Category Archives: NEWS

SCO’s half-century and other seasons

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The Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s jubilee caps a promising orchestral programme for the year to come, writes Keith Bruce

In the run-up to its 50th anniversary, the SCO is understandably cock-a-hoop to be able to preface its new season announcement with the news that Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev has extended his contract with the orchestra to 2028.

As the young Russian’s reputation continues to grow globally, and his dizzying schedule takes him to the most prestigious concert halls and opera houses, he has clearly established an important mutually-supportive relationship with the Edinburgh-based ensemble. In the coming season that is as diverse as ever, opening with a seven date Scottish tour of Beethoven’s “Eroica” and a new work by the orchestra’s Associate Composer, Jay Capperauld.

Emelyanychev’s SCO season ends with Mendelssohn’s Elijah, which he, the orchestra and the SCO Chorus will perform in this summer’s newly-announced BBC Proms season.

The RSNO also kicks off with Beethoven, with Lise de la Salle the soloist for the Third Piano Concerto, when Music Director Thomas Sondergard also conducts Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben. Sondergard’s season ends with Berlioz’s Grande Messe and also features two concerts including piano concertos by Saint-Saens with the season’s Artist in Residence Simon Trpceski, and an evening of French music with Scots mezzo Catriona Morison the soloist.

At the BBC SSO, Chief Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth continues to make an individual mark, opening with a concert that includes his own Piano Concerto with Steven Osborne the soloist, alongside Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, with soprano Sally Matthews. He also focuses on Elgar, with the Symphony No 1 and Dai Miyata playing the Cello Concerto, and continues his exploration of Stravinsky’s ballet music with Orpheus and The Fairy’s Kiss, with Principal Guest Conductor Ilan Volkov adding Petrushka in January 2024.

Wigglesworth also conducts the Verdi Requiem next March as the SSO continues its association with the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, and there is much for lovers of choral music to enjoy elsewhere as well.

The RSNO Chorus is celebrating its 180th anniversary in style, including a “Come and Sing” Verdi Requiem in January and Jeanette Sorrell conducting the annual New Year Messiah following an end-of-November concert of Sir James MacMillan’s Christmas Oratorio, conducted by the composer. As well as that Berlioz Grande Messe, it also features in a John Wilson-conducted concert of Ireland, Elgar and Holst – and the RSNO Youth Chorus has an equally busy concert year.

The SCO Chorus can boast a MacMillan premiere with his Burns-setting Composed in August, and Capperauld gives them another first performance with his setting of Niall Campbell’s The Night Watch. It also sings Bach’s B Minor Mass, under conductor Richard Egarr, and Schubert’s Mass in A-flat.

Mezzo Karen Cargill joins the SSO and conductor Alpesh Chauhan for Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and is the soloist for a Scottish Chamber Orchestra programme celebrating the Auld Alliance with France. The SCO’s big birthday line-up of soloists also includes percussionist Colin Currie directing an evening of Steve Reich, Julia Wolfe and Arvo Part, Steven Osborne playing Ravel and Pekka Kuusisto returning for three concerts, one in partnership with Emelyanychev.

Violinist Nicola Benedetti, whose first programme as director of Edinburgh International Festival is unveiled on Monday, plays the Beethoven Violin Concerto with the SCO at the end of the year and gives the much-delayed Scottish premiere of Mark Simpson’s concerto written for her with the RSNO next March.

Full details of all the seasons at sco.org.uk, rsno.org.uk and bbc.co.uk/bbcsso

New piano festival

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Loaningdale House, to the north of Biggar in Clydesdale, has a rich, varied and sometimes controversial past, and next week a new chapter in its history begins as it hosts a series of piano recitals in its 120-seat auditorium.

Arts at Loaningdale is the initiative of the retired proprietor of the Edinburgh Piano Company, James Cameron, who has retained three instruments from his former business for the project, a modern Steinway and vintage Bosendorfer and Steinway models.

Playing them from Wednesday April 26 to Sunday April 30 will be Angela Hewitt, Nikita Lukinov, Miriam Gomez-Moran, jazz pianist Brian Kellock and duo Worbey and Farrell.

The classical menu opens with Hewitt’s recital of music by Mozart and Beethoven, with Lukinov pairing Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition on Thursday, and Gomez-Moran playing Liszt on Friday.

The new festival is directed by Fiona Finch, who recently established a music festival in France with Scottish pianist Alasdair Beatson, and managed by Miranda Heggie.

Alongside the recitals, which begin at 7.30pm, apart from Hewitt’s 3pm matinee opener, there will be an exhibition of recent works by local artist Sarah Dawnay, and the Steinway concert grand will be available to pianists of all ages and abilities on Saturday’s Open Day, from 10am to 3pm.

Full information and tickets available at artsatloaningdale.org

Picture of Angela Hewitt by Lorenzo Dogana

Now show unwrapped

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Following the reprieve for the BBC Singers, BBC Scotland has now decided that the demise of radio’s Classics Unwrapped is not the end of classical music programming presented by Jamie MacDougall on a Sunday evening.

Occupying the same time slot, 7pm to 9pm, and with the popular Scottish tenor still wearing the headphones, “Classical Now” debuts tomorrow evening, April 2. The new show does not use Unwrapped’s magazine format with interviews and commercially-available recordings, but will focus on live performances. The first show recycles music from two concerts first broadcast on Radio 3 – Ryan Wigglesworth’s debut as Chief Conductor of the BBC SSO in September of last year with Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe, and last month’s Scottish premiere of Nico Muhly’s Violin Concerto “Shrink” by Pekka Kuusisto and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

The Dunedin Consort completes  the line-up as Classical Now lays out its stall as a platform exclusively for Scottish artists and with longer works played in full. Whether the show has come about in response to the protests and petitions about the axing of Classics Unwrapped is unclear, but a BBC insider noted that the new show will be significantly cheaper to make.

The programme’s producer, Laura Metcalfe, is actively seeking stories and recordings from Scottish-based musicians. Classical Now is being pitched as “an opportunity for Scottish orchestras, ensembles and other performers to expand their reach to all households across Scotland via Radio Scotland and BBC Sounds” and those who wish to grab that offer should email laura.metcalfe@bbc.co.uk.

RPS Awards nominees

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The shortlists for this year’s Royal Philharmonic Society Awards includes a diverse trio of nominees from Scotland, alongside many others who are regular visitors or sometime residents.

Aberdeen’s sound festival is nominated in the Series and Events category for its 2021 festival, which explored the climate emergency through specially commissioned works and environmentally themed performances. Performers and audience members were encouraged to travel to the festival using sustainable modes of transport and the programme included a ground-breaking multi-media chamber work by composer Laura Bowler which saw soprano Juliet Fraser performing in Aberdeen with the Talea Ensemble streamed live from New York.

Director Fiona Robertson said of the nomination: “It recognises the contribution that the arts sector can make, both practically and artistically, to the climate emergency. It shows that it is possible to bring some of the world’s leading performers and composers to a festival in the UK, without an enormous carbon footprint.”

In the Opera and Music Theatre category Scottish Opera is up against ENO’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Garsington’s Orfeo and Theatre of Sound and Opera Ventures’ Bluebeard’s Castle, and unusually not linked to a single production. The citation reads: “Scottish Opera are on a roll. From their hilarious, magical take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream to their community-driven Candide, all their ventures this year have embodied their signature spirit and talent for magnetising audiences from near and far.”

Given the task of unveiling the shortlists on BBC Radio 3’s Breakfast show, Edinburgh’s Kate Molleson modestly omitted the Storytelling category, presumably as the writer and broadcaster herself is nominated for her acclaimed book exploring 20th century composition beyond the mainstream, Sound Within Sound. She is competing with James Runcie’s Bach novel The Great Passion and Manchester Camerata’s short film Untold: Keith.

The awards have been described as the classical music BAFTAs, but VoxCarnyx prefers to think of the BAFTAs as the RPS Awards for film and television! 

The full shortlists are available at royalphilharmonicsociety.org.uk and the winners will be announced on March 1 in London.

BBC Music Show Cuts

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BBC Radio Scotland’s rumoured plan to axe a huge swathe of its specialist music programming has now been confirmed. A news exclusive this week by the Scotsman’s arts correspondent Brian Ferguson extracted a response from the press office at Pacific Quay that neither denied BBC Scotland’s intentions nor offered a convincing argument for the controversial decision.

Widely discussed over the festive season, Ferguson’s story confirmed that both Classics Unwrapped, presented by tenor Jamie MacDougall and Jazz Nights, fronted by singer and violinist Seonaid Aitken (pictured), had been “decommissioned” in response to the freezing of the licence fee and a shift from broadcast to digital output.

Added to the news that pipe music programme, Pipeline, was to lose its broadcast slot – revealed to writer and piper Rab Wallace before Christmas – the changes amount to the cancellation of the BBC Scotland’s commitment to much of its weekend broadcasting of traditional and classical music, opera and jazz.

Although BBC insiders believe that the cost-cutting measure is unlikely to be reversed, political condemnation of the organisation has been swift and widespread. Two of Scotland’s best known musicians, tenor saxophonist and educator Tommy Smith and composer and conductor Sir James MacMillan, have started online petitions opposing the decisions to cut Jazz Nights and Classics Unwrapped.

The new director of the Edinburgh International Festival, violinist Nicola Benedetti, quickly added her voice, and the campaign has also been supported by Creative Scotland’s Head of Music, Alan Morrison.

The justification for the axing of the programmes has looked desperately thin, with Smith and others pointing out that the programmes’ budgets will represent a small saving and Ferguson speculating that sports coverage has been ring-fenced at the expense of the arts.

It certainly looks like an abdication of responsibility on the part of BBC Scotland to curtail its support, reporting and discussion of areas of music that are a distinct national success story and whose funding is built into the political settlement of devolved government in Edinburgh.

Although its main paymaster is BBC Radio 3, it is also true that the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra is a local asset paid scant attention by BBC Scotland itself, and whose long-term future is hardly helped by the decision.

Few will also be persuaded by the BBC Scotland spokesperson’s glib statement about a shift towards digital, when more thoughtful strategies of parallel development are being pursued elsewhere in the BBC. As the range of formats and platforms employed for recorded music has long demonstrated, consumers do not follow such a linear path but prefer to be able to choose and use the full range of what is on offer.

That it has been left to an un-named press officer to justify the cuts also speaks volumes of a decision that has been made to achieve savings without affecting BBC Scotland’s narrow definition of its core activity and staffing. A senior management representative should be called to account in the face of the vociferous opposition to the changes.

SCO 22/23 Season

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Two premieres from the pen of Sir James MacMillan and a focus on the work of Brahms by Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev are the headline attractions in the new season unveiled by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

The first of the MacMillans will be his Second Violin Concerto, with soloist Nicola Benedetti, for whom it has been written. The world premiere will take place at the end of September, shortly after the violinist has taken up her new post as director of the Edinburgh International Festival. It will be conducted by Emelyanychev in a concert that also includes John Adams’ The Chairman Dances and Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony.

The other new Macmillan work is a short piece on a football theme that had its world premiere in Antwerp last week as part of the repertoire the SCO took on its European tour. The first UK performances of “Eleven” will be next March in concerts Emelyanychev is directing with himself as soloist on Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 22, K482.

The conductor is at the harpsichord for a programme of “Baroque Inspirations” in November that teams Vivaldi with Grieg, Hindemith and Gorecki. At the end of  February he conducts an all-Brahms concert with the Symphony No. 1, preceded by the Violin Concerto with Aylen Pritchin as soloist, and at the start of March an all-Mendelssohn one with the Italian Symphony and the Incidental Music from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The season concludes next May with Brahms’ German Requiem, Sophie Bevan and Hanno Muller-Brachman the soloists and Gregory Batsleer’s SCO Chorus concluding a busy year. The same two singers are joined by tenor Andrew Staples for The Creation by Haydn in October, with Emelyanychev again conducting, and Richard Egarr directs Handel’s Israel in Egypt in December, with Rowan Pierce, Mary Bevan, Helen Charlston, James Gilchrist and Andrew Foster-Williams the soloists.

Other familiar faces conducting and directing concerts include Clemens Schuldt, with a November concert that includes Alban Gerhardt giving the Scottish premiere of the cello concerto written for him by Julian Anderson, Peter Whelan with music of the Scottish Enlightenment, Andrew Manze, Joseph Swensen, Joana Carniero, Francois Leleux and violinist Anthony Marwood.

Next Spring, Bernard Labadie directs an evening of music Handel wrote for Royal occasions, joined by singers Lydia Teuscher, Iestyn Davies and Neal Davies, following a fortnight residency by Finnish violin maestro Pekka Kuusisto who has singer-songwriter Sam Amidon and tenor Allan Clayton, singing Britten’s Les Illuminations, as soloists and composer Nico Muhly featuring in both programmes.

The star names keep coming at the season’s end, with mezzo Karen Cargill singing Berlioz and cellist Laura van der Heijden playing Shostakovich in April and Lawrence Power giving the Scottish Premiere of Cassandra Miller’s Viola Concerto, under the baton of John Storgards, in May.

Full details at sco.org.uk

SSO’s New Season

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Ryan Wigglesworth, the BBC SSO’s newly appointed chief conductor, will open the orchestra’s 2022-23 Season with a programme on 22 September dominated by Ravel’s complete ballet score Daphnis et Chloé. The following evening Wigglesworth will appear as pianist with a trio of BBC principals in Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, part of a wider Messiaen theme next season to mark 30 year’s since the radical French composer’s death.

Wigglesworth, who succeeds Thomas Dausgaard in the SSO conductor hot seat, will spearhead a further six programmes in the season, including a performance of Messiaen’s The Sermon to the Birds from his opera St Francis of Assisi, a Bach/Stravinsky double-header in which Wigglesworth will also feature as piano soloist in Bach’s E major Keyboard Concerto, and a closing concert in May 2023 featuring the world premiere of Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s Cello Concerto (soloist Laura van der Heijden) and Elgar’s Symphony No 2.

“Ryan is a compelling musician – whether as conductor, composer or pianist – and his warmth towards our players will be evident in all the varied programmes he’s bringing to audiences across Scotland,” said SSO director Dominic Parker, presiding over the launch of the orchestra’s first full season of performances since the pandemic hit two years ago.

The orchestra’s other associated conductors are also back in force. Conductor emeritus Sir Donald Runnicles tackles Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh in February. Alpesh Chauhan, associate conductor, takes on two programmes, one with Rimsky Korsakov’s richly-coloured Scheherazade, another with Shostakovich’s hard-hitting Fifth Symphony that also goes to the Sage in Newcastle. 

Principal guest conductor Ilan Volkov’s particular penchant for modern repertoire is reflected in two season programmes that range in repertoire from Ligeti and Xenakis to the rarefied sounds, and UK premieres, of Norwegian composer Oyvind Torvund and Belgian Stefan Prins. Volkov will again co-curate the annual contemporary music festival Tectonics in May.

The newly-announced SSO appointment of Danish-born modernist Hans Abrahamsen as composer-in-association is marked by the world premiere of his Vers le silence in November, a month before he celebrates his 60th birthday. Wigglesworth, who conducts that concert, will also direct his own distillation of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, “A Symphonic Journey”. 

Other world premieres include a new BBC commission from genre-bending South African cellist/composer Abel Selaocoe and the former BBC Young Composer winner Jonathan Woolgar. 

Among the many guest conductors returning to the SSO are Joanna Carneiro, Hannu Lintu, Matthias Pintscher and Michael Sanderling. Tabita Berglund, in Scotland this month to conduct the RSNO, is joined by pianist Stephen Hough for Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto. Long-time favourite Martyn Brabbins contributes to the Vaughan Williams 150th anniversary celebrations with a performance, alongside Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs, of his Symphony No 5. He also directs a screening of Charles Frend’s 1948 adventure film Scott of the Antarctic, complete with live performance of Vaughan Williams’ haunting soundtrack. 

In a late season afternoon concert (April) Brabbins curates “The Sound of Scotland” which features the world premieres of his own Aduos and James MacMillan’s Canon for Two Violas alongside music by Judith Weir, Iain Hamilton and William Wallace’s Creation Symphony.

The SSO are alluding to this as their A-Z season, with the wildest possible range of repertoire, from Thomas Ades to Alexander Zemlinsky, by way of Bartok, Chopin, Debussy, Elgar and much more. Guest artists include pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason (Dohnanyi’s Variations on a Nursery Song), violinist Elina Vähälä (Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No 2) and the BBC Singers (in the opening Ravel concert and Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms). 

Regular favourites include the seasonal Christmas Classics and Christmas at the Movies with singer/presenter Jamie MacDougall. Most concerts will be recorded for BBC Radio 3, valuable thereafter on BBC Sounds and BBC iPlayer. The announcement of further concerts is due in the coming weeks.

Full information on programmes and booking at bbc.co.uk/bbcsso

RSNO’s Succulent Season

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Launching a new season brochure of familiar shape and style, but with a few special ingredients, RSNO chief executive Alistair Mackie told the orchestra’s loyal patrons last night: “It is important to recognise that, despite the challenges faced over the last two years, with the help of our supporters we have accomplished a lot.”

That means that alongside a 19-concert season, which includes eight under the baton of music director Thomas Søndergård, the RSNO continues to embrace the possibilities of digital streaming of concerts and pursuing learning and engagement goals through online means. Its other performances of film and video game music, in partnership with Children’s Classic Concerts, and involving the young musicians from the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland and the Sistema Big Noise music education projects are also present and correct, as are the matinee and chamber music performances in its own hall in the RSNO Centre next door to Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.

Søndergård has chosen to focus on the music of Johannes Brahms, which he studied closely during the pandemic lockdown. In the first months of 2023 the orchestra will perform all four of his symphonies, as well as the Academic Festival Overture. The First Symphony arrives last, at the end of May, as part of an All-Star Gala that teams Nicola Benedetti, Sheku Kanneh-Mason and Benjamin Grosvenor to play Beethoven’s Triple Concerto.

That concert – tickets for which are certain to fly out of the door as soon as they go on sale – also features the last of next season’s “Scotch Snaps” performances of pieces by composers living in Scotland, with Errollyn Wallen’s Inherit the World. Subscribers can book from April 29 and general booking opens on June 6.

Another, postponed, “Scotch Snap” – David Fennessy’s Riot Act – features in Søndergård’s season-opener, alongside Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, followed the next week by the RSNO debut of harpsichordist Mahan Estafani playing the new concerto by Paul Ruders, which the orchestra co-commissioned. He is the first of a star line-up of keyboard players working with Sondergard over the season, which also includes Francesco Piemontesi playing Beethoven’s Emperor and Leif Ove Andnes with Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto.

Principal guest conductor Elim Chan teams up with pianist Steven Osborne for Mozart K414 in a programme that also includes Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, and with the season’s Musician in Focus, clarinettist, composer and conductor Jorg Widman, for her earlier concert at the end of October this year. That concert is also the first to feature Edinburgh’s Dunedin Consort, beginning a three-year partnership between the symphony orchestra and the award-winning ensemble. In 2023 the Dunedin has two concerts in the RSNO Centre, and the Hebrides Ensemble will also appear there under the auspices of the RSNO, with the music of Widman on the bill.

The RSNO Chorus, now under new director Stephen Doughty, closes the season with Verdi’s Requiem in June 2023, and will also give the Sir Alexander and Lady Veronica Gibson Memorial Concert on Armistice weekend this year with Britten’s War Requiem, both with Sondergard on the podium.

ll programme details for the 2022-23 RSNO Season at rsno.org.uk

Read Ken Walton’s interview with Thomas Søndergård and Alistair Mackie here

SCO On The Road

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As the RSNO returns from touring in Europe, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra has announced a huge list of concerts on tour across Scotland this summer.

The SCO’s version of “returning to normal” after the restrictions of the pandemic is to take every facet of its work out on the road, with everything from full-scale performances by the orchestra and by the SCO Chorus, to the projects for pre-schoolers to secondary students and with amateur adults, as well as visiting more remote venues with string and wind ensembles.

The programme of work runs from June to September and visits venues from the Shetland Isles to the Borders, with showcases for soloists from within the current line-up and return visits by old friends.

Inverness and Shetland are the locations for the SCO’s long-established and admired education and outreach work on the tour, with projects at Eden Court and in Elgin and in Lerwick and Brae in June. The professionals clearly expect amateur musicians to have been honing their chops during lockdown as its “Scrapers and Tooters” initiative offering coaching to rusty instrumentalists has adopted the more expectant “Come and Play” title.

Around the same time the SCO Chorus makes its venture into touring with concerts in Stirling Castle and St Andrews Holy Trinity Church on June 11 and 12. Chorus Director Gregory Batsleer directs a programme that ranges from Byrd to Britten and includes a new work from Associate Composer Anna Clyne.

The summer schedule begins in Inverness and Drumnadrochit on June 9 and 10 when an 11-piece chamber group plays a new version of Beethoven’s First Symphony by principal flute Andre Cebrian, alongside works by Ligeti and Lutoslawski.

The following week, the orchestra divides into its more familiar touring configurations of string ensemble, directed by leader Stephanie Gonley, and wind soloists. The former visits Blairgowrie, Callander and Helensburgh with a programme including Elgar, Schubert and Bartok, while the winds go to Ballachulish, Mull, Seil and Tillicoultry with Mozart, Telemann and Hummel.

Former principal bassoon Peter Whelan conducts the full orchestra in concerts, with Cebrian as soloist, in Castle Douglas, Langholm and Selkirk as June ends and July begins, before the SCO makes its annual visit to the East Neuk Festival with a programme that includes soprano Anna Dennis singing Mozart.

Principal conductor Maxim Emelyanychev joins the touring party later in July with Maximiliano Martin playing Weber’s Clarinet Concerto No 2 in Stirling and Dunoon and Philip Higham Haydn’s Cello Concerto in C in Glenrothes and Musselburgh.

At the start of September, after the SCO’s involvement in the Edinburgh Festival, Catherine Larsen-Maguire picks up the baton and Higham is joined by current first bassoon Cerys Ambrose-Evans as soloists in music by Dvorak and Mozart. That programme can be heard in Kingussie, Findhorn, Fraserburgh and Arbroath.

Ten days later the epic trek to a’ the airts winds up in Blair Castle, Linlithgow and Greenock with Estonian conductor Kristiina Poska, and the music of Shostakovich and Beethoven.

Full details are available at sco.org.uk

Edinburgh International Festival 2022

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It may be couched in terms of sustainability, and the avoidance of needless consumption of resources in the pursuit of artistic excellence from around the world, but the programme for the 75th Edinburgh International Festival also looks back to the shape of the event in the years after the Second World War with its residencies by companies and orchestras bringing more than one programme of work.

That the founding director of the Festival, Rudolph Bing, was a refugee from conflict is also marked in the programme – a thematic strand that has proved more appropriate than the EIF team could have foreseen as they shaped the anniversary event.

The orchestras “in residence” are the Philadelphia, with conductor Yannick Nezet-Seguin, and the Philharmonia, under the baton of new Principal Conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali and Sir Donald Runnicles, making his debut with them. The Czech Philharmonic also has two Usher Hall concerts with Semyon Bychkov, as do Edward Gardner and the Bergen Philharmonic, one of them a concert performance of Strauss’s Salome with soprano Malin Bystrom.

The BBC SSO gives the Opening Concert, with Runnicles on the podium and the Festival Chorus singing Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, and the RSNO gives the closing one, Sir Andrew Davies conducting the Chorus in Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius. The RSNO also appears under the baton of Elim Chan to play Bartok and Tan Dun and with Thomas Sondergard to perform Mahler 3 with the RSNO Junior Chorus and the Festival Chorus.

The Chorus’s busy August also includes Janacek Glagolitic Mass with the Czech Phil and Beethoven 9 with the Philadelphia, while the National Youth Choir of Scotland sings in the opening and closing Usher Hall concerts as well as at the 2022 Festival’s free opening event at Murrayfield Stadium, which is expected to attract an audience of up to 20,000.

The Philadelphia’s residency also includes a free 75th anniversary concert at the end of the Festival, details of which have yet to be announced, as well as a further Usher Hall concert including Szymanowski and Florence Price, and Mozart chamber music at the Queen’s Hall, featuring Nezet-Seguin at the piano.

Douglas Boyd conducts the Philharmonia in the Festival’s only fully-staged opera, a Garsington production of Dvorak’s Rusalka by Jack Furness with Natalya Romaniw in the title role, and Runnicles conducts a concert performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio. In a further nod towards the Festival’s origins, its chamber music programme at the Queen’s Hall includes a String Trio by Hans Gals, another refugee who made his home in the Scottish capital and was a founding figure of the event.

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra has two concerts, one with Nicola Benedetti, the EIF’s recently-announced artistic director designate, performing Bruch, and playing Gershwin, Bernstein and Copland under the direction of pianist Wayne Marshall, the musical director of last year’s A Grand Night for Singing.

The Usher Hall programme is completed by appearances from Les Siecles and Francois-Xavier Roth, featuring music from 1913 by Lili Boulanger and Igor Stravinsky, Hesperion XXI and Jordi Savall with music from the 14th century, the LSO, Sir Simon Rattle and a Daniel Kidane premiere, Zubin Mehta conducting the Australian World Orchestra, Bernard Labadie directing Handel’s Saul with Iestyn Davies and The English Consort, and the Festival debut of the Helsinki Philharmonic, conducted by Susanna Malkki.

The Festival’s return to the Queen’s Hall after the pandemic includes Brett Dean playing with the Hebrides Ensemble, pianist Malcolm Martineau with Florian Boesch for Winterreise and with Steven Osborne and a quartet of voices, soprano Golda Schultz, mezzos Magdalena Kozena and  Anne Sofie von Otter, Richard Egarr, Dunedin Consort, Ronald Brautigam and the Takacs and Pavel Haas Quartets.

The Edinburgh International Festival runs from August 5 – 28. General booking opens on April 8.

eif.co.uk

Picture: Natalya Romaniw by Antonio Olmos

Concert for Ukraine

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Musicians from Scottish Opera Orchestra and its independent offshoot McOpera have amassed a powerhouse of Scots-based vocal and instrumental artists to stage a performance of Mozart’s Requiem in Glasgow this weekend. Proceeds will go to the Ukraine Crisis Appeal which is run by the British Red Cross Association’s Disasters Emergency Committee.

The performance, conducted by Scottish Opera’s head of music Derek Clark, takes place on Saturday evening in St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, Great Western Road and features soloists who have starred in the recent run of highly-acclaimed Scottish Opera productions: soprano Catriona Hewitson, mezzo-soprano Sioned Gwen Davis, tenor Jamie MacDougall and bass John Molloy.  

Chorus members are drawn from Scottish Opera, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and from the University of St Andrews. The venue has been made available free of charge by St Mary’s Cathedral and the event is supported by the Scots support charity for service veterans, Bravehound.

Violinist Katie Hull, who has helped spearhead the initiative, and who will lead the orchestra on Saturday, explained: “Mozart’s Requiem is a fitting work to reflect our cause to do what we can to raise funds for the humanitarian crisis that plagues Ukraine. 

“Mozart passed away before he completed his Requiem, leaving that task to others – when we are faced with tragedy, everything and everyone else must continue, by imperfectly piecing together what is left. We invite everyone to come and join us in Glasgow’s West End to reflect in the music and give generously to our cause.”

Mozart’s Requiem for the DEC Ukraine Appeal takes place on 26 March, 7.30pm, at St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, Glasgow.
Tickets are by donation via www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/mozart-at-st-marys-cathedral-tickets.
Donations can also be made through www.justgiving.com/fundraising/mozart-at-st-marys

TECTONICS Goes Live

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This year’s Tectonics Glasgow Festival (30 April – 1 May) will focus on the music of Janet Beat, the 84-year-old pioneering Glasgow-based composer who, in the 1950s, was among the first British woman to explore the potential of electronics music composition. 

Beat – who in 2019 received the first ever Scottish Women in Music Lifetime Achievement Ward, and only last year released her debut album “Pioneering Knob Twiddler” – will be featured through works for solo performer and electronics, performed by members of the BBC SSO and British soprano Juliet Fraser. Fraser also forms part of the 4-artist line-up in a tribute programme, the Beat Goes On, featuring live sets by experimentalist performers Andie Brown, Sharon Gal and Ailie Ormston.

The 2022 event, centred at Glasgow’s City Halls and Old Fruitmarket and with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra at its core, marks the event’s first return to live performance after two years of Covid-enforced online presentation. Co-curated by founder and conductor Ilan Volkov and creative sound producer Alasdair Campbell, the two-day programme will also feature 5 world premieres, together with an installation and performances by the Japanese-based sound artist FUJI||||||||||TA.

There will be brand new BBC commissions for orchestra by Pascale Criton, Joanna Ward and Amber Priestley, further new works by creative duo Cassandra Miller and Silvia Tarozzi and James Weeks, and UK premieres from Liza Lim and Kristine Tjøgersen.  

Other Festival highlights include collaborations by sound artist Russell Haswell and violist Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaig with members of the SSO. French bassist Joëlle Léandre teams up with Jamaican composer, improviser, sculptor and instrument-maker Douglas R Ewart, whose 1979 conceptual instrumental work Red Hills will be performed by the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra.

The majority of performances will be recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3, including a special edition of the New Music Show on 7 May. Some performances, still to be confirmed, will also be available to watch digitally.

Booking opens Friday 4 March at 10am.  Further details can be found at www.bbc.co.uk/tectonics

Benedetti to direct EIF

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Scots violinist Nicola Benedetti is to be the 11th director of the Edinburgh International Festival, succeeding Fergus Linehan, who steps down after this year’s 75th anniversary programme.

In a surprise announcement, less than 24 hours after the EIF had buried the controversy around its Russian Honorary President Valery Gergiev by accepting his resignation, the Festival’s appointment breaks new ground in a remarkable list of ways.

When she takes up the post of October 1 this year, Benedetti will be the first woman in the role and the first Scot to lead the Festival. Turning 35 in July, she will also be the youngest holder of the position since Robert Ponsonby in the 1950s.

In the public eye since she won the BBC Young Musician competition in May 2004 at the age of 16, playing Szymanowski’s First Violin Concerto with the BBC SSO in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall, Benedetti has carved a hugely successful international career as an orchestral soloist and chamber musician, with a succession of chart-topping recordings. Most recently she has been celebrated for her championing of music education, notably through the establishment of her own Benedetti Foundation. The youngest recipient of the Queen’s Medal for Music in 2017, she was made a CBE in the 2019 New Year Honours.

Currently on a tour of Europe which opened at London’s Wigmore Hall, playing Schumann and Brahms with her regular trio of cellist Leonard Elschenbroich and pianist Alexei Grynyuk, the violinist was unavailable for interviews. The statement from the Festival said that “alongside her role as Festival Director, Nicola will continue to perform internationally and to lead the Benedetti Foundation. She will naturally be more selective with her engagements in order to ensure she fulfils each of her commitments.”

The Director Designate herself was quoted: “I am deeply honoured to contribute to the long and rich history of the Edinburgh International Festival and the cultural landscape of Scotland. This festival was founded on principles of reconciliation and the ideals of art transcending political and cultural fracture. Following in the footsteps of the wonderful achievements of Fergus Linehan and his predecessors, I will uphold these values and greatly look forward to serving this festival, its mission of cultural exchanges, and the people of Scotland.”

Scotland’s First Minister, Rt Hon. Nicola Sturgeon MSP, said: “I’m sure that people across the country are looking forward to supporting the Festival’s full in-person return after two years, and welcoming visitors and artists from around the world to Scotland.

“I welcome Nicola Benedetti’s appointment as Director – especially as she becomes the first woman to ever hold the role. Her experience in promoting Scotland’s cultural scene to audiences around the world will be invaluable and I wish her every success.”

Keith Skeoch, who chairs the EIF Board of Trustees, added: “It is such a pleasure to welcome Nicola Benedetti as both the first woman and the first Scottish director of the Edinburgh International Festival. In many ways she reflects the spirit of this festival; internationally recognised and respected but Scottish to her core, she’s dedicated to advocating world-class music making and innovating new ways to bring it to audiences.

“As an artist, her string of collaborators reads like a who’s who of the world of classical music and as an educator she has reached tens of thousands worldwide. I have no doubt that she will bring a wealth of new ideas to the organisation and build on Fergus’ exceptional work from the last eight years.”

Benedetti’s predecessor will unveil his final programme at the end of March. The 75th Festival follows two years when the presentation of events was impacted by the global pandemic, becoming mostly filmed and online in 2020 and with the construction of three tented pavilions to house the 2021 music programme.

During the same period, Benedetti moved much of her education work online but has also performed acclaimed new orchestral works written for her by Wynton Marsalis and Mark Simpson, and formed her own early music ensemble, Benedetti Baroque, which appeared at last year’s Festival.

The Festival’s Board yesterday announced that it had asked for and accepted the resignation of Valery Gergiev as its Honorary President. Arts organisations across the world have distanced themselves from the Russian conductor since the invasion of Ukraine because of his friendship with President Putin

This year’s Edinburgh Festival runs from August 5-28, and more information is available at eif.co.uk.

Gergiev bows out at EIF

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With a brief announcement on Twitter, the Edinburgh International Festival has announced the end of its association with Russian conductor – and supporter of President Vladimir Putin – Valery Gergiev.

The musical director of the Mariinsky Opera in St Petersburg had been the Honorary President of the Festival for more than a decade, but pressure had mounted on the EIF to terminate his appointment. Maestro Gergiev had been dropped by his German-based agency following his removal from a five concert tour of the US, conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.

The statement from the Festival said: “Our board of trustees has asked for, and accepted, the resignation of Valery Gergiev as Honorary President of the Festival. Edinburgh is twinned with the city of Kyiv and this action is being taken in sympathy with, and support of, its citizens.”

Festival’s Gergiev Problem

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As the first reports of the Russian attack on Ukraine emerged, Edinburgh International Festival was putting out a press release preparing the way for the unveiling of its 2022 programme, celebrating the event’s 75th anniversary and expected at the end of March.

The Festival is likely to find itself the focus of attention over cultural sanctions before the big reveal however. Its Honorary President, and regular visiting superstar conductor, is Valery Gergiev, a close friend and associate of Vladimir Putin, who has regularly expressed his support for the Russian president and his actions.

Gergiev was due to conduct the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra at New York’s Carnegie Hall this evening in the first of three concerts, but the Austrian orchestra will now be conducted by the music director of the Metropolitan Opera, Yannick Nezet-Seguin. Russian pianist Denis Matsuev, who has also expressed support for President Putin, has similarly been dropped from the New York concerts.

In Italy, where Gergiev has been conducting performances of Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades at Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the mayor of the city has instructed theatre management to sack the conductor if he fails to explicitly condemn the invasion of Ukraine.

Gergiev last appeared at the Edinburgh Festival when he conducted the RSNO and pianist Steven Osborne in the temporary concert hall tent at Edinburgh Academy Junior School last summer (reviewed by Vox Carnyx here: https://voxcarnyx.com/2021/08/20/rsno-gergiev-osborne/). With his singular conducting style, he is one the world’s most admired musicians, but his association with Putin has long been controversial.

The conductor was announced as Honorary President at the end of the 2011 Festival, the third musician to hold the title in the event’s history, succeeding Yehudi Menuhin and Charles Mackerras. The appointment marked 20 years of association with the EIF, bringing the Mariinsky Opera (previously the Kirov) to Edinburgh, and directing international orchestras. A Mariinsky production of Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten closed the 2011 programme at the Festival Theatre.

A year later Gergiev appeared in a television ad for Putin’s presidential campaign and in 2014 he endorsed the annexation of Crimea. In 2016 he conducted a televised propaganda concert from the Syrian city of Palmyra after Russian air strikes assisted President Bashar al-Assad.

Putin awarded the conductor a Hero of Labour medal the same year and has funded a new opera house for the Mariinsky in St Petersburg, where the men have shared roots.

While Gergiev and other vocal supporters of the Russian president have found themselves in the front line of sanctions in the cultural field, there have been calls for a wider boycott of Russian artists in protest against the action in Ukraine, regardless of their views on the country’s leader. German pianist and conductor Lars Vogt is amongst those who have said they will not play in the country or share a platform with Russian artists who support Putin in the current situation, while others have called for “a full cultural boycott” of Russia.

A spokesman for the the Edinburgh International Festival said: “The title of Honorary President has been given to a range of artists in the festival history, people who have made important artistic contributions to the festival. Valery Gergiev was named as Honorary President 11 years ago and it remains an honorific title”.

East Neuk 2022

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It’s back to business as usual for the East Neuk Festival, which returns to a live 5-day format this summer (29 June – 3 July) after two years of Covid-inflicted limitations. 

Announcing the 2022 programme this week, founder and artistic director Svend McEwan-Brown promised the event was “poised to deliver our best festival ever” with over thirty events embracing classical music, folk and jazz, pop-up performances, the annual ENF Retreat for young musicians, dancing and juggling, and this year’s collaborative Big Project, Thunderplump. 

The core classical programme follows the ENF’s tried and tested formula, a full diet of chamber music with a particular focus on the piano featuring top international artists and centred around the trio of familiar church venues in Crail, Cellardyke and Kilrenny. 

Elisabeth Leonskaja returns to Fife for the third time with solo performances of Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas, and with violinist Liza Ferschtman and cellist Ivan Karizna in trios by Schubert. Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy add Schubert’s piano duos to the mix, and tackle Stravinsky’s blockbuster Rite of Spring in its dynamic piano duet version. Veteran Festival favourite, Christian Zacharias, will present his last ENF piano recital before retiring as a soloist.

Another pianist, Moscow-born Boris Giltburg, joins members of the Pavel Haas Quartet in trios and quintets by Dvorak and Brahms. The wider chamber music programme features the flexible Magnard Ensemble, the Elias String Quartet, clarinettist Michael Collins, oboist Robin O’Neill and former SCO principal horn Alec Frank-Gemmill.

On a larger classical format, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra performs Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven with soprano Anna Dennis, under the baton of its former principal bassoonist Peter Whelan.  

The town of Anstruther is the hotspot for jazz, folk and traditional music, with programmes that cut across the genres. Kenyan singer songwriter Rapasa Otieno teams up with fiddler-composer Frankie Archer; Syrian oud player Rihab Azar and singer Luke Daniels combine traditional sounds with experimental electronics. Jazz and Middle Eastern music merge courtesy of cellist/improviser Shirley Smart and her trio.

His year’s Big Project, Thunderplump, at the Bowhouse brings together professional, amateur and young musicians and artists for a community initiative involving new and archive film and original music inspired by the unpredictable Scottish weather. Trumpeter John Wallace and Tony George of the Wallace Collection and jazz musician Richard Michael lead a musical conglomerate of 100 young brass players, Fife Youth Jazz and the Tullis Russell Works Band. Curating the event are composer, author and dramatist Neil Brand and filmmaker David Behrens.

Also at the Bowhouse, the ENF’s largest venue, is the collaboration Light the Lights, in which contemporary circus group Gandini Juggling links up with award-winning guitarist Sean Shibe and violinist Benjamin Baker for a one-off multi-genre show.

Performing outside the regular venues and elsewhere in the East Neuk will be Band in a Van, a visible touring presence last year in their converted antique Citroen van, and a big hit with their impromptu pop-up performances.

Full programme details and booking information for the 2022 East Neuk Festival (29 June – 3 July) is available at www.eastneukfestival.com. 

Shibe wins Bernstein Award

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Edinburgh-born Sean Shibe continues to blaze a trail for guitarists with the announcement that he is the 2022 winner of the Leonard Bernstein Award to a young musician from the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival in Germany.

The prize, which is worth 10,000 Euros, alongside a showcase concert at this summer’s festival, has never been awarded to a guitarist before. Previous winners include pianists Lang Lang and, last year, Isata Kanneh-Mason. Shibe, who is 29, was also the first guitarist to be chosen as a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist and to be awarded a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship, while his albums on the Delphian and Pentatone labels have been garlanded with awards.

His concert, in Lubeck on August 19, will feature the Concierto de Aranjuez by Rodrigo with the Schleswig-Holstein Festival Orchestra under Christoph Eschenbach.

The prize is supported by a consortium of German savings banks and is assessed by a panel of judges that includes two of Bernstein’s children: Jaime Bernstein Thomas and Alexander Bernstein. Festival director and fellow jurist Dr Christian Kuhnt said: “Sean Shibe combines different styles and genres. In doing so, he impresses with outstanding musical ability, a rich imagination and the courage to break new ground. He enriches the concert stages with his programmes. We are looking forward to many stimulating ideas from this exceptional talent.”

Shibe said: “This recognition is deeply moving, perhaps particularly so because it is the first time that the Leonard Bernstein Award has been awarded to a guitarist – but mostly because it feels like a ratification of an artistic direction that, while deeply felt by myself, at the time seemed risky and peculiar to many of my colleagues. Thank you, SHMF, for instead encouraging me further!”

www.shmf.de

https://seanshibe.com

Portrait by Iga Gozdowska

Dausgaard Cancels Glasgow and Seattle

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Danish conductor Thomas Dausgaard has announced he is to resign with immediate effect from the Seattle Symphony Orchestra midway through his third season as music director. 

The news emerged last Friday, the same day that the BBC SSO, where he is also principal conductor, released a statement saying Dausgaard would not be travelling to Scotland this week to conduct the first in a planned series of concerts featuring Nielsen’s six symphonies.

Dausgaard has not been seen with the BBC SSO since the start of the pandemic, the first major casualty of which was his highly-anticipated Beethoven Festival in May/June 2020. He recently returned to Seattle briefly after a 20-month absence, only to issue his shock decision to quit there.

Dausgaard, whose Seattle contract began in 2019 and was due to run until the 2022-23 season, cited the pandemic as the underlying reason for his premature departure. “My decision to step back at this time when we have achieved such collective artistic success is the result of these pandemic times, where the question for all of us is central: how do we value our lives,” he said.

The same fears were expressed in the statement issued by the BBC SSO. “Unfortunately it is clear the world in 2022 is not yet as stable as we might have hoped, and with the continuing health risks and responsibilities we must all face, travelling at this moment in the pandemic is sadly not an option for me,” he explained. “It is therefore with enormous regret that I have decided that I cannot join you in Scotland at this time.”

An article on the Seattle Symphony Orchestra website also points to undisclosed “personal turmoil” playing a part in Dausgaard’s extended self-confinement in Denmark during the pandemic.

The announcement will come as a blow to the BBC SSO for whom Dausgaard’s Nielsen series was effectively his swan song before leaving his Glasgow-based post this summer. The English conductor Geoffrey Paterson will step in to conduct this Thursday’s programme, which remains unchanged with the world premiere of Erica Fox’s new BBC commission David Spielt vor Saul (with pianist Julian Jacobson), Bartok’s Divertimento and Nielsen’s Third Symphony. 

Due to the new Covid restrictions over Christmas, the BBC SSO had suspended ticket sales for Thursday’s concert at Glasgow City Halls. It has now confirmed that the concert will go ahead and ticket holders will be notified.

Meanwhile, the SSO’s search for a successor to Dausgaard is under way.

MacMillan in St Petersburg

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This weekend (27 Nov), St Petersburg’s famous Philharmonia, which is celebrating its centenary, will stage the first of three major concerts this season by the music society’s Academic Symphony Orchestra featuring the music of Sir James MacMillan. The Scots composer has been appointed the Philharmonia’s composer-in-residence for the 2021-/22 season. All five works included in the series will be receiving their Russian premieres.

Saturday’s opening concert is conducted by Alexander Titov, formerly a regular guest conductor with the BBC SSO. It features MacMillan’s orchestral fantasy Britannia – what will Russian audiences make of its explosion of quotes from Celtic reels and Elgar to Knees up Mother Brown? – and Larghetto, his 2017 orchestration of an earlier Miserere for a cappella double choir.

Vassily Sinaisky conducts the second concert on 18 Dec which includes the 2019 orchestration of Ein Lämplein verlosch, written originally for string quartet, which takes its title from the first song in Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. MacMillan conducted this highly personal response to the early death of his own granddaughter in an online concert earlier this year by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (see VoxCarnyx reviews).

For the final St Petersburg programme on 5 Feb, the composer is travelling to Russia himself to conduct The Confession of Isobel Gowdie, the orchestral work that catapulted him to international fame at the 1990 BBC Proms, as well as the short Saxophone Concerto, written in 2017 for Australian virtuoso Amy Dickson and the SCO. It will be played this time by a Russian soloist. 

MacMillan, who was in St Petersburg last year giving lectures courtesy of the British Council, said he was delighted to be associated with “a historical musical organisation with links to so many great Russian composers of the past, such as Shostakovich, and to be brought under the umbrella of what is such an important year for the venue and its famous orchestras.” 

It is unclear at this point if the performances will be available online. “I understand that is the intention,” said MacMillan.

Further information at https://www.philharmonia.spb.ru/en/

Scotland’s Studio

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It is almost a decade since the Scottish Government set up a “delivery group” to cut through speculation about the desirability of a dedicated film studio in Scotland and create what most agreed would be a valuable cultural asset. Since 2013, various sites from Cumbernauld to Govan and the foothills of the Pentlands to Leith have been proposed, with the latter and Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall now seeming likely to reach fruition.

In just two short years – and years dominated by the strictures of a global pandemic at that – the RSNO has moved to create a sound studio that could prove just as significant in attracting film production to the country blessed with locations for shooting movies by making it possible to record a symphony orchestra playing the soundtrack in Glasgow.

The orchestra this week unveiled the first project to be created within that facility – music composed by Edinburgh-born composer Blair Mowat for a remake of the 1972 film The Amazing Mr Blunden which will be screened by Sky in the run-up to Christmas – as part of its launch of Scotland’s Studio before an invited audience.

With Scottish Culture Secretary Angus Robertson and Mowat adding contributions via video, RSNO chief executive Alistair Mackie joined the orchestra in its home next door to Glasgow Royal Concert Hall to hail the creation of a studio that matches those in London – Air and Abbey Road – for which there are long waiting times.

He said: “We’ve created a state-of-the-art facility that will give the RSNO another string to its bow in the post-pandemic landscape as the only orchestra in the UK with its own recording studio, while also giving Scotland’s developing film industry a new facility to support its offer nationally and internationally.”

Mr Robertson added: “The new studio will contribute to growing a sustainable economy for the creative industries. The RSNO plays a major role in the performing arts and the new studio will give the orchestra the opportunity to build on their already highly-acclaimed international reputation for recording and expand on its educational activities.”

Mr Mowat, who conducted the recording for his new version of the Antonia Barber children’s fantasy novel, remembered seeing Elmer Bernstein, who scored the original 1972 soundtrack, work with the RSNO on a school trip to hear the orchestra in 1997.

“Scotland’s Studio is a world-class facility and it’s a game-changer, not only for Scotland, but for anyone looking to record in the UK,” he said. “We’re in desperate need of more recording studios this size to meet the pent-up demand, and the players in the RSNO rival the best in the world.”

The auditorium was already known to be well designed and flexible enough to meet the stringent acoustic standards for recording. With the help of a legacy from orchestra patrons Iain and Pamela Sinclair, it is now linked to a 72-channel analogue recording desk in a control room which has been named in their memory.

The RSNO has recruited Digital Manager Hedd Morfett-Jones and Audio Engineering Intern Sam McErlean to operate its new equipment, while two current players – principal percussionist Simon Lowden and first horn Christopher Gough – have recently taken post-graduate qualifications to acquire skills that will also bring additional benefit to the orchestra’s film recording ambitions.

Picture: Composer Blair Mowat conducting the RSNO’s recording of his soundtrack for the Sky film The Amazing Mr Blunden

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