the heart of its art out of the world of circus and street performance into more exalted company.

“I’d love to do more opera,” Gandini confirms. “There was some suspicion of our involvement in Ahknaten until people actually saw it. It is a very unusual way of using juggling, but then there is a problem of hierarchy in the arts: juggling is lower in the pecking order than opera. Perhaps if Louis XIV had been obsessed with hula-hoops rather than ballet, things might have turned out differently!”

Light the Lights has its first, and so far sole, performance at The Bowhouse on Friday July 1, as part of the East Neuk Festival, June 29 to July 3. Full details of the whole programme are available at eastneukfestival.com

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