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SCO / Manze

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City Halls, Glasgow

With the exception of the four stalwarts of the cello section – whose leader Philip Higham was one of the evening’s first solo voices – there was an unfamiliar look to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra on Friday evening, in the strings as well as in the additional instrumentalists required for the programme.

The evening was entirely made up of music composed by John Adams and – given that it was all written in the last century, and necessarily excluded his largest works – it was a very useful introduction to his style for the uninitiated.

We began in the 1970s with the demanding performance challenge of Shaker Loops, clearly influenced by the music of his American minimalist colleagues but already finding original pathways from that inspiration. The glissandos of the second section and Higham’s solo in the third were evidence of that, and conductor Andrew Manze ensured that work’s finale was more dramatic and dynamic than might have been anticipated from the work’s somewhat hesitant, sotto voce beginning.

If Shaker Loops can be an austere listening experience, Gnarly Buttons is an entertainment, albeit a hugely challenging one for the clarinet soloist. The SCO’s principal clarinet Maximiliano Martin was equal to the task but he and his colleagues possibly left some of the humour in the score unexpressed, with the exception of the unmissable cattle noises in the keyboard samples.

The scoring for the piece is always ear-catching, and Manze ensured every detail was clear from the early combination of trombone, cor anglais and bassoon, through viola and pizzicato basses to the guitar and four-hands piano in the altogether simpler, plaintive finale. Of the many guest musicians onstage over the evening, it was Robert Carillo-Garcia who was crucial here, moving on to the guitar after his equally essential contributions on banjo and mandolin.

For the final work, 1988’s Fearful Symmetries, Stephen Doughty sat at the grand piano while Simon Smith and John Cameron exchanged keyboard riffs and four saxophonists joined the brass and woodwinds. If Gnarly Buttons is close kin to the symphonic Naïve and Sentimental Music, Fearful Symmetries shares orchestral similarities with the music played from the pit in Adam’s first huge opera success, Nixon in China.

There may be fewer exotic time signatures to negotiate in this score than in the other two works, and the through-written half hour supplied the most elegantly-played music of the programme, with by far the largest forces on stage. Here the individual elements, like the saxophone quartet and the sampling keyboards, were less startling individual ingredients than parallel elements, integrated with the brass and strings in a coherent whole which Manze communicated as one compelling narrative.

Keith Bruce

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

SCO / Manze

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Faure’s Requiem is a popular choice for amateur choirs: not too long and requiring limited contributions from just two soloists, it is very often heard with organ or piano accompaniment. Predictably, the honed precision of the SCO Chorus, as prepared by director Gregory Batsleer, was in another league altogether, but it was the partnership with the orchestra itself that made this a revelatory performance.

Faure’s spare orchestration, completed a decade after the work’s composition, is substantially in the hands of the low strings, so SCO Principal Guest Conductor Andrew Manze had the orchestra re-positioned with principal viola Jessica Beeston in the orchestra leader’s seat opposite first cello Su-a Lee, and the violins centre stage but further back.

The effect was crucial aurally as well as visually, the front stage musicians’ combination with horns and organ in the Introit emphasising the movement’s affinity with early music, and the entry of the harp and violins in the Sanctus answered by the lovely counterpoint line given to the violas. For the Pie Jesu that followed, soprano Julia Doyle sang from high in the organ gallery, and the pizzicato cellos and basses in the Libera Me seemed absolutely essential to the anguish of the baritone’s plea for deliverance.

That soloist was Roderick Williams, and the conductor had also put his participation in an excellent broader context. If Gabriel Faure brought something of an outsider’s eye to the rituals of the Catholic church, that perspective could also be detected in everything else in the concert.

Berlioz’s devotion to Shakespeare – albeit in the person of one actress in particular – still seems odd for a man with limited command of the English language, but his Overture, Beatrice and Benedict, is unmistakably a work of the theatre. The combinations of wind instruments were a sparkling part of his dramatic narrative.

Then it was the turn of the SCO strings to shine in music from a century later, and an Essex woman’s impressions of the Lake District. The SCO is in the vanguard of championing the neglected Ruth Gipps and her Cringlemire Garden both harks back to the architectural era of the country house of its title and shows the influence of her teacher, Vaughan Williams, whose own composition of exactly that time – the beginning of the 20th century – followed.

His Five Mystical Songs set the Christian lyrics of early 17th century metaphysical poet and priest George Herbert, and Williams and the SCO Chorus found the sort of respectful distance to the words that the composer surely intended. The best-known of the five is the choral closer, entitled Antiphon, but familiar from its couplet “Let the world in every corner sing, My God and King!” That hymn and the opener, Easter, bracket more personal statements of faith, the central “Love bade me welcome” perhaps the loveliest.

The way Vaughan Williams combines soloist and choir is full of interest and invention, with wordless underscores as well as the fuller choral writing, and Williams is a superb interpreter of this music.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Roderick Williams by Theo Williams

East Neuk turns 20

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Tickets are now on general sale for the 20th East Neuk Festival, on Fife’s picturesque Forth estuary shoreline, which includes a celebration of the Elie Church concert that inspired its first programme, featuring some of the players involved in that event. A group led by violinist Alexander Janiczek, former leader of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and including ex-SCO players Ursula Leveaux on bassoon and Alec Frank-Gemmill on horn and current SCO first cello Philip Higham, plays Beethoven’s Septet on the festival’s closing day, June 29. The 2025 performance is at noon in St Ayle’s, Cellardyke.

The main threads of this summer’s bill of fare are the late quartets of Beethoven, the compositions of Schubert and the versatile musicianship of festival regular Sean Shibe.

The Edinburgh guitarist is the soloist for the opening Bowhouse concert by the SCO under principal guest conductor Andrew Manze on the evening of Wednesday June 25. Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez is followed by Schubert’s Sixth Symphony. Shibe also gives three intimate recitals in Anstruther venues on Saturday June 28, playing lute, classical guitar and electric guitar.

Three Schubert song cycles are performed over three days in Crail Parish Church, pianist Joseph Middleton accompanying baritone James Newby for Die Schone Mullerin, tenor Mark Padmore for Wintereise and both for Schwanengesang.

The Beethoven quartets are in the hands of the Elias, Castalian, Belcea and Pavel Haas Quartets, all four of whom come together for the closing concert at the Bowhouse, which includes a new commission from composer Sally Beamish, written for four string quartets.

Other attractions include festival debuts for London saxophonist Tom Smith and his Septet and traditional musician Katherine Tickell with her band The Darkening, oud virtuoso Nizar Rohana and jazz pianist Euan Stevenson.

Full details and booking information is available at eastneukfestival.com

SCO / Manze

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City Halls, Glasgow

Although it is a habit that persists, it is never useful to compare Mozart’s “hackwork” with pieces he wrote to no apparent commission. It is unarguable that he couldn’t help but put his best efforts into everything he wrote, musically.

Both the composer’s works in this programme were written to specific commissions from wealthy patrons and supposedly under protest. The truth is that Mozart’s words, as they have come down to us in his letters, are less reliable than his music, so Symphony No 35, the “Haffner”, composed for a Salzburg family after Mozart had de-camped to Vienna, and the Flute Concerto, written for an instrument he once claimed to dislike, are full of distinctive writing.

Conductor Andrew Manze, safely back in the SCO fold, his flirtation with the BBC Scottish now ancient history, found all the light and shade in the symphony, its first few bars an opening of ear-catching gradation and the whole package so poised and well-balanced. The finale owes an audible debt to Mozart’s contemporaneous commitment to opera composition, specifically the recently-completed Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serial, and that theatricality reflected the work that preceded it in the concert.

Johann Heinrich Schmeltzer’s Serenata was composed in Vienna over a century earlier, possibly to score a drama. Manze’s new arrangement of the Baroque music sat well in his programme in many ways, not least in his colourful orchestration’s parallels with the Schoenberg Chamber Symphony No 2 with which the concert had begun. The range of dynamics and tempi in both works were exquisitely captured by the SCO players, the Schoenberg displaying an emotional depth that his technical complexity can obscure and the Schmeltzer close to heart-rending in its closing Lamento.

The SCO’s principal flute Andre Cebrian made his own persuasive case for Mozart’s Flute Concerto, his golden-toned playing burnished across the full range of the instrument and his cadenzas quite captivating soliloquys. It was the conversations across the platform that revealed the best of the piece however. In the opening movement the exchanges are between the soloist and oboe and horns and the Adagio is all about the flute, the two in the orchestra under-scoring the soloist’s fleet fingering. They return again in the middle of the witty finale, the flute trio bars following some sparkling writing – and playing – in the violins.

Cebrian’s encore was of a folk tune from his native Spain, preceded by an appeal for donations to help those afflicted by the flooding in Valencia. Fund-raising purchases of his recent CD in the foyer at the interval were rewarded with some excellent home listening: his duo with guitarist Pedro Mateo González, Cartografia de mar, is a very fine recording.

Keith Bruce

Nordic Music Days: SCO / Manze

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City Halls, Glasgow

A programme of new music is not what Scottish Chamber Orchestra patrons have come to expect from the visits from Andrew Manze, but perhaps this contribution by the orchestra to the Nordic Music Days weekend suggests a broader remit since his appointment as Principal Guest Conductor.

The obvious reason for his presence on the podium was the Scottish premiere of Swede Anders Hillborg’s Viola Concerto, as he also conducted its first performance three years ago by its dedicatee, Lawrence Power, with the Royal Liverpool Phil.

The virtuoso violist is in a class of his own, and the work demands all his skill as it knocks any preconceptions about the capabilities and tonal colour of his instrument out of the park. As Manze mentioned, the work’s Covid-era composition can be heard in much of the writing, particularly the furious “Rage” of the opening movement, which has a reprise at the end.

It is redolent of Appalachia as much as Scandinavia, and there is an appeal to the work that suggests a global audience in mind, not least the closing string crescendo’s resemblance to The Beatles’ A Day in the Life, accompanied by a vocal cry from the players. That Hillborg took his bow wearing an Abbey Road album cover t-shirt was presumably no coincidence.

Behind the frantic bowing of the solo part, there is some very specific scoring throughout the concerto from slapped string basses to sustained chords on piano and SCO principal viola Max Mandel’s drone note beneath Power’s later cadenza.

The composer’s Swedish contemporary Madeleine Isaksson provided the short work that began the second half. Flows (Tornio) is the central part of a geographical triptych and much more recognisably “Nordic” with a compelling narrative arc in which its rich scoring dissolved to something much simpler.

There is nothing simple about James MacMillan’s Symphony No.2, which closed the concert. It is 25 years since the SCO gave its premiere and the piece is not ready to give up all its secrets yet. It’s a peculiar sort of symphony, the main course of the second movement framed by two much briefer – although hardly slighter – sections. Much of it would not readily be identified as bearing the composer’s signature at all and the audible influences range dizzyingly wide.

To the Wagner, Boulez and Berio he acknowledges, one could add Shostakovich and Messiaen, and – much less predictably – hints of Ravel and even a few bars akin to John Williams’ score for Star Wars. Manze brought an expansive intelligence to this performance which kept revealing its more fascinating depths. It is well worth tuning into the BBC Radio 3 broadcast of the concert for this work as much as anything else in the programme.

The composition that is likely to keep most listeners by their wireless sets, however, is the work that opened the evening. Jay Capperauld’s Death in a Nutshell was first performed by the SCO three years ago (shortly after the premieres of both the Swedish composers’ pieces, curiously), with MacMillan conducting. Capperauld was then made SCO Associate Composer (as MacMillan has once been), and has made an exemplary contribution in that role thus far. If this work was a factor in his appointment that would be no surprise.

Perfect Hallowe’en fare, its inspiration in the dioramas of crime scenes made by Frances Glessner Lee is remarkable and the programme notes which accompany it are a compelling read. They are far from compulsory, however, as the six-movement work is simply terrific music, and its Cluedo/Hitchcock vibe, complete with hints of Herrmann, comes with bits of theatre (percussionist Louise Goodwin’s claw hammer) and some glorious melodic material, often to match the grisliest stories.

Keith Bruce

This concert was recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Wednesday November 6, available thereafter on BBC Sounds.

Pictured: Jay Capperauld

SCO Academy / Manze

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City Halls, Glasgow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ken Walton

(Photo: Christopher Bowen)

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

SCO / Manze

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City Halls, Glasgow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keith Bruce

SCO / Manze

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City Halls, Glasgow

Throughout the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s near half-century existence, one of the greatest joys has been the orchestra’s intimate connection with Mozart. It was present once again in this final 2022 programme, which featured the classy South Korean pianist Yeol Eum Son in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 27 in B flat, and flashed up pleasurable memories of the complete Mozart concerto series performed with the same magnetic poise by pianist Mitsuko Uchida with the SCO way back in the 1980s.

Eum Son’s delivery had the same honesty and purity about it, lightning finger work precisely placed, an evenness of tone informing crystalline phrase, and a composure that allowed the music to express its intentions with natural elan. That conductor Andrew Manze – whose violin-playing days were once equally notable for their clean-cut Mozart – was of the same mind, brought a satisfying unity of purpose to the performance.

It was clear from the unending applause that Eum Son had no option but to deliver an encore, and boy did she oblige with the chattering brilliance of Moritz Moskowski’s Etincelles (Sparks) Op 36 No 6, like Scarlatti on steroids and offering a pyrotechnic glimpse of the pianist’s showier persona.

All this came immediately after the Concerto for String Orchestra by another amazing woman, Grazyna Bacewicz. As a pioneering female Polish composer in mid-20th-century male-dominated Europe, who had previously established herself as a celebrated violinist, it’s clear from this gutsy work (and others that have increasingly crept into concert programmes in recent years) that she was a voice to to be reckoned with.

Bullish, ultra-confident and instantly arresting, the opening movement was one unstoppable adrenalin rush, Manze drawing visceral heat from his eager, belligerent players. The wrestling complexity of the Allegro, a sizzling cauldron of thematic conflict, gave way to the more restful, rich-textured Andante, before the hi-octane finale, with its rhythmic twists and turns, produced a relentless, resolute dash to the finishing line. 

Manze completed his programme with music more often reserved for larger entities than the SCO, Dvorak’s Symphony No 7 – some may recall a BBC SSO performance a couple of weeks ago under Portuguese conductor Nuno Coelho. What transpired, though, was a refreshing reconsideration of its expressive potential. Where the string numbers were limited, the quality of sound was so alive and intense it captured details in the textural world of this heated symphony that are rarely heard.

As is standard with Manze, this was a programme brimming with refreshing thoughts, studiously intelligent on the one hand, passionately revealing on the other.

Ken Walton

Photo credit: Marco Borggreve

SCO / Manze

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Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

For his first concert with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra since before the pandemic, conductor Andrew Manze presided over a magnificent programme that will surely be one of the most thoughtful and inventive to grace the 150th anniversary year of composer Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Only one of the works – Britten’s Lachrymae – was familiar to me, and the highlight of a sensational concert was a world premiere, The Years by the SCO’s Associate Composer Anna Clyne, commissioned with funds from the RVW Trust.

Setting verses by Stephanie Fleischmann, this response to the pandemic was a real challenge for the 45 voices of the SCO Chorus, and music few other amateur choirs would have attempted. Clyne employed the voices incrementally, sometimes using very few of them. Here was a fabulous evocation of the solace we all found in nature during lockdown walks, with trilling winds and bugle-like calls on the trumpets. The integration of the chorus with the instrumentalists was masterly, with some exceptional sonic results.

Part of that rich mix of sound was an evocation of the sea, and the new work was preceded by the Sea Sketches for strings by Grace Williams, a pupil of Vaughan Williams and contemporary of Britten, and another female composer whose work is ripe for rediscovery. Introducing it, Manze must have been keenly aware that the violinists behind him included only one man, seconds leader Gordon Bragg.

He, leader Doriane Gable and first viola Jessica Beeston all had brief solos in the hugely effective third section Channel Sirens, which is followed by the brisk, picturesque Breakers. This is 20th century “sea music” as worthy of a regular place in the repertoire as the famous pieces by Britten, Debussy and Ravel.

The works that followed the interval were also sequenced superbly. Manze supplied his own orchestral arrangement of John Dowland’s If My Complaints Could Passions Move as a precursor to the Britten, which is based on the Renaissance song and was written for Scots viola virtuoso William Primrose. The soloist here was young Timothy Ridout, who has recorded it with the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra on a disc that also includes music by Vaughan Williams.

The work by Vaughan Williams that brought this clever programme to a close was his Flos Campi, which features both solo viola and the chorus. It is structured on texts from the Song of Solomon, but the vocal line is wordless, and although it might have been a more straightforward sing for the choir, it is still far from standard repertoire. Given the composer’s interest in traditional music, it is little surprise that Ridout was required to bring some folk fiddle feeling to his contribution.

With the sopranos on especially impressive, precise form, the chorus that brought their best game to the very scenic scoring of the piece, in what was another pinnacle of a triumphant evening, repeated at Glasgow City Halls tonight.

Keith Bruce

Timothy Ridout picture by Jan Hordijk