Category Archives: Reviews

SCO / Manze

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City Halls, Glasgow

It was hard not to be impressed by the chutzpah of the programming: two of the finest Mozart Piano Concertos, Nos 21 and 24, with one of the most admired soloists of our time, Yeol Eum Son, and between them Anton Webern’s Symphony Op 21, a two-movement expression of Schoenberg’s 12-tone method that is reckoned to be among the most perfect, concise examples of that system.

With the aim of helping an audience that had – obviously – turned up in good numbers to hear the Mozart, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s Principal Guest Conductor Andrew Manze preceded the Symphony with an extended introduction, full of musical illustrations, with the 12 violinists who would later be half the ensemble that played it physically embodying those 12 notes.

It was an explanation of admirable clarity, leavened with humour, but it was probably as long as the ten-minute work itself, and it did not land well with everyone in the Grand Hall. Some perhaps felt patronised, others thought Manze’s closing remarks about Webern’s death at the end of the Second World War in poor taste. An earlier joke referencing the current troubles of the house of Windsor was also bold, given that the SCO recently gave a private concert for its royal patron, King Charles.

Putting the introduction to one side – and it was a mixed blessing at best – the programming conceit worked. There is an enormous journey between the prolific Mozart’s 1785 concerto and Webern’s 1928 Symphony, but its interpolation made more obvious the distance between the up-beat C major concerto and the more complex, darker C minor one Mozart composed just a year later.

Yeul Eum Son was the soloist on the last recording Sir Neville Marriner made, of that earlier work, K467, at the beginning of her ascendancy, and almost ten years later she plays it with an elegance and effervescence few can match. This was a partnership, though, and we had already heard some top playing from the SCO before her first entry.

The articulacy of her playing in the first movement and the powerful left hand she brought into play in the closing cadenza were balanced by a willingness to step back and share the limelight. The understated way she approached the familiar slow movement, after an absolutely on point statement of the opening theme by the first violins, seemed ideal, and the closing Allegro vivace assai was a lively conversation between soloist, conductor and orchestra.

Son’s last appearance with the SCO was in May, when she performed Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto. It has been suggested that the composer modelled his C minor work on Mozart’s, which he is known to have admired, and the finale of No 24 is certainly a long way from the music that closes the earlier concerto, and much nearer the music that Beethoven would write.

The increased volume of a larger orchestra brought no superfluous fireworks from the South Korean pianist. Her first entry was a model of restraint and the phrasing of her playing, long sentences of notes unfolding with their meaning effortlessly conveyed, was always beautiful. Once again, she took a back seat in much of the Larghetto, with the different combinations of wind soloists making as much of an impression, so that the return of the quintet of winds in the finale was especially obvious.

The structural language of the later concerto was also very clear to ears that had been honed by the Webern before the interval. The Symphony’s particular ensemble, with bass and regular clarinet, harp and a pair of horns joining the 20 strings, makes an individual sound to match the meticulous use of the work’s 12-tone row. The ever-adaptable SCO players handled the shift of gear with masterful ease, and the inclusion of the 20th century piece was, musically at least, a fascinating decision.

Keith Bruce

BBC SSO / Glassberg

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City Halls, Glasgow

The fingerprints of the BBC SSO’s chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth were all over this Thursday matinee programme, but the man himself was not there, having called off unwell.

That was very sad for him, not least because a concert in which only the concluding work, Ravel’s La Valse, was at all well known, attracted a good-sized audience for what was a very thoughtful programme, with no fewer than three featured soloists, in which everything spoke eloquently to everything else.

Conductor Ben Glassberg, who stepped up to the podium at a week’s notice, can take a great deal of the credit for that success. He has built his growing reputation in the opera houses of Europe – most recently with Deborah Warner’s staging of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw in Rome – and will be back in the City Halls in March to conduct the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in a concert featuring saxophonist Jess Gillam.

Glassberg’s energetic marshalling of the huge forces required for some of the music was as impressive as his precision direction of the musical haikus of the last completed work by Oliver Knussen, O hototogisu!, for just two dozen musicians.

It paired soprano Claire Booth with the SSO’s principal flute Matthew Higham. Beginning and ending his evocation of the bird of the title (a Japanese cuckoo with an altogether more extensive vocabulary than the European one) by making his notes resonate beneath the lid of a concert grand, Higham’s duet with Booth was a conversational delight. This sort of thing may be meat and drink to her, but there are precious few sopranos who could tackle Knussen’s demands with such relaxed confidence.

The piece closed a first half which had begun with Knussen’s friend, Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, looking to Europe, and specifically Debussy, in his 1967 piece, Green. Ear-grabbing from the start with bold opening statements from the winds, brass and percussion in turn, Glassberg set out his stall in the opening bars and maintained his tight grip on the dynamics of the music throughout.

Maurice Ravel’s three-song cycle Scheherazade followed, setting texts by his contemporary Tristan Klingsor (aka Leon Leclere) that were inspired by Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral suite. That lineage reflected the structure of this concert programme in some ways, but there was also an audible kinship with the Knussen that followed, which also directly referenced the work of Takemitsu.

Booth was on imperious form in the Ravel, which is not often enough heard, moving from an opening role where she was almost part of the wind section (her carefully calibrated singing matched by the measured playing of first horn Chris Gough) to a terrific climax in the long first song when the executioner wields the “great curved sabre of the Orient”.

In an orchestra with many impressive guests in key front-desk positions (viola, trumpet and percussion among them) guest leader David Guerchovitch and first flute Eilidh Gillespie made telling contributions, while the hugely affecting closing song was all Booth, her French diction immaculate.

In what was luxury casting, the first work in the second half featured viola virtuoso Lawrence Power playing a work he has championed, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s On Opened Ground. With a big orchestra onstage once more, and further sonically-fascinating tuned percussion, this was another side of the composer from his operatic triumphs, although it was easy to hear Power as a characterful protagonist and the other instrumentalists as the chorus in the opening exchanges. The soloist produced a huge sound from his instrument, but the colourful orchestration was often just as arresting in the opening movement, Cadenza and Scherzino.

The second part, Interrupted Song and Chaconne, was more contemplative with Glassberg embodying the liquid rhythm to which it returns after an intense gun-shot climax.

That structure in some ways mimicked the closing Ravel. If La valse was originally intended as a tribute to Johann Strauss II, whose bicentenary has lately been marked, it travelled a long way to its very French finished form. With superb playing from the SSO strings, Glassberg shaped the work perfectly, from the basses’ opening pulse to the sparkling complex finish.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Claire Booth

Nicola Benedetti & Friends

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Some years ago I recall hearing violin showman Maxim Vengerov interviewed on BBC Radio 3’s In Tune, and Sean Rafferty asking if he was ever irritated by audiences coming to see him more for his virtuosic encore choices than the concertos orchestras contracted him to play.

Vengerov’s memorable reply was: “Well, you may go to a restaurant because it serves the best tiramisu, but you still have to eat.”

It might look as if Nicola Benedetti’s upcoming new album, Violin Café – and the current concert tour launching it – is in danger of serving a surfeit of desserts and no main courses, but that would be to underestimate the sound-world she and her new associates have created.

Italian accordionist Samuele Telari, Brazilian guitarist Plinio Fernandes, and cellists Maxim Calver (live) and Thomas Carrol (on the recording) may make the sort of informal ensemble the album title suggests, but the bespoke arrangements are mostly true to her classical education.

In fact some of them are the work of Stephen Goss, who was Benedetti’s theory teacher at the Yehudi Menuhin School, others by Paul Campbell, who does the same job for her Foundation’s education work, and the freshest by traditional music talent Brigdhe Chaimbeul.

An international star player of the small pipes, Chaimbeul is currently in the midst of tour dates of her own and free to join Benedetti’s group only for the Ulster Hall date at the start of December. Her place in Glasgow was taken by Fin Moore, who has followed in the footsteps of his father Hamish as one of Scotland’s top pipe-makers, and also taught Chaimbeul as a youngster.

That sense of legacy in the sequence of traditional tunes the quintet played at the start of this concert’s second half ran through the whole evening. Benedetti has talked about reconnecting with her core audience following the absences of the Covid pandemic, her work with the Edinburgh International Festival and her maternity leave, and that has gone hand-in-hand with her revisiting her own musical past and the repertoire she learned as a student of the violin.

So she was joined by a younger alumnus of the Menuhin school, Yumi Fujise, for the Pablo Sarasate duet, Navarra, a favourite test piece for young players to push one another on (which also features on the record). Henryk Wieniawski’s Polonaise de Concert is a similar sort of work, and a Niccolo Paganini sequence, which began with a solo Caprice, before the one Andrew Lloyd Webber and Melvyn Bragg made famous, and then the lovely Cantabile Op 17, was clearly in the same territory.

Significantly, though, there was a balance between the fireworks of the likes of Vittorio Monti’s Csardas and more gentle fare, like Claude Debussy’s Beau Soir, Manuel Ponce’s Estrellita (popularly revived by Benedetti Foundation associate Elena Urioste and her husband Tom Poster with their pandemic Jukebox recordings), and the encore of Paul Campbell’s arrangement of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s Farewell to Stromness.

It was a perfect way to end an evening that saw Benedetti embracing her past but eschewing nostalgia, and it would have been good to hear much more of Fernandes, for example, who came to the fore only at the end. There was a real sense that there could be much more to come from this ensemble.

Keith Bruce

Further dates at Ayr Town Hall (Oct 31), Bridgewater Hall, Manchester (Nov 19), National Concert Hall, Dublin (Nov 23), Royal Albert Hall, London (Nov 27), Lighthouse, Poole (Nov 29), Ulster Hall, Belfast (Dec 1) and The Royal Hall, Harrogate (Dec 4).

Picture by Christopher Bowen

SCO / Ibragimova

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City Halls, Glasgow

ALINA Ibragimova’s schedule over the next few months is remarkable. She is on tour with Ivan Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto before a run of chamber music dates with her piano partner Cedric Tiberghien and then the period instrument Chiaroscuro Quartet she founded, playing a long list of repertoire.

The quartet also has dates in Europe at the end of January, playing different music, before which she performs the Stravinsky Concerto in Montreal with conductor Robin Ticciati. And before that she is in Minnesota, playing with and directing the St Paul Chamber Orchestra.

Alongside a Mozart concerto, there’s a Haydn symphony in those US concerts, but it is a different one from the “Drum Roll”, No 103, that featured in the programme she directed from the violin with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra last week. The other work in her SCO programme, Karl Hartmann’s hugely challenging Concerto funebre, has just one further scheduled performance, in Leipzig in the middle of November.

That massive workload does not appear to stop Ibagrimova being very much an ensemble player, but finding a third work to complete the programme for her three Scottish dates presented the SCO with a challenge to its usually deft concert-compilation skills.

Although a comparison of the conduct of Hartmann and Richard Strauss during the Second World War made for an interesting programme note, Strauss’s early Suite in B-Flat major for winds, Op 4, was perhaps an odd way to start. The composer won praise, and a job, for his conducting of the premiere of the work, but the SCO’s wind soloists needed no direction with the orchestra’s top class principals – specifically Andre Cebrian and Maximiliano Martin – cueing their colleagues when required.

Strauss may have been inspired by a Mozartian model, but his quartet of horns and contrabassoon produced a sonorous underscore that was a long way from Mozart, prefiguring the composer’s own orchestral tone poems. In fact the 13 players often sounded like a much larger group, while the solo playing, and especially the oboe of Miriam Pastor, was exquisite.

Much stage shifting, and mental reset, was required for the Hartmann, scored for strings and virtuoso violin soloist and a tough piece for players and listener. Composed in 1939 (although revised twenty years later), it is full of grim foreboding of the calamity about to unfold in Europe, even if the funereal hymn with which it closes seems to embrace glimpses of light.

There was not a lot of direction required of Ibragimova here either, with the SCO strings eloquently responsive to her expressive, robust playing with muscular performances of their own. The ensemble is a very creative partner in the work’s conversation, regardless of the technical range required of the soloist, in what is a powerful, if mostly unremittingly dark, work.

The musical fun of the Haydn symphony was a welcome contrast after the interval, with Ibragimova in the concert-master’s chair, giving a beautiful performance of the cadenza-like solo in the slow movement. Other notable contributions came from the first oboe once again, and, of course, timpanist Louise Lewis Goodwin with those crisp drum rolls that give the work its nickname.

Keith Bruce

Scottish Opera: La boheme

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Theatre Royal, Glasgow

ALTHOUGH both Madama Butterfly and La boheme are essentially intimate personal tragedies, there is little doubt that Puccini intended wider resonance than their domestic settings. Both have proved perennially popular, but while the former has invited epic reinvention on the opera stage as well as in Boublil and Schonberg’s Miss Saigon (and more recently David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly), the latter, notwithstanding the musical RENT, has tended to be a staple of smaller-scale productions.

Happily, the Canadian direction and design team of Andre Barbe and Renaud Doucet gave the work a proper full-fat production for Scottish Opera in 2017 and this revival seems even sharper. It is framed by the slightly distracting conceit of being in the imagination of a present-day tourist to Paris, but that device undoubtedly works to the ambitions of universality that the production and the composer share.

The bulk of the action takes place in the “Jazz Age” of the 1920s, and the parallels between the lives of the haves and have-nots then and that gap a century later scarcely need underlining. In the world of these characters, the source of no-one’s money is a mystery, old sport.

The long contemporary scene grafted on to the front of Puccini’s score segued, with pitch-perfect precision, from a recording into a live performance of the overture, and it was immediately apparent that the orchestra, under the baton of Scottish Opera’s music director Stuart Stratford was on board for the fully-realised production. The rich, sumptuous sound from the pit was perfectly balanced by the Onstage Banda, with Puccini’s specific scoring further enhanced by a solo interlude from accordionist Djordje Gajic before Act IV.

The transition that made the production, however, came between the first two acts, when the chilly apartment of the four artists was swept away by a streetscape incorporating much more than Café Momus, with puppets, fairground rides and an art gallery all gloriously populated by an immaculately-drilled chorus of adults and children.

The stage craft on display there is emblematic of the production, superbly lit by the directorial partnership’s regular designer Guy Simard, where everyone knows exactly where they have to be at every moment.

That standard of excellence ran through the cast of principals, with Hye-Youn Lee returning as Mimi and giving a performance as moving as it is beautifully sung. Guatemalan tenor Mario Chang made a memorable company debut as Rodolfo, and the ensemble strength included a very carefully characterised Marcello from Roland Wood and Rhian Lois giving her Musetta an equally thoughtful portrayal. One of the current cohort of Scottish Opera Emerging Artists, Edward Jowle added another feather to his cap as the musician, Schaunard.

Keith Bruce

Touring to His Majesty’s, Aberdeen (Oct 30, Nov 1); Eden Court, Inverness (Nov 6 & 8); Festival Theatre, Edinburgh (Nov 14, 16, 18, 20 & 22)

Picture of Rhian Lois as Musetta by Mihaela Bodlovic

RSNO / Niemann / Philbert

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

The orchestral backroom boys, so to speak, got a prominent showing with the RSNO this weekend. Mainly the percussion, but also – in Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, the programme finale – the wider rearguard ranks of woodwind and brass. That all seemed fortuitously appropriate especially as the evening’s concerto slot, a brand new timpani showpiece by Matthew Rooke – featuring RSNO principal Paul Philbert as soloist and making his last RSNO appearance before taking up a new post in Canada – was the centrepiece. 

It was anyone’s guess how Rooke, a charismatic Oxford-born composer of Scottish and Gabonese descent whose thoughts and music constantly reflect those divergent inborn influences, would approach such a rare challenge. There are timpani concertos out there – a thunderous, rhythmically-charged and visibly entertaining one for two timpanists by Philip Glass for one. Equally there are clues to the instrument’s solo potential in such bombastic outbursts as feature in symphonies by the likes of Berlioz and Nielsen. To some extent this was an extension of the latter, Rooke opting to position his soloist on a raised platform rear-stage, but visibly attached to his exotically-equipped percussion colleagues. Philbert, besides his undoubted technical skill, is nonetheless a dynamic showman, so all eyes and ears were fixed on him for the work’s Glasgow unveiling. 

The three-movement piece, called Tamboo-Bamboo (a multi-pitched Afro-Caribbean instrument borne out of slavery’s censorial extremes), proved to be a riot of celebration and atmosphere, its opening movement driven by an almost virulent blues energy, tinged with melancholy but fired by powerful rhythmic resilience. Already the restlessness of Rooke’s musical language felt all-consuming, an eclectic menagerie touching on everything from jazz to classical rock, at its height making fleeting feisty allusions to the giddiest extremes of John Barry’s 007 soundtracks. 

Philbert’s performance – which began with simple hand claps – was dizzying to watch, whether requiring him to rotate 360 degrees to cover speedy logistics, or sourcing infinitesimal sound effects such as the surreal zoological sound world of the central Nocturne. The final Masquerade went full carnival, wild and loose-limbed, only for its intoxicating climax to be tamed by introspective reflection. 

David Niemann’s alert direction was all the more remarkable for the fact he was replacing an indisposed Anthony Parnther – we were told the German conductor had interrupted his honeymoon to be in Scotland. But the real focus of this particular performance was on the indomitable Philbert, whose show-stopping execution proved a thoroughly memorable farewell to a highly-visible and distinguished seven years tenure with the RSNO.

Panufnik’s Third Symphony, Sinfonia Sacra, written in 1964 by the exiled Polish composer to commemorate a millennium of Christianity in his native country, summoned up its own distinctive champions from within the orchestra, the initial three Visions effecting a profound sense of religious theatre. 

From the first of these – a clarion-like flourish featuring four trumpeters spread across the choir gallery – the atmosphere switched dramatically to a luscious blanket of strings introducing the mystical Vision II, the third announced by a barrage of percussion. Niemann extracted animated precision from the orchestra, especially in the more extended final Hymn where Panufnik’s musical inspiration – the ancient Polish anthem Bogurodzica – surfaced in full amid the gathering conflict and resolution.  

While Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the Eroica, might have seemed in comparison like a reassuring old friend, Niemann had other plans. As regular Eroicas go, this one was of the brisk variety, the opening hurtling off the starting blocks like a hungry whippet. But it was also super-clean and full of unexpected surprises, Niemann directing us to elements within the score that often go unnoticed, especially from the woodwind. If some of it smacked of interpretational experimentation, it was also curiously exciting. Above all, and despite some evenness across the upper string sections, Niemann’s palpable motivation bore exhilarating results.

Ken Walton

BBC SSO / Morlot / Leonskaja

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City Halls, Glasgow

Grasping persuasively the conflict of mood and momentum at the start of Sibelius’ challenging Second Symphony is one thing; sustaining that formidable, ambiguous tread through to the bitter end is another. In this performance by the BBC SSO under Ludovic Morlot – returning to the orchestra in his own right after a highly impressive stand-in appearance two seasons ago – what initially promised gold eventually delivered bronze.

In other words, this was a perfectly worthy performance, if not a record-breaking triumph. It got off to a gripping start, the stop-start multiplicity of Sibelius’ opening themes like dramatic fragmentations, yet galvanised by an overarching vision of continuity, grizzly tensions that lingered through the Allegretto’s silences and gear changes, tempi that constantly refreshed the emotional thrust. 

Such qualities again played their part in the ensuing Andante, which felt, as it should, like the symphony’s mindful, but still restive, centrepiece. The spareness of the initially lonesome walking basses cast an immediate aura of introspection, Morlot’s unlaboured pacing avoiding any necessity for knee-jerk tempo shifts later on, letting the heightening inner tussles speak for themselves. The flow of the final movements proved less heated, Morlot’s grip faltering at times, lessening the euphoric arrival and light-giving impact of the final heroic theme.

In all of this, too, was an occasional sense of undernourished, sometimes misjudged, texturing, most noticeably from the woodwind. Where was the abrasive edge that brings Siblelius’ writing so vividly to life, a belligerence so in keeping with the composer’s character? It rarely surfaced in a performance that almost, but didn’t quite, lead the field.

The first half was all Mozart: a relative novelty in the case of five entr’actes composed in the 1770s for Tobias Philipp von Gebler’s heroic play Thamos, King of Egypt; and one of Mozart’s best-known Piano Concertos – No 24 in C minor – with the redoubtable Elisabeth Leonskaja as soloist.

For all that the incidental music bore a certain fascination – its three call-to-attention chords boldly pre-echoing The Magic Flute, and the “theatre” implicit in Mozart’s writing smacking of operatic prototype – there was an overriding sense of a missing dimension. Nor was the performance as tight and together as might have captured more convincingly its stormy thrills and spills.

If such inconsistencies spread to the concerto – some glaringly uncoordinated attacks sadly diminishing its overall preciseness – there was much in Leonskaja’s performance that earned her the adulation her admirers visibly hold. 

She is her own woman, issuing a style of Mozart playing that eschews the intellectualism of, say, the late Alfred Brendel, the sweet lyrical precision of Mitsuko Uchida, or the golden tone-production of a Steven Osborne or Paul Lewis. Her playing offered a sort of resigned simplicity, a performance given to sudden flights of lightning virtuosity (Brahms’ high-calorie cadenza for one) against moments of seemingly detached calm. 

While these were instances to savour, there were equally ones that felt as if the lights had been dimmed and the heat went off, as in Leonskaja’s tendency not always to shape or caress the lyrical line, or simply to mishit notes. Maybe that’s what led to the periodic nervousness emanating from Morlot and the orchestra.

That aside, Leonskaja’s style remains a matter of taste, and a sizeable audience for Thursday’s live BBC Radio 3 broadcast clearly enjoyed it. She responded with smiling gratitude and, as an encore, the charmed innocence of the Andante from Mozart’s Piano Sonata in C, K545.

Ken Walton

This concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 beyond which it is available for 30 days on BBC Sounds

SCO & SCO Chorus / Emelyanychev

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City Halls, Glasgow

The clue was in the title. The odds of an SCO programme labelled Gloria! being anything less than euphoric and uplifting were slim. Maxim Emelyanychev and his band, with their in-house SCO Chorus never failed to deliver, but we shouldn’t leave Poulenc off the credits, whose mischievously seductive music dominated the longer first half.

Across the entire programme there were, in fact, two Glorias composed centuries apart by Poulenc and Vivaldi respectively, but as fascinating for their similarities as their fundamental differences. Both thrived on the flawless precision of the SCO Chorus, the stylistic adaptability of the SCO, a thrilling assortment of vocal soloists and the singularly-minded dynamism of conductor Maxim Emelyanychev. 

To whet the appetite, however, Emelyanychev had turned to a rarer Poulenc, the 1940s post-war Sinfonietta he wrote for the BBC celebrating the first anniversary of the erstwhile Third Programme. Bang and we are off: a fearsome explosion of Stravinsky-infused joy immediately capturing the mood and establishing a journey through which Poulenc frequently tempers the exuberance with breezy wit, elegiac schmalz, and a specific way with melody that tugs on the heartstrings. 

Emelyanychev grasped the seething ambiguity of the music, its pungent similarities at times to the  earlier Organ Concerto, the breezy joie de vivre of the second movement Scherzo, the spectral delicacy of the Andante cantabile, and the undisguised echoes of Tchaikovsky, even Dvorak, surfacing occasionally above the transient hubbub of a truly sparkling score. He got the very best from a visibly energised SCO.

It offered the ideal preparation for the same composer’s Gloria, the perfection of the ensuing performance – with its renewed allegiance to Stravinsky, this time owing much to A Symphony of Psalms – critical to its gripping success. Again, there was electrifying playing from the orchestra, at times screamingly brutal, at others liquid and ephemeral. The Chorus – if slightly overwhelmed at the very start by the band – quickly found its feet in a performance ranging from idyllic reverence to declamatory exultation, yet always within the bounds of crystalline homogeneity. 

Soprano soloist Anna Dennis was breathtaking, picking notes seemingly from nowhere with pinpoint accuracy in the Domine Deus, casting an otherworldly spell over the gorgeous Agnus Dei.

The remarkable thing about the Vivaldi performance was the complete transition of the players and singers to authentic Baroque-style performance, Emelyanychev now directing from the harpsichord. The same precision applied, but now with a silver purity (vibrato-less strings, ravishingly pure oboe, agile single trumpet, with organ and theorbo completing the continuo group) and stylish persona. 

It introduced further soloists – Dennis joined by Glasgow-born soprano Rachel Redmond for a spritely duelling account of Laudamus te, countertenor Alberto Miguélez Rauco bringing an alluringly fresh dimension to the line-up. Oboist José Masmano Villar took the limelight in the Domine Deus, Rex coelestis, spinning out the solo obligato with increasingly rapt ornamentation.

The SCO Chorus was again a distinguished, life-giving presence, appropriately so in a week that welcomed the news of chorus master Gregory Batsleer’s decision to extend his SCO contract till August 2028. Definitely something to sing about!

Ken Walton 

Scottish Opera: Opera Highlights

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Scottish Opera: Opera Highlights

Gartmore Village Hall

With its community-run pub, The Black Bull, next door, Gartmore Village Hall in the Trossachs has the atmosphere of some of the further-flung venues that Scottish Opera’s small scale touring operation reaches, like the early November dates in Lochinver and Glenuig on this current outing.

It beggars belief that Kenneth MacLeod’s late-20th century office set, complete with watercooler and Mac Classic computers, fits into the small van that has traditionally been used for these excursions, and its quality of build and attention to detail speaks of the ambition of this iteration of the project once known as Opera-Go-Round.

No longer a sequence of party pieces with a few rarities to add spice, Opera Highlights has become a directed show (Emma Doherty this time out) that links extended excerpts from three operas and all of a fourth (Barber’s A Hand of Bridge) in an invented scenario – a farewell bash in the retro-office during which all manner of interpersonal relationships come to light.

It’s fun – if never quite funny enough as yet – but not the main point of the exercise, which is to give four young singers and a hard-working repetiteur at the piano (Meghan Rhoades, one of three of the current cohort of Scottish Opera Emerging Artists involved) the opportunity to strut their stuff, and to fly the national company’s flag outside of Scotland’s big cities.

The mission of taking proper singing to Crail and Nairn and Castle Douglas and Castlebay is admirably accomplished. Baritone James Geidt opens proceedings as Tonio from Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci and later takes the role of Silvio, while tenor Luvo Maranti plays cuckolded Canio and gets the big aria that closes the first half.

Soprano Ceferina Penny, making her company debut, comes storming out the blocks as Gounod’s Juliette – and the departing colleague in the workplace scenario, which is established with Maranti as Romeo and mezzo Chloe Harris doubling as his page Stephano and her nurse, Gertrude.

As everything is sung in good English translations (Bill Bankes-Jones, Amanda Holden and David Pountney among the wordsmiths), the office setting is believably maintained, with the Barber an interlude at the party that is inventively echoed in the sequence of selections from Strauss’s Die Fledermaus that brings the whole show to a suitably champagne-fuelled climax.

The quartet really comes into its own as a group then, and the most accomplished performer, from the moment she swaps her trainers for work shoes under the office computer-desk at the start to her drink-fuelled Chacun a son gout, is Harris. She also has the best of the evening’s outliers in the Letter scene from Massenet’s Werther, duetting with Penny, and an aria from Handel’s Alcina.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Sally Jubb

Full tour details scottishopera.org.uk

SCO / Emelyanychev & RSNO / Sondergard

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh / Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra entitled the opening of its new season From Darkness to Light and that idea was just as audible in the concerts that began the seasons of both the BBC SSO and the RSNO.

At Glasgow City Halls the previous week, it was undoubtedly behind the celebratory strings of Ryan Wigglesworth’s tribute to the SSO’s former leader Laura Samuel, and applied just as well to the trajectory of Schumann’s Violin Concerto, as performed by Daniel Lozakovich.

In the SCO programme it clearly worked for both the opening and closing works. The famous fate motif that opens Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was predictably not laboured by Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev in a pacy and detailed interpretation of the work, following on from a much-lauded BBC Proms performance. It was in the transition from the Scherzo to the finale that the sense of emerging into brightness was most obvious, but this was a far-from-simplistic reading of the symphony with refreshing changes of power and tone in the slow movement as well as in the unfolding of its conclusion.

The concert had begun with Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen in a compact and intense version that was truly “chamber” music, with some excellent solo playing from the string front desks and carefully controlled ensemble that always kept a little in reserve. It was a performance that is well worth listening out for when the BBC recording is broadcast.

So too, it hardly needs saying, is the orchestra’s playing of Veni, Veni Emmanuel with soloist Colin Currie, even if the trajectory of the piece arguably defies the Darkness-to-Light equation. Currie must have given a fair proportion of the remarkable number of performances MacMillan’s early percussion concerto has enjoyed since the SCO premiered it with Evelyn Glennie at the 1992 Proms.

It is still one of the most thrilling works in the composer’s now extensive catalogue, and it was good to be reminded that the brasher music is more than balanced with much gentler, melodic, and equally virtuosic, music. The closing bars, when the soloist moved to tubular bells at the back of the stage and the whole orchestra adding tinkling percussion was movingly evocative of the Ascension, so perhaps the SCO’s concert title did work here as well.

‘From darkness to light’ is only one interpretation of the complexity of Mahler’s Symphony No.7, the major work of the RSNO’s season-opener as Music Director Thomas Sondergard continued his commitment to a full cycle of the composer’s symphonies. It’s a valid one, nonetheless, and the conductor certainly suggested as much in his dynamic marshalling of the large orchestra through its long structure. The two Nachtmusik movements emerged especially well, the horn calls in the former, and the sequence of solos – violin, guitar, mandolin and oboe among them – in the latter beautifully calibrated.

There is much operatic about the work’s conclusion, and Sondergard was in his element with the theatrical changes of pace leading up to the dramatic bells that also punctuate this work’s ending.

In a great run of concert openers, the RSNO began its season with Oliver Knussen’s terrific miniature, Flourish with Fireworks, which has long transcended its specific commission by the LSO at the end of the 1980s to become an emblem of the composer’s infectious enthusiasm.

The concerto that followed was Ravel’s in G Major with Francesco Piemontesi the perfect partnership soloist, embracing his dialogues with orchestra members and as eloquent in the lush Romanticism of the central Adagio as in the more 20th century jazzy rhythms of the contrasting outer movements.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Martin Shields

Cumnock Tryst: Roderick Williams/Carducci Quartet

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Trinity Church, Cumnock

In Crail Church during the East Neuk Festival earlier this year, young baritone James Newby gave a remarkable performance of Schubert’s first major song cycle Die schone Mullerin which emphasised the disturbed existential angst of the protagonist.

Introducing his own radical revision of the work, Roderick Williams confessed to wishing he had tackled it as a younger man, and his very different reading gave us not the live trauma of a jilted lover falling apart but the regretful tone of an older man looking back on troubled times.

The boldness in Williams’ recital was in his own arrangement of the instrumental accompaniment for string quartet. The piano part is so integral to Schubert’s vision – and its playing (by Joseph Middleton in the case of Newby’s concert) key to its success – that the absence of it in the familiar opener, Das Wandern, could not help but jar.

The softer edge to the music, even if cellist Emma Denton in particular often added percussive pizzicato, undoubtedly altered the experience, but equally it suited Williams’ more wistful tone – or perhaps his approach deliberately matched his arrangement.

Whatever, it was a new way to listen to a familiar piece and as the ear attuned, one that revealed much about it. With the piano part mostly covered by the other players, quartet leader Matthew Denton sometimes added an extra obligato line – the usually unheard voice of the Fair Maid of the Mill herself. There was more of a sense of the landscape in which the songs are set, rather than simply the viewpoint of the smitten singer.

By the time we arrived at Morning Greeting, the next song that really enjoys a stand-alone life, the lush string arrangement was assuredly a positive advantage and the sequence that song starts was a highlight of the whole performance.

From then on, Williams added more drama and spice to his delivery, which was all to the good. The self-deception of Mein!, envy of Der Jager, and cynical side-eye of Die liebe Farbe brought changes of timbre in his vocal delivery, although the relaxed delivery of the German verse and technical precision across his entire range never faltered.

The final song, Des Baches Wiegenlied, was beautifully recast by the quartet, its rocking rhythm especially good in the hands of the strings. It also restored the sense that we had been given a glimpse into past grief that had proved eminently survivable.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Stuart Armitt

Cumnock Tryst Chorus/BBC SSO | NYOS Camerata

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Barony Hall, Cumnock | Cumnock Town Hall

One of the truly local successes of James MacMillan’s Cumnock Tryst festival has been its very own Festival Chorus. Populated by singers from the wider Ayrshire diaspora – including much of the Tryst management and MacMillan himself on Saturday – it has played an integral part in defining the home-grown element of the event, not least its willingness to address challenging contemporary repertoire over the years.

The beauty of American composer Taylor Scott Davis’ Magnificat, however, of which this was the Scottish premiere, is the extent to which this half-hour-long work lends itself to such enthusiastic amateur outfits. Written to a predominantly singable formula – the soft-centred comfort blanket of Rutter-like lyricism and golden harmonies never far away – and illuminated by a filmic orchestral glow courtesy here of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, this left ample freedom for conductor Eamonn Dougan to elicit the unpretentious expressiveness behind the notes. For the listener, it was a sincere and comforting ride. 

If eclecticism was in full view, so was the Texan-based composer’s craftsmanship in knitting together a stream of recognisable influences. Where the energised sparkle of the opening spoke freely of John Adams, such was the sweep of ongoing references – fleeting echoes of so many Hollywood soundtracks – that the magpie-like mind of John Williams seemed a permanent resonance.

Scott Davis, the Texan-based composer, was himself in Cumnock to witness the performance, members of his Texan choir also making the trip to swell the vocal masses. Thus the red-ripe confidence greeting the opening Magnificat anima mea, the silken underpinning of ravishing solos by soprano (and former Scottish Opera Emerging Artist) Catriona Hewitson, the subdued acquiescence of the Et misericordia, and the ultimate euphoria of the Gloria.

This wasn’t a long concert – most of the Cumnock programmes come in at around an hour apiece – but it was a fulfilling one, opening with a deliciously light-fingered, joyously articulated account by SSO players of Dvorak’s Serenade for Wind Instruments (the added cello and double bass essential, but so like cuckoos in the nest) under MacMillan’s direction. A brief a cappella choral performance of MacMillan’s own wholesome six-part communion motet Benedicimus Deum caeli (from the Strathclyde Motets) followed, deftly conducted by chorus director Andrew McTaggart.

All of this took place in the Barony Hall, the central auditorium within Cumnock’s Robert Burns Academy, which worked really well acoustically, save for a vigorous air-conditioning system that gave intermittent life to a rack of tubular bells at points when they weren’t prescribed.

NYOS Camerata conducted by Matthew Coorey

Earlier, Saturday’s afternoon concert was in a rather chilly Cumnock Town Hall, so thankfully we had an hours’ worth of Richard Strauss to warm the cockles and counter the remnants of Storm Amy outside. This featured the National Youth Orchestras of Scotland Camerata, a kind of elite squad at the apex of the NYOS family, performing ex-Berlin Philharmonic oboist Nigel Shore’s classy wind ensemble distillation of Strauss’ opera Der Rosenkavalier under the baton of British-based Australian conductor Matthew Coorey.

Word is that some last-minute call-offs had required emergency changes to the ensemble line-up, which may have accounted for the unevenness, even some nervousness, in the score’s adrenalin-fuelled opening flourish and other key tutti points. Yet there were plentiful moments where character and skill took hold, such as those deliciously flighty figurations from the flutes, or the oboe’s plaintive lyrical poignance. 

Coorey’s taut direction brought alertness and cohesion to a monumental task. Yes, there were instances that tested the young musicians, but there was seldom a moment where Strauss’ calorific masterpiece didn’t feel like a meal you simply didn’t want to end.

Ken Walton

[Photo credit: Stuart Armitt]

Cumnock Tryst Ensemble

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Cumnock Old Church

In the hours running up to the opening concert of this year’s Cumnock Tryst festival, footage of East Ayrshire’s head of education Linda McAuley-Griffiths ridiculing the value of music’s place in the school curriculum was running rampage on social media. “I’m no really seeing the point of a wean knocking seven bells out of a glockenspiel,” was her careless remark caught on camera at a September council meeting. She has since apologised and said her words were taken out of context.

It was hard to ignore the crassness of McAuley-Griffiths’ comments as this year’s festival opening concert got under way. It featured the Cumnock Tryst Ensemble, a flexible instrumental collective established last year as a high-calibre performance group populated by some of Scotland’s most prominent musicians. Equally, though, it functions as a resident resource for the educational and community projects spearheaded by Tryst founder and globally famous composer Sir James McMillan, himself a product of an East Ayrshire schooling. 

This was the Ensemble’s own showcase, an assorted combo of flute and strings, and a programme of mainly contemporary works that utilised various permutations within. At this concert’s heart, though, was the shadow of founder-cellist Christian Elliott, who died earlier this year and the age of 41, and whose memory was central to a programme tinged with personal reflection and homage. 

Individually, the performances were often touching, at times scintillating. As an opener, Duncan Strachan’s unaccompanied cello struck a neat conversation between the ecstatic freneticism and meditative acceptance underpinning MacMillan’s Easter-inspired And he rose. Violist Felix Tanner completed the brief MacMillan solo coupling with In memoriam, written three years ago to mark the passing of Julliard String Quartet violist Roger Tapping, its moments of despair challenged by an intense virtuosity.

With Judith Weir’s St Agnes, a simple elegy for viola and cello, the air of contemplation prevailed, yet its intriguing play between playing styles – bowed legato tropes punctuated by pizzicato flourishes – felt like a gathering release en route to the heightened exchanges of Weir’s The Bagpiper’s String Trio, quirkily excitable but with ghostly undertones. Violinist Gordon Bragg made his first appearance here, bringing a top-end gloss to the ensemble. 

The third brisk movement from Heitor Villa-Lobos’ Assobio a Jato (Jet Whistle) introduced flautist Ruth Morley, her duo performance with Strachan electrically-charged in its inexorable journey to a soaring catharsis, only then to be calmed by Lisa Robertson’s enchanting Dlùthas for solo violin, inspired by the composer’s own wistful improvisation in Midlothian’s Rosslyn Chapel – though possibly also by Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending. Morley re-took the stage for her own quietly animated Whisper.

What followed verged weirdly on the burlesque, the RSNO’s eccentric principal double bass Nikita Naumov playing for laughs as he introduced Julius Goltermann’s Souvenirs de Bellini – a predictably lugubrious set of difficult variations for cello and bass, even more so in what seemed like a touch-and-go performance at times. Nor, despite the obvious virtuosity on display, was Naumov’s solo performance of Emil Tabakov’s Motivy as defined is it might have been, some moments leaning dangerously towards heavy metal.

What had been missing thus far in the programme was a piece involving the full ensemble, a factor remedied in the closing performance of New Cumnock-born Jay Capperauld’s superbly crafted Schiehallion!. Commissioned in 2023 by King Charles for the Honours of Scotland ceremony in Edinburgh, and based on Scottish tunes selected by the monarch, Capperauld’s acute sense of characterisation, succinct originality and wit is laid bare. Harmonic ingenuity, imaginative texturing, and the sheer joy expressed in this sparkling music was met by a spirit of delivery to match.

It also pointed retrospectively to a weakness in the design and presentation of this programme. Up to a point, it had felt a bit like a routine school concert – one act off, one act on, too much unstructured chat between items, and maybe let’s get the sad stuff out of the way first. Could the church space have been more creatively purposed, Robertson’s lovely Dlùthas, for instance performed from one of the empty balconies? More imaginative production and choreography would have made all the difference.

Ken Walton

(Photo: Stuart Armitt) 

BBCSSO / Wigglesworth

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City Halls, Glasgow

At this year’s Edinburgh Festival, Head of Music Nik Zekulin was making no secret of his exasperation with the inability of audiences to switch off their mobile devices for the duration of a concert, Ryan Wang’s Chopin recital at the Queen’s Hall being only the most spectacularly disrupted.

Before the opening concert of the BBC SSO’s 90th anniversary season, R3 presenter Gillian Moore made the usual plea for audience members to ensure their phones were silenced for the live broadcast, but Chief Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth was forced to halt the last movement of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No 3 and recap a few bars when a ringtone persisted beyond endurance.

It was, perhaps, small consolation, but the efficiency with which the interruption was dealt  spoke eloquently of the focus of players and conductor on the music. The impression that remains is of a sparkling and detailed account of the work with Wigglesworth steering its many changes of tone and direction with great style.

Without being quite as flamboyant, the symphony shares a lot of DNA with the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini that preceded it, the starring role of the piano instead shared across the orchestra. The SSO, with six guests in key positions, including leader Clio Gould, was full-sized for the first time in the evening and the big percussion section, five horns and brass all made their presence felt in the climax of a superb season-opening programme.

It had begun with the Scottish premiere of Wigglesworth’s for Laura, after Bach, his musical memorial to the orchestra’s former leader Laura Samuel, who died at the end of 2024. First unveiled at the end of July in the Royal Albert Hall, it is a work for string orchestra that the composer has spun from the Gigue in Bach’s Partita No 3, which Samuel recorded during her final illness. It is a captivating tribute, more celebratory than elegiac and should find a lasting place in the repertoire for its fascinating way with the source material.

The concert’s guest soloist was young violinist Daniel Lozakovich whom the orchestra first met in South Korea during its Proms tour there at the end of last year. He followed Schumann’s Violin Concerto with an encore of the Sarabande from Bach’s Partita No 2 in what was a particularly apt and lovely way to end the first half.

That addition spoke of Lozakovich’s keen musical intelligence, which had already been very evident from his performance of the concerto. Few violinists of his age and experience know this work as well as he clearly does and he and Wigglesworth shaped this performance to make the best case for it. The balance between soloist and orchestra was as perfect as one might hope, the slow movement a narrative of beguiling beauty from its opening dialogue with first cello Rudi De Groote, and the remarkably upbeat finale defying its tricky reputation.

Keith Bruce

Lammermuir: Van Baerle | Ridout

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Dunbar Parish Church | Crichton Collegiate Church

The first thing to note about the Van Baerle Trio is that they share the honours. Whether in the blissful ease of late Haydn, the seismic profundity of mature Brahms, the poignant tragedy of a young Lili Boulanger or the exotic Basque-flavourings of Ravel, this splendid Dutch threesome evoked generosity, luminosity and shared conviction in every one of Sunday afternoon’s enthralling performances.

First, however, we had to deal with the prospect of the government’s emergency alert system test, Festival director James Waters holding the start back a few minutes to avoid a clash between Haydn and a screaming chorus of mobile phones. A wise decision, given the random reality of the latter. 

After that momentary reminder of how dangerously unstable the world currently is, Haydn’s Piano Trio No 30 in E flat returned us instantly to a more halcyon frame of mind. Not for nothing did the composer describe his trios as sonatas for keyboard with violin and cello accompaniment, a quality self-defined by pianist Hannes Minaar’s liquid performance, his dominance beautifully tempered so as not to overstate, the refined and expressive support of violinist Maria Milstein and cellist Gideon den Herder respectful but never shy in making its mark. It was forever a joyous journey that ended in the disarming depth, courtly elegance, and ultimately unbridled vivacity of the Finale.

If the sudden grandiosity of Brahms’ C minor Piano Trio, Op 101, thrust us into a very different world, one reeling from tumultuous outbursts of passion and richly-flavoured textures, there was still a deep-seated eloquence in these musicians’ delivery. Even in the two fast opening movements – the first momentously discursive, the second energetically succinct – the interplay was incisively neat, profound but never thick-set. The Andante grazioso found a solid piano presence deliciously offset by liquid exchanges between the strings, paving the way for Finale’s unquenchable, optimistic volatility.

The focus turned to France for a second half that opened with two moving works by Lili Boulanger – the equally talented younger sister of composer Nadia – who died from tuberculosis in her mid-twenties. D’un soir triste and D’un matin de printemps were composed towards the end of her life, and in them you sense an ambivalence of hope and despair. This Van Baerle performance captured beautifully their indebtedness to Debussy – soft-scented harmonies and supple melodic shaping – but also those delicate flecks of dissonance that were the composer’s distinctive hallmark. 

No mistaking the vibrant personality of Ravel that shines through his Piano Trio in A minor, which served as a sparkling conclusion to the ensemble’s official programme. Beyond the mind-blowing delicacy of the opening bars and fluid rhythmic argument that followed, the Spanish-fuelled Pantoum presented a sunburst moment before the calm, plaintive intricacies of the Passacaille. The final Animé, surging and incandescent, was breathtaking. A tender Haydn encore brought us back to earth.

Timothy Ridout performed solo at Crichton

Equally impressive, earlier on Sunday, British violist Timothy Ridout performed solo in the remarkable acoustics of Crichton Collegiate Church, a venue that transported this Lammermuir audience momentarily out of East Lothian and into Midlothian. It was a journey well made, Ridout’s performances outstanding for their effortless virtuosity and opulent musicianship.

The main diet of works were by German Baroque contemporaries Telemann and Bach, in both cases viola versions of their respective canons for solo violin/cello. If Telemann’s Fantasies without Bass are less well-known than Bach’s Sonatas and Suites, they are no less challenging and fulfilling. Ridout’s exceptional facility and robust tonal mastery elicited a characterful charm from the Telemann pieces, and from the Bach – whether negotiating the complexities of a fugue or the suavity of a dance – a powerfully flexible composure. 

Especially interesting, though, was his opener, in manus tuas, by American Pulitzer-prize winning composer Caroline Shaw, conceived like a ghostly snapshot of the Tallis motet it is based on. Magically evocative in its use of the human voice – Ridout adding the odd sung note to a chord like some divine intervention – it’s a piece that sat perfectly in this ecclesiastical setting, its spiritual nuances all the more poignant as a result.

Ken Walton

The Lammermuir Festival runs till Mon 15 Sep. Full information at www.lammermuirfestival.co.uk

Lammermuir: I Fagiolini

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St Mary’s Church, Haddington

Around twenty years ago, I Fagiolini – Robert Hollingworth’s quirky high-calibre vocal ensemble –  presented Monteverdi madrigals to a puzzled Glasgow audience: puzzled because the setting in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall restaurant was literally gastronomic and, unbeknown to us, the singers were interspersed like fifth columnists among the diners, erupting mid-course into songs and actions of spurned love or unfettered passion. We sank our coffees with a renewed insight into Monteverdi.

Fast forward two decades, and over last weekend the same group, with the same quasi-theatrical flair plus period instrumental guests, reawakened such memories through two idiosyncratic evening performances of Purcell and Monteverdi. Both took place in the historic spacious sanctuary that is Haddington’s St Mary’s Church, which served to accommodate an intriguingly contextualised Dido and Aeneas (Purcell’s uncompleted opera prefaced by other miscellaneous Purcellian titbits) on Saturday; then, on Sunday, Hollingworth’s highly-personalised (neatly and entertainingly argued) take on Monteverdi’s monumental Vespers, his virtuosic collection of liturgical engine parts published in 1610.

The Purcell programme was fundamentally intimate, the team-spirited singers underpinned by a lithe but lightly-hued band of gut-stringed strings (one to a part) and fluid continuo. A first half taster journeyed from the gossamer luminosity of Purcell’s Soft Music and Dance of the Furies from Dioclesian to the same semi-opera’s Triumph, Victorious Birth, by way of assorted arias and the instrumental interludes. 

Highlights included some wild fiddling, verging on rock improv, emerging from the ground bass aria Mark, How Readily, and the instrumental sunburst piercing through The Sparrow And The Gentle Dove from the 1683 wedding ode From Hardy Climes.

When it came to Dido, we were firmly in the groove. An eight-strong singing troupe took to the task like touring minstrels, doubling parts, costumes simple and adaptable such as the Hallowe’en witches’ noses and googly-eyed glasses, the general acting style a mix of Disney-type hero (a cool, contemporary Aeneas) and heroine, and comic grotesquerie. Rather than jar with a serious tale, this rather emphasised the entertainment dimension of the piece, a kind of character reference for a composer known for his latent bawdiness and barstool wit.

More importantly, nothing got in the way of Purcell’s engaging music. Julia Doyle’s regal Dido, the gorgeous resignation of her famous Lament, rang true with Frederick Long’s molten Aeneas, who was given an extra aria (sourced from Purcell) that made so much more sense of his strangely curtailed presence in the plot. Rowan Pierce, her ever-active eyes as dramatically captivating as the unflinching purity of her voice, was mesmerising as Belinda. The witches cackled and spat, the sailors (looking a bit like Pontins bluecoats) came and went. Dances were generally avoided, to no great cost. Hollingworth’s laissez-faire musical direction allowed the evening to flow effortlessly, the performers happily owning their own show.

Sunday’s Monteverdi was more of a set-piece experience, though a modicum of stagecraft served to validate the music’s adaptable construct and extremes of utilised personnel. Thus an opening wall of reverberant sound saw the singers amassed behind instrumental forces that included the pungent tutti of the English Cornett and Sackbutt Ensemble. The ensuing cocktail of psalms and motets – from such wonderfully flagrant numbers as Nigra sum to the ecstatic escalating female voice suspensions in Duo Seraphim – required much coming and going front stage to suit the endless combinations of voices, occasionally reminiscent of school concert choreography but coming together cathartically in the final Magnificat with the full choral contingent now purposely to the fore.

Roger Hollingworth conducts Monteverdi’s Vespers

Typical of Hollingworth, he had something new to offer in what marked the start of a new project for I Fagiolini (due to be recorded soon). He drew our attention to the raised pitch of certain settings based on recent research, which, true to his word, gifted the numbers affected with a rare piquancy. He adopted more leisurely tempi, sourcing nuggets of unexpectedly enriched sentiment and expression. 

Ultimately, though, it was the extraordinary ability of these singers to deliver individuality as soloists, while merging as one homogenous body in ensemble, that raised this performance beyond the ordinary. In the wrong hands, Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine can so easily become a challenge of endurance. This one never failed to enthral.

Ken Walton

I Fagiolini perform their final Lammermuir programme, A Life In A Cappella – We’re Not Dead Yet, in Aberlady Parish Church on Tue 9 Sep at 3pm. Information at www.lammermuirfestival.co.uk

(Photo Credits: Sally Anderson)

Lammermuir: Kaleidoscope Collective

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Dirleton Kirk, East Lothian

The Lammermuir Festival has a fine track record of bringing musicians together in interesting combinations to explore new repertoire. When it invites the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, the group arrives with much of that work already done.

The regular cellist with Kaleidoscope, Laura van der Heijden, is the festival’s artist in residence this year and she will appear with other groups of friends and as a soloist with the Royal Northern Sinfonia before it ends. She began the commitment more gently, as a member of the ensemble founded by pianist Tom Poster and his violinist partner Elena Orioste.

Poster is a pianist of formidable relaxed skill who wears his musical erudition lightly, but the second of Kaleidoscope’s recitals at Dirleton Kirk demonstrated his special programming ability.

It was designed to showcase the virtuoso flute playing of Adam Walker, and thus immediately suggested a focus on French music of the last century, where and when composers were especially attracted to writing for the instrument.

Of the four works featuring Walker, however, only the Poulenc Flute Sonata was at all familiar, and few if any of the capacity audience would have known the earlier pieces played.

Intriguingly, they each teamed the flautist and piano with one of the string players, beginning with Urioste in the Suite en trio by Mel Bonis. Another triptych, the Trois femmes de Legende, has already brought the almost forgotten Bonis to Scottish attention, with both the RSNO and BBC SSO playing the orchestrated piano pieces recently, and this chamber work was similarly finely-wrought. A salon conversation with the listening violin responding to the flute’s lead, the work becomes more muscular in the closing Scherzo, driven by the keyboard.

Philippe Gaubert is also little remembered as a composer, although he was a well-known flautist and conductor in the early part of the 20th century. His Three Aquarelles, with cello completing the trio, are not especially pictorial but explore the full ranges of all three instruments and the dynamic possibilities of their combination in elegant style. Where  the Bonis began with a Serenade, the Gaubert closed with one, but it was the central slower section, with solos for cello, flute and piano in sequence, that was the most beguiling.

Maurice Durufle is not known as a composer of chamber music because he didn’t write much of it, and the Prelude, Recitatif et Variations from 1928 is the only piece he published. Quite different in structure from the music that preceded it, this was the composer looking back to early music from a modernist perspective, if one far from as experimental as some of his contemporaries. With violist Vicki Powell as the string addition, the unfolding of those Variations developed with building intensity, making for a powerful conclusion to the first half of the concert.

The Poulenc, it hardly needs saying, was brilliantly played by Walker and Poster. This is core repertoire for a virtuoso flautist and this one barely looked at his score in a performance of technical and expressive virtuosity. The attack he achieves on the instrument and the fluidity of his fingering is a class apart, and Poster’s rippling keyboard skills and considered dynamic control made for a perfect partnership.

The programme concluded without Walker, with Faure’s Piano Quartet No 1, a beautifully-shaped early work that followed on from the works that Poster and the strings had played on Friday evening.

If this was young Faure expressing his broken heart after being jilted by Marianne Viardot, that melancholy is most eloquently expressed in the cello-led Adagio. The Scherzo that precedes it was particularly enticing, with bright pizzicato strings and sparkling keyboard playing.

As the growing number of Kaleidoscope fans had surely hoped, Poster revealed one of his bespoke arrangements for all five musicians by way of a unique encore. If Henry Mancini’s Moon River might appear to have little relationship with the rest of the programme, Urioste pointed out the composer was a flute and piano player who honed his arranging skills with the US Air Force Band, serving in France in the Second World War.

Keith Bruce

Pictured: Laura van der Heijden

Lammermuir: Scottish Opera Double Bill

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St Mary’s, Haddington

Perfect though the use of Haddington’s Corn Exchange proved for Britten’s Albert Herring at last year’s Lammermuir Festival, Scottish Opera’s return to St Mary’s for its 2025 contribution was both necessary and welcome.

Primarily that was for musical reasons, and the superb playing of the full Orchestra of Scottish Opera for Maurice Ravel’s L’heure espagnole and William Walton’s The Bear, under the energetic baton of Alexandra Cravero. The Ravel, of course, is packed with delightful orchestral detail. The story of the convoluted love-life of Concepcion, the fickle wife of clockmaker Torquemada, had every possible expression of the passage of time, with onstage metronome, ticking percussion and chiming bells most obvious.

The score of The Bear proved no less fascinating, and as it includes knowing nods to other composers, including Debussy and Britten, it is far from unlikely that Walton had the early work in mind as well. This is the playful Walton of Façade rather than the composer of the more problematic Troilus and Cressida.

In putting the two works together, the company was also making use of its resident company of Emerging Artists, and regular soloist Jamie MacDougall – and had the added impetus of producing a staging that will work in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal and Edinburgh Festival Theatre during the autumn season.

That will mean an expanded scenic design, but it was clear that the essential elements are already in place in Kenneth Macleod’s work for Jacopo Spirei’s production.

It paid to pay close attention to the supertitles in L’heure espagnole, which faithfully rendered the jokes being delivered in French by the cast. Lea Shaw’s knowing performance as Concepcion had the lion’s share of these and she played them to the hilt, matched by Edward Jowle’s broad portrayal of lustful banker Don Inigo.

South African tenor Luvo Maranti probably got more laughs though, for the poetic attempts by his character, Gonzalve, to play up the role of romantic lover, while baritone Daniel Barrett caught just the right tone for the naïve Ramiro, in a production that was not really about subtlety at all.

Making good use of the whole performance space in a way that was new to Scottish Opera’s work in the venue, there was a lot going on, but then that is exactly what farce is all about.

The premise of The Bear might be just as absurd – what purpose can a widow have in trying to punish her faithless husband by refusing any human interaction herself after his death? – but its source in a short story of Chekhov means we are in a very different world.

Barrett, making his Scottish Opera debut as a new recruit to the team of Emerging Artists, was superb as the titular Bear, a boorish creditor of the dead man who finds himself falling for the widow. Chloe Harris, as bereaved Yelena Ivanovna Popova, also gave a nicely-measured performance, and a definitive reading of the evening’s hit tune – the mezzo party-piece, I Was A Constant, Faithful Wife.

Keith Bruce

Repeated at Glasgow’s Theatre Royal, October 18 and 22 and Edinburgh Festival Theatre, November 15.

Picture of Daniel Barrett and Chloe Harris in The Bear by Sally Jubb

Lammermuir: Earth, thy cold is keen

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St Mary’s Church, Whitekirk

The other St Mary’s Church in the Lammermuir list of lovely venues is a gem of building half way between North Berwick and Dunbar, now in the care of the community. It returned to the festival this year with a programme of music by Stuart MacRae that perfectly suited its resonant acoustic.

Those who know MacRae mainly from his big Scottish Opera commissions would have recognised his signature in much of it, but it was perhaps just as well that the young mezzo-sopranos due to sing big roles with the company in the Haddington St Mary’s that evening could not hear Lotte Betts-Dean, the singer whose remarkable voice was showcased here.

MacRae tailor-made much of this repertoire for the UK-based Australian, having heard her perform one of his songs, and this recital drew substantially on the 2023 Delphian disc with string duo Sequoia (violinist Alice Rickards and cellist Sonia Cromarty) and the composer himself on harmonium. If the language is “classical” – these are contemporary art songs, setting ancient texts alongside those of Christina Rossetti and Emily Bronte – there is a rich seam of traditional and indigenous music being mined in the work of everyone involved.

Betts-Dean has an extraordinary range, from rich, full alto to soaring soprano, and just as wide in timbre and tone. She is as accurate and controlled as she is expressive, but those technical capabilities are allied to colours that recall such diverse antecedents as Robin Williamson of the Incredible String Band and Nina Simone.

MacRae’s familiarity with Gaelic song ran throughout the programme, not just in his setting of one of those, but also in his instrumental writing for the strings, both evocative of landscape, notional and specific, and part of an environmental focus that is key to Sequoia’s practice.

With Norse and Middle English part of the textual fabric, and birdsong and electronics in the soundscape, there were a lot of ingredients in the mix but ample space for Betts-Dean to demonstrate her a cappella abilities as well. Not only was the material radically re-ordered from the recorded version, it was also substantially revised in some arrangements. The sense of a growing, organic project was clear.

That was obviously so with the world premiere that ended an enthralling 80 minutes, setting Bronte’s The Prisoner. The central song of The Captive was sung unaccompanied, and was MacRae’s superb word-setting at its finest, while the bracketing narrative Prologue and Epilogue added the instruments and a very seductive melody. The 5-tone falling figure on the word “liberty” at the end of the former was emblematic of the fruitful relationship between the composer and his muse.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Lotte Betts-Dean by Matthew Johnson

EIF: BBC SSO | RSNO

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Mendelssohn’s Elijah was an odd choice to end the 2025 Edinburgh International Festival and the 60th birthday season of the Festival Chorus. As a programme note online by Professor Eric Levi pithily explained, it is a work that has been as much lambasted as acclaimed, for musical as well as political reasons, since its Birmingham premiere in the mid-19th century, although the Victorians – and the Queen and her husband in particular – generally liked it.

And although performances are not that common in our time, it had been given a memorable one in the Usher Hall just over a year previously when it closed the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s 50th anniversary celebrations.

This one was on a larger scale, both vocally and instrumentally, but that meant that there were larger forces to manage, and the benefit was dubious, especially as it has been this choir’s skill in singing quietly with intensity that has impressed this year.

There is a lot of choral content in the structure of the work, but it is in two different voices (narrative and of “The People”), which is only one of the difficulties in story-line which follows the prophet’s life-story chronologically (Baal in Part 1, Jezebel after the interval) but uses texts from across the Old Testament and some of Matthew’s Gospel as well.

The soloists were the stars, Christopher Maltman magnificent in the title role, mezzo Karen Cargill adding a more dramatic performance than soprano Mari Eriksmoen and tenor Ben Bliss in powerful voice as Obadiah. Martha Johnson delivered The Youth authoritatively but the four Rising Stars singers took a moment to settle into an ensemble for their first quartet.

While there were some fine solo voices in the orchestra too, and the brass and horns were on dependable form, this wasn’t a classic performance from the RSNO, great at the choral climax of the work but with a few dips in coherence along the way.

The Festival Chorus had a much finer showcase three days previously with the rather briefer Chichester Psalms by Leonard Bernstein, and the team with whom they had closed the 2023 Festival, conductor Karina Canellakis and the BBC SSO.

That they had to sing in Hebrew rather the English mattered little, the choir dealing with the music’s challenging rhythms with aplomb. Countertenor soloist Hugh Cutting, with his part memorised, was just as commanding as Maltman would be, and first cello Rudi De Groote took his solo as beautifully as RSNO principal Pei-Jee Ng did in the Mendelssohn.

Sadly, the EIF’s Rising Stars were disadvantaged here too, the (different) SATB quartet located next the orchestral percussion between choir and instrumentalists and initially barely audible.

With the choral feature bracketed by Messiaen and Stravinsky, the concert was also a great opportunity for the SSO.  In Les Offrandes oubliees we heard string playing just as quiet and demanding of attention as the smaller numbers of Poland’s NFM Leopoldinum had demonstrated ten days earlier, and Petrushka was a delight from start to finish. Canellakis was absolutely on it for the frantic moments of the score, but equally happy to give soloists enough leeway to make the theatrical musical jokes as rewarding as really good players can tell them.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Jess Shurte

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