Category Archives: Reviews

Dunedin Consort/Mulroy

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Glasgow University Memorial Chapel

The naming of much-loved tenor soloist Nicholas Mulroy as Associate Director of Dunedin Consort may have looked like a cosy in-house appointment, but this programme, which has toured Scotland and ends the ensemble’s 2023/24 season with a concert at London’s Wigmore Hall on Wednesday, knocks any such notions into the proverbial cocked hat.

Entitled Scattered Rhymes – the name of the most substantial recent work, by composer Tarik O’Regan – it was a masterpiece of compilation, linking early and contemporary music in a deeply considered way, and often astonishing in execution.

For those who think they know what to expect from an a cappella concert by this group, there was plenty of that. It began with James MacMillan’s Behold, you are beautiful, my love, written for the wedding of the composer’s son Aidan and setting words from the Bible’s Song of Solomon, later included Palestrina and closed with Tomas Luis de Victoria setting texts from the same source. A parallel, and mirroring, stream of words came from 14th century Italian poet Petrach, the text for O’Regan and the 16th century Flemish composer Adrian Willaert.

Many a choir could tackle the MacMillan with some confidence, but elsewhere these musicians were required to produce singing of extraordinary complexity with virtuosic technique. In that, Scattered Rhymes itself was the most striking example.

 A quartet of singers produced, together and sometimes individually, a hugely challenging declamation of the Italian verse, with constant changes of rhythm, dynamics and time signature, while the rest of the choir had equally varied music, setting Latin from an anonymous contemporary English poet and found in the Arundel manuscripts in the British Library. The unlikely gloss Mulroy provided – that O’Regan told him the 1971 rock song Won’t Get Fooled Again by The Who was another inspiration – turned out to be remarkably helpful in listening the work’s structure.

That was just one of many unusual and rewarding pathways the conductor’s sequence of music took us down. The world premiere of the set was Caroline Shaw’s Companion Planting, a Dunedin Consort commission from one of the most in-demand composers on the planet. Her own lyric had many similarities to the early texts in the recital, using the horticultural metaphor to compare the wonders of nature with the joys of a rewarding human relationship.

The music was as attractive as everything she writes, and used some of the techniques she has explored in her other vocal pieces in the most subtle, understated, but brilliantly effective way.

Nor were these the only highlights of the programme. Some distance from the music for which he is best known, Gavin Bryars’ Petrarch-setting A la dolce ombra is from his Fourth Book of Madrigals and not only linked precisely with the O’Regan in its text, but also explored the same metaphorical territory as the Shaw.

The other recent, and unfamiliar, treat, came from the pen of Canadian composer Stephanie Martin. Rise up my love, like the MacMillan using the Biblical source, is also full of flora and fauna and the word-setting –  long, flowing lines filled with crisp ear-catching repetitions – was as fine as anything else in the programme.

Keith Bruce

SCO / Elijah

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SCO / Elijah

Usher Hall, Edinburgh 

If Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah has had a mixed press over the years, it’s not because the piece is second rate, but rather because it poses a musical, as well as technical, challenge to anything less than first rate choirs. This superb performance mounted by the SCO and SCO Chorus to complete its 50th Anniversary Season was living proof.

Rarely have I felt so gripped by the lengthy, yet energetically succinct, theatrical thread with which Mendelssohn depicts the turmoil of Elijah’s testing mission to return the God-forsaken idolaters of Baal to recognising their true God, with all the cataclysms that accompany it. What the composer did, in time for its Birmingham premiere in 1846, was to encapsulate this in vivid, quasi-operatic terms. On Thursday at the Usher Hall, SCO chief conductor Maxim Emelyanychev harnessed its  unfaltering intensity, gleaning from his orchestra, chorus and soloists a performance that flew like “the mighty wind”.

The unorthodoxy of the opening played its own part in tilting us towards the edge of our seats – an awakening pronouncement from Elijah (baritone Roderick Williams) before the down-to-business assertion of a fugal overture whose chromatic, two-note opening motif could so easily have inspired John Williams’ Jaws theme. Then with hardly a second to catch breath, the SCO Chorus announced their own presence with an opening chorus, sung with penetrating precision, yet warmed by neatly nuanced phrasing.

Thereafter, the momentum never once flagged. The soloists, seated either side of the stage, remained alert to their cues to move to and from centre stage, and from whom some of the loveliest arias took flight.

Tenor Thomas Walker brought heartwarming purity to “If with all your heart”, soprano Carolyn Sampson imbuing “Hear ye, Israel” with sublime lustre. Anna Stéphany’s gorgeous mezzo tones sat perfectly with “Woe unto them who forsake him!”, unshaken by an errant (if perhaps timely) mobile phone. The sublime resignation in Williams’ “It is enough” gained added poignancy against the vibrato-less cellos, while Soprano II, Rowan Pierce, cut a soaring presence as The Youth, even if it that brief role remains more characterful when sung by a young treble voice.

Beyond all else, though, this was a collegiate triumph in which Emelyanychev’s vision held firm in shaping the common will. Every note had defined purpose; each paragraph in the drama bore distinctive cogency.  There wasn’t a singe moment where the energy or excitement sapped. If the SCO has proved over this Anniversary Season that it’s riding on a magnificent high, this was the absolute pinnacle.

Ken Walton 

La traviata

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Theatre Royal, Glasgow

In an interview ahead of the premiere of his production of La traviata for Scottish Opera 16 years ago, David McVicar likened Verdi’s tragic fallen woman Violetta Valéry to Amy Winehouse, then still with us although well down the road to self-destruction. It was a bold assertion, given that the floorcloth of his set is clearly the tombstone of the protagonist.

With a movie about the r’n’b singer recently released, it could seem timely to revisit the comparison, but Hye-Youn Lee, the soprano leading the cast of the company’s second revival of the production, does not really give us the “I told you I was trouble” bonne vivante side of Violetta to precede the doomed tubercular tragic figure.

She sings the role beautifully, however, and her final demise was as anguished as you might wish, with pitch-perfect support from Thomas D Hopkinson as Doctor Grenvil and Heather Ireson as her maid Annina. Whether her lover Alfredo (company debutante Ji-Min Park) and his severe father Giorgio Germont (a perfectly judged performance from Philip Rhodes) achieve any redemption at the end remains unclear, but the music certainly suggests some deathbed forgiveness for Violetta and her dissolute lifestyle.

In conductor Stuart Stratford’s meticulous account of the score, that climactic moment was prefigured in the unmistakably ecclesiastical cadences that concluded the long second act. It is a masterful piece of through-composition for the three principals that may be the perfect example of opera being all about the lengthy contemplation of the consequences of actions that are themselves hurriedly despatched.

The narrative emphasis of this production, revived here by Leo Castaldi with McVicar’s input, was of a piece with the music throughout, Stratford never hogging the ball when the sequences of superb melodies gave him ample opportunity to do so. From the delicate phrasing of the overture and the ebullient dance music of the party scenes, through Alfredo’s roller-coaster journey to self-awareness and the personal angst of Violetta’s recognition of her fate, Stratford’s instrumentalists – in the pit and off-stage – played superbly.

Lee’s voice is more than equal to the huge demands of the role, and Park was her match technically, if less fluid as a performer. Any slight awkwardness, however, was bound to be exposed sitting amongst an ensemble performance that was as fine physically as it was musically. The smaller roles combining wonderfully with the chorus, this show looked more like the work of a seasoned and established company of singers than a cast brought together for these 15 performances only. A small corps of superb dancers were the icing on the cake.

Keith Bruce

Continues at the Theatre Royal to May 18 before touring to Inverness, Aberdeen and Edinburgh until June 15.

picture: Scottish Opera/James Glossop

Tectonics 2024

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City Halls, Glasgow

There’s always a risk with a contemporary music event like Tectonics that you can get too much of the same thing. The most refreshing aspect of Day 1 in this year’s two-day festival was the varied extent of its content. 

Whether it was the passing tilt towards traditional music in the BBC SSO strings’ collaboration with two folk musicians, the club vibe of a concerto for turntables, or visceral spirituals-based improvisations of performance artist Elaine Mitchener, a “fun” side complemented the hard-edged avant-garde experimentalism more associated with this perennial event by joint creators Ilan Volkov and Alasdair Campbell.

What it avoided was any lull in momentum whatsoever, Saturday’s experience amounting to a continuous stream of mid-afternoon to late-evening performances, the sizeable cult-like audience processing seamlessly from one City Halls venue to the next. 

There was a touch of the weird in the series of six improvisations – Common Sense Will Not Prevail – delivered in what seemed an ironic setting, the bijou elegance of the small Recital Room. Billed as featuring Kate Armitage & Co, its eponymous leader had called off due to illness. What remained of her “entourage” were the performers Dave Jackson, Helmut Lemke and one Miss Vymethoxy Redspiders, whose extemporised delivery – both vocalised and aided by an assortment of manipulated objects – was strangely mesmerising in its collective bizarreness.  

In a similar vein, and equally ritualised, Eiko Yamada’s solo recorder (descant and tenor) improvisation – Traces of Air – seemed proportionally out of place in the main Grand Hall, its fluttering pianissimos and ephemeral multiphonics like cries of despair from a far-off world.

Yet both of these offered vivid contrast to the energised magnitude of two feisty performances in the Old Fruitmarket. Mitchener’s solo programme showed this gritty solo performer at her eye-catching best: her singular presence mid-stage within a halo of smoke and dramatic lighting hauntingly reminiscent of a Samuel Beckett scenario; her penetratingly deconstructive, electronically-enhanced musings on the spirituals Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child (Olly Wilson’s Sometimes) and Amazing Grace viscerally engaging. 

As for that incursion by the SSO strings into the extended folk idiom of participating Norwegian-based fiddle-guitar duo, Sarah-Jane Summers and Juhani Silvola, they had the joint jumping with Summers’ The Spirit Multitude. In a work, directed by Volkov, that fused racy, foot-stamping reels with evocative excursions into the realms of the truly surreal, the temperature of this festival jumped to mercury-busting heights. It wouldn’t have been out of place in Glasgow’s Celtic Connections.

The main evening concert by the full SSO was equally inclusive. The first half opened with the world premiere of Marc Yeats’ spatially-conceived A Point in the Landscape, in which order is sought out of chaos. With the orchestra divided into mixed groups, on and off stage, and the process governed by the timers on the players’ own mobile phones, the effect was remarkably liberating, not to mention admirable in this conductor-less entity’s success in finishing as one. 

It wasn’t a beautiful experience, a quality subsequently delivered by violinist Ilya Gingolts in his breathy, sotto voce unaccompanied performance of Salvatore Sciarrino’s solo Caprices.

But it was the 6 Scenes for Turntables and Orchestra, jointly composed by Mariam Rezaei and Matthew Shlomowitz with the former as soloist, that finally brought the house down. Rezaei’s spellbinding floor show – like a DJ on speed – elicited rhythmic bite and stratospheric sound effects that added ecstatic overlay to Shlomowitz’s free-flowing, hi-octane orchestral score. It was an exhilarating climax to an illuminating day.

Ken Walton  

(Photo: BBC/Alex Woodward)

SCO Academy / Manze

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City Halls, Glasgow

It’s extraordinary what Vaughan Williams achieved with his 1950 Concerto Grosso, a work for strings conceived on several levels of player competency, from adept professionals to beginners on open strings, that somehow sounds as if no compromises have been made in achieving the ultimately wholesome, intense musical result. 

It’s also remarkable that this particular assemblage of mixed-ability musicians – seasoned members of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra outnumbered by youngsters from the City of Edinburgh Council Instrumental Music Service, Glasgow CREATE and St Mary’s Music School – produced a performance that never once fell below the level of consummate artistry. “These are the future,” declared conductor Andrew Manze from his rostrum. Let’s hope our political masters were listening and provide them with one.

Then there was Manze himself, newly appointed as principal guest conductor of the SCO, and already, in his second week, proving how generous a figure he is on top of his energising musical prowess and affable communication skills. 

Clearly his influence over the SCO Academy players – they and their tutors had worked together over the past two weekends rehearsing this music – was both penetrating and inspiring. From the very opening of the Concerto Grosso, a baked blanket of instantly identifiable Vaughan Williams, the quality of sound and alertness of response was magical and captivating. Beyond that curtain-raising Intrada came an edgy Burlesca Ostinato, a central Sarabande loaded with ruminating calm, a fleeting Scherzo, and a final March and Reprise whose jaunty opening bars could so easily have passed as the pawky soundtrack to an Ealing comedy. 

The rest of the programme remained with Vaughan Williams but without the youngsters, now seated as observers in the choir balcony. First up was, as Classic FM would have it, everyone’s favourite VW, The Lark Ascending. Even for doubters, this was an enlightening and refreshing performance, thanks to the innate musicality of violin soloist, SCO leader Stephanie Gonley. There was nothing pressurised in her languid vision of the work, just a natural response to its poetic essence. Manze obliged accordingly, colouring its luscious orchestral textures in pastel shades, but not without reference to unexpected detail. I can’t recall ever noticing the triangle’s pertinent presence before.

In the Fifth Symphony, its flowing persona at odds with its composition during World War II, Manze’s attention to detail was again a compelling feature. Against an overriding effortlessness, driven also by the modal fluidity of Vaughan Williams’ writing, the Prelude was intensified by Manze emphasising its harmonic juxtapositions, and the Scherzo bristled with spiralling, at times ephemeral, impatience. In the Romanza, with its heart-tugging cor anglais solo, time stood magically still, before the final contentment of the Passacaglia finale and the quiet fulfilment of its closing bars.

Manze is an inspired addition to an already powerful SCO artistic team. Only good can come of it, surely.

Ken Walton

(Photo: Christopher Bowen)

This performance was recorded for the BBC’s Radio 3 in Concert Series, due for broadcast on 11 June.

RSNO / Carneiro

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

For artists who lead a solitary existence much of the time, composers can still make the news – and the RSNO had three of those in this programme. Stravinsky’s Petrushka came between the success of the Firebird and the controversy of the Rite, Errollyn Wallen found herself in the centre of the perennial Last Night hoo-hah when she was commissioned to arrange Jerusalem for the 2020 BBC Proms, and Esa-Pekka Salonen has just made the front pages by resigning from the musical directorship of the San Francisco Symphony after a row with the board over policy and budgets.

Perhaps we may now hear more of Salonen the composer, and this concert’s conductor, Joanna Carneiro, made an eloquent case for that with her vigorous direction of his Nyx, named for a mysterious dark figure in Greek mythology, and receiving its Scottish premiere. Opening with a horn quintet fanfare and featuring two extended clarinet solos, its other singular orchestral details included quartets of flutes and piccolos, some downright sleazy string writing, and prominent roles for pianist  and harp just as in the Stravinsky.

RSNO harpist Pippa Tunnell was also to the fore in the opening of Wallen’s violin concerto, rumbling strings preceding her partnership with tubular bells as soloist Philippe Quint made his first entrance with fluttering harmonics.

This was the UK premiere of a work co-commissioned by the RSNO and specifically composed for Quint, with details of his own musical life woven into it. He certainly had plenty virtuosic music to play, with few bars of respite, but it was often overshadowed by the quality of the orchestral writing in the earlier sections. Written in three distinct movements, it was the last of these that seemed the most satisfying, the soloist’s pizzicato line distinguishing him from the strings, and the brass and timpani setting up a grand chorale and a concluding sprightly dance.

If Petrushka is sometimes overshadowed by the other ballet music of Stravinsky’s early career, Carneiro and the RSNO brought their A-game to make the case for it. The conductor took a storybook approach, bringing in the soloists, of whom first flute Katherine Bryan was among the most prominent, as if ushering the characters to the front of the stage. The musicians responded in kind, relishing their moments in the spotlight, whether recurring or in crucial cameos from contrabassoon and cor anglais.

Keith Bruce

SCO / Manze

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City Halls, Glasgow

The manufacturers of conductors’ batons may be the only people upset by the appointment of Andrew Manze as Principal Guest Conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Like Maxim Emelyanychev, he often eschews their use in favour of a pair of expressive hands.  Also like the SCO’s Principal Conductor, Manze started out as a Baroque specialist but now ranges across much wider repertoire, paralleling, to some extent, the orchestra’s own journey.

His first programme of a fortnight’s work with these musicians focused on Ravel, with Steven Osborne the soloist in the G Major Piano Concerto and the composer’s earlier Pavane pour une infante défunte preceding the last of Haydn’s Paris Symphonies, No 87. It began, however, with another of the French capital’s Les Six group of composer, Arthur Honegger, and his Pastorale d’été.

Composed in the Swiss Alps in the summer of 1920, it is a very lovely work for strings and just five winds – all of whom have solo spots – that deserves to be heard more often. In the context of this programme it was a substantial hors d’oeuvre to the Ravel Concerto, very different in style but sharing some of the jazz influence that was in the air at the time.

Osborne is, of course, a pianist who delights in the prediction of jazz music to be found in a late Beethoven sonata, who plays Gershwin to perfection (as the BBC Proms will hear later this year), and who chose to encore this performance with his own transcription of a piece by American jazz pianist Keith Jarrett. That said, he did not labour the bluesy ingredients of the opening movement, and its kinship with Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. In fact this was a very relaxed Osborne throughout the work, delivering the most virtuosic music with casual grace and delighting in the furious pace of the finale. The central Adagio was arguably the highlight though, the SCO wind soloists once again on top form in the duets with the pianist and Osborne himself wonderfully poised and expressive in the elegiac melody that distinguishes what would be the composer’s final big piece.

It is not, however, a tune that most people would recognise in the hum-along way they would Ravel’s earlier Pavane. As a piano piece it made the name of the young composer and its orchestrated version begins, like the Honegger, with a solo horn – beautifully played here by George Strivens.

There is something operatic about Haydn’s 87th Symphony, also heard less often, because, Manze claimed, it lacks a nickname. The work for the section principals is very characterful and it is not hard to imagine the solos as vocal ones, and the ensemble work as dances. That is only explicit in the third movement Minuet, which the conductor took at a very deliberate pace although it was still light on its feet.

On paper Haydn had looked an odd choice to end this programme. In execution, Manze and the SCO made it the perfect one.

Keith Bruce

Colin Currie Quartet

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Boswell Centre, Auchinleck

In the second leg of its current Scottish Tour, the Colin Currie Quartet found itself pounding the beat, literally, in Auchinleck on a sunny Saturday night. Were they a delicate string quartet, the experience might have been diminished by the counterpoint of children screaming happily in the play area immediately outside the town’s amenable Boswell Centre. 

But Currie’s ensemble is, as most of this East Ayrshire town will now know, an all-percussion collective with the fire power to overcome the most rumbustious opposition. No competition? Well, almost. One dramatic musical silence gave way to a shrill playground countdown, one of those lighthearted moments where chance interruptions turn to memorable highlight.

Little in this compelling programme, promoted by the Cumnock Tryst Festival as part of its extended year-round activity, proved anything less than compelling. The mere sight of these four black-shirted virtuosi – Currie himself, Owen Gunnell, Adrian Spillett and Sam Walton – huddled in successive configurations, was powerfully visceral, given the physicality involved and the heated communication between them.

The two opening pieces by American percussionist and composer Andy Akiho were from his trailblazing Seven Pillars project, their accumulating might coloured by intricate rhythmic conversations and textures tickled by the curiosities posing as instruments – empty wine bottles, a kitchen sieve and much more bric-a-brac besides. What these guys can’t do with everything but the kitchen sink simply isn’t worth talking about.

What the young Scottish composer (and accordionist) Aileen Sweeney has done with her new work Starburst is well worth mention. This was the subtlest music-making of the evening, opening with the gentle unfolding of a basic motif on delicate hand chimes, reaching its highpoint with a hypnotising rock groove, before unwinding to a hushed conclusion. It gave short shrift to the notion that all percussion playing carries a health warning.

In Dave Maric’s nature-inspired Nascent Forms for mallet instruments the emphasis on quick fire repetition was mesmerising in itself, the performance scintillating for its dextrous precision and intoxicating interaction. For their send-off, the quartet turned to four drum kits and the Reich-like adrenalin rush of Julia Wolfe’s Dark Full Ride. Yes, it veered towards the deafening at times, but with a sense too of artful exhilaration as this dazzling floor show powered towards its final emphatic thump.

Cumnock Tryst founder and artistic director also used this celebrity occasion to announce his plans for the 10th Festival Programme, which runs from 2-6 October, one day longer than previous events. Among the artists featuring will be pianist Steven Osborne, British tenor Joshua Ellicot, the excellent Maxwell Quartet, folk music from Alastair Savage and Friends and locally-based Seán Gray, and jazz from the Tommy Smith Youth Jazz Orchestra and The Euan Stevenson Trio. Local groups also feature, notably the Tryst Festival Chorus and Dalmellington Brass Band among others in a special Tenth Birthday Gala Concert. 

MacMillan also announced the launch of a new Cumnock Tryst Ensemble, consisting of some of Scotland’s finest classical musicians, led by cellist, improviser and composer Christian Elliott. 

Ken Walton

The Colin Currie Quartet continues its current tour in Castle Douglas (27 April) and Biggar (28 April). Details at www.colincurrie.com

Full details of this year’s 10th Cumnock Tryst Festival are available at www.thecumnocktryst.com 

BBC SSO / Wigglesworth

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City Halls, Glasgow

Although it was surely the presence of pianist Stephen Hough as soloist on Rachmaninov’s perennially popular Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, alongside an invitation to subscribers to hear about the coming season, that attracted a such good house to the Candleriggs on Thursday evening, the rare performance of Stravinsky’s 1928 The Fairy’s Kiss that took up the second half of the concert was a particular delight.

A stellar example of the contrary character of the composer, the drama  of this Hans Christian Andersen-derived score might be a deal more subtle than Stravinsky’s earlier ballet music, but it is there nonetheless. Unusually for him, it does seem a little prolix, but the orchestration is as full of interest over its entire 45 minutes, and there was some especially fine playing here, particularly from the SSO winds.

Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth was clearly concerned with the arc of the whole suite, the four scenes having a quasi-symphonic structure, but there were one or two moments where the tempi wavered uncertainly. Stravinsky drew on songs and piano works by Tchaikovsky for his musical material and the work references his predecessor’s own distinctive orchestrations, but the final result, and particularly the dying fall of the last bars makes its own unique impression.

The programme had opened with a contemporary interpretation of the same writer in Hans Abrahamsen’s Three Fairy-Tale Pictures from ‘The Snow Queen’. Wigglesworth’s affiliation with the orchestra’s current Composer-in-Association produced a performance that made the most of the huge orchestra required, with singular ingredients like the four flutes all doubling on piccolos. There was something distinctly MacMillan-esque about the build-up of the work, and especially the use of brass and percussion – and Sir James was in the audience to hear it.

Characteristically, Stephen Hough brought a very thoughtful approach to the fireworks of Rachmaninov’s Paganini variations, and Wigglesworth – himself a pianist of course – was very much his ally in that. Here was an account of the work that lost none of its Romantic intensity but where as much space and attention was given to the less virtuosic music. There was marvellous cohesion in the variations of tempo and a wonderfully meaty mid-range sound from the orchestra.

It was the fine detail of the soloist’s playing that really sealed the deal, though, culminating in what was surely the least showbiz despatching of the witty final bars possible.

Keith Bruce

Tippett: New Year

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City Halls, Glasgow

It would be premature, in truth ill-informed, to assess the BBC SSO’s concert-style revival of Michael Tippett’s final opera, New Year, as creating a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. For how many of us have actually witnessed this bizarre work in its fully-staged totality? Completed by the ailing septuagenarian Tippett in the late 1980s, it was only ever subject to one staged production, by Peter Hall, with performances in Houston Texas in 1989, transferring to Glyndebourne, then in a modified form by Glyndebourne Touring Opera. Since then, nothing.

What Saturday’s semi-staging by Victoria Newlyn offered was just one facet of the whole – the musical score – predicated on the fact that NMC, as partners to the event, were usefully recording it to create the first commercial recording of New Year. It will be available, rather conveniently, “early in the new year”.

The issue arising from this sharp-edged Glasgow performance, in which the SSO under Martyn Brabbins were joined by a dedicated cast and the BBC Singers, was not so much what we did hear, as what we didn’t see. 

It’s a plot you need regular help with: a tale of two worlds colliding, the urban banality of “Somewhere and Today” and the utopian “Nowhere and Tomorrow” somewhere in space, constructed by Tippett in naively futuristic Wellsian terms. The literal interaction between the two sets of beings – an earthly trio rescued from dysfunction by an otherworldly trio of spaceship travellers – is puzzling enough, but not to witness the actual physicality of the substantial, presumably pivotal, dance scenes leaves the full visual impact of Tippett’s fantasy concept incomplete.

As for the music, this has to rank, if not quite the rantings of an elderly esoteric composer, as an impatiently wild and cathartic compositional exorcism. There’s no limit to the juxtapositional chaos of clashing styles – moments of gorgeous post-pastoral Englishness thrown to the wind by the intervention of crunching 20th century dissonance; the lugubrious twang of an electric guitar enlivened by the onslaught of rap and reggae; the electronic datedness – Blake’s 7-style – of the space ship sound effects; even a stirring Ne’erday chorus of Auld Lang Syne shredded by scintillatingly combatant counterpoints. 

What Brabbins did so successfully was to masterfully harness such fragmentations, making energetic sense of it in the same way a good Bernstein Mass performance makes sense of its stylistic incongruences. He was abetted fully by a trusty cast. Alan Oke – a one-time regular with Scottish Opera in the 1980s – commanded a stentorian central presence as the Presenter; soprano Rhian Lois sang powerfully and alluringly as the chief protagonist Jo Ann, Ross Ramgobin somewhat gauche as her Afro-Caribbean foster brother Donny. Foster mother Susan Bickley bore a stirringly stoical countenance.

The white suited time-travellers offered a potent contrast – Roland Wood typically imposing as computer wizard Merlin; Robert Murray lustrously impassioned as space pilot Pelegrin; with their boss Rachel Nicholls’ radiant soprano powering through, exhilaratingly so. The BBC Singers contributed animated rearguard support. 

For all its crazy merits though, including the nostalgic aura of what is essentially mood music and sound effects of the time, this experience constantly felt as if it were one dimension short. If New Year is already a silk purse, we need full theatrical proof. Anyone keen to test that might be tempted by Keith Warner’s new production for Birmingham Opera Company opening this July. The conductor is another SSO regular, Alpesh Chauhan. 

Ken Walton

This concert was recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3, after which it will be available via BBC Sounds for 30 days

BBC SSO / Lazarova

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City Halls, Glasgow

It’s hard to tell exactly what attracted such a large audience to this afternoon concert by the BBC SSO, but even if it was purely a matter of chance none will have gone away unsatisfied. 

It could, of course, have been for Sean Shibe, the cool Scots-born guitarist, who complimented a recently-composed concerto for his instrument with the more famous one of Jaoquín Rodrigo, the Concierto de Aranjuez. Or it may have been the sunny coupled attractions of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol and Stravinsky’s suite The Firebird.

More surprisingly, perhaps, it might have been for Bulgarian-born conductor Delyana Lazarova, who is not yet so familiar a name here, but who certainly made a significant impact on the SSO players – eagerly responsive to her invigorating lead – and on an audience, cheering noisily in the wake of dynamic, warm-hearted performances.

Rimsky-Korsakov’s exuberant Spanish portrait provided a glittering opener, the Mediterranean ecstasy of the juicy tuttis charmingly offset by prominent solo writing, not least for violin, breezily executed by SSO leader Kanako Ito, and clarinet, Adam Lee bewitching us with beguiling virtuosity. Especially exciting was the visible, energised synergy between Lazarova and the orchestra.

In the first of the two concerto appearances, Shibe fronted a new chamber orchestra version of Turia by the Spanish trombonist-turned composer Franciso Coll. By his own admission, Coll “sees” his music in pictorial terms. “Sometimes I don’t know if I’m composing or painting, because I don’t see much difference,” he has said. The visual stimulus here is a dried-out riverbed in his native Valencia, now transformed into a verdant sea of flora and fountains. 

From its wistful opening – spectral brushstrokes on guitar finding firmer footing as the orchestra’s rhythmic presence increases – a sequence of five movements capture successive musical images. Awe and mystery give way to frenetic concision, before the scene turns eerie once again. A sonorous calm envelops the penultimate movement, blown aside by the dizzy rapture of the finale. Shibe’s absorbing performance was lustrous yet breathtakingly precise.

Then, after the interval, he returned for that most famous of guitar concertos by Rodrigo, its swashbuckling opening chords signalling the radiance that was to follow. The opening movement sparkled with joie de vivre. The central Adagio, assisted by James Horan’s exotic cor anglais solo, introduced an elusive sensuality before the incisive brevity of the finale, in which Shibe’s sizzling virtuosity – strangely emphasised by a markedly stoical countenance – was spiritedly amplified by Lazarova’s sharp-witted superintendence.

She, alone, moulded the conclusive tour de force that was Stravinsky’s The Firebird, a narrative of extremes countering the fickle magic of the Firebird’s opening dance with the Russian succulence of the Round Dance, the demonic heat of the Infernal Dance with the fetching elegance of the Berceuse, and finally the purposeful triumph of a hymn-like apotheosis. Lazarova, one hopes, will be back before long.

Ken Walton 

Recorded for future broadcast by BBC Radio 3, after which it will be available for 30 days on BBC Sounds.

RSNO / Afkham

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

If, as seems likely, this was her last full concert appearance before taking maternity leave, Nicola Benedetti chose an ideal work from which to take a step back, because it begged her swift return to performing.

I am sure I was not the only listener left in two minds by Mark Simpson’s Violin Concerto, co-commissioned by the RSNO, specifically written for Benedetti and twice postponed before she gave its Scottish premiere with the orchestra. The need to hear it again before coming to judgement is unarguable, because it is a packed, full-throttle piece for much of its length.

There are a lot of notes for the soloist to play, and much of it is the high-octane stuff at which Benedetti excels in established repertoire works. Her virtuosity was clearly as much of an inspiration as any external influences, and the composer’s citing of the Covid pandemic and lockdown as one such factor is not immediately obvious.

Written in five movements, but played uninterrupted, perhaps there is a catharsis in the manic second movement, but the more readily appreciable moments came later in the work. With a lot of work for a large percussion section and the brass, much of the earlier music was very loud, although the trombones and tuba were at their most interesting muted.

The concerto does calm down a little later, but still makes considerable demands of the soloist with double stopping and other virtuosic techniques even when the underscore was pared back to low strings and gong, or Pippa Tunnell’s harp. The harmonic flavour of the work draws on a wide range of ingredients, sometimes very Eastern sounding but ending in another boisterous movement that sounds very American, mixing the concert hall with the world of movie soundtrack.

Was there a discernible narrative arc to the whole piece? Further listening is required, but conductor David Afkham certainly shaped – and, crucially, balanced – the sections with great attention.

The German has been at the helm of the Spanish National Orchestra in senior posts for a decade and has extensive American experience as well. This was his RSNO debut and the Shostakovich Five he directed after the interval suggested a very useful partnership already. Under earlier chief conductors, this orchestra played more of this composer’s music than we have heard of late, but it still revels in it.

The Fifth, of course, was Shostakovich’s 1937 response to Stalin’s criticism (of the “muddle” of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk), and much has been written and said about decoding its message. Afkham’s approach to the score was refreshingly direct, quite brisk in places that give other conductors pause, and, I think, entirely free of irony. It is a pretty bleak work in places, and the slow movement had a tangible feeling of utter resignation, but the RSNO wind soloists were on stellar form and the strings magnificent in the relentless single note that brings the work to its compelling conclusion.

Keith Bruce

Picture shows the curtain call at Friday’s Usher Hall concert (credit: RSNO)

SCO / Emelyanychev

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City Halls, Glasgow

Alongside world class musicianship and a breadth of programming that leaves few ears unengaged, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s 50th anniversary season has been distinguished by very thoughtful and original programming. This concert, built around the world premiere of a new choral work by Sir James MacMillan, was a stunning example of that.

MacMillan’s Composed in August – not a diary note but the real title of the Robert Burns lyric known mostly by its first line Now Westlin Winds – is an SCO commission with partner organisations in Estonia and Sweden. Once they have had their premieres, it is likely to become a very popular piece with choirs, challenging in parts but tune-filled, and unusual in being a secular work from MacMillan for these forces.

The singers have to employ a range of techniques and the excellent SCO Chorus members were as assured in their diction of the rhythmically overlapping phrases as in the wordless music at the gentle finish. The instrumental music is for the SCO’s standard set-up, with the odd extra string player, and echoes the pastoral music of the Baroque era in the strings, horns and woodwind birdsong while still bearing the clear signature of the composer. With a wealth of different music over the five stanzas, it is an exquisite piece.

The work of two Ayrshire lads was followed by a Mancunian’s impression of Orcadian celebration, with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s perennially popular An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise. There are few conductors who so obviously enjoy their work as Maxim Emelyanychev, but the young Russian was in ecstatic form here, enjoying all the theatre of the piece with foot-stomping enthusiasm. That included a tray of drams being brought on for himself and leader Stephanie Gonley as the work slides into inebriation, greeted with a hilarious massed “slanj” of hipflasks from the chorus, still seated in the choir stalls.

If the larks set up the arrival of piper Robert Jordan, in full regalia, from the back of hall to perfection, there was also a characteristic precision in every detail of their performance – especially the “tuning up” moment, which Emelyanychev surely recognised as being a gag partly at his own expense.

The programme began with a French composer’s way with Scots romanticism, Berlioz’s Rob Roy overture, which takes Burns’s tune Scots Wha Hae and finds a lot of different things to do with it. With some period instrumentation, it is a curious and fascinating response to Sir Walter Scott’s novel, full of colour and a reminder, perhaps, that the melody makes a strong claim to National Anthem status.

The overture teed-up a superb performance of the same composer’s La mort de Cleopatre with mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill on her best form. Rather than a soloist at the front of the stage she was embedded in the music, but at the same time gave an expressive reading that was straight off the opera stage. The low string pulse that sets up her welcoming of death sounded startlingly contemporary, and emblematic of how this orchestra and its associates span the centuries.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Karen Cargill by Nadine Boyd

BBC SSO: Verdi Requiem

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City Halls, Glasgow

I’ve no idea what Thursday’s live broadcast performance of Verdi’s Requiem by the BBC SSO and Edinburgh Festival Chorus sounded like over the airwaves – though it’s easy enough to find out by dialling it up on BBC Sounds – but in the flesh, in the limited acoustical sound box that is Glasgow City Halls, and untamed by production tricks, it veered close on its mightiest occasions to deafening. That won’t be the case on Sunday, when the same performers under SSO chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth repeat this showpiece work in the spaciousness of Edinburgh’s Usher Hall.

That said, reservations lay not entirely with bricks and mortar. What Wigglesworth gave us on Thursday evening was a Verdi Requiem rich in golden moments, at times particularly thought-provoking, but which was otherwise erratic in its piecing together of what is essentially fluent impassioned opera dressed in sacred concert hall formality. 

The very opening was full of theatrical promise – the slow, considered cello motif faintly whispered, embracing a brooding, mysterious tone from which the opening Introit and Kyrie looked set to rise and fall with mountainous persuasion before the ensuing Dies Irae, with its savage drums, venomous energy and protracted drama. 

The full-bodied Festival Chorus, trained by its director James Grossmith, was instantly impressive, wholesome and confident, wide ranging in its expressive power, diction crystal clear. Enter, too, the solo vocal quartet, notable initially for the piercing operatic tenor of Antonio Poli, to which soprano Miah Persson, mezzo soprano Alice Coote and bass William Thomas added both their corporate heft and, where it mattered, intuitive sparks of individuality. The SSO responded dutifully with supportive playing and matching sumptuousness, despite the brass being actively encouraged to overwhelm the chorus. 

All this gave Wigglesworth scope to add his own thoughts – glimpses of often ignored orchestral detail he felt needed emphasis, though some were more awkwardly manufactured than naturally emergent; weighted tempi that, when judiciously applied, magically drew breath. What we didn’t always get was a sense of complete organic synergy – the SSO left ever so slightly behind the beat at times – or sufficient seamless vision to give the piece its macro-visceral grip.

The later, shorter movements produced the same peppering of delights: the soloists revelling in the transformational piety of the Offertory; an ecstatic choral Hosanna to round off the Sanctus and Benedictus (despite its exquisitely busy violin countermelody – the icing on the cake – being barely audible); the spiritual awe and intensity of the Lux Aeterna, including a dynamic floor show from the double basses whose synchronous, animated pizzicato resembled an archery display; and then the Libera Me, its gorgeous a cappella “Requiem Aeternam”, Persson soaring ethereally above, like a precious preparatory moment before the work’s exhaustive, final plea for deliverance. 

If this was a performance that occasionally seemed one rehearsal short of complete readiness, Sunday afternoon’s repeat at the Usher Hall should redeem that. And there. of course, the brass can let off steam without causing any offence.

Ken Walton

Idomeneo

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Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow

It would be fruitless to pretend that the Alexander Gibson Opera School’s end-of-term production of Mozart’s pivotal early opera was not compromised by the indisposition of the tenor cast as Idomeneo.

Canadian James Schouten was onstage, and walked, mimed, and occasionally coughed, through the title role, while New Zealander Aidan Thomas Phillips sang the part from the side of the stage. Plaudits to them for their perseverance, but by the end of the night it was clearly a stretch for both, and the brave efforts of their colleagues could do nothing for the skewed balance of Act 2’s beautiful “farewell” trio and the ground-breaking quartet featuring all four main characters in Act 3.

Rehearsals had apparently been dogged by illness, but even if everyone had been well, it would be hard to enthuse about PJ Harris’s production. The imposing set, by Anna Yates, is dominated by “Neptune’s column” a lighthouse-like edifice which contains the god (sung by Joshua McCullough) and is mounted on a rocky plinth which later opens up to become the grotto/allotment of the captive Trojan princess, Ilia (Audrey Tsang). With the upper playing area being home to a collection of props – a safe, a crown, a tomahawk – that are the subject of much distracting stage business, and the restricted space below permitting only processional choreography of chorus and principals, the reason why David McVicar’s Scottish Opera production took a minimal approach to staging the same work was all too apparent. Perhaps all this opaque symbolism referenced a recently-popular fantasy TV series, but if so, so what? And, indeed, why?

Musically the performances were mostly very fine indeed. Tsang was in superb voice from the start – although her better solo music comes later in the score – and Rosie Lavery, dressed in scarlet as Elettra, Ilia’s rival for the affections of Idamante, was even more commanding vocally and the most confident performer onstage, ideally cast for the drama of her solos in Act 3. In a simpler staging, the decision to make Idamante the daughter of Idomeneo, rather than a “trouser role” in the traditional sense, might have seemed more significant, but making it almost incidental may well have been entirely deliberate. Charlotte Bateman sang well, and although her less powerful voice did not match the work of either of her suitors, the three blended beautifully.

The best ensemble work, however, came from the chorus, who also have their best music later in the work, and produced the goods in their eloquent commentary on the shenanigans of their supposed superiors. In the pit, conductor John Butt has the student orchestra as well-drilled as you would expect, while his own harpsichord playing characteristically drives the soloists’ accompagnato to fine narrative effect.

Picture by Robbie McFadzean/RCS

SCO / Kuusisto

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City Halls, Glasgow

Time and Tides was no ordinary Scottish Chamber Orchestra gig, nor was it a typical SCO audience. But then, when has the versatile Finnish musical phenomenon Pekka Kuusisto – violinist, director and funky entertainer – ever made claims to doing things the traditional way? In this, the last of his current four-programme residency with the orchestra, it was anything but business as usual.

Nor were we short-changed. As well as two astonishing UK premieres – former SCO associate composer Anna Clyne’s violin concerto and a new song cycle by Helen Grime, written 2023 and 2021 respectively – Kuusisto, doubling on violin and miniature harmonium, teamed up with Scots fiddler Aidan O’Rourke to introduce some of the traditional melodies used by Clyne in her concerto. Thus, perhaps, the reason for the wider-sourced audience, one that was encouragingly young and vocal. And there was more besides.

First and foremost, this was a programme devised with arched intent. It began with a hint of provocation, the curved-ball dissonant writing of Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür as witnessed in his orchestral piece Lighthouse. Its combination of harshness, meatiness and slithery translucence, also its retro-Baroque inflexions, makes for an atmospheric gem. Under Kuusisto, and with the assured SCO strings, it had a beguiling, delirious impact. 

At the other end of the evening came Einojuhani Rautavaara’s avian curiosity Cantus Arcticus, surreal in the way he overlays a luscious orchestral landscape with a cacophony of recorded birdcalls, but also a kind of traditional night cap bringing us back to earth after the concert’s central highlights.

As previously mentioned, Kuusisto’s plan was to ease us into the Clyne Concerto – Time and Tides – by way of a stylistic gear change, he and O’Rourke intimately calming the air with folk tunes from Scotland and Finland, joined ultimately by some upper string backing in close harmony. If physically it wasn’t the smoothest transition, it served its purpose, sharpening the sensitivities required to appreciate the multiplicity of Clyne’s folk-inspired creation. 

Written especially for Kuusisto, his eccentricities were exploited – his knack of whistling while playing, his unlimited vocabulary of violin/non-violin skills – and built into a glittering suite of five movements that embraced everything from zany pastiche and wit to reflective soulfulness and airy pastoralism. Within this, the integrity of Clyne’s chosen folk songs – from Scotland, Finland and America – remained hauntingly intact, especially when the players added their own singing voices to the closing mix.

Helen Grimes’ It Will Be Spring Soon – optimistic texts by Philip Larkin, Sandra Cisneros and Jane Hirshfield set to luminous, opulent music – was delivered engagingly by one of its dedicatees, soprano Ruby Hughes (the other being violinist Malin Broman, whose obligato role was conveniently taken here by Kuusisto). Written with echoes of Britten, Grimes creates a magical relationship between the sprightly strings/harp scoring and the soprano’s controlled intensity. 

Just how effective the foyer presence of DJ Dolphin Boy (Andy Levy) was during the interval likely depends on personal experience, but with him tucked almost anonymously into a tight corner along from the interval drinks, I’m guessing his efficient efforts may have passed some people by. Good idea; more a venue issue perhaps.

Ken Walton

RSNO / Søndergård

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Between them, the Mendelssohn siblings lived the aggregate equivalent of one lengthy life span: Felix shuffling off this mortal coil at the age of 38, his big sister Fanny in the same year, 1847, aged 41. Felix, as a man of his time, clearly got the better deal when it came to exposure as a composer, yet it’s often claimed that Fanny, had she been gifted a more even societal hand, would have been recognised as equal, if not better, in creative terms. It’s a moot point, though enough evidence of her talent exists to at least sustain the question.

One of these pieces is the Overture in C, her first orchestral work written as a married mother and therefore attributed to Fanny Hensel. A work of exceptional craftsmanship, neatly sculpted, engagingly tuneful and touched by a Weber-like sense of the theatrical, it was an energising springboard to a programme that would later end with one of her brother’s theatrically-inspired masterpieces. 

Music director Thomas Søndergård’s firm belief in it emerged instantly, a tropical warmth emanating from the strings, enhanced by a sweet, often playful interplay among the woodwind and brass, and a rhythmic energy that was excitedly crisp, precise and punchy. Moments passed where echoes of her brother’s lyrical virility took hold, and there were lengthy paragraphs where Beethoven’s ghost was the reference point, but there was never any denying the genuinely cohesive worth of this artful overture.

Saturday’s programme was also a showpiece for the RSNO Youth Chorus, currently flourishing under its director Patrick Barrett. They produced an absolute gem in the form of British-born composer James Burton’s The Lost Words, settings of poems from Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’ eponymous book mourning the loss in some dictionaries of certain childhood vocabulary: words like “Conker”, “Bluebell” and “Wren”. 

The vocal animation in Burton’s music, his sense of fun and pawky irony, is a perfect match for such young singers, who delivered its rhythmical jokes and stylistic variability – the whimsical word-play of Newt, the bluesy Bluebell, a wistful Willow and Disney-style Wren – with remarkably clear enunciation and accuracy. Though written five years ago, this was the first full performance of Burton’s orchestrated version, a luxuriously expanded illumination of songs that are so intrinsically characterful.

Returning to the Mendelssohn family, the concert ended with Felix’s atmospheric incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, featuring Scots actor Christine Steel as the lucid, unshowy narrator, the duetting charms of Carine Tinney (soprano) and Rosamond Thomas (mezzo-soprano) and once again the spritely voices of the Youth Chorus. 

Søndergård, like a veritable circus ringmaster, exerted immaculate control of his forces, the performance unfolding with impeccable timing, seamless tempi and generous sprinklings of musical fairy dust. Mendelssohn’s genius – his exquisitely detailed instrumental palette and the pertinent charm of the vocal writing – cast its exquisite spell.

Ken Walton 

Leif Ove Andsnes

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Perth Concert Hall

Composer and pianist Geirr Tviett is a problematic figure for Norwegians because of his association with the neo-Heathen nationalist movement and its links with the Quisling puppet-administration in the Second World War. Like his jazz pianist contemporary Tord Gustavson, however, Leif Ove Andsnes is concerned with what little of his music survives to be performed – almost all of it was destroyed in a fire at the composer’s home in the year both men were born.

In this recital, a UK exclusive performance from Andsnes in Perth, the pianist spoke to the audience only to give some of that background before playing Tveitt’s Sonata No 29, the sole surviving score of around 30 such works for the keyboard. Named “Sonata Etere” (Sonata of the ether), one of its distinguishing techniques requires the pianist to hold down a long block of notes with the left forearm while playing a staccato line with the right hand, each note resonating the harmonics of the depressed keys. The device is introduced in the variations of the second movement and then revisited at the end of the finale.

Those are the simplest and sparest moments of the half-hour work, which is highly virtuosic elsewhere. The opening movement is filled with unresolved tension, not unlike orchestral Shostakovich, while the edgy third, driven by a propulsive left hand, becomes a frenetic, even possessed, and then exhausted dance. In this player’s hands it was unarguably compelling.

Andsnes presented his countryman in the context of music that was often just as dark. Schubert’s 1823 Sonata in A minor, D784, seems to be the composer interrogating himself, or the universe, on the uncertain future, posing unanswerable questions and receiving the most tentative of replies. It too, ends in a troubled, frantic finale.

The later Impromptu No 1 in F Minor, D935, is superficially lighter but, like the contemporaneous song-cycle Winterriese, has a darker heart. Schubert is quite technically specific in his expressive instructions, and the pedal work of Andsnes was as precise as his eloquent fingering.

Apart from a Chopin Mazurka by way of a cheerier encore, the recital was completed by the late Brahms sequence Fantasien, Opus 116, Andsnes launching into them swiftly after the Schubert Impromptu and taking only small pauses between the three Capprici and four Intermezzi. If the first of the latter is quintessential late Brahms, sad and lovely, and the final one, in E Major, sounds like the careful tying up of loose ends of the narrative, the two between seemed startlingly modern in Andsnes’ reading. Here was Brahms foreshadowing the compositional journey of the 20th century, and influencing what we now know as The Great American Songbook.

From this great pianist these four works emerged as distinct, utterly enthralling stories in themselves. Since Perth’s superb hall was first opened almost 20 years ago it has provided some of the finest piano recitals Scotland has heard – and this was another to add to that distinguished list.

Keith Bruce

RSNO / Sondergard

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Lovers of French music can enjoy a purple patch of programming in Scotland, with the SCO combining Berlioz with more local fare in an “Auld Alliance” concert with Karen Cargill this month and the Hebrides Ensemble using the same title for a programme doing a similar thing with Debussy and Ravel at May’s Perth Festival.

The RSNO were first out of the blocks, however, with their evening showcasing French composers, although it ended up being rather briefer than planned. In Perth and Edinburgh, featured soloist Catriona Morison had sung Chauson’s setting of Maurice Bouchor, Poeme de l’amour et de la mer, as advertised, but she was too unwell to do so on a third night.

By way of what would have been a not unpopular substitute, ticket holders were advised that first flute Katherine Bryan would now be the soloist for Francoise Borne’s arrangement of the hit tunes from Bizet’s opera, Carmen. During the afternoon rehearsals of that piece, however, the flautist was taken ill, leaving the orchestra without both half an hour of music and its principal flute for the Debussy and Ravel in the rest of the programme.

It says a great deal for the strength-in-depth of Scotland’s musical community, and the RSNO in particular, that the concert we heard seemed so little compromised. Shifting Ravel’s Une barque sur l’ocean – the only one of the Miroirs piano works the master orchestrator fully scored – to open the programme, the impromptu flute partnership of the promoted Jenny Farley and sight-reading last minute recruit Adam Richardson were called on to play the evening’s first bars of music and they never looked back.

That piece was always intended as an appetiser for the work that now had the second half of the concert to itself, Debussy’s La mer. One of the most popular works of symphonic impressionism, every detail of this performance, from Henry Clay’s cor anglais solo at its opening to the huge brass climax at the end, was superbly played. Conductor Thomas Sondergard’s handling of the architecture of the work was absolutely masterly, that enticing first movement ending in particularly robust pizzicato basses and the central Play of the waves maintaining the lightest touches so that the finale could build with a marvellously-paced unfolding power.

Before the interval, the work that had been planned for the start of the concert actually found a more advantageous slot. Melanie Bonis has a novelistic life story and her music is ripe for rediscovery. A student of Cesar Franck at the Paris Conservatoire, she wrote a series of celebrations of “Femmes de legend” for piano at the start of the 20th century and her orchestrations of three of them – Ophelia, Salome and Cleopatre – were only published this century and premiered by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Jessica Cottis in 2015.

The resulting suite sat very comfortably in the exacting company of Ravel and Debussy because Bonis was a highly accomplished orchestrator herself. If her picture of Hamlet’s doomed girlfriend was more pastoral than tragic, Salome emerged as a saucy minx and the Eastern flavour continued in the very colourful, and more substantial, tone poem Le Songe de Cleopatre. Concerns that International Women’s Day can seem tokenistic can be overlooked when the result is the discovery of little-known gems like these.

Keith Bruce

SCO / Kuusisto

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City Halls, Glasgow

THREE centuries on from its first publication, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons has withstood any number of revisions and re-interpretations. At the end of May, the Perth Festival of the Arts has a concert by Il Giardino d’Amore which includes the responses of Astor Piazzola and Max Richter alongside the original, and Nigel Kennedy, who took it to the top of the charts in 1989, revisited it again a decade ago.

Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto is 20 years Kennedy’s junior, and his soloist foil in this concert with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Swedish cittern-player Ale Carr, is not yet 35. They share the sort of eclectic musical experience straddling the classical and traditional music worlds that made this version of the old warhorse work as fresh and vital as anyone might wish.

With the SCO string players around them, mostly standing, Kuusisto and Carr turned the suite into a folk session, combined with the rhythmic rigour of the best baroque ensemble practice. With the support of the SCO front-deskers, Marcus Barcham Stevens (concert-master this week), Max Mandel, Philip Higham and Gordon Bragg, Kuusisto’s direction moved seamlessly between the music Vivaldi wrote and a varied selection of other tunes, some from Nordic traditional sources as advertised, but others from nearer home or familiar in the concert hall. Unpicking this tapestry would be complex and pointless – the intention was to present the result as a whole, Kuusisto’s “shoplifting”, as he styled it, creating additional cadenzas for the 18th century Venetian suite.

Kuusisto is not the first musician to think that Vivaldi might benefit from the addition of a rhythm guitar, but Carr’s contributions on cittern went far beyond that, looking every bit the axe-hero in his leather trousers. The Finn’s additions to the score also included some choreographed page-turning and humming by the ensemble and gleefully embraced a car revving in Albion Street outside.

The Italian composer’s representation of bird song in The Four Seasons shaped the rest of the concert programme. Only listeners as old as this writer will immediately associate the opening of Respighi’s suite Gli ucelli (The Birds), which itself repurposes earlier music, with Arthur Negus and the BBC TV antiques show Going for a Song.

When Grieg’s Holburg Suite is so regularly trotted out, it is strange that we don’t hear this colourful work more often. It is a perfect partner for the Vivaldi, full of colourful pictorial writing, with lovely solos for flute and oboe in particular and harp and celeste decorating the superb orchestration you would expect from this composer.

The icing on the cake of this clever programme was Andrea Tarrodi’s Birds of Paradise. Daughter of trombonist and composer Christian Lindberg, the Swedish composer has, in fact, written a Four Seasons of her own. The orchestrated version of Birds of Paradise, originally for strings, requires some extended techniques on strings and winds alongside bowed percussion to produce startlingly accurate ornithological imitation.

It begins, contrastingly, with specific subdivisions among the string players in a structure of overlapping phrases that alludes to American minimalism but produces a very different sonic result. As a contemporary addition to the musical aviary the piece was a fascinating seven minutes.

Keith Bruce

Pictured: Ale Carr

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