Tag Archives: anna clyne

RSNO / Heyward & Gillam

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Soprano saxophonist Jess Gillam invariably presents herself in striking primary colours – Saturday’s electric red trouser suit was a typically dazzling sartorial statement set against the workaday black of the RSNO – but when it comes to the music, the Cumbrian live-wire embraces every hue and its attendant emotions.

She had the perfect vehicle for that in Anna Clyne’s mercurial concerto Glasslands, written for Gillam in 2023 (after the performer’s success with their earlier collaboration, the rascally Snake and Ladder), premiered in Detroit that year, and now receiving its Scottish premiere. Where the work itself is a restless torrent of demonstrative contradictions, Clyne drawing on her Irish descent  and its folklore to explore the wild ritualism of the wailing Banshee, Gillam brought it vividly to life in an extraordinarily animated, virtuoso performance.

There’s no introduction, just a seismic eruption of screaming rhetoric that hits the listener like an electric shock. Gillam savoured the moment and its instant effect, issuing cascades of notes with shrill precision and bloodcurdling ferociousness, establishing a signature trope that was to persistently assert its structural significance throughout the 25-minute concerto.

Yet this is a piece that defies simplistic transparency, as Gillam proved in the theatricality of her delivery, ever the unpredictable protagonist pushing the orchestra, indeed the listener, in directions they never expected to go. 

The RSNO, in sharp form under Baltimore Symphony Orchestra conductor Jonathon Heyward, played with equal spontaneity and flamboyance. Where Gillam switched the mood, their response was immediate. The interplay was exceptional, sometimes as radiant amplification of the solo line, at other times engaged in frenetic dialogue, but just as easily offering enticing background comment, anything from belligerent slap bass to dreamy mysticism. 

From the high drama of the opening movement, through the released tension of a slow movement introduced by its gorgeously soulful saxophone-cello duo, to a jaunty finale (at times cartoon-like) counterbalanced by dense Philip Glass-like sonorities, Hayward’s prescriptive lead facilitated the big picture without sacrificing the excitement within.

Likewise Shostakovich’s daunting Eighth Symphony, a work written during the Second World War and ostensibly hewn out of wartime gloom (and more clandestinely a daunting comment on the oppressiveness of Stalinist Russia), fared well under Heyward’s unfussy pragmatism. He stuck to the letter of the score, eliciting grim determination from the opening Adagio, its gnawing, dogged anguish all the more telling as a result. 

The sneering irony of the Allegretto made its point with ample curtness; then the homeward sequence – the machine-like demonism of the Allegro non troppo with its cataclysmic climax, spilling into the desolation of the Largo (those eerie flutter-tongued flutes) before a bittersweet transformation to the symphony’s major key Finale, its quizzical extremes barely resolved by ultimate questioning. 

Ken Walton 

(Picture credit: Katie Kean)

SCO / Kuusisto

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City Halls, Glasgow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ken Walton

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