Category Archives: Reviews

SCO / Manze / Stalheim

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City Halls, Glasgow

Through the good offices of a foundation established by a Norwegian savings bank which holds a collection of musical instruments, Amalie Stalheim plays a cello made in the 18th century which once belonged to Mstislav Rostropovich. It is in very good hands.

Rostropovich made several celebrated recordings of Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme, so it is likely that this cello features on at least one of them. Although the repertoire for cello soloists is hardly large enough to do without it, the work is probably less in favour these days.

It sat very well at the heart of this programme of works that all clearly looked back to earlier music, however, conducted by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s Principal Guest Conductor Andrew Manze. In Tchaikovsky’s case, it was to Mozart in particular, and Stalheim’s fine, disciplined account of that piece was followed by his Serenade for Strings, a homage that has also fallen from fashion.

As in the approach of both soloist and conductor to the Variations, Manze brought the sort of crisp approach to the Serenade that he brings to Mozart’s music itself. The second movement waltz remains instantly recognisable and both it and the Elegie that follows were played with just the right level of romantic sentiment.

That second half of the concert followed a first half of much less well-known music, which nonetheless shared significant ingredients. It is likely that Lars-Erik Larsson’s Lyric Fantasy was pretty much core repertoire for Manze during his years working in Sweden, where the composer is a key figure. It dates from 1966 but sounds earlier, a chamber ensemble pastorale with single winds working as a quintet alongside two dozen strings.

Whether or not Larsson intended it – and his actual inspiration was likely half a century later – it did find a mirror in the Tchaikovsky Serenade.

The Cello Concerto that preceded the interval was by Anders Hillborg, arguably Sweden’s greatest living composer, whose viola concerto, composed just a year later, was played by the SCO and Manze for Nordic Music Days two years ago.

The Cello Concerto is a beautifully structured work, full of virtuoso material for Stalheim across the full range of her instrument, but also plenty of interest in the orchestral part with the strings sounding like a Renaissance choir at the start and finish of the piece. Alongside that lyrical music there are percussive explosions from piano and percussion (tubular bells, gong, and timpani) and ear-catching glissando drops in pitch.

With the SCO’s principal cello Philip Higham a crucial duet partner for the soloist, the work’s elements required careful balancing by Manze, clearly keeping the level in check for the glorious swell of sound at the end.

Keith Bruce

RSNO: Verdi Requiem

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Verdi’s insistence that anything less than a 200-strong choir would struggle to do justice to his mighty Requiem was well and truly substantiated in Saturday’s RSNO performance, which coupled the already significant forces of the RSNO Chorus with the mighty Edinburgh Festival Chorus. The impact was immediate – as much in the consuming intensity of the breathily subdued “Requiem” introduction as in the contrapuntal definition that ignited the ensuing “Te decet hymnus”. Rarely, in the latter, do you hear such radiant confidence from a choir’s tenors and basses.

This was, indeed, a performance defined by the strength of the masses, though never in the crudest musical sense. Under the cool jurisdiction of RSNO principal guest conductor Patrick Hahn – and having clearly been pre-drilled to perfection by the respective coaching skills of Stephen Doughty (RSNO Chorus) and James Grossmith (EFC) – this was choral singing that matched volume at either end of the dynamic spectrum with polished homogeneity, which delivered diction so precisely annunciated it projected effortlessly above the most clamorous orchestral surges, and which delivered crescendos so visceral they repeatedly sent shivers up the spine.

That’s not to say this was all about impact and magnitude. With such vocal power at his disposal, Hahn was never restricted by the need to over-hush the orchestra, allowing instrumental details to emerge that were surprising and revelatory, even to someone who has heard this work countless times. In the likes of the lengthy Dies Irae with its dazzling off-stage brass, or the snappy double chorus Sanctus, moments of sublime luminescence vied with eruptive wrath or rapture. 

Just as interesting was the quartet of soloists that fell in line with Hahn’s clean, expressive approach. Individually they exuded distinction: from soprano Jennifer Davis an angelic radiance; from American mezzo-soprano Irene Roberts (standing in last-minute for the advertised Deniz Uzun) a ravishing warmth. Tenor Mario Lerchenberger offered a passionate but strikingly clean-cut delivery, refreshingly un-Verdian at times, complementing the often dark operatic bass of Edwin Crossley-Mercer. It was unfortunate that Davis’ intonation sagged in the critical high peaks of the Libera me. 

As a whole, and enhanced visually by BSL performer Paul Whittaker’s meaningful onstage interpretative signing, this was a Verdi Requiem that set out to honour the music’s operatic fervour, epic persona and heart-tugging sentiments forcefully, but with just enough calculated restraint to avoid over-egging the pudding. It was enlightening to hear an old warhorse like this being presented from a slightly altered stance.

Ken Walton

(Photo: RSNO)

BBC SSO: Wigglesworth / Bevan

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City Halls, Glasgow 

An intriguing cross-referencing informed the first half of Thursday’s all-Russian matinee programme by the BBC SSO. Alongside Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth chose to include two of Anatoly Lyadov’s picturesque orchestral miniatures, Baba-Yaga and The Enchanted Lake, the former much better known in its fearsome musical depiction by Mussorgsky in his Pictures at an Exhibition.

With that famously demonic version lurking in the mind, Lyadov’s portrayal of the mythical witch is by comparison more stylised, less horrifying. But that didn’t stop Wigglesworth positively arguing its case in a performance respectful of Lyadov’s resourceful colourings, nervy rhythms, pictorial concision and character-defining energy. The wailing winds, Baba Yaga’s furious flight and an overarching eeriness found effective voice in an orchestration as liquidly vivid as any of Rimsky Korsakov’s, Lyadov’s teacher.

More interesting, perhaps, was the impressionist leanings of The Enchanted Lake, purposefully inoffensive, but nonetheless appreciable for its hypnotic stasis, subtly shifting colours and moonlit temperament. Lyadov presumably intended the ultra-dry, repetitive bass drum motif to conjure up the waters’ icy depths, but on this occasion it stuck out as a seemingly foreign irritation. That apart, and with plentiful mystique emanating from the SSO’s entire ranks, the music’s poetic impact was not lost.

The Mussorgsky songs that followed, performed in Shostakovich’s respectful 1962 orchestration, proved something of a family affair, with soprano Sophie Bevan – Wigglesworth’s wife – as soloist. That the couple share a mutual affection for these depictions of Death as an active protagonist was evident in a performance rich in emotional delineation, yet forged by a singular united vision. 

Bevan’s hold on the blackish narrative – the sardonic Lullaby for a dying child, Death’s Serenade for a terminally ill woman, the cold trickery expressed in Trepak, and mockery of The Field Marshall – benefitted considerably from the current of restraint underpinning her delivery. It worked well with Shostakovich’s sensitive, often spare texturing, in which he noticeably steps back from imprinting too much of his own signature, allowing Mussorgsky’s brooding temperament to dominate. 

After a relatively cool-headed first half, Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony brought a welcome dose of rich, red-hot Russian Romanticism. As in some of his most recent appearances with the SSO, Wigglesworth seemed relaxed, willing to let the orchestra have its own voice, which gave this airing of the Symphony a sustained warmth, lyrical suppleness and expressive welter. 

From its patient, considered introduction, the opening movement’s ensuing Allegro was both thrusting and malleable. Chris Gough’s horn solo opened the Andante cantabile with a golden serenity that fed through even the movement’s most heated episodes. The Waltz served its nominal purpose with both whimsy and delicacy, finally hinting of the victorious Finale ahead. If the latter lost some of its heat towards the end, there was enough stock already in this performance to satisfy the whole. 

Ken Walton

(This concert was recorded fur future broadcast in Radio 3 in Concert, after which it will be available to stream or download for 30 days via BBC Sounds)

RSNO / Akiki

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RSNO / Akiki

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

HAS there ever been a time since its hurried construction in Glasgow’s annus mirabilis, 1990, that Glasgow’s big hall was entirely without issues? Currently, performances by a full-sized symphony orchestra have to take place with the strings on the same level as the front rows of the stalls, because the platform extension that was previously used has been condemned as not fit for purpose.

Acoustically, that perhaps makes little difference in a venue that is far from perfect, but visually it is pretty hopeless for audience members seated downstairs, where the sound is generally better.

The orchestra that has its home there, the RSNO, can only grin and bear it until the problem is sorted. Or, as was the case with this programme, introduce a little performative flamboyance to make up for the deficiency.

Opening with Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man – a work that can surely claim a place in the top twenty most recognisable pieces of classical music –  seven trumpets, eight horns, five trombones and a tuba were lined-up across the choir stalls, high above their orchestral colleagues. The extras were members of the Smith Square Sinfonia (formerly the Southbank Sinfonia) an annually-convened ensemble of early career professionals from which Scotland’s national orchestra has recruited. This new partnership ran through the concert, and will continue next year while the Sinfonia’s London home is being refurbished.

It wasn’t a flawless performance of the short composition, but it packed plenty of punch and, as RSNO first clarinet Timothy Orpen explained while the brass and horns found their way down the stairs, it made an interesting companion piece to the work in the second half, Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony. One was a rallying cry for the USA’s involvement in the Second World War, the other a statement of the resistance of a city besieged by the Nazis.

It was also a nice dramatic start for conductor Bassem Akiki, a composer and opera specialist, recently appointed artistic director and principal conductor of the Poland Radio Orchestra in Warsaw, who had an evening of new challenges ahead. Born in Beirut, he could readily identify with the defiant message of Shostakovich Seven even if he had never conducted it before.

The RSNO was a good place to start with the work, as the orchestra has established form with the composer. It was not too fanciful to imagine that the long narrative arc of the work was already there in the players’ performance as well as in Akiki’s direction.

The step of the long march in the first movement, so simple and directly dictated by the side drum, comes to culmination with nine horns making the ultimate unison statement. With the brass arranged on either side of them, the parallels with the Copland were obvious regardless of the work’s much darker tone.

The third movement Adagio is only a little less long and the RSNO wind soloists were on their best form there, while the “Victory” finale – however nebulous the composer saw it – built incrementally to a glorious climax.

The conductor had also been dealt a UK premiere for his RSNO debut, the first Violin Concerto by Lera Auerbach. It dates from 2004, when it was played at LA’s Walt Disney Hall by Philippe Quint, and she has since written three further concertos for the instrument.

Quint recently recorded the piece with the RSNO in Glasgow, and he is becoming a familiar soloist, previously playing concertos by Korngold and Errollyn Wallen. With the orchestra having played Auerbach’s Chimera Symphony in May 2025, there was much re-acquaintance on stage.

That symphony memorably included a theremin amongst the violins, and the concerto asks for a musical saw, adding a not-dissimilar voice to the tonal palette. Although there was plenty of fast fingering for Quint to negotiate, the work is as much about a vast range of orchestral colours, with a haunted scherzo/waltz second movement and an equally dark repetitive third.

Russian-born but US-domiciled, Auerbach’s influences clearly come from both countries, but the theme that followed Quint’s cadenza in the finale was inescapably, and appropriately, indebted to Shostakovich.

Keith Bruce

SCO / Bancroft

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City Halls, Glasgow

Although there have been some notable exceptions – particularly the commitment which Opera North has made to performing his stage work – composer Kurt Weill is still not taken seriously enough by the classical music world, which is strange given what a perfectly 20th century life he managed to lead, having fled his native Germany in good time.

Perhaps that can be traced back to the Amsterdam premiere of his Second Symphony, conducted by Bruno Walter at the Concertgebouw no less, which failed to please the modernists. Weill effectively turned his back on the concert hall, and made sophisticated Broadway music instead.

American Ryan Bancroft has a Glasgow fan club as one of the most successful graduates of the conducting course at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and for this guest appearance with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra he set the symphony in a very telling, thoughtful context of music both hugely more popular and much less well-known of around the same time.

The box-office stuff was by Weill’s younger US contemporary Samuel Barber, his Violin Concerto and the screen and memorial-service favourite, the Adagio for Strings.

The latter featured 23 players, possibly the ideal number for the piece in this space, and the SCO’s guest leader Maia Cabeza – who played beautifully all night – is an alumnus of Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute where Barber studied and became professor of composition. She, Bancroft and the players ensured that this was an immaculately phrased rendition, far removed from any mawkishness.

The soloist for the violin concerto was Korean Clara-Jumi Kang, chamber music partner of pianists Sunwook Kim and Yeol Eum Son, who brought that sort of collaborative approach to the dialogue with the orchestra in her reading of a work that is similarly in danger of becoming overfamiliar but which was perfectly paced by herself and Bancroft.

The concert began with the real curiosity that is Erwin Schulhoff’s Suite for Chamber Orchestra from 1921. It shares some vocabulary with Weill’s early stage work with Bertolt Brecht, but Schulhoff was a one-off, with a taste for sonic eccentricity that was provocative rather than comic, although it is still fun. With the six percussionists having one of the six movements to themselves (hooters, horns and all) and the prologue being a declamatory poem from Bancroft himself, it featured some great solo playing from Cabeza and many others on the platform.

Weill’s Symphony No 2 emerges from the distance of years as less self-consciously radical but also less dated. He embraced tuneful music as enthusiastically as Barber but combined it with contemporary voicings and an ever-present sense of the dramatic.

The symphony’s central Largo may be a funeral march, but it is one for a state occasion (oddly, as Barber’s Adagio has become just that in the USA) and with something of a Hitchcock soundtrack about it. Bancroft’s enthusiastic direction was rewarded with very fine ensemble work from the SCO across all three movements, and the coherent arc of the work could not have been expressed more clearly.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Ryan Bancroft by Per Morton

SCO / Brophy / Samuelsen

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City Halls, Glasgow

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s adept season programming produced another box office hit with this concert of music composed in the last 50 years, proving that there is still a vast young audience for what is broadly categorised as “minimalism” even if those so labelled bridle at the term.

Any reservations about the music, then, have to be set against the reality of 2000 people in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall on Thursday – many of them new faces to the orchestra management – and a City Hall filled to the choir stalls. The box office draw was the name of Max Richter, credited with an hour of the music we heard, and the concert title “Richter+” shockingly relegated composers Philip Glass and John Adams to that simple “plus” sign, when there would, surely, be no Max Richter without them.

Be that as it may, they provided what was, to these ears at least, the most interesting music of the night, played as part of a genius first half sequence conducted, with peerless finesse, by Irishman David Brophy.

Brophy’s clever verbal introduction ensured there was no presumptuous interrupting applause before the end of John Adams’ The Chairman Dances, probably his most performed work after A Short Ride In A Fast Machine. This “out-take” from his opera Nixon in China might equally be described as pictorial impressionism, so precisely does it live up to the composer’s narrative note. In Brophy’s reading, with the largest forces assembled onstage all evening, it was all too easy to see Mao and his glamorous movie-star wife tripping the light fantastic across a ballroom.

It had segued from Philip Glass’s equally theatrical Company, written for a production of Samuel Beckett’s late existentialist work by New York’s ground-breaking Mabou Mines company. Much less often heard, it is vintage Glass and shows how colourful his writing can be even when working with strings alone. Meticulously directed by Brophy, the SCO players were at their expressive best, regardless of the technical demands of the composition, alternating between two metronome markings and full of dynamic variation.

The sequence had begun with Richter’s OPUS 2020, itself a fascinating technical exercise that nods to Stockhausen as well as being based on notes from a late Beethoven Piano Sonata and composed for a German celebration of Ludwig’s 250th birthday. It ends with two minutes of music from the sonata itself, performed by pianist Michael Bawtree, after extended “tape loops” played live and based on very simple material sourced from the sonata.

With individual players sitting out of sections to vary the sonic ebb and flow and nothing as measured as the beats of Louise Lewis Goodwin’s timpani, this is a precision-engineered score, often as interesting to watch as listen to, and more rewarding than some of Richter’s “ambient” music.

The second half of the concert, although it had Richter’s name on the tin, was completely different. His “Recomposed” version of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, with Norwegian violinist Mari Samuelsen as soloist and director and Chris Ekers in charge of the electronic soundscapes, is still recognisably the music that accompanies many a frustrating wait for a call-centre response, although it is substantially Richter’s own work.

Harp and harpsichord added to 15 strings, playing amplified and with atmospheric lighting, the ambience is crucial to Samuelsen and Ekers well-honed project, but it is still impossible not to listen out for the old Vivaldi bits. This rite of passage for many a young virtuoso violinist influenced generations of future composers and Richter’s gussying-up relies heavily on what he has kept of its tunes.

While some of the amplification is essential to the score’s success – that of the harpsichord and lower strings of the harp in particular – it sometimes seemed that Samuelsen was a little shrill and over loud. But this was undoubtedly her show, one she and Ekers have been touring for a decade, and she found ideal partners in what was her SCO debut.

Keith Bruce

Scottish Opera: Turandot

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Theatre Royal, Glasgow

Where Puccini envisioned “mythical ancient times” in imperialist Peking as the setting for his final opera Turandot, Sir David McVicar’s new production for Scottish Opera of the composer’s last opera assigns it to the authoritarian brutalism of fascist Italy in the 1920s. The impact is exhilarating and workable at every level, driven by a ferocious energy that never once loses its grip. 

It’s clear, from the moment music director Stuart Stratford sets in motion the cold, biting discomfort of the orchestra’s abrupt scene-setter, that Scottish Opera has a supreme hit on its hands. Charles Edwards’ set designs instantly echo the magnificence of the musical score, tempered by signs of physical and moral decay, the latter amplified by a grotesque chorus whose febrile reactions range from bloodthirsty and vengeful to terrified and oppressed. Under McVicar’s  meticulous direction every detail matters, every individual action counts.

Such is the human canvas on which the main cast embosses its vital presence, defined of course by the preeminence of its two central characters, Turandot and Calaf. No worries there. Danish soprano Trine Møller projects a refreshingly lyrical Turandot, still dark and aloof in her ruthless campaign of inviting suitors to answer three riddles and having them executed when they fail, but ravishingly transformed by Calaf’s selfless passion. 

As Calaf, tenor Victor Starsky exerts remarkable control and expressive range, literally show-stopping in a Nessun dorma that eschews showmanship in favour of its broader dramatic relevance. For both Møller and Starsky, these performances represent their Scottish Opera debuts.

The more familiar face of Hye-Youn Lee portrays the fateful Liù – cursed by her unrequited love for Calaf – with all the agonising loyalty and tender affection the role calls for, ever supportive of Calaf’s ageing father Timur, nobly sung by Insung Sim. Jamie MacDougall is impressively world weary as Turandot’s father, the Emperor Altoum.

Amid the darkness and the tragedy, Ping, Pang and Pong – a whimsically oddball trio of commedia dell’arte-style court bureaucrats – provide a welcome foil, played brilliantly by Josef Jeongmeen, Aled Hall and Luvo Maranti respectively. The choreography is wonderfully madcap, the trio’s satirical purpose well served.

McVicar and Stratford have opted for Franco Alfano’s original ending, one of two versions he wrote when asked to complete the unfinished score after Puccini’s death. The transition after Liù’s harrowing death remains audible, but the driving impetus of this staging, the ripeness of the Scottish Opera Orchestra, and the overall cohesiveness of the production’s acoustical tricks, argue the case convincingly. I challenge anyone not to feel a shiver down the back in the opera’s closing moments.

Perhaps the most telling aspect of this new Scottish Opera Turandot is its unrelenting, thought-provoking captivation. McVicar’s visceral staging, its vivid characterisations and fearless clarity, shines the focus on such issues as victimhood, authoritarianism or power-structured relationships that might seem distant, even inoffensive, in a Chinese fairytale setting, but which hit so much harder when brought nearer to home. It may be 1920s Italy, but there’s a lot happening in today’s global politics that connects us to it. 

Ken Walton

Scottish Opera’s Turandot is at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow (25,28 & 31 October), and at Edinburgh Festival Theatre (11, 14, 17, 19 & 22 November). Full information at www.scottishopera.org.uk

(Photo: Mihaela Bodlovic)

RSNO: West Side Story

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Even with its enforced content change, this RSNO all-American programme had a certain completeness about it. There was the razzmatazz of hard-hitting Broadway in Leonard Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story; the freshly-minted quintessential wonderment of the pioneering landscape poignantly captured by Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring Suite; the fruity African American cultural injection expressed by William Grant Still in his bluesy Symphony No 1; and the heart-tugging indulgence of the Hollywood soundtrack channelled through the melting lyricism of John Williams.

The RSNO even fielded its in-house American-born Associate Artist, conductor Kellen Gray, whose cool, malleable presence drew performances that powerfully reflected the universality of the music. 

He opened with Copland’s picturesque suite, whose sensory journey took us from the timeless prairie images of the opening, through the toe-tapping vitality of folk-styled dances and the uplifting momentum of the Shaker tune variations, to the work’s final repose as the opening stillness returned. Gray’s simple, coaxing direction allowed the narrative to flow with effortless ease and effect.

The plan had been to follow that with Florence Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement, but due to injury the scheduled soloist, Jeneba Kanneh-Mason, had to call off. This produced the aforementioned Hollywood moment, a rescue performance by RSNO leader Maya Iwabuchi of Williams’ Three Pieces from Schindler’s List.

There’s no doubting the spellbinding expressiveness of the main theme – famously played in the original soundtrack by Itzhak Perlman – which Iwabuchi captured with touching simplicity. It’s the most memorable element of this concert confection, which continued with the gutsier Polish ghetto music (Jewish Town) and finally Remembrances, with its ultimate references back to the eclipsing main theme. 

Still’s Symphony, the “Afro-American”, opened the second half: unashamedly light in spirit, revealing the composers mastery of vernacular styles, yet skilfully weaving these influences into a genuinely concrete classical structure. 

The scene-setting cor anglais solo, invoking the soulfulness of the negro spiritual, soon gave way to a big band-style blues, the Adagio – “Sorrow” –  expanding on the earlier spiritual references. The short scherzo, which allegedly provided Gershwin with the model for his famous I Got Rhythm motif, served up the symphony’s most dazzling moments, before a finale – “Aspiration” – packed with seriousness and determination.

Gray’s vision of the West Side Story Dances was electrifying, not so much in the explosive sense, more to do with the combination of daringness and precision he elicited from the orchestra. Hip-swinging solos, mind-blowing percussion, searing brass playing and red hot swathes of string sound played their part in raising the roof, and reminding us how ferociously dramatic, how uplifting, at times movingly serene, this masterpiece of 20th century American music theatre really is.

Ken Walton 

(Photo: Benavente)

Scottish Opera: Hansel & Gretel

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Macrobert Arts Centre, Stirling

The peculiar circumstances of the Covid pandemic gave a cohort of young singers signed up as Emerging Artists of Scottish Opera an advantageous profile, but not since then have those benefitting from the scheme had as showcasing a start to their tenure as the three sopranos now working with the company.

Hot on the heels of an appearance at the Lammermuir Festival singing Britten’s Les Illuminations, Phaedre and Our Hunting Fathers with the Orchestra of Scottish Opera and conductor Douglas Boyd, Charlotte Jane Kennedy, Charlotte Clapperton and  Avery Lafrentz are the major ingredients of the cast of Humperdinck’s Hansel & Gretel, which began the autumn leg of its tour at the Macrobert in Stirling on Thursday evening.

This is an important show for Scottish Opera, and one that looks to the past as much as to the future. Succeeding the four-singers-and-a-piano Opera Highlights tours in which an original, often rather vague, storyline linked a sequence of solos, duets and ensembles, Opera On Your Doorstep presents a pocket-sized version of a full show, with five singers in this instance, including former Emerging Artist baritone Alexey Gusev as Father and another alumnus, Jose Javier Ucendo, the Music Director at the piano.

This harks back to Graham Vick’s Opera-Go-Round when he was with Scottish Opera in the 1980s, an initiative that not only toured obvious candidates like Barber and Cosi but included Jenufa and Don Carlos. The return to Stirling’s Macrobert also recalls the mid-scale touring with a small orchestra that fell by the wayside for financial reasons, but which another Lammermuir show, Britten’s Albert Herring two years ago, inevitably recalled.

This Hansel & Gretel, then, has to tick a lot of boxes, and work in venues as large as the MacBob, The Byre in St Andrews and Pitlochry Festival Theatre as well as community halls on Seil, Benbecula and Skye. In responding to that taxing remit, director Lucy Bradley and designer Janis Hart have come up with a gem of a show.

Although Robbie Butler’s lighting is clever and the prop making and scenic art is exemplary, there is something delightfully home-made about this benign version of the Grimms Brothers’ Fairytale, with its shadow-puppetry and patched clothes. Lafrentz doubles the role of Mother (who has a job as a care-worker, a device which has certainly been seen before) with that of the Witch, and is far from scary as either.

Nor is the overnight stay in the woods by Hansel & Gretel likely to worry small children in the audience, framed as it is by the beautifully-costumed and sympathetic presence of the only company debut, Scots soprano Emily Wishart as the Sandman and the Dew Fairy.

She reappears in the final scene as the vocal-and-dance captain of a locally-recruited posse of children (from Bridge of Allan Primary in this performance) liberated from the Witch’s kitchen after her oven-based demise, which makes up for this staging’s lack of guardian Angels.

The production benefits from a top-notch cast of singers, including Wishart, who is nearer the age and experience of many a previous Emerging Artist. The rest of the cast are vocally more mature and it shows in their ability to blend their voices, especially Charlotte Clapperton’s Hansel and Charlotte Jane Kennedy’s Gretel.

Singing David Pountney’s English translation, their diction – and indeed that of Lafrentz and Gusev as well – could occasionally be sharper, but the theatrical story-telling is so strong that a few lost words hardly matters.

Opera productions that can genuinely be said to be “for all the family” are as rare as hen’s teeth, but this one, just an hour and three-quarters long, including the 20-minutre interval, is exactly that. It is at Peebles Eastgate Theatre on Saturday, tours across Scotland to November 14 and is on the road again in the Spring.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Julie Howden

RSNO / Hahn

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

The RSNO ends October with Shostakovich’s massive Seventh Symphony, the wartime ‘Leningrad’, and it began the month with the same composer’s Fifth, an ambiguous expression of the composer’s more personal battles.

Both works are presented in thoughtful contexts, the Fifth packaged with Schnittke’s Viola Concerto, from Soviet Russia half a century later and played by the master of the instrument Lawrence Power, preceded by Bach as reimagined at the end of the Second World War.

The popular arrangements of Leopold Stokowski, a British conductor who found huge fame in the USA, have long fallen from fashion in the face of global enthusiasm for historically-informed authenticity, so it was intriguing that the RSNO’s Principal Guest Conductor Patrick Hahn chose to begin his first concert of the new season with one of them.

Stokowski’s orchestration of the sacred song Komm, susser Tod could scarcely be further from today’s period instrument approach to the composer but worked beautifully here on its own terms, as an opening gambit by the RSNO strings, who would go on to have a sensational night, with the brass and winds joining in muted fashion. Far from saccharin, it made a real impact as a powerful opener.

After which the focus was on the lower strings of the orchestra, because Alfred Schnittke’s 1986 Viola Concerto dispenses with the violins altogether and asks for as many basses as there are cellos and violas, as well as piano, harpsichord and celesta and two sets of tubular bells.

Regardless of this singular sound-world, the focus is firmly on the soloist much of the time, and Power was predictably authoritative in his role, even as he was attentive to the ensemble, and especially Felix Tanner and the violas immediately behind him.

Schnittke’s music may be to some extent a technical exercise on a theme based on the letters of the name of the work’s dedicatee, Yuri Bashmet, but it is appreciable without knowing that for its dramatic explosions, skewed waltz and other vaguely familiar samples of music. While there is obvious drama in the soloist’s cadenzas, at other times it can be difficult to pinpoint the exact source of some theatrical sounds in what ends as a slightly disturbing listen.

Many have come to the same conclusion about the ambiguous triumphalism of the finale of Shostakovich Five, the composer’s famous response to Stalin’s criticism. Hahn let the music do its work there, having prepared the way perfectly. There was no sense of foreboding in the beautiful string playing of the opening movement, or indeed the more plangent third, although intimations of unrest from piano and brass were never far away.

The RSNO players revealed their own deep understanding of the piece in a superb collective performance with individual moments of excellence from leader Maya Iwabuchi, first horn Amadea Dazeley-Gaist, principal flute Katherine Bryan and harpist Pippa Tunnell, among many.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Clara Cowen

Cumnock Tryst: BBC SSO

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Barony Hall, Cumnock

The saxophone and the euphonium were invented in the same decade of the 19th century but the amount of repertoire created for each of them as solo instruments in the 180 years since could scarcely have been less equal.

While the sax made the transition from French marching bands to the new art form of jazz while forging a parallel path in classical music, the euphonium remained in the brass band world and never featured in symphony orchestras. Tellingly, one acquired a snappy, abbreviated nickname, but no-one has ever played the “yoof”.

The comparison may rarely be made, but this year’s Cumnock Tryst did so, and the work of the festival’s founder, Sir James MacMillan was key to that.

On Friday evening, at the state-of-the-art hall in Cumnock’s new Barony Campus, the strings of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra played music that featured both instruments in concerto soloist role, penned by MacMillan.

Scotland saw the premiere of his Saxophone Concerto, by Amy Dickson with the SCO and Joseph Swensen, in 2018 but Jess Gillam has recently made the work her own, with  a growing list of performances over the past two years. Its inspiration may be specifically Scottish, from traditional music and Gaelic Psalm singing, but the mix of lightning-fingered exuberance and melancholic melody suits her style perfectly.

The composer’s expressive conducting style also suits the work well, and the pair were a delight to watch together in the opening movement in which the March, Strathspey and Reel seem filtered through the cartoon scores of Carl Stalling or Raymond Scott.

 It was the slow movement, where beguiling overlapping string lines are led by the cantor voice of the saxophone in imitation of the psalm singing of the Western Isles, that yielded the most memorable moment of Gillam’s performance. The exquisite control of her closing phrases were absolutely breath-taking.

MacMillan described his more recent Where the Lugar Meets the Glaisnock as a “concertante”, and its combination of demanding work for the strings and showcase for solo euphonium is a single-movement concerto that is also a depiction of Cumnock itself, which grew up at the confluence of those rivers.

It was written for the concert’s soloist, David Childs, and premiered in his native Wales; he has since taken it around the globe as what he describes as the most important work for his own instrument in its history.

MacMillan’s inspiration – as well as the virtuosity of its dedicatee – was his grandfather, an Ayrshire miner and player of the euphonium in brass bands. The picture of the composer’s native turf that emerges is a warm and generous one. Like the Saxophone Concerto, this is very approachable modern MacMillan, packed with lyrical tunefulness, exploiting the range and tone of the euphonium to the full.

If it is a virtuoso work-out for Childs, and any other player of his instrument capable of taking it on, it also requires precision performance from the strings, initially just six front desk players and later precisely voiced chords behind the soloists.

In those elements, it spoke to the clever choice of opening work in the programme, Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, directed from the violin by the SSO’s long-standing Associate Leader, Kanako Ito. There was historically-informed-performance sensibility to aspects of this reading, but with a contemporary edge that meant the detail benefitted from the venue’s dryish acoustic.

All three works were recorded by BBC Radio 3 for future broadcast, although their transmission as a sequence may be a forlorn hope.

On Saturday, both soloists gave recitals in Cumnock’s Trinity Church, illustrating the parallels between their chamber music histories. Both began with earlier music – Corelli in Gillam’s case and a Hummel Fantasy, originally not for trumpet as one might have guessed, but viola or clarinet, from Childs.

The Telemann concerto in Gillam’s set was first intended for bassoon or recorder, while Childs included an early work by pianist Ludovico Einaudi that was written for cello. Accompanied by Christopher Williams at the piano, his modern choices also included the tango movement of a concerto commissioned by him from Sir Karl Jenkins, and a piece by the Canadian-Japanese composer Cait Nishimura, with a Welsh title, Hiraeth.

His most apposite choice was the three-movement Force of Nature by Sir James MacMillan’s student contemporary and brass-band colleague Peter Graham, of Prestwick. His depiction of Ernest Hemingway and his obsessions, from the bull-ring to sea-fishing, was well worth hearing.

Gillam attracted a larger audience, and with her partners, pianist Zeynep Ozsuca and double bassist Sam Becker, the music sometimes recalled the Jacques Loussier trio. More often, though, it was quintessential Jess Gillam, segueing from Nadia Boulanger into Barbara Thompson and Meredith Monk into Rune Sorenson (of the Danish String Quartet) and culminating in the bespoke calling card written for her by John Harle, RANT!

Keith Bruce

Picture by Stuart Armitt

SCO / Emelyanychev: Matthew Passion

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

BARITONE Roderick Williams, making a swift return to Scotland after featuring at the Lammermuir Festival, was the best-known name on stage for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s St Matthew Passion, but there were star voices everywhere on the platform, and magnificent instrumental performances to match them.

Williams, who sang Pilate, had his moments, notably the late Aria Mache dich, mein Herze, rein, giving voice to Joseph of Arimathea, but no more than others in this luxury line-up. Tenor Robert Murray combined with cellist Philip Higham, an oboe, two recorders and the chorus in a Part 1 highlight, while counter-tenor Tim Mead and soprano Hilary Cronin both had memorable solos – including the latter’s significant apocryphal intervention as Pilate’s wife – as well as duetting in counter-point to the chorus on So ist mein Jesus nun gefangen.

Gregory Batsleer’s SCO Chorus, split into two choirs, mirroring the division of the players below them, was not only as precise in its diction as the principals, but demonstrated a vast tonal range, whether standing and seated, to match the text. From its ranks Emily Kemp and Olivia Mackenzie Smith sang First and Second Maid, and bass Alex White was a step-out sensation as Judas, Peter and the High Priest. The addition of 14 youngsters from the choir of St Mary’s for some first half choruses was precision icing on the choral cake.

The role of Jesus was in the reliably capable hands of Matthew Brook, and his characterful singing of the words of the Last Supper and the plea to be spared the cup of suffering that swiftly follows was full of feeling. Likewise tenor Nick Pritchard’s Evangelist, especially impressive at the top of his range, was immaculately measured and increasingly animated as the familiar story unfolded.

It is a cliché to say that an inspired conductor can make early music sound as if the ink is still wet on the page, but Maxim Emelyanychev’s account of a work now approaching 300 years old really did seem box-fresh in the way its structure sparkled. His adventurous story-telling was edge-of-the-seat stuff.

In fact it is 290 years ago this year that the exquisite copy of the score that is the basis of reliable performances of Bach’s intentions was made. Those wishes have rarely been communicated to the audience as clearly as this conductor did in this performance. With the number of instruments carefully calibrated to maintain an ideal balance, from the Grand Circle of the Usher Hall it was like watching a perfectly-engineered machine in lubricated motion as the two orchestras, two choirs and mobile soloists found the perfect place and poise to make their point.

Both orchestra leader Stephanie Gonley and fellow violinist Marcus Barcham-Stevens had fine solos, the latter also directing his half of the musicians while Emelyanychev was busy at the harpsichord. The instrumental music was full of details like that, in the variations in the range of the wind accompaniment, continuo playing that combined cellos and basses – so warm-toned on gut strings – and the featuring of Alison McGillivray’s viola da gamba.

For all its majesty, Bach’s Matthew Passion can sometime make one pine for the composer’s briefer treatment of the Gospel of John. This one, repeated the following evening at Glasgow City Halls, flew by.

Keith Bruce

I’ll Be Seeing You

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Pitlochry Festival Theatre

Theatre reviewing has never been the domain of VoxCarnyx, but Martin Sherman’s new play I’ll Be Seeing You, for Pitlochry Festival Theatre, titillated our musical curiosity. 

Why? It centres on the outrageously camp showmanship of pianist/entertainer Liberace, a candy floss figure described by the Daily Mirror columnist “Cassandra” in 1959 as “a quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love”. Liberace had taken the Mirror to court, falsely denying the paper’s charges of homosexuality, and won.

This deceit lies at the heart of Sherman’s fast-moving theatre piece.  A young gay writer, commissioned to write a play about Liberace, and feverishly portrayed by Fra Fee, is not only consumed with hatred of the star’s disingenuous court denial, but ultimately falls prey to his acid manipulation. It delves, sometimes brutally, below the facade.

Who better to capture that edge than Simon Russell Beale, whose numerous pumped-up, attention-grabbing showbiz entrances – smoke-filled, fur-lined and massively bejewelled – give way in an instant to a much nastier piece of work. In these moments, strength lies in devious understatement. 

Thankfully there’s humour too, dark and light, augmented visually by a choreographed duo of hammy hunks (Ali Watt and Adam Kashmiry), Russell Beale’s impressively flamboyant dummy keyboard syncing, and Tim Hatley’s mischievously versatile stage designs. If this production, directed jointly by Alan Cumming and Ben Occhipinti, is unruly verging on the manic, it doesn’t lack affection. The audience, encouraged to contribute, is drawn in from the word go.

For those too young to remember Liberace in person, his back story – from awkward piano-playing kid and wannabe classical virtuoso to lush caricature and top showbiz earner, ultimately succumbing to HIV and death at 67 – is neatly and swiftly inserted. His Polish-born actress mother (Anne Lacey) is thrown in for good measure. 

But the music is just window dressing and the emphasis persistently returns to the Writer’s – indeed Sherman’s – angry bone of contention. For in the final moments, Sherman replaces Fee on stage as the now elderly playwright, pitifully namby-pambied by Liberace, visibly defeated. 

Ken Walton 

(Photo: Tiu Makkonen)

I’ll Be Seeing You runs at Pitlochry Festival Theatre until 11 October. Full details at www.pitlochryfestivaltheatre.com

BBC SSO / Wigglesworth / Bomsori

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City Halls, Glasgow

Alexander von Zemlinsky cuts something of a phantom figure within the annals of musical history. Admired by Brahms, and as first teacher of Schoenberg, he was unquestionably well-connected and influential. As a conductor, Stravinsky rated him highly, while Mahler and the Second Viennese School were well-served by his championship. 

Yet his personal life was peppered with disappointment, not least when his young student and lover Alma Schindler abandoned him for Mahler; and his music, occupying an explorative twilight zone between Mahler and the serial modernists, made less of an impact than it deserved during his lifetime, eventually winning revival performances in the 1970s, 30 years after his death.

That, and for the practical reason it calls on immense forces, is why performances of his heavy-duty Lyric Symphony are few and far between, and why its presence in the BBC SSO’s season opener on Thursday was such a landmark event.

This 50-minute extravaganza was, by his own account, Zemlinsky’s response to Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, but one that argues its own synthesis of symphony and opera against Mahler’s conflation of symphony and song cycle. Thus the highly-charged eroticism contained in its emotionally turbulent, gauchely rhetorical score, and the dizzy theatricality of the seven songs, set – unlike the beauty and melancholy of Mahler’s Chinese texts – to words by Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, performed in alternating, uninterrupted sequence by soprano and baritone soloists.

It was clear from the outset that the SSO were well up for the challenge, chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth grasping the opening flourish with fearless determination – a curt fanfare motif straight out of the old Hollywood epic manual. His musicians responded with wholesome, electrifying vigour. 

What followed was unrelenting, even delirious. Where the intense heat of the orchestration fed into the more reflective moments, occasionally overwhelming the singers, both soloists – soprano Miah Persson and baritone James Atkinson – revelled in the ecstasy and torment their characters (a young girl and a prince) encounter. Persson’s purified longing for the “young Prince” in the lighter scored Mutter, Der Jung Prinz was a moment of sheer enchantment, her desperate sense of loss in the penultimate Vollende denn das Letzte Lied profoundly felt. Atkinson was every bit as versatile in his volatile journey from infatuation to accepting the inevitable. The final orchestral moments were as exhaustive as they were sublime.

It was a performance that made up for a rather disappointing, unfulfilling Beethoven Violin Concerto that preceded it. That was surprising, given the favourable memories of South Korean violinist Bomsori’s previous appearances with the SSO. There were certainly sizeable chunks in which Bomsori’s lyrical radiance sang with purity and purpose, and her virtuosity sparkled. Equally, though, she succumbed to uncharacteristic fluctuations in concentration, brief periodic episodes in which the focus in her tone became uncentred, intonation wavered and the momentum flagged.

Was it just an off moment? A dazzling encore – Fritz Kreisler’s Schön Rosmarin – revealed the Bomsori we’re much more familiar with.

Ken Walton

This concert was broadcast Live on BBC Radio 3 and is available on BBC Sounds

SCO / Emelyanychev: Berlioz

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SCO / Emelyanychev

Perth Concert Hall

There are no apparent repertoire limitations for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra these days, but an all-Berlioz programme was nonetheless a bold choice by Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev to open the new season.

Augmented to 34 strings with four horns, four bassoons, nine brass and six adaptable percussionists, this was a huge SCO, but possibly a minimum with which it is possible to play this music. The joy of the performance was that it sounded as the SCO always do under Emelyanychev, full of sparkling precise detail and always dynamically flexible, turning the quietest moments into swells of sound, and back to near-silence again, in the space of a few bars.

Although it is a joy to hear a full-fat Symphonie fantastique, the light, crisp, string playing here was a revelation from the opening bars, and as much in the driving rhythm of the low strings as  from the violins. It made the music live anew. The conductor’s pacing of the second movement waltz permitted no wallowing in the pauses while losing none of the essential phrasing, and the Beethoven-indebted pastoral Adagio moved incrementally from quietness to richness.

The March to the Scaffold, with the delayed gratification of the delivery of the work’s big tune, was similarly exquisitely paced, and the Dream finale – which can never make any real narrative sense – was simply an explosion of delightful music with some eye-catching channelling of Taiko drumming at the end.

There was always plenty of activity, with first oboe Clara Schweinberger leaving the platform to play her dialogue with Katherine Bryer’s cor anglais from off-stage, and off-stage brass and bells colouring the final movement.

By the second half of the concert, however, none of this perambulation of musicians was a novelty. Although it was composed first, the Symphonie fantastique was preceded by Harold in Italy, the composer’s hybrid of symphony and viola concerto that set a template for the tone poems of Liszt and Strauss.

During its opening movement, Harold in the mountains, violist Timothy Ridout strolled onto the stage to play next to his harp duet partner and then only gradually made his way to the centre of the platform. During the closing Orgy of bandits he departed into the wings on the other side, only to reappear in the balcony for his final plaintive melodious response to an echo of the March of the Pilgrims, played by a trio of cello and two of the second violins that had similarly made their way off-stage.

The dynamic ebb and flow of that second movement march was emblematic of all that was perfectly poised in Emelyanychev’s interpretation, the delicacy of the closing bars quite ethereal.

Praise should also go to the poise of the first violins and the calm efficient way they dealt with the SCO’s new leader Bogdan Bozovic breaking a string as he turned towards his section in an intense passage.

After some dextrous swapping of instruments, his own was repaired onstage by Kana Kawashima at the desk behind and returned to him before the piece ended.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Andrej Grilc

Echoes in Stone and Brass |100 Tubas at Amisfield

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Glasgow Cathedral/Amisfield Walled Garden

Substantially occasioned by the passing of John Wallace, inspirational trumpeter and former principal of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, 2026 has been a busy year for fans of music for brass. Lammermuir Festival’s contribution to his remembrance was exactly the sort of ambitiously mad event he would have taken part in himself.

The Walled Garden of the Amisfield estate at Haddington is vast, dates back to the 18th century and is now tended by an army of volunteers. It was the venue for this year’s Lammermuir project by Red Note Ensemble, previously responsible for music beneath the wings of the Concorde in the aircraft museum at East Fortune.

Perhaps there was a generous attitude to recruitment for 100 Tubas at Amisfield, but not far off that total of instruments was achieved, most of them tuba-shaped if not sized, and capable of producing a similar sound. The score they tackled was Anthony Braxton’s Composition No 19, written – for 100 Tubas – in the 1970s but, perhaps understandably, unheard until it was played in New York City two decades ago.

Like that one, this was a promenade performance, the audience bussed-in from central Haddington and then free to wander within the garden walls. On arrival, a rainbow enlivened the ever-present threat of rain which never materialised, but a less windy day would probably have allowed the sound to carry and bounce off the high walls more often than such echoes were detectable.

The tubas, sousaphones and smaller horns were deployed in four groups, each with their own conductor, moving about the garden. Repeating figures were swapped around the space, and there was the freedom, fairly strictly delineated, for some improvisation – embraced with more enthusiasm by some players than others.

Mostly the score is about ensemble sound, and the topography of the garden – which includes orchards, potagers, and a maze, as well as avenues of flowers – meant that the environment played an important role in how the ensembles sounded. Nonetheless, it might have been a very samey hour of music had the producers not added a quartet of trumpets, whose clarion calls separated the tuba excursions, with music by Benjamin Britten and Lewis Murphy on their stands.

100 Tubas at Amisfield convened on the penultimate day of Lammermuir, and two days earlier this year’s Glasgow Cathedral Festival commenced with Echoes in Stone and Brass, curated by the RSNO’s principal trombone Davur Juul Magnussen

To an extent Magnussen was also emcee of that hour of music in the nave of the Cathedral, his solo improvisation opening the sequence and also possibly – but very subtly – signalling its ending, but the designation “curator” was quite specific. This programme was a collective effort, and that was its great strength.

Although that beginning was one of a series of six “improvisations” through the programme, some were far from as free as jazz players would understand the term, the ten-strong Glasgow Cathedral Choir, for example, working with music written by Ailie Robertson and to a defined, if organic, structure.

Between those were a selection of specific compositions, two – on which Magnussen was joined by fellow RSNO trombonist Cillian O Ceallachain and the choir – originally commissioned for Nordic Music Days 2024 and composed by Drew Hammond (who added some organ playing) and Claire McCue, and two from the repertoire of the Rookh Quartet, playing Jan Garbarek on Wagner tubas, and Allisson Kruusmaa on French horns.

The sonic skills of Sam McErlean, contributing live electronics as well as the superb ambient mix in the space, were central to another pair of pieces, The Heavier it Rocks by Sofia Kiviniemi and the rendition of the Seikilos Epitaph, a very early piece of musical notation engraved on a pillar in ancient Greece.

Andrew Forbes, Director of Music at the cathedral, also played some organ and conducted the more formal choir music, while the closing commission, Things Must Pass by Neil Tomas Smith, added more brass from the Conservatoire, RSNO and The Cooperation Band. The reverberation with this sanctuary’s ancient walls launched the festival as only those instruments really can.

Keith Bruce

Pictures by Stuart Armitt (Amisfield) and Campbell Parker (Cathedral)

Lammermuir: The Diary of One Who Disappeared

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Dirleton Kirk

In the first phase of the Covid pandemic in 2020, when all gatherings were prohibited, Scottish Opera set the pace with its response to the emergency, and its contribution to a necessarily online version of that year’s Lammermuir Festival was a staging of Janacek’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared, filmed at the Theatre Royal with tenor Ed Lyon in the central role.

The history of this niche work at Lammermuir acquired another fascinating chapter this year when Nicky Spence stepped in to perform the song cycle at Dirleton Kirk, replacing Joshua Ellicott and hot on the heels of his show-stopping turn at the Last Night of the Proms in the Royal Albert Hall. If that contrast of venues was remarkable, the same applies to his piano partner Jeremy Denk, who is as familiar with New York’s Carnegie Hall as he now is with Lammermuir’s tour circuit of East Lothian churches.

What a dynamic duo they made, in a performance that treated Janacek’s ambiguous tale as opera-in-concert, ably assisted by mezzo-soprano Victoria Simmonds as the seductive gypsy girl Zekfa with the chorus of villagers provided by Edinburgh’s Robin Chapel choir: mezzo Susan White and sopranos Virginia Wilson and Caroline Trutz.

Their music, with close harmonies predicting the Andrews Sisters as much as they resemble Wagner’s Rhinemaidens, is one of the delights of the piece, in which the combination of the tenor and mezzo is less opera duet than intimate conversation, and years ahead of its time.

That intimacy reaches its fulfilment, as it were, in the only section of the work without libretto, a piano interlude labelled Intermezzo erotico, and Denk’s playing of it suggested a robust and passionate liaison as clearly as he had delicately depicted glow-worms and swallows earlier in the cycle.

Spence, who has been awarded for his performances of Janacek in the Czech Republic, was in masterly control of the material throughout, even as his love-struck farmer’s boy character is far from master of his own fate. Hearing his powerful voice calibrated to this small venue, with the tonal variations he has available at the top of his range, was a remarkable experience, especially delivered in such a natural and unaffected way.

The tenor had even brought along a nifty encore of a Janacek folk-song arrangement that involved the full sextet and appropriately hymned the joys of being a musician.

The scope of that choice of career had already been well established by Jeremy Denk in the first half of the concert, when he played Beethoven’s late Sonata in A-flat Major, Op 110, in the captivating way Lammermuir audiences have come to enthusiastically appreciate. The combination of lightning fingering and moments of still, subtly altered phrasing in the repetitions of the central Allegro, and the propulsive shaping of the whole work were the pianist at his finest.

The extent of the repertoire he carries in his memory-banks was illustrated by his apparently last-minute decision to precede it with Bach’s A Minor Partita, rather than the advertised Prelude and Fugue. Whether this was a nod to the broader programming of the festival – the D minor Partita for Violin had featured in Wednesday’s Scottish Ensemble concert with NYCOS singers – or just a personal whim, it was a virtuosic delight. It is certainly possible to play Bach more slowly, but few pianists can apply such finger-power at such pace, and still be clear and distinct.

Keith Bruce

RSNO: Søndergård / Malofeev

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

For the planners of this RSNO season opener, which paired Rachmaninov’s Fourth Piano Concerto and Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, how fortuitous might it have been for history’s sake had the latter composer once conducted the former as soloist in that very same concerto? 

Death got in the way, Mahler well gone by the time Rachmaninov penned his original version of the work in 1926, never mind its revised manifestation of 1941. For the record, Mahler did – in 1910 – conduct Rachmaninov as pianist/composer, in the more popular Third Piano Concerto at New York’s Carnegie Hall. By all accounts it was quite a show.

As was Saturday’s, given the spectacle of the vastly extended player numbers required for the Mahler symphony and the cornucopia of percussion additives, from shimmering cowbells to the gargantuan, cartoon-like mallet that signals the “blows of fate”. It was just a pity, due to hall’s difficulties in adding the regular stage extensions, that the orchestra was seated at ground level, limiting sight lines. Thankfully the sound quality was not affected.

That was certainly true of Russian pianist Alexander Malofeev, making his RSNO debut with a combination of electrifying virtuosity and sweeping poeticism. Where this concerto shoots off in directions that seem exploratory for Rachmaninov – harmonies that stretch tonality to the brink, melodies that wink at modernism, textures of uncharacteristic leanness – Romantic Russian blood still courses through its veins. Malofeev’s performance was as clean as it was powerful, effortlessly fiery and flamboyant in the outer movements, enchanting in the central Largo, supported crisply by conductor Thomas Søndergård and the orchestra.

The same calculated precision informed Søndergård’s vision of the Mahler, which bore a vivid transparency from the outset: neatly calibrated mood swings and tempo changes, and a perceived wish to let the often tortuous drama emerge unforced. Where that excelled was its focus on the intricacies, those jarring twists and turns that seem initially to challenge logic, yet somehow fall into place in the wider context. 

Such structured discipline lent the long opening movement a sense of gravitational solidity, scintillatingly precise, if a little understated emotionally. There was a sense, too, in the Scherzo that more could have been made of its side-stepping eccentricities, its parodic grotesquerie. The Andante moderato, though, was spellbinding, an oasis of relative calm amid the surrounding sea of brutal torment. The finale, devastatingly conclusive both in its apocalyptic climaxes and ultimate descent into nothingness, was a veritable tour de force.

It was a long evening, but one that set a high bar for the season ahead. It also provided a public opportunity, right at the start, for the chief executive of the Royal Philharmonic Society, James Murphy, to present RSNO chairman Gregor Stewart with the prestigious RPS Ensemble Award, won earlier his year by the RSNO for the extent, versatility and ambition of its creative operation. 

“Here is an orchestra firing on all cylinders, everything a 21st century orchestra should be,” Murphy announced, adding that the RSNO are the first symphony orchestra to win this award since 2014.

(Photo: Martin Shields)

Ken Walton

Lammermuir: Concerto Copenhagen / Scottish Ensemble & NYCOS

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St Mary’s, Haddington/St Mary’s, Whitekirk

If he didn’t invent those two pillars of classical music – the string quartet in chamber music and the symphony for the orchestral repertoire – the prolific Joseph Haydn certainly developed both to the form with which we are familiar.

For the central concert of their residency at Lammermuir 2026, period ensemble Concerto Copenhagen, directed from the harpsichord by Lars Ulrik Mortensen, played three sequential symphonies from the start of the composer’s residency in the court of Prince Esterhazy, and the beginning of that process.

Haydn’s Symphonies No 6, 7, and 8, Le matin, Le midi, and Le soir, were written to be heard this way, as a sequence and by an orchestra of this size. What was missing from a performance by a full size modern “symphony orchestra”? Nothing at all, and in fact there was a huge amount to be gained from Concerto Copenhagen’s clarity, which came with plenty of volume and richness of tone.

The familiar face on the platform was flautist Katy Bircher, and she had much of the solo spotlight, from the dancing tune in the Menuet in Le matin through to the pacey theatrical La Tempesta: Presto finale of Le soir. Orchestra leader Fredrik From and first cello Judith-Maria Blomsterberg also had lively moments across all three symphonies, as did, perhaps more surprisingly, bassist Megan Adie, often in partnership with the bassoon of Kamila Marcinkowska-Prasad.

The way all of that detail emerged from the ensemble, signalled – occasionally a little eccentrically – by Mortensen, was delightful, while the particular character and pitch of their baroque instruments made it all sound as bright and fresh as it must have done 275 years ago.

Three decades further back, Johann Sebastian Bach had already written a number of cantatas although he had not yet begun the remarkable weekly series he composed for the churches in Leipzig. They incorporated Lutheran chorales for the congregation to join in, and musicologist Helga Thoene has shown that those chorales, and specifically ones for the consolation of the bereaved, lie behind the remarkable Chaconne that concludes his 1720 Partita in D Minor for solo violin, composed immediately after the death of his first wife.

In St Mary’s, Whitekirk, Scottish Ensemble leader and artistic director Jonathan Morton played the Chaconne while nine singers from the NYCOS Chamber Choir sang those chorales, conducted by Christopher Bell.

The virtuosic violin piece is a captivating listen on its own, but the addition of the voices, initially sparingly but cumulative, with the single tenor and highest sopranos making telling additions to the underscore, transformed the experience into something even greater.

The piece opened a programme, Bach and Blood, that the ensemble and choir is touring, with a London date at Milton Court on October 2. The “Blood” element is David Fennessy’s composition of that title, which uses a 12th century melody by Hildegard of Bingen, slowed down so that the Latin text becomes a series of extended vowel sounds for the singers, interspersed with breathy effects. Morton was, again, the violin soloist, but now joined by his Scottish Ensemble colleagues with the front desk players having their own conversations with him.

With bassist Diane Clark doubling on resonating wine-glasses, Fennessy’s composition is as much “about” the particular musical elements his score requires as anything else, but it was hard not to hear some consolation in the heavenly concluding bars of violin and vocals after the turbulence of what had gone before.

Between those two very complementary works, the string orchestra played Arvo Part’s Greater Antiphons, which recasts choral music from the Roman Catholic Advent liturgy as a seven-movement instrumental work. It is a piece absolutely tailor-made for this group, and was played with satisfying precision.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Stuart Armitt

Lammermuir: Roderick Williams / Scottish Opera

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Holy Trinity Church / St Mary’s Kirk, Haddington

A year ago, baritone Roderick Williams sang Britten’s War Requiem in Hiroshima, one of a global run of performances of the work that included Tel Aviv and Kyiv, marking both 80 years of the end of World War 2 and the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death, which falls on December 6 this year.

It was the latter that received due recognition on Friday at the Lammermuir Festival, with Williams on his best form in a late night recital with pianist Christopher Glynn in Haddington’s Scottish Episcopal Church.

Ironic self-deprecation is the lingua franca of musicians, but few deploy it with the charm of this singer and his was the most personal of programmes, finding room for two settings of Blake that he wrote as a teenager to follow Britten’s Songs and Proverbs of William Blake, composed for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in the mid-1960s.

Williams, who made his own excellent recording of the cycle, knows the work inside out, and delivers the crucial proverbs with as much panache as the more familiar songs, like The Tyger and the psychological A Poison Tree. His own early works may be musically naïve in comparison but they are very lovely.

As are the four songs by Britten’s mentor Frank Bridge that followed, all from the early years of the 20th century, and appealing art songs that are often very nearly show tunes.

Britten found his own way with traditional and familiar material in the quartet Williams ended with, including The Salley Gardens and a knowingly-delivered The Foggy, Foggy Dew. Williams’ own Bach-inspired arrangement of A Red, Red Rose made a perfect encore.

The recital was presented by Lammermuir as a coda to Scottish Opera’s contribution to this year’s programme, a showcase for three Emerging Artists singing Britten with the orchestra.

These recruits to the company will all shortly be seen in the company’s touring production of Hansel and Gretel, and if their individual dramatic expressiveness in this programme is any guide, that should be well worth catching.

Conductor Douglas Boyd is possibly still remembered in his native Scotland as an oboe player, but he has been exclusively a conductor for 20 years and artistic director at Garsington Opera for much of that time, bringing a memorable Rusalka to the Edinburgh International Festival four years ago.

Directing the Orchestra of Scottish Opera, he began, appropriately, with Arvo Part’s Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten, a brief work that has exceeded its original inspiration (Part admired but never met the British composer) to become a concert hall favourite. It worked brilliantly here not just for its dedication but also its suitability to the acoustic of St Mary’s – Boyd allowing the orchestra’s carefully calibrated strings to build incrementally – and the obvious parallel Part intended with the tolling bell opening of Britten’s final composition, the Phaedra cantata he wrote for Janet Baker.

Almost a mini-opera in itself, mezzo Charlotte Clapperton projected the confessional mix of recitative and song in a committed characterisation. Britten clearly appreciated the story-telling of Robert Lowell’s English version of Racine, and that narrative directness balances the emotional torment conveyed by the music, scored by strings with percussion and harpsichord.

From forty years earlier in the composer’s career, the song cycle Our Hunting Fathers  employed the fullest edition of the Orchestra of Scottish Opera, the winds (including alto saxophone) and brass essential to its effectiveness. The challenge it presented to soprano Avery Lafrentz was immense and she dealt with its tricky libretto, assembled and partly written by W H Auden, with aplomb.

There is much in this complex early work – which baffled some in 1936 – that prefigures the War Requiem, but it is structurally much less easy to decode. The scoring for the orchestra, which uses some of the sonic palette of contemporary dance bands, and the demands on the singer, grappling with overlapping texts and exclamations, are virtuosic however, and it made a terrific climax to the concert.

It was the other soprano, Charlotte Jane Kennedy, who had the programme’s most appealing and often-sung work. Les Illuminations, setting a selection of texts by Arthur Rimbaud to string orchestra accompaniment, has the undoubted advantage of being in mellifluous French and is Britten on the road to being a great opera composer.

As often heard sung by a tenor, following Peter Pears’ adoption of the work, the brightness of a soprano – and Kennedy has that quality along with power at both ends of her range – is arguably best suited to the piece, regardless of the homo-erotic message in Being beauteous.

It was noticeable, too, that Kennedy referred less to the music-stand in her performance, but then she had the work that could prove the most useful repertoire addition to a blossoming career.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Sally Anderson

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