Category Archives: Reviews

BBC SSO / Morlot

Posted on by

Eden Court, Inverness

It’s been four years since the BBC SSO last visited Inverness, but its audience has not lost interest. A well-packed Eden Court Theatre greeted the SSO’s return on Friday, and a programme that on paper might have seemed a random assemblage of Puccini, Tchaikovsky, Panufnik and Rachmaninov, but which in practice proved engaging, colourful and purposeful.

Much of that was down to a conductor who wasn’t meant to be there in the first place. As a last-minute replacement for the indisposed Valentina Peleggi, Ludovic Morlot – currently music director of the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra, and latterly of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra – struck a rapport with the SSO that was so natural and flowing you’d have thought they were meant for each other.

There was glowing tenderness in a little-known Puccini opener, his Preludio sinfonica, written while a student in 1882, which angles towards the emotional heat of La Boheme but with a cooler  countenance that Morlot coaxed out clearly and calmly. Even with the mild challenge of the dryish Eden Court acoustics, there was a simmering sumptuousness, particularly from the strings, in a performance that smoothly negotiated its shifting contours.

It was the perfect appetiser, too, for Tchaikovsky’s Dante-inspired symphonic fantasia Francesca da Rimini, on one hand the hell-raiser you’d expect from a depiction of Dante’s second circle of hell, on the other an impassioned love story. Morlot captured that equivocation, its wild, impatient frustrations of a stormy background allayed by the sensuous allure of the lovers. Here, the acoustics suffocated to some extent the amplified glow this music breathes, though not so much as to quash its tempestuous exhilaration.

The songs of Alma Mahler, wife of Gustav, with their rare beauty and poetic depth, have only recently come to prominence through recordings. Roxanna Panufnik has recast three of them – Hymne, Ansturm and Hymne an die Nacht – as re-imaginations for orchestra. Or, as she calls them in quasi-Mendelssohn terms, Alma’s Songs Without Words. 

She doesn’t hold back, applying harsher layers of sound to climactic points than you might expect, given the golden sumptuousness of Alma’s expressive style, but Panufnik does offer so much in the way of imaginative colour – from hazy atmospherics to busily entwined melodic tapestries – that there is an unceasing sense of genuine discovery. Morlot took that in hand and moulded a sequence that was both thrilling and reflective.

It might seem unusual to finish a programme with Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2, but few will have regretted having pianist Boris Giltburg’s towering performance as the memory to carry home. His wasn’t a typical account, more a heightened personal viewpoint that set out to challenge the accepted rhetoric of this popular warhorse. It was clear from Morlot’s intense concentration that he, too, was prepared for the unexpected. Such a duelling sense of danger added significantly to the theatre of the performance.

Giltburg’s playing was bold and gestural, radiant flourishes accented by a tendency to play provocatively with the tempi, though never to the point of disruption. Inner textural gems were projected unexpectedly, adding that element of surprise and delight, which the SSO responded to with equal suppleness and sparkle. Inevitably, Giltburg responded to the cheering audience reaction with an encore, and again – in Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C sharp minor – showed that he only does things his own way. 

Ken Walton

Thursday’s Glasgow performance of the same programme is available to listen to on BBC Sounds

Marx in London!

Posted on by

Theatre Royal, Glasgow

There’s a craftsmanship throughout Jonathan Dove’s operatic scores that is both cinematically detailed and musically invigorating. Marx in London!, written originally for its German premiere in 2018, and which Scottish Opera this week introduced to the UK, upholds these qualities. Just as importantly, it’s a rib-tickling night out.

In mounting the UK premiere, Scottish Opera has brought together the tried and tested creative partnership of Dove and stage director Stephen Barlow, both of whom gave Scotland a memorable production of Dove’s Flight in 2018. That was set in an airport. Marx in London! covers a day in the life of Karl Marx, set in his London home and playing to a side of Marx that was, if we are to believe it, more Groucho than Karl. 

It’s a madcap comedy centred on the accepted belief that the famous German political philosopher, while sternly didactic in his social theories, was an absolute catastrophe when it came to mundane domestic responsibilities. What’s more, Scottish Opera gave the green light to Barlow to create a brand new production, having adjudged the original Bonn production, which didn’t involve him, short of the mark. 

The result is exuberant, quirky, action-packed and wickedly ridiculing, hitting somewhere between Mozartian opera buffa and Springtime for Hitler. Marx is broke, bailiffs empty his house, he’s party to convoluted sexual entanglement involving his wife, the housekeeper and, it transpires, a son Freddy courtesy of the latter. 

Charles Hart’s libretto is bullet-like, Barlow’s direction is ceaselessly inventive, Yannis Thevoris’ playful designs bear an animated picture book charm, Kally Lloyd-Jones’ choreography bristles with irony – all embracing Dove’s music, which is vigorously minimalist in essence.

Not one of this cast fails to honour the challenge. Central to that is Marx himself, baritone Roland Wood’s portrayal ricocheting from one bumbling escapade to the next, comical with the merest hint of sage. He’s to some extent swamped by the people and events surrounding him: long-suffering wife Jenny (the passionately-voiced, ultimately Brünnhilde-like, Orla Boylan), flighty daughter Tussi (her vocal acrobatics sung fearlessly by coloratura Rebecca Bottone), enigmatic housekeeper Helene (the warm-hearted mezzo voice of Lucy Schaufer), the searching young Freddy (played engagingly by William Morgan), and a stoically forbearing Friedrich Engels (sung by tenor Alasdair Elliott).

A confection of characters sharpen the periphery, among them Jamie MacDougall’s prowling Prussian Spy and John Malloy’s indignant pawnbroker. The chorus add vocal girth to well-engineered high points. Conductor David Parry – another seasoned Dove collaborator – ensures the music’s cut and thrust does its vital job, realised by a Scottish Opera Orchestra in truly vibrant form.

It’s a show that knows exactly how to celebrate slapstick, satire and farce without veering towards the ridiculous. And guaranteed, you won’t take Marx seriously ever again.

[Photo credit: James Glossop]

Ken Walton 

Further performances in Glasgow (15 & 17 Feb); and in Edinburgh (22 & 24 Feb)

SCO: The Great Grumpy Gaboon

Posted on by

Perth Concert Hall

ALL orchestras have education and outreach departments these days, but the Scottish Chamber Orchestra was a trail-blazer with admired initiatives from its earliest days. So it is more than fitting that its 50th anniversary season  should include another ground-breaking project.

The orchestra’s current composer-in-residence Jay Capperauld has achieved something very special with the 45 minute piece he has written for young people. Not only are the tastes of his target audience of four to eight year-olds not fully-formed, but it is also impossible to predict what music they will have been exposed to at home or at nursery and primary school.

Capperauld’s solution is to cover many possibilities. The suite of music he has written for this collaboration with story-teller and illustrator Corrina Campbell includes a little of everything. It opens with a Broadway-like overture, and includes a fair amount of jazz-inflected material, but there are also moments of Scottish traditional fiddle and ceilidh reels, a journey through the countryside with an English pastoral feel, and a drum-kit-led big band excursion. There are many clap-along moments in the score, which suited the very young audience as much as the slapstick action on stage.

Those performances are the other remarkable element of The Great Grumpy Gaboon. Aside from an effective but never intrusive voice-over by director Chris Jarvis, there are no extra performers in this SCO project. Although the bulk of the orchestra are in concert black attire, seven players, alongside conductor Gordon Bragg, are named characters in the narrative, with extravagant head-gear, props and costumes, and a very mobile approach to playing their instruments.

The title role is played by first bassoon Cerys Ambrose-Evan and that rhyming with their instruments is carried through the others, excepting her nemesis, Screature, played by bassist Nikita Naumov. If such expansive performance seems in character for some of the players, regular concertgoers will see long-serving first trumpet Peter Franks and principal flute Andre Cebrian in a new light.

There are details in the narrative that probably don’t come across as they should just yet, and the message of the story (“be kind”, basically) probably escaped a fair percentage of the audience at the first performance, but it is impossible to fault the gusto with which the musicians went about their extra-musical work, with daft dancing, silly clowning and roaming into the auditorium all part of the show.

Without a shadow of a doubt The Great Grumpy Gaboon will get slicker, and the orchestra has clearly invested in it with an eye to many future performances. What is beyond argument is that Capperauld has given the SCO a score that makes the effort completely worthwhile.

Keith Bruce

Dunedin Consort: Leipzig 300

Posted on by

Perth Concert Hall

During his pre-concert remarks, Dunedin Consort director John Butt implied that this early 2024 recreation of what Johann Sebastian Bach was composing exactly 300 years ago in Leipzig may be the beginning of a longer exploration of his cycles of weekly-composed cantatas. If so, the first one was perhaps undersold as an excellent start to the project, bringing together the University of Glasgow professor’s universally-admired scholarship, a quartet of fine singers and an expanding ensemble of versatile instrumentalists.

As is well known, Bach was third choice for the Leipzig composer and choirmaster job, and Butt presented three of his cantatas performed at the start of 1724 alongside works by the other two, Christoph Graupner’s eight-movement Ouverture in E flat major preceding Telemann’s Viola Concerto in G, with Telemann’s setting of a German paraphrase of Psalm 100 between two of the Bachs in the second half.

Of the singers, bass Matthew Brook had the best of the night, with the Telemann cantata, a “voice of God” aria accompanied by oboes d’amore in Bach’s Jeus schlaft, was soll ich hoffen (BWV 81), the opening Recitative in Gleichwie der Regen und Schnee von Himmel fallt (BWV 18), and the opening Aria of Leightgesinnte Flattergeister (BWV 181), which he attacked with articulate verve. (If there was some numerological significance to the coincident recurrence of the digits in the catalogue numbers, Professor Butt was silent on that point.)

The other voices – soprano Julia Doyle, mezzo Helen Charlston, and tenor Nicholas Mulroy – each had their own solo high spots, including Doyle’s aria Mein Seelenschatz ist Gottes Wort, Charlston’s Wohl mir, mein Jesus spricht ein Wort and Mulroy’s Der schadlichen Dornen unendliche Zahl, where his duet partner was leader Huw Daniel’s expressive violin.

The four also combined expertly in the chorales, led by Doyle, and the tempi Butt found for those were always revealing – rarely do the chorus hymns sound so much part of the shape of the cantatas as they did here.

That rhythmic assurance was just as impressive among the instrumentalists, from the opening Graupner suite with its pizzicato passage and finale full of changes of pace, through violist John Crockatt’s solo turn on the Telemann concerto, to the superb continuo playing in the closing Bach, cellist Jonathan Manson on crisp, precise form as usual.

As well as playing the oboes, Oonagh Lee and Frances Norbury provided the recorders Bach added to the score of BWV18 for its Leipzig outing, where second violins Anna Curzon and Emilia Benjamin switched to violas, the only cantata Bach wrote requiring four of them, and no fiddles.

With the natural trumpet of Paul Sharp joining the ensemble later, the sonic palette was constantly finding new colours in a programme that showed exactly how music was developing three centuries ago. As is the practice of this ensemble, that lesson was always as entertaining as it was educational.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Julia Doyle by Louise O’Dwyer

SCO / Leleux

Posted on by

City Halls, Glasgow

A familiar presence at Scotland’s orchestral concerts into his 90s, Hedley Wright, who died last year, was also one of Scottish music’s great philanthropists, both in cash and in gifts for performers and promoters of the Springbank whisky produced in Campbeltown by the family firm.

Last week’s Scottish Chamber Orchestra concerts were dedicated to his memory and, as he sponsored the orchestra’s first oboe chair for many years, appropriately featured that instrument. French oboist Francois Leleux was conductor and soloist but it was the holder of that chair, Robin Williams, who had the first solo word in Mozart’s Symphony No 25, the G Minor work he wrote on his return to Salzburg from Vienna in 1773.

If, as has been suggested, the piece documents the teenage composer’s first heartbreak, Leleux certainly made the case for the symphony as an early Romantic work, but without sacrificing any of the SCO’s Classical precision.

Leleux’s own arrangements of arias from Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute opened the second half of the concert, a delightful bit of bold appropriation of the music for his own instrument. The two Papageno songs in particular were treated in a theme-and-variations fashion, becoming show-off party-pieces for oboe – part juke box, part musical box.

The other soloist in the programme was soprano Carolyn Sampson, in absolutely unmatchable form on the Berlioz cantata Heminie. As theatrical as everything the French composer wrote, it provided the musical theme for his masterwork, the Symphonie Fantastique, but is fascinating in its own right. Setting text by poet and playwright Pierre-Ange Vieillard it is the monologue of the titular Muslin princess, in love with Christian crusader Tancredi, the enemy of her people – Romantic story-telling that ranges from dramatic exclamation to anguished prayer. Sampson’s delivery of the composer’s response to the words was masterly, at ease with abrupt changes in tempo and bold leaps across her range. The cantata has an exquisite musical arc too, and the linking of its discrete sections by Leleux and Sampson became persuasively more fluid as the work progressed.

That sense of narrative continuity was also present in Leleux’s account of Ravel’s Ma mere l’oye (Mother Goose) which brought the concert to an end. Ravel’s response to the fairytales of Charles Perrault and Madame d’Aulnoy may be individually readable, with details like the clarinet as Beauty and contrabassoon as The Beast, but it is the use of the full range of instrumentation, including percussion details, harp and celeste, and solos from flute, piccolo and front desk strings, that make the orchestration of the whole work a compelling tale.

Leleux took a symphonic approach to the suite so that the full orchestral climax was a glorious finish to a very colourful, clever programme.

Keith Bruce

BBC SSO / Wigglesworth

Posted on by

City Halls, Glasgow

As chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth’s programmes with the BBC SSO go, this was one of his most conservative offerings. Yet even with such loveable mainstream workhorses as Elgar and Brahms at its core, he threw in a fascinating new BBC commission – “An acre ringing, still” by Australian-born composer Lisa Illean – for good measure. As a substantial concert opener it provided food for thought – intrinsically beautiful but uniquely challenging, to some extent discomforting.

Scored for chamber orchestra, 11-piece “consort” and pre-recorded electronics, it’s a work defined by expressive containment, an ephemeral sound world played at minimal volume, with even its climaxes teasingly frustrated. Lasting around 20 minutes, that’s a powerful proposition, and this performance elicited the most magical, imaginative colourings, amplified paradoxically by their quiet intensity. That the electronic dimension was so subtly embedded within the textures as to be barely perceptible is a positive observation.

As for any discomfort, you could sense an acute tension within the audience, unused to such dogged musical hypersensitivity. The tiniest crinkle of a programme brochure, the practised tiptoeing of an usher, the squeak of a seat, even in this case the wagging tail of a guide dog seemed like a heightened sonic distraction. In a sense, we were asked to play our part, which was perversely exciting.

There was mild perversity, too, in the approach of Japanese soloist Dai Miyata to Elgar’s Cello Concerto, inasmuch as his was a highly personalised interpretation, generously poetic, but too often wildly poetic.

It was mildly unnerving in the opening minutes, where Elgar sets up his stall with gathering thoughts, but which needs a binding momentum to make directional sense. Miyata’s over-egging, and an initially lagged response from Wigglesworth, brought to mind Wilfred Owen’s “cursing through sludge”. Once free of that, the journey ahead was surer of foot. 

The best moments emerged in the sublime tranquility of the Adagio, its timeless opening theme, and in the closing moments of the finale, where – despite a sense that Wigglesworth was following rather than anticipating events, notably in the offbeat chords – a triumphant oneness and tempered resolve took hold.

Brahms’ Third Symphony was what you might term a “pipe and slippers” affair, fireside Brahms that seemed content to follow time-honoured interpretational traditions rather than chance anything more thought-provoking. Wigglesworth and the SSO gave a solid performance: casually-paced, heftily textured, sweeping but emotionally reserved in the outer movements, while recognising the lighter hues of the Andante and the gracious lyrical warmth of the gorgeous Allegretto. A fuller string sound would have better matched the substantiveness of the wind and brass, but for those who like their Brahms safe and reliable, this will have done the trick.

Ken Walton

This concert was recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3, when it will be made available on BBC Sounds for 30 days. A repeat performance takes place tonight (Friday 2 Feb) in Aberdeen Music Hall

BBC SSO / Volkov

Posted on by

City Halls, Glasgow

HE may be long dead, and in his career as pragmatic as any composer in pursuit of a bawbee, but Igor Stravinsky was the most challenging and abrasive voice in Thursday evening’s concert reuniting the BBC Scottish with Principal Conductor Ilan Volkov for the first time in 2024.

Stravinsky’s Petrushka was the work in the second half and this was a glorious account of it, with marvellous playing all over the platform. It was the SSO strings that made the startling initial impression: muscular playing that was pin-sharp. That example was swiftly followed by their colleagues, either individually – Lynda Cochrane at the piano – or collectively in the brass and percussion departments.

Sitting between the Firebird and the Rite of Spring, the musical drama of Petrushka may be subtler but it is no less colourful storytelling and Volkov and the SSO ensured the narrative unfolded in all its kaleidoscopic splendour. Yann Ghiro’s clarinet section in particular were on stellar form.

This was the more compact 1947 revision of Petrushka and it was preceded at the start of the concert by the less often heard Four Etudes in the 1952 version of a score that also started life many decades earlier. The third of them, the more contemplative Cantique, is perhaps the most compelling section but the rhythms of the other pieces are all vintage Stravinsky and, although they began as piano works, eloquent studies in orchestration.

We were in a very different world for the rest of the programme, but not, perhaps surprisingly, a more rarified one. Composers Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton, veterans of Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra and a performing duo themselves, were both present to hear their works and acknowledge the applause, and Volkov dedicated the concert to their associate and contemporary John White, who died on January 4.

Skempton’s Piano Concerto, from 2015, references Stravinsky as well as Morton Feldman, but is altogether more Broadway than that would suggest. Soloist Joanna MacGregor revelled in the bluesy serialism of the central movement and the climax of the work which is a jazzy, brassy march. For a contemporary piece, it proved surprisingly easy listening, and perhaps rather slight in the context of the programme. Even more melodic and pretty was MacGregor’s encore, Skempton’s dedication to Cardew, Well, Well Cornelius.

There was nothing especially “difficult” about the newest work of the evening either. Parsons’ LEVELS for Orchestra was also a BBC Commission and appears to have had to wait a few years for this world premiere. The composer draws a distinction between “chords” and the stratified aggregation of notes in his work, but I doubt that matters much to many listeners. Whether we were hearing the contrasting timbre of the orchestral sections in sustained harmony or sequential notes, the piece was – like the Stravinsky Etudes – an exercise in hearing the make-up of an orchestra. Whether Parsons says anything new on that subject is a matter of opinion.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Joanna MacGregor

SCO: 50th Birthday Concert

Posted on by

City Halls, Glasgow

It was in this very hall, on 27 January 1974, that a brand new Scottish Chamber Orchestra first broke onto the scene, offering a mid-sized complement to the magnitude of the nation’s existing symphony orchestras. On Friday, in a spruced-up City Halls – refurbished 18 years ago – today’s SCO presented its 50th Birthday Concert to both a packed house within, and a live Radio 3 listenership at home.

As its current chief executive Gavin Reid explained in his pre-concert welcome, this was a programme representative of an orchestra with an exciting future ahead, but expressed in terms of the unique strengths that have sustained it for half a century. So there was a core Classical menu of Mozart and Haydn, offset by the contemporary sounds of composers Elena Langer and Jay Capperauld, not forgetting the vivacious, spontaneous creativity of principal conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, who makes every programme he directs seem like it is fresh out the box.

That was true from the word go in Moscow-born Langer’s quirky suite Figaro Gets a Divorce. In the same way that Christopher Rouse’s percussion concerto “Whatever Happened to Alberich” imagines how life for Wagner’s miserable Ring Cycle anti-hero turned out, Langer muses on the comic fate of Mozart’s (and Rossini’s) Figaro. 

Emelyanychev took it for what it is, a musical pantomime playing free with pastiche and parody to  manufacture its gauche, sometimes cartoonesque, delights. After the shady, scene-setting fog of Almaviva’s castle, a love song introduced a theme not dissimilar from one of Ravel’s in his Daphnis et Chloe. Indeed, the spirit of Ravel was often conjured up in music that was artfully textured, often unnervingly beguiling.

And there was plenty fun – a Keystone Kops-like chase, a steamy tango (all the more woozy for Ryan Corbett’s accordion interjections within the ranks) and a big-time Cabaret-style skirmish – A Mad Day – that romped unchallenged to the end. It was a piece that triumphed on adrenalin, its attendant energy overlooking any momentary weaknesses in compositional continuity.

Emelyanychev was joined by fellow pianist Dmitry Ablogin as duelling soloists in Mozart’s Concerto in E flat for Two Pianos – or rather fortepianos, as the Russian duo opted for the more delicate period choice of instrument. It may not feel like one of Mozart’s most accomplished works (everything’s relative!), but with the entertainment value provided here, and the gutsy clarity that is the SCOs signature Mozart sound, thrills weren’t short in supply.

And surprises! What was this showmen-like tit-for-tat preamble improvised by the pianists? Surely not Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto? Which is exactly what is was, conveniently in the same key of course, and a languorously hanging dominant chord to complete the joke, the punchline being its segue into the Mozart proper. 

From hereon in, Emelyanychev and Ablogin ramped up the solo dialogue into a cat and mouse game, enclosed physically within the surrounding orchestra, the whole mischievous visual interaction adding to the playfulness of the music. The final Rondo was the icing on the cake. 

Or rather it would have been, had it not been marginally upstaged by principal cellist Philip Higham’s poetically breathtaking encore performance of The Swan from Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals, accompanied by the two pianists. 

On paper, the second half was exclusively populated by Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony, the orchestra now standing to deliver a performance that responded immaculately and vitally to Emelyanychev’s imaginative twists and turns. It was perfection without being boring, neatly coordinated nuances that momentarily froze time without losing focus and direction. Ample surprises, but all in the best possible taste.

What followed was also meant to surprise – a masterful piece of “occasional” writing by the SCO’s composer-in-residence, Ayrshire-born Jay Capperauld. His birthday gift was an ingenious variation-like fantasy on the tune Happy Birthday to You, the theme’s rhythmic essence teasingly displaced, almost hooligan-like in its swagger and belligerent domination of the entire piece. 

This was virtuosic writing, bullishly imaginative, concise but emotionally extravagant, perfect for its purpose and ripely thrown off by an obliging SCO. I’ve probably said this before, but Capperauld should turn his hand sometime to the world of film music. He has an instinctive feel for capturing the moment.

Ken Walton

Here this concert again on BBC Sounds

Nordic Music Journeys

Posted on by

New Auditorium, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Later this year from 29 October and 3 November, a four-day festival in Glasgow, Nordic Music Days, will present the work of composers from the Nordic regions and Scotland, exploring close cultural connections, but just as importantly bringing us up to date with the pattern of current creative activity in these regions. With wider representation at Aberdeen’s sound festival (23-27 Oct) and a related Glasgow University-hosted conference on 29-30 Oct, the entire concentration of activity amounts to a 10-day collaborative bonanza.

It doesn’t stop there. The project’s Scottish curator, horn player and arts impresario Andy Saunders, has plans to embrace wider-linked activity in the lead-up. Last Saturday’s Nordic Music Journeys – three back-to-back hour-long concerts at the RSNO’s excellent rehearsal auditorium in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall – served as the all-important, to some extent defining, launch event.

It’s aim was to give a platform to new Swedish and Scottish music, performed respectively by Sweden’s Gageego! ensemble and Scotland’s Hebrides Ensemble, both flexible groups capable of multiple configurations, thereby ensuring varied programming. Gageego!, under its director Fredrik Burstedt, performed the two outer programmes; Hebrides took the central spot. A smattering of electro-acoustic works throughout widened the listening experience.

Nor was the event simply about performance. It was fascinating, between concerts, to participate in a peripheral speed dating session, designed to bring the composers into contact with industry colleagues and promoters, even allowing journalists like your intrepid VoxCarnyx scribblers to update themselves on the contemporary music scene in Sweden. The buzz was palpable, Saunders announcing the end of each four-minute “dating session” with an impertinent blast of his natural horn.

As for the music itself, the emphasis was on individual brevity, which naturally afforded a broad coverage of styles and approaches. 

Concert 1 by Gageego! opened sotto voce, with the quiet sensuality and suppressed intimacy of Benjamin Staern’s From Hilma Scenes, before treading wilder waters with the sinewy, provocative complexities of Henrik Denerin’s Collide and acid clarity of Mika Pelo’s Abandoned, inspired by his and his son’s “urban explorations” of hauntingly abandoned city spaces still discoverable in post-unification Berlin. 

Electro-acoustic contributions included Mirjam Telly’s Apparitions, rather like the restless product of an electronic toy box; and Time’s Arrow by Lars Bröndum, effectively throwback postured performance art (with the composer at the controls) in the manner of a Stockhausen tribute act. 

While Gageego! allowed the composers a moment to introduce each of their pieces – some pointlessly reading what was in the programme note – Hebrides, in the central concert, were more streamlined with their delivery of the Scottish repertoire. Aileen Sweeney’s moody Siku found lone cellist and ensemble director William Conway as dimly lit as the shadowy atmospherics of Sweeney’s evocative music, segueing into the nature calls and Gaelic soundscape of Fraser MacBeath’s electronic work, Mar gum biodh an teine air do chraiceann. 

Glasgow University lecturer Jane Stanley’s Lalla Rookh followed, its combination of words (a letter written in 1874 by William Thomson, Lord Kelvin to his sister Elizabeth in 1874) and natural horn (played by Saunders) evoking a lively sonic illumination to the spoken text. The earthy substantiveness of Gemma MacGregor’s Betrayal, excerpted from her 2017 St Magnus Festival opera The Story of Magnus Erlendsson, found the perfect complement in Fergus Hall’s intimately sensitised Laig Beach for solo violin. 

Beyond the visceral originality of Finn O’Hare’s ääni (the most imaginative and proportionally satisfying of all the electronic works), and the desperately disturbing textures of Rylan Gleave’s Heartstrings, Oliver Searle’s skilfully woven Harbour Dreams, from his Dalriada Trio, brought this Scots-themed concert to a distinguished conclusion.

Gageego!’s closing programme furthered the Swedish cause with another cocktail of varied styles. Marie Samuelsson’s The Lion was surprisingly effervescent, like a skittish caricature of the true beast. A long-titled electronic work by Sune Mattias Emanuelsson, built around deconstructed medieval chant, seemed a little loose-limbed, unfocused in its intent. Ylva Fred’s Motor Music for piano quartet trod fertile, filigree ground and a final adrenalin rush that stopped just short of minimalist rock, against which Madelaine Isaksson’s Capsuled Time seemed powerfully ruminative and claustrophobic.

But the most interesting voice in this final programme was that of Alfred Jimenenz, whose With Voice for flute, cello and piano proved utterly compelling. Its deliberate constraint, expressive intensity and the sheer boldness of its techniques (rarely did the pianist actually use the piano keys!) was mesmerisingly original and profoundly impactful.

Ken Walton 

Keep up to date with Nordic Music Days 2024 at www.nordicmusicdays.org

ERCU: Messiah

Posted on by

Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Soprano Emma Morwood’s I Know That My Redeemer Liveth and then If God Be For Us – in partnership with orchestra leader Greg Lawson’s violin – gave the singers of the Edinburgh Royal Choral Union the ideal pathway to the climax of their annual New Year performance of Handel’s Messiah.

A very gentle sotto voce start to that deliciously-unfolding final Amen, with John Kitchen adding just the right level of underscore from the Usher Hall organ, was followed by a carefully calibrated crescendo for which all four soloists stepped to the front of the platform to add their contributions to the section-work. It was a gesture that seemed especially appropriate to this established occasion.

The choir was impressively responsive to the dynamic instructions of Chorus Director Michael Bawtree throughout, with moments like the unaccompanied “the iniquity of us all” at the end of Part 2’s sequence of choruses and the crisp His Yoke Is Easy that ended Part 1 especially good from the number of singers onstage. The 40 sopranos were as cohesive a unit as the dozen tenors and the whole choir’s diction was excellent from the start.

Of the soloists, alongside Morwood it was counter-tenor Alexander Chance who really shone. The clarity and precision of his singing, both quietly and at volume, and his immaculate articulation demonstrate a talent in full bloom. His ornamentations were never excessive and included a distinctive skill in small glissandi. Set pieces like He Was Despised at the start of Part 2 were magnificently measured.

The other two soloists inevitably suffered in the comparison. Tenor Elgan Llyr Thomas was a little thick-toned much of  the time – he does seem to have a lighter voice available, but we rarely heard it. Bass Thomas Chenhall was too keen to force the pace and his lower notes lacked the heft his arias of darkness, warring nations and resurrecting trumpets require. Both had moments of uncertain intonation too.

With excellent continuo playing from cellist Niamh Molloy and David Gerrard at the harpsichord, and well-known faces throughout the Edinburgh Pro Musica Orchestra, this Messiah was on firm ground instrumentally and it was good to see the capital’s big hall well filled for a heritage event that now vies for attention in the city’s packed Hogmanay festival schedule.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Alexander Chance

Dunedin Consort: Messiah

Posted on by

St Aloysius, Glasgow

As the instrumentalists set off on the first steps of the marvellous journey that is Handel’s Messiah, it seemed that the opening “Sinfony” was even speedier than conductor’s John Butt’s brisk tempo of memory. And so it proved, with Part One – over which some versions dawdle for more than an hour – coming in at an incredibly brief 50 minutes or so.

Small wonder that tenor Anthony Gregory – most recently seen in Scotland as a memorably-characterised Count Almaviva in Scottish Opera’s Barber of Seville – added a little extravagant ornamentation to his “Comfort ye” while that was feasible. The topography of the “Every valley” that followed was exalted at pace, and that was characteristic of Butt’s direction to the end.

With the soloists stepping out from a chorus of three singers per section, in the Dunedin fashion, his Messiah is always light on its feet, but this performance, in the relatively unfamiliar resonance of the ornate church in Garnethill, was often quite startling. Despite that acoustic, the chorus “For unto us a Child is born” was as clear as it was fast, “His yoke is easy” rarely sounds quite so airy, and “All we, like sheep” gambolled more like Spring lambs.

That chorus ends what was the only sustained passage of more contemplative music – including a deeply moving “He was despised” from Bethany Horak-Hallett – and Part Two approached its conclusion with a fearsomely fast “Why do the nations?”, negotiated with enormous skill by both the string players and bass Matthew Brook.

This was a very fine line-up of soloists, bringing opera performances to the music and Charles Jennens’ inspired selection of Biblical texts. Horak-Hallett was billed as a mezzo but displayed a rich, full contralto range, and soprano Anna Dennis was on sensational form from her virtuosic turn in the Nativity story of Part One through a masterclass of vowel sounds in “How beautiful are the feet”, to technically masterful phrasing in “I know that my Redeemer liveth”, another aria that breathed afresh for being brisker. 

Butt included some music often omitted – not just the mezzo/tenor duet “O death, where is thy sting” in Part Three but also the rarely-heard chorus “Let all the angels of God worship him” and its preceding tenor recitative in Part Two – but the whole concert was still over in two and three-quarter hours, including an interval. Most importantly, the conductor’s tempi meant the narrative bowled along in an exhilarating fashion, and the work of the players and singers, whose diction was exemplary, was always precise and full of expression.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Bethany Horak-Hallett by Emma Jane Photography

Hansel & Gretel

Posted on by

Paisley Town Hall

Stories for children are full of warnings, and there was another for English National Opera in the new concert staging of Hansel & Gretel that Scotland’s national company created for the rejuvenated Paisley Town Hall’s inaugural season: if you employ your orchestra on a part-time basis, you create contractual obstacles to making the most of your work.

Perhaps there were other elements in the decision, but it seems likely that the cost of employing its own orchestra was the major factor limiting this vibrant, compact expression of Humperdinck’s gorgeous score to just two performances. Some might say that sold short the brilliant young cast (of singers the company can be justly proud to have nurtured), the Junior Chorus of enthusiastic children, the good people of Renfrewshire and their very splendidly restored venue.

Still, as Dr Seuss says, don’t be sad that it’s over, be glad that it happened. I look forward to seeing a big budget production from Roxana Haines, but once again the company’s former Staff Director has produced the goods with slender resources, using the venue it was designed to showcase creatively with singers making entrances from around the auditorium. The stage itself was largely occupied by the orchestra, with music director Stuart Stratford on the podium, and that was nothing but an asset, with every detail of the music in perfect balance, not excepting the voices of the choir of youngsters who were directed from the front row of the stalls by Susannah Wapshott.

From the opening of the overture – a piece of orchestration that should be heard more often as a standalone in the concert hall – it was evident that Paisley’s lovely hall has a very good acoustic and it was notable, and a credit to the conductor, that while the brass and horns were clear and sparkling from the start, the voices of Lea Shaw and Catriona Hewitson in the title roles were always absolutely at the top of the mix.

Both former Emerging Artists with the company, and Shaw still an Associate, their voices blended immaculately and they inhabited the front stage with engaging skill. Using David Pountney’s English translation, there were a lot of words to deliver clearly and at pace, but the diction of both was exemplary and always in the service of the music – and the magnificent melodies Humperdinck wrote.

Ukranian soprano Inna Husieva, a current Emerging Artist, was perhaps a little less clear in the words of the Sandman and Dew Fairy, but sang beautifully, while her colleague on the scheme this season, baritone Ross Cumming, is a performer of great skill with a rich tone who made Peter, the children’s father, more genial than he can sometimes be portrayed. The parental ambiguity was left to Shuna Scott Sendall to express, and she drew a fine contrast between mother Gertrude, victim as much as oppressor, and her doubling as a malign but cartoonish Witch. The mezzo was a late substitute for Heather Ireson and clearly not in the best vocal health herself but she gave her all in performance.

Stratford’s tempi were spot-on in an interpretation that made a joy of the opportunity to see the players in details like orchestra leader Tony Moffat’s blackbird as the children awake in Act 3. When the conductor’s baton (not that he uses one) was repurposed by Hansel & Gretel as a wand to undo the Witch’s magic it was a nice directorial expression of exactly how precisely the composer’s classic score works.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Shuna Scott Sendall (Witch) and Catriona Hewitson (Gretel) by Sally Jubb

The Night With… Festival

Posted on by

The Engine Works, Glasgow

The bold assertion by contemporary music evangelist Matthew Whiteside that the first festival under the banner of his concert series, The Night With … ,  aims to give classical music its own Glastonbury may not bear very rigorous scrutiny, but neither is it entirely nonsense.

The opening sessions established an atmosphere that was relaxed and informal, making full use of the post-industrial venue’s spaces, without disrespecting the music in any way. A food truck dispensed sustenance between sessions and a “Parlour” hosted conversations away from the performances, while the programme alternated between two areas, permitting a seamless flow of sounds, even if the planned schedule very swiftly began to slip.

The Hebrides Ensemble took The Night With … into new areas, and not solely because the quintet featured a concert grand, played by James Willshire. Cellist Will Conway’s ensemble, completed by violinist David Alberman, flautist Emma Roche and Yann Ghiro on clarinet, represents an older generation of players, and that was paralleled in some of the music they chose, from more established names than have been the regular fare at Whiteside’s events.

The oldest piece was Seven Pierrot Miniatures by Helen Grime, a Hebrides commission from 2010 which references Schoenberg in its structure and in some of its sound but makes complete sense in its own terms – sonically theatrical, especially in the exchanges between the top line instruments.

That sense of drama was also present in the world premiere of the Ensemble’s set, Rylan Gleave’s Leave John, take Michael, its possibly punning title also suggestive of liturgical choral work. If the quintet’s sound was sometimes hymn-like, it was at a distance, with percussive use of the piano and abrupt changes of dynamics and tonality. Most startling of all were the most conventional moments – a straightforward popular song-style modulation and a quaintly resolved final chord.

David Fennessy’s duo for violin and cello, Changeless and the changed, while beautifully played, perhaps sat rather oddly in the middle of a programme which was framed by two more quintets. It opened with Mingdu Li’s Superposition and Measurement, a quantum physics-inspired piece by the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Masters student that was premiered at the conservatoire’s 175th birthday celebrations last year, and closed with Stuart MacRae’s lockdown composition from 2020, Ursa Minor. It probably presented the group at its most integrated and was, in its pictorial and atmospheric way, the ideal work with which to end.

The festival had begun by referring back to previous incarnations of The Night With … through a set by virtuoso violist Garth Knox that included pieces he played in 2019 at Glasgow’s Hug and Pint, by RCS composition student Nora Marazaite and self-composed. The second of his Entropies, entitled Pluie, was precisely titled not just in its sound but in its effect on the weather at the food truck, while his closing duet with fellow viola player Ruth Gibson, Still Points, repurposed the familiar “Theme by Thomas Tallis” that Vaughan Williams used to distinctive effect, much as Knox’s Microtonal Blues had earlier radically revised Muddy Waters.

But, perhaps surprisingly, its was the work of two dead composers that will be remain in the memory from Knox’s festival-opening gambit. The Prologue to Gerard Grisey’s Les espaces acoustiques was specifically requested by Whiteside for its exploratory meaning as the event’s first utterance. Kaija Saariaho’s exquisite Vent nocturne (Night Wind), was composed for and dedicated to the viola-player by the Finnish composer, who died in June this year, and he played it in her memory.

Keith Bruce

BBC SSO / Gardolínska

Posted on by

City Halls, Glasgow

It’s just over two years since Polish conductor Marta Gardolínska made her impressive debut with the the RSNO. It wasn’t an ideal first appearance, given that lingering Covid restrictions had required that to be an online stream. Here at VoxCarnyx, though, we felt she definitely brought a “springlike freshness” to Lutosławski’s music. We hoped she’d be back in Scotland live sometime soon.

Well, here she was, this time with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and once more conducting some Lutosławski with all the natural affinity you’d expect from a Polish compatriot. This was a meatier example of Lutosławski, his gritty 1950s Concerto for Orchestra, a work characterised by its East European bite, loaded folk melodies, pugnacious rhythms and searing passion.

Gardolínska harnessed all of that impressively. The curt motivic engineering of the opening bars, the pulsing timpani persisting like a obdurate child, rich clarion blasts from the brass leading to a climax as ferocious as Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, soon calmed to reveal a rosier vision as the Intrada drew to a quieter close.

The central Capriccio shaped its own narrative destiny, a cascading menagerie of perpetual motion, through which the piano and xylophone fired razor-sharp shards of colour (one glancing motif from the xylophone hinting strongly of a quote from Britten’s A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra) before a heavier mood took hold courtesy of the brass. The Finale, a magnificently inventive Passacaglia originating from the murky depths of the double basses, ultimately engulfed by a chorale-like peroration not unlike that in the Intermezzo of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, provided a thrilling conclusion.

This wasn’t the only work in Thursday’s afternoon concert to showcase the orchestra’s constituent virtuosity, in particular the front desk strings. It had already been plentifully displayed in Gażyna Bacewicz’s 1948 Concerto for String Orchestra, more concentrated in scale than the Lutosławski, and sourcing its own exuberance in a style more rooted in neoclassicism. This performance had mischief, pathos, melting eloquence and outright joy, and a level of precision and attack to fully sustain its enjoyment.

Completing the Polish package was Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No 1, but with the extraordinary South Korean soloist Bomsori. Gardolínska again elicited an appealing response from the SSO, in the concerto’s toy box opening, its rhapsodic surges and sumptuous textures. 

As for Bomsori, what seemed initially like a rigid, unmoving first few bars proved to be a theatrical ruse. For what followed was a triumph of enchantment, the violinist’s increasing physical intensity echoing a musical journey that grew from teasing excitement to rapturous rhapsodic heights, only to dissolve whimsically with the orchestra into a final throwaway pizzicato. 

Ken Walton

This concert was recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3, when it will be available for 30 days on BBC Sounds.

SCO / Benedetti / Marquise Gilmore

Posted on by

Perth Concert Hall

With sponsorship from investment managers Quilter Cheviot and busy box office, Nicola Benedetti’s latest appearances with the SCO will be a significant entry on the balance sheet for the orchestra’s 50th birthday year. Crucially, it has its own way of presenting Scotland’s most popular classical musician, and that – as principal cello Philip Higham pointed out in his introductory remarks – involved luring another member of the extended SCO family back to the front desk of the first fiddles.

Benjamin Marquise Gilmore job-shared as SCO concertmaster before taking up his current post as one of the three leaders of the London Symphony Orchestra. Benedetti may be the big marquee name, but his role in this concert was no less significant, leading the orchestra through the whole programme, including the Beethoven Violin Concerto she directed, although it remained her interpretation.

The most ear-catching moment of that was the first movement cadenza, possibly the one the composer himself wrote for the piano version of the score, and certainly following Christian Tetzlaff’s recent lead in having timpani as a foil to the soloist. Louise Lewis Goodwin was warmly embraced by the violinist at the end of the concert and her playing of the rhythmic “fate” motif that Beethoven so loved was a significant ingredient in Benedetti’s approach to the piece.

In her younger years, she might have played the concerto with more obvious virtuosity. Now the darkness at the heart of the work is as clear as the prodigious technique required to perform it. Beethoven was not always the grumpy old bloke of his public image, but there is little levity about this music, at least until the more sprightly rondo of the finale.

Having set the tone for the performance, Benedetti left the direction of the players to Marquise Gilmore, the job he had been doing during the first part of the evening. In a reversal of the usual order of things, the programme’s symphony preceded the interval, but as it was Mozart’s brief three-movement 34th, that made eminent sense.

Whether Symphony No 34 in C Major makes internal sense is another question, but after the brass and horns of the opening movement there was some lovely work from the SCO reeds, the slow movement scored for bassoon and strings and the finale led by the oboes. Marquise Gilmore’s whole-body pacing of the orchestra is the sort of physical urging players are swept along by, and exactly how the work should be performed.

The icing on this classical cake came at the start, in Jessie Montgomery’s Strum, one of at least three compositions from the American to have featured in recent programmes by the Scottish Ensemble. It suited the SCO well too, with plenty of the technique of the title for the string players to demonstrate – especially the violas – before some lush pastoral bowing and touches of folk fiddling, in what is highly accessible modern music.

Keith Bruce

SCO: Maxim’s Baroque Inspirations

Posted on by

City Halls, Glasgow

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra are shamelessly, but successfully, trading on the “Maxim” brand. He’s the orchestra’s charismatic left field chief conductor – Maxim Emelyanychev – and his zany presentational mark penetrated every aspect of Friday’s programme, entitled Maxim’s Baroque Inspirations. 

Even that had a tantalising dubiety. Did “Baroque” refer simply to the 17th/18th century musical epoch, or to its meaning in arts criticism as something bizarre or exaggerated? Given that this programme cast its net wider than Bach and his contemporaries – both in actual terms and by virtue of later influence – the former was stretching credibility. The latter, however, seemed more appropriate.

It hardly mattered in what was a captivating evening. There was barely a moment where activity ceased. The lights dimmed on an empty stage, then action: Emelyanychev bounded onto the platform with his SCO strings, having foregone their customary onstage warm-up, to launch immediately into Vaughan Williams’ Renaissance-inspired Fantasy on a theme by Thomas Tallis.  

In an acoustic naturally less glowing than the work’s original 1910 Gloucester Cathedral setting, Emelyanychev took every opportunity to explore forensically the score’s finest detail and antiphonal texturing. There were magical interactions, and just one or two moments of wavering intonation.

A few words from the restless maestro on the thinking behind the programme before he leapt towards the harpsichord for his solo spot in Philip Glass’ Harpsichord Concerto. A strangely incongruous work, with frequent jarring collisions between pastiche Baroque fantasia and the composer’s trademark minimalism that wouldn’t have been pout of place in a hammy 1970s TV horror soundtrack, it eventually took flight in an exuberant finale propelled by devilish rhythmic zest.

Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances, Suite No 1, ended the opening half on a delicate note. There was jewel-like precision from an orchestra now enlarged to accommodate the composer’s refined re-imaging of the original Renaissance lute pieces. The opening Balletto: “Il Conto Orlando” was grace personified, complemented by a Galliarda that was sweet and jaunty. A plaintive Vilanella with gorgeous oboe solo and sporadic “pings” from the harp gave way to the closing Passo mezzo e mascherada, its agile flutey trumpet the icing on the cake.

The second half was genuine uninterrupted Baroque, opening with Corelli’s Concerto Grosso in B-flat, one of his fine Op 6 set, before taking us into unfamiliar Telemann territory with his Concerto in D minor for two Chalumeaux (forerunner of the clarinet) and a 1970 reconstruction of Bach’s spirited Triple Concerto in D.

These were a showcase for individual virtuosity within the SCO. The Corelli earned significant overtime for principal cellist Philip Higham, at one point racing through fistfuls of notes at hair-raising speed. The Chalumeau duo, Katherine Spencer and SCO clarinettist William Stafford, displayed an enticingly dulcet timbre in the Telemann, and there was scintillating team play from the Bach solo trio – violinists Stephanie Gonley, Marcus Barcham Stevens and Gordon Bragg.

If all that wasn’t enough to digest, the interval was consumed by Renaissance dances in the foyer, Emelyanychev now on cornett and sopranino recorder and egging on his fellow minstrels. He was even spotted on stage a moment later tuning the small chamber organ for the second half. Clearly his show!

Ken Walton

BBC SSO / Brabbins

Posted on by

City Halls, Glasgow

This evening was already set to be the busiest of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s season when ill-health removed Sir Mark Elder from the podium on the final day of rehearsals. By sheer good fortune, the orchestra’s popular former associate principal conductor Martyn Brabbins was in Glasgow and able to take on the adventurous programme. I cannot recall hearing a last-minute substitute conductor winning such a warm reception from the audience.

That the concert, pairing Shostakovich’s two piano concertos with Debussy’s three orchestral Images, was such a spectacular success says much for Brabbins, but also for the SSO players and the two star soloists, Italian Federico Colli and trumpeter Matilda Lloyd, paired with the pianist for the unique vision that is the first of the those concertos to conclude the evening.

The conductor was immediately into the swing of things – from his hips specifically – for Debussy’s Iberia, actually the second of the published Images, although the first he wrote. From its opening rhythms, tambourine and castanets, to the Galician folk fiddle and reeds of the third movement, it’s as Spanish as anyone might want, with plenty for first trumpet Mark O’Keeffe to do as well. The most interesting playing of the composer’s hugely colourful scoring came in the fragrant middle section, with principle oboe Stella McCracken’s solo over lovely ensemble violas and cellos, and leader Kanako Ito’s unison line with guest first flute Tom Hancox.

Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No 2 has one of those themes in the opening movement that many people know even if they could not identify its origin, but few will have heard it played in the highly percussive style Colli brought to it. His performance was completely captivating, through a more leisurely Romantic slow movement to the more familiarly frantic Shostakovich of the finale. It may be a fairly conventional work from the iconoclastic Russian, but Colli, who was very attentive to his fellow players on the platform and in close communication with the conductor, make it a very memorable one.

Debussy’s Images were not composed as a suite, and this programme’s deployment of them was very useful, numbers 1 and 3 opening the second half. They are perhaps more obviously the Debussy of L’apres-midi d’un faune or Jeux. The first of them, Gigues, uses a tune, The Keel Row, that has its origin in North-East England, even if that’s not where the composer heard it. Again requiring a large orchestra, the concluding Rondes de Printemps was a real showcase for the 20 players in the wind section.

Shostakovich’s Concerto No 1, composed over twenty years before No 2, is a remarkable work, subtitled “for piano, trumpet and strings” and no less colourful for being compact. Brabbins kept the energy level high in brisk transitions through the four movements, although the pace slackens for the muted trumpet solo in the slower middle section before the work becomes a Keystone Cops chase to the end, famously inspired by the composer’s side-hustle as a silent movie accompanist as a student. Colli and Lloyd made an ideal partnership for the job.

With performance and live Radio 3 broadcast salvaged in style, the casualty of Sir Mark Elder’s indisposition was the projected recording of the Stravinsky concertos for Chandos this weekend. That postponement could have an economic impact somewhere down the line, as it may well have been underwriting the substantial forces required for the Debussy.

This concert is available to listen to on BBC Sounds for 30 days.

Keith Bruce

Mahler Players / Negus

Posted on by

Strathpeffer Pavilion

Act Three of Siegfried has a strong claim to be the funniest – and potentially the sexiest – hour and 25 minutes in the entirety of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. As such, it was a good choice for the third of the Mahler Players annual Highland concerts of music by the composer.

Not only does it stand alone well, a sequence of three duets between Erda and Wotan, Wotan and Siegfried and Siegfried and Brunnhilde, but it is full of orchestral riches. It was the first work of the more experienced Wagner when he returned to the Ring after abandoning it to compose Tristan und Isolde, part of which the Mahler Players had performed last year in Inverness and Strathpeffer.

As an added attraction at the Pavilion, the orchestra’s director, Tomas Leakey, ceded the podium to Anthony Negus, with whom he has been studying recently. After a long career at Welsh National Opera, Negus is musical director at Longborough Festival Opera, which will present its full Ring cycle next summer, and has recently been in charge of performances of the cycle in Australia. As was very evident in his conducting, he knows every bar of this music.

The Longborough connections were many, as it turned out, because Sir John Tomlinson, although present, was unable to sing, having succumbed to a chesty cold in the final rehearsals. The last-minute substitute as The Wanderer was Paul Carey Jones, who will sing the part in the Cotswolds, and soprano Lee Bisset – last year’s Isolde – was Brunnhilde here and will return to the role at Longborough.

Completing the cast was rich-toned mezzo Rozanna Madylus as Erde, the earth goddess whose resistance to the blandishments of Wotan gets the comedy started, as well as allowing her to mention some of the drama’s other characters for the benefit of new listeners. The nicety that The Wanderer is in disguise (an eye-patch, usually) at this point was perhaps not clear, but the fact that the couple have history was certainly made apparent, even to anyone who had missed the brooding/breeding puns earlier.

While Paul Carey Jones – like Negus – was in white tie and tails, Brad Cooper’s Tiggerish Siegfried sported all-black evening dress, and that contrast worked well for the increasingly ill-tempered exchanges between the two. The tenor initially seemed to lack the heft to be heard over the instrumentalists, but that was, it soon became very clear, simply Cooper playing a sensibly long game.

The slow build of his duet with Bissett was quite beautifully handled by the pair, and set-up with great “singing actor” skill by Cooper as he mimed removing the armour from the sleeping warrior he believes to be male, and finding – as Wagner’s score makes pointedly clear – that she has a fine pair of clarinets.

When they eventually give in to The Power of Love, it was all conveyed in coy glances from either side of the platform until Cooper’s Siegfried could hold back no longer and sprinted across the stage for a snog on the final chord.

As well as the raw material of the Siegfried Idyll, Act Three is replete with the motifs and techniques that Wagner employs throughout the Ring, so much of the orchestral music has a very familiar sound, and the reduced orchestration by Matthew King and Peter Longworth preserved all the essentials. The intonation of the horns and brass of the Mahler Players took a while to settle, but the strings were on their best form from the first bar to the last.

Of the soloists, Bisset was simply sensational, producing her top notes with apparent ease and demonstrating a huge dynamic vocabulary as well as masterly breath control. The same might be said of Paul Carey Jones, even if he was understandably the only one referring to a copy of the score.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Lee Bisset by Clive Barda

RSNO / Søndergård

Posted on by

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Reading about last week’s flight trials by aircraft fuelled on reconstituted chip pan oil brought the fateful story of Icarus to mind. Which may partly explain the mild shivers experienced while listening to another Icarus, Russian-American composer Lera Auerbach’s eponymous concert piece, extricated from her First Symphony, and a quick-fire opener to the main part of Saturday’s RSNO Glasgow concert.

Not that Auerbach actually wrote her work with the story of the reckless Greek, who flew too close to the sun, in mind. As she explained in a pre-performance introduction with second oboist Peter Dyke – a smooth-talking natural to the compering role – the whole concept of programmatic music, as prescribed by a composer, is not her preference. “It’s for you to decide how you respond to music that is intrinsically abstract,” she told us. So why call it Icarus? Apparently it’s the first image that came to her after hearing it.

That seems perfectly justified, given that it conveys an unmistakable sense of soaring ever upwards, the elemental ferocity of Icarus’ opening bars morphing swiftly into an ET-like fantasy flight, its instrumentation as sparkly and filmic as any John Williams score, its ultimate destination stratospheric, only to tip towards oblivion. The piercing theremin – the electronic instrument once comically championed by Bill Bailey and played here by Charlie Draper – added a weird, otherworldly sonic dimension.

It was then up to the RSNO’s new principal cellist, Australian-born Pei-Jee Ng, to bring us back to solid ground. He’s the latest of the orchestra’s key players to reveal their talents under the solo spotlight, the vehicle for which in this instance being Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No 1. 

Working with his regular colleagues under music director Thomas Søndergård, proof of their close-working synergy was immediate. What this performance had in spades was unfailing togetherness, Ng’s precision engineering of the opening movement, rather teasingly suppressed in dynamics but articulated crisply and robustly, inspiring instant motorised excitement. 

The second movement, Moderato, transported us to ghostlier territory, a classic example of Shostakovich in darkly austere, almost despairing, mood from which Ng’s cadenza movement emerged like a Shakespearean monologue. He held it back emotionally to some extent, deliberate preparation perhaps for the swashbuckling romp of a Finale. 

Then the product of a very different Russia, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade: music steeped in luscious Romantic melody, endlessly inventive harmonies, technicolor orchestration, and an exoticism fired by evocative subject matter taken from The Arabian Knights Tales.

This was fruitful territory for Søndergård, whose malleable nurturing of his forces unleashed kaleidoscopic bliss. Every new idea came at us with fortified radiance and purpose, in the way of good storytelling. 

The oceanic scene-setting of the opening movement bore a sturdy countenance; The Tale of the Kalendar Prince, spiced with soft eccentricity and characterful detail, was enchanting; The Young Prince and the Young Princess scene oozed exotic charm and seductiveness; the Finale, teeming with turbulent festivity, powerfully climaxed before settling to its somnolent close. Crowning many fine solo contributions was leader Maya Iwabuchi’s exquisite prominence on violin. 

Before all of this, the Glasgow audience had witnessed a bonus performance, a showcase moment for the children of Sistema Scotland’s Big Noise Govanhill celebrating the Glasgow scheme’s 10th anniversary and the RSNO’s partnership role. Together, these diminutive instrumentalists (seated within the RSNO) and their rumbustious choir sang “We Make a Big Noise, written by storyteller and composer Penny Stone and presented in an attractive and buoyant arrangement by Seonaid Aitken. Their beaming faces said it all.

Ken Walton 

SCO / Batsleer

Posted on by

City Halls, Glasgow

The tune in the opening movement of the Bach concerto in this week’s Scottish Chamber Orchestra programme may be one of the more familiar by the composer, but remarkably it was probably also the only instantly recognisable melody in the entire concert – especially when the other composers were Mendelssohn, Schumann and Schubert.

The concert was chiefly a platform for the orchestra’s remarkable chorus and – conducting all bar the Bach – its director Gregory Batsleer. Few amateur choirs could tackle the repertoire, but the SCO Chorus made deceptively light work of it, particularly the Schubert Mass in A Flat that took up the whole of the second half.

It is a glorious showcase of choral singing, but a challenging one. At its heart is a setting of the full Latin text of the Credo, in which the four soloists only come on board for the Amen, and at the centre of that section there is a transition from the crucifixion to a belief in the resurrection that is as musically eloquent as in any mass setting of any era.

The Credo follows a Gloria that is an absolute corker of a choir piece, much more integrated with the singing of the four soloists, and with a fugue that Schubert was apparently persuaded to revise because it was deemed too tricky to perform. Batsleer and the SCO Chorus stuck with the original version.

Those soloists were a story in themselves, because contracted soprano Ruby Hughes became unwell after Thursday’s Queen’s Hall show and Emma Morwood – who is one of the choir’s vocal coaches – stepped in at the last minute, her voice leading off many of the quartet’s contributions. If she pushed her first entry in the opening Kyrie a bit, that was excusable. The blend with mezzo Idunnu Munch, tenor Thomas Walker and bass baritone Callum Thorpe gelled as the work progressed, and the Benedictus trio, with pizzicato cello accompaniment, was another memorable highlight of the score. It was Thorpe who sat that one out, but he has a beautifully precise, resonant instrument which there will be another opportunity to hear in Scottish Opera’s French music concert programme in March.

The choir’s contributions to the first half offered a contrast, opening with Mendelssohn’s hymn-like Verleih uns Frieden, chamber music in scale with the low tones of cello, bassoon, and bass underscoring the singers, and closing with Schumann’s Nachtlied, a masterclass in orchestration to compliment voices, from the horn, brass and timpani of the opening to the clarinet and oboe ornamentation later.

For all its melodic familiarity, the Bach in between was also rare fare, as the C Minor concerto was performed in a 1920 “reconstruction” for two violin soloists, rather than for harpsichord or violin and oboe. Directed by leader Stephanie Gonley, who also took the “oboe” part, leader of the SCO’s second violins Marcus Barcham Stevens was the other soloist. The main interest, however was in the radically different, and very precise, ensemble sound of the 18-piece string orchestra (plus harpsichord) in the outer movements. Bach the precursor was, as ever, also the palette-cleanser.

Keith Bruce

Pictured: Gregory Batsleer

« Older Entries Recent Entries »