Tag Archives: Anna Meredith

Dunedin Consort: The Quality of Mercy

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St Aloysius Church, Glasgow

English court composer John Sheppard died during a flu epidemic in the winter of 1558, some 430 years before the birth of Edinburgh-based composer Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade, who is still in her mid-30s. Both, however, sat very comfortably in the Dunedin Consort’s startlingly diverse programme of choral works for Lent.

Associate Director of the Dunedin, tenor Nicholas Mulroy – who was conducting and not singing for this concert – may have devised a programme that should win accolades for its diversity alone. Although it was built around the four motets Francis Poulenc wrote as he rediscovered his Catholic faith on the eve of the Second World War, featured two movements from the Mass Benjamin Britten’s right-hand woman Imogen Holst wrote as a student, and was liberally sprinkled with Renaissance polyphony, it also contrived to include five living composers, four of them women, and a Marian hymn by a Portuguese musician reckoned to be the first black composer to have his work published.

The “rediscovery” of Vicente Lusitano may not have been big news in Lisbon, where that happened 50 years ago, but the rest of Europe is now catching up and his Sancta Maria proved a fascinatingly dense and complex work, sung by a sextet drawn from the ranks of the 16-strong choir. A similar approach of one voice to a part was employed with quintets for Orlando Lassus and William Byrd, and – at a stretch – for Anna Meredith’s affecting and highly original Heal You, performed by a female trio and at times reminiscent of the wonderful Roche sisters.

It followed Canadian Sarah MacDonald’s Crux Fidelis, a work whose intricacy was both textual and musical with the men and women swapping roles as singers of the Latin text and the English poetry of Emily Dickinson and Elizabethan “Dark Lady” Emilia Lanier. The Byrd was followed by Cruttwell-Reade’s The Dead, a setting of Don Paterson’s version of a Rilke sonnet on which the ink is barely dry, and whose harmonies other choirs will surely lap up eagerly.

The distinctive musical dialect of the Poulenc and James MacMillan’s Miserere gave this ensemble plenty of chewy stuff to display their chops, and the Holst, Sheppard, William Gibbons setting of Fletcher’s Drop, Drop Slow Tears  and William Henry Harris’s of John Donne’s prayer Bring Us, O Lord God showed their command of more ‘mainstream’ repertoire.

The other new gem in the concert was also a John Donne setting, his masterly sonnet At The Round Earth’s Imagin’d Corners given superbly complementary musical life by Cheryl Frances-Hoad. Giving the sopranos a bit of r’n’r, her ATB voicing, in unison and deceptively simple harmonies, proved a masterclass in sensitivity to rhyme scheme and rhythm.

As well as being the architect of this clever sequence of works, Mulroy was in eloquent command of its musical performance. At the Glasgow one, however, he chose to present it in artificial groups of three pieces, solely to control the applause, and regardless of stage management realities. It was an unfortunate decision, and letting the audience do its own thing, or – even better – asking it to hold back until the end of each half, was really what his thoughtfully-compiled recital deserved.

Repeated at Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh on Friday March 28, Dundee St Mary’s Parish Church on Saturday 29 and Aberdeen’s Cowdray Hall on Sunday 30.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Nicholas Mulroy by Jen Owens

Scottish Ensemble: in Sync

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RSNO Centre, Glasgow

There are as many routes to making classical music accessible as there are creative musicians putting their minds to that purpose, but there have been few hours to that end as entertaining as this one. After a run of performances in schools and a couple of public ones further north, this was the last outing – for the time being at least – of a collaboration between the Scottish Ensemble and Mish Mash Productions, which exists to bring classical music to young people.

They may be the target audience, but the programme worked just as well for those of us half a century beyond our youth.

Much of the musical content was typical for the group, moving easily between contemporary pieces by Anna Meredith, Jessie Montgomery, Jonny Greenwood and Caroline Shaw and arrangements of Purcell, Shostakovich, Piazzolla and Debussy. But with the players in motion around the auditorium, engaging one-to-one with the audience from the start, dressed more colourfully than is habitual and – crucially – performing everything from memory, the presentation was entirely different.

Beginning with an engaging explanation by violinist Laura Ghiro, there was also a fair bit of talking, and precious little of it was about the music. The clutter on the colourful stage set – picture frames, a coffee set, a shepherd’s crook and stirrups – turned out to be less random than first appeared, as the musicians used emblematic objects to speak of their lives beyond their professional career.

They ranged from the aforementioned crook (aspirant goat farmer violist Jane Atkins) and a Nintendo Switch portable games console (violinist Kate Suthers) to Carol Ella’s bonkers (and possibly entirely fabricated) turnip obsession. And was I the only one slightly disappointed by a mere photo of Kirsty Lovie’s motorbike, rather than the actual machine?

Here’s the thing though: did I listen more intently to her Carnatic violin solo from Reena Esmail’s Darshan as a consequence of her sharing some personal stories? I think I did, and the 15-year-old me certainly would have.

There were other fine solo turns – notably double bassist Diane Clark’s party piece adaptation of Jay Leonhart’s It’s Impossible to Sing and Play the Bass – and the Montgomery, for example, required just a string quartet, but the main emphasis was on the collective “ensemble”. That included lots of movement – the choreography for Piazzolla’s Verano was really rather slick – as well as music, some audience participation percussion following musical director Donald Grant’s excursion into traditional Scottish music, and harmony vocals on the closing piece by the Danish Quartet’s Rune Tonsgaard Sorensen.

This was one of those projects that derived its success from a vast amount of work by people unseen as well as onstage, to appear almost effortless in its final form. A triumph from start to finish.

Keith Bruce

picture by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan