Tag Archives: BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

2026 Cumnock Tryst Revealed

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This year’s Cumnock Tryst, which runs from 1-4 October, will conclude with a major tribute to John Wallace, the trumpeter, composer and former principal of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland who died earlier this year.

“We mark his memory and his legacy for Scottish music this year in a special way”, announced Festival director James MacMillan, whose own trumpet concert, Epiclesis, was written for Wallace in 1993. “John attended last year’s Tryst festival and was looking forward to participating in this one,” he added. 

Instead, the final two days of this year’s event will not only feature Wallace’s eponymous brass ensemble, The Wallace Collection, but will see them team up with The Cooperation Band in Wallace’s own arrangement of Giovanni Gabrielli’s 1615 Canzoni et Sonate. For this Venetian-style spectacular Festival finale (4 Oct) the massed players will be spread around the encircling galleries of Cumnock’s Old Church. “It will be the ultimate surround sound experience,” promises MacMillan.

On the previous day, The Wallace Collection teams up with The Cumnock Tryst Festival Chorus and local young singers in the town’s Barony Hall for an ambitious programme under the baton of Eamonn Dougan. Besides music by Vaughan Williams, John Rutter and Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds, there’s the world premiere of a new work by American composer AJ Harbison.

Thursday’s opening concert (1 Oct) showcases the talents of the young blind Scots pianist Ethan Loch, who came to prominence winning the keyboard category of the BBC Young Musician competition in 2022. He has since appeared as soloist with the RSNO, BBC SSO and Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. His recital in Cumnock’s Trinity Church features some of his own music alongside that of Gluck, Liszt, Debussy and Chopin.

Other visiting classical artists include the high-profile saxophonist Jess Gillam and virtuoso euphonium player David Childs. Both feature in the Festival’s only orchestral concert (2 Oct) by the BBC SSO: Gillam taking front stage in MacMillan’s own Saxophone Concerto; Childs in the same composer’s Where the Lugar Meets the Glaisnock, a work MacMillan describes as a “love-letter to the town where I grew up”. 

Childs also teams up with pianist Christopher Williams in Trinity Church for a Saturday morning recital (3 Oct), while Gillam presents a colourful spread that afternoon with her own Jess Gillam Trio in music ranging from Corelli and Sidney Bechet to Nadi Boulanger and George Gershwin. 

The overall Festival template remains familiar. The Cumnock Hour (2 Oct), in partnership with the Boswell Book Festival, sees writer and broadcaster Stephen Johnson discuss his new book – Music Lessons: Seven Composers and What They Taught Me – which explores how “dark” music helped him during difficult times. Earlier that day The Unbroken Thread showcases care and share initiatives undertaken by the Riverside Centre with pupils from Hillside School in collaboration with Drake Music Scotland and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

Artists appearing at the late night Festival Club include contemporary folk from the Hannah Rarity Trio (1 Oct), a tribute to Stéphane Grappelli by the Seonaid Aitken Quintet (2 Oct), and music theatre cabaret, CAMPS After Dark!, from Cumnock’s own theatre group.

This year’s Promenades at Dumfries House (4 Oct) are given over to local young talent, including Kilmarnock pianist Ethan Chan.

The 2026 Cumnock Tryst runs from 1-4 October. Full details at www.thecumnocktryst.com

BBC SSO / MacMillan

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City Halls, Glasgow

As it was revealed in the programme, it seems most unlikely that Sir James MacMillan was the only soul in the City Hall unaware that the Scottish premiere of his new Concerto for Orchestra, “Ghosts”, would be preceded by the award of a prestigious Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Philharmonic Society, as was suggested, but the conceit at least spared the conductor the additional task of preparing an acceptance speech.

More importantly, it gave RPS chief executive James Murphy and the charity’s chair Angela Dixon the opportunity to explain the significance of the honour – MacMillan joining a pantheon that includes many of the most familiar names of classical music – and to remind the audience of the composer’s vast back catalogue, beginning with the acclaim for The Confession of Isobel Gowdie and Veni Veni Emmanuel. (BBC Radio 3 should further expand on that when this concert is broadcast.)

As it stood, however, this was already a mighty evening of music, painting a comprehensive picture of where MacMillan is now, because that new piece was preceded by no fewer than eight orchestral works from composers nurtured at the festival he has established in his home town, The Cumnock Tryst – an event that has already been garlanded by the Royal Philharmonic Society.

They ranged in length from a few minutes to a quarter of an hour and demonstrated a diversity of stylistic approaches, but remarkably all but the first of them, by Copenhagen-based Yorkshireman Matthew Grouse, were by composers from Ayrshire. MacMillan is fond of saying that there must be something in the water to grow such a concentration of talent in the area, but Dixon was correct to point out that the secret ingredient is plainly his dedicated mentorship.

Grouse’s Solods and Tuttis was an intriguing beginning, a collage-work commissioned by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Cumnock Tryst, it attempts to convey the musical experience of the Covid-19 pandemic with the sudden switch to online and filmed performances. Musical quotations and technical glitches were mashed-up in a wry sonic soup that changed gear and tempo relentlessly, a bracing test for both the players and the conductor.

Michael Murray’s brief Visions of the A-Frame, inspired by the relic of the coal-mining industry that stands as a memorial to lives lost near Auchinleck, provided a contrast – and some theatrical direction of the orchestra by MacMillan. The self-taught Murray, has been part of the Tryst story since it began and this atmospheric piece was perhaps the most emblematic ingredient of the evening.

Electra Perivolaris has also been part of the new music at the festival for some years. Her two short environment-inspired works, A Wave Breaking and A Forest Reawakens, owe a debt to Peter Maxwell-Davies as well as her acknowledged influence, Judith Weir. The first featured some particularly lovely writing for the winds, while the second grew to a warm choral climax.

Jay Capperauld is undoubtedly now the best-known of the products of the Tryst and currently enjoying a purple patch as Associate Composer with the SCO, which explained his personal absence from this concert as his newest work, Bruckner’s Skull, was being premiered by the orchestra in Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall.

His equally intriguingly-titled Inertia of a Bona Fide Pyschopath dates from 2014 but this was its Scottish premiere. Melodious flutes and clarinets  alternated with splashy discordant harpsichord in a compelling evocation of mental stress, and Capperauld’s skill with colourful orchestration was always evident as cacophony and statement battled it out.

There was some of that technique in Scott Lygate’s Engines and Men as well. The composer himself was soloist on this single-movement concerto for contrabass clarinet and orchestra, his majestic instrument receiving its own share of the applause when he brought it onstage. He demonstrated a virtuosic range of extended techniques on it too, while the orchestral writing began with a string underscore before ranging into the jazzy involvement of the other winds, and became distinctly cinematic as the work opened out.

After the interval, MacMillan’s own music was prefaced by two short pieces from Gillian Walker, both inspired by poetry, the first in Shetland dialect, the second Lowland Scots and both very redolent of the speech rhythms of their source. The specific melodic echoes in Jean Redpath’s Skippin’ Barfit Thro’ the Heather made it an appropriate partner for MacMillan’s Concerto for Orchestra “Ghosts” which quotes Beethoven’s “Ghost” Trio and alludes to Debussy’s trio for flute, viola and harp.

Larger combinations of instruments within the sections of the orchestra are employed at various points in what is a multi-faceted but very clearly-structured work. Rich in melody, “Ghosts” is MacMillan at his most approachable and it is a piece surely destined for regular performance. Written for the fullest orchestral forces, it also makes virtuosic demands of individual players with some terrific passages for brass and clarinets, and switches from familiar combinations of instruments to more esoteric ones. The SSO played it quite brilliantly for him.

Keith Bruce

Tectonics 2024

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City Halls, Glasgow

There’s always a risk with a contemporary music event like Tectonics that you can get too much of the same thing. The most refreshing aspect of Day 1 in this year’s two-day festival was the varied extent of its content. 

Whether it was the passing tilt towards traditional music in the BBC SSO strings’ collaboration with two folk musicians, the club vibe of a concerto for turntables, or visceral spirituals-based improvisations of performance artist Elaine Mitchener, a “fun” side complemented the hard-edged avant-garde experimentalism more associated with this perennial event by joint creators Ilan Volkov and Alasdair Campbell.

What it avoided was any lull in momentum whatsoever, Saturday’s experience amounting to a continuous stream of mid-afternoon to late-evening performances, the sizeable cult-like audience processing seamlessly from one City Halls venue to the next. 

There was a touch of the weird in the series of six improvisations – Common Sense Will Not Prevail – delivered in what seemed an ironic setting, the bijou elegance of the small Recital Room. Billed as featuring Kate Armitage & Co, its eponymous leader had called off due to illness. What remained of her “entourage” were the performers Dave Jackson, Helmut Lemke and one Miss Vymethoxy Redspiders, whose extemporised delivery – both vocalised and aided by an assortment of manipulated objects – was strangely mesmerising in its collective bizarreness.  

In a similar vein, and equally ritualised, Eiko Yamada’s solo recorder (descant and tenor) improvisation – Traces of Air – seemed proportionally out of place in the main Grand Hall, its fluttering pianissimos and ephemeral multiphonics like cries of despair from a far-off world.

Yet both of these offered vivid contrast to the energised magnitude of two feisty performances in the Old Fruitmarket. Mitchener’s solo programme showed this gritty solo performer at her eye-catching best: her singular presence mid-stage within a halo of smoke and dramatic lighting hauntingly reminiscent of a Samuel Beckett scenario; her penetratingly deconstructive, electronically-enhanced musings on the spirituals Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child (Olly Wilson’s Sometimes) and Amazing Grace viscerally engaging. 

As for that incursion by the SSO strings into the extended folk idiom of participating Norwegian-based fiddle-guitar duo, Sarah-Jane Summers and Juhani Silvola, they had the joint jumping with Summers’ The Spirit Multitude. In a work, directed by Volkov, that fused racy, foot-stamping reels with evocative excursions into the realms of the truly surreal, the temperature of this festival jumped to mercury-busting heights. It wouldn’t have been out of place in Glasgow’s Celtic Connections.

The main evening concert by the full SSO was equally inclusive. The first half opened with the world premiere of Marc Yeats’ spatially-conceived A Point in the Landscape, in which order is sought out of chaos. With the orchestra divided into mixed groups, on and off stage, and the process governed by the timers on the players’ own mobile phones, the effect was remarkably liberating, not to mention admirable in this conductor-less entity’s success in finishing as one. 

It wasn’t a beautiful experience, a quality subsequently delivered by violinist Ilya Gingolts in his breathy, sotto voce unaccompanied performance of Salvatore Sciarrino’s solo Caprices.

But it was the 6 Scenes for Turntables and Orchestra, jointly composed by Mariam Rezaei and Matthew Shlomowitz with the former as soloist, that finally brought the house down. Rezaei’s spellbinding floor show – like a DJ on speed – elicited rhythmic bite and stratospheric sound effects that added ecstatic overlay to Shlomowitz’s free-flowing, hi-octane orchestral score. It was an exhilarating climax to an illuminating day.

Ken Walton  

(Photo: BBC/Alex Woodward)

BBC SSO / Gardolínska

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City Halls, Glasgow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ken Walton

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

Cumnock Tryst

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Various venues, Cumnock

It’s hard to believe The Cumnock Tryst is approaching the significant landmark of its first decade. Nine years ago, local boy, now globally-celebrated composer, Sir James MacMillan founded the event, modelled on the likes of Orkney’s St Magnus Festival, in the hope it would play its part in accelerating the cultural and economic revival of the former mining-dependent Ayrshire town. 

It has certainly proved sustainable. MacMillan’s contacts book may have been essential in enticing celebrity names from the classical world and beyond, but just as imperative has been the Festival’s catalysing effect on generating projects involving local people that impact so positively on their social and cultural well-being. 

The 4-day 2023 Festival was no exception, witnessing on the one hand the magnetic persona of Australian-American opera star Danielle de Niese, the electrifying a cappella vocal ensemble Tenebrae and leading Scots folk singer Findlay Napier; while on the other, such big-hearted community events as BIG Saturday!, back-to-back concerts in the new Barony Hall of Robert Burns Academy, a central hub in the sprawling multi-school Barony Campus newly built on the edge of the town.

Both hour-long concerts – “In the Stars” and “Darkness into Darkness” – were the culmination of a three-year project celebrating the legacy of the local coalfields, in which schools and older community groups (including the now well-established Festival Chorus) engaged with composers and songwriters to create their own musical responses. These were performed by the participating groups with professional support from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under MacMillan’s direction.

I witnessed Saturday’s earlier event, “In the Stars”, notable for its slickness of presentation and stylistic variety the challenge produced: from Doon Academy, an attitudinal percussion number with narration by singer-songwriter Karine Polwart; from Netherthird Primary Choir the catchy Elder of the Woods; from Logan Primary the whimsical Crow from Crow Wood; and finally Robert Burns Academy’s vocal pop number, The Colour Room, its title borrowed from an actual Cumnock hairdressing salon.

Dalmellington Brass Academy had set the mood with brass band composer Andrew Duncan’s Knockshinnoch 1950, a robust tribute to an historic local mining accident. Further short orchestral links written by Duncan, Electra Perivolaris, Michael Murray, Gillan Walker and Jay Capperauld, and ranging in temperament from Murray’s brooding and mysterious Visions of the A-Frame to the minimalist lustre of Capperauld’s Zenith, secured a vital continuity, and a vehicle to offset the successive performers’ comings and goings. With MacMillan’s riotous football tribute, Eleven, a pugnacious BBC SSO blew the final whistle. 

Friday evening offered a stimulating juxtaposition between the sacred and the secular. The former was delivered by Nigel Short’s excellent a cappella vocal ensemble Tenebrae in a programme entitled I Saw Eternity, referring to the Scottish premiere of MacMillan’s eponymous anthem, a work written specifically to partner Bach’s motets.

Which is precisely what Tenebrae did, coupling that and more by MacMillan’s choral settings with two of Bach’s loveliest cantatas, Komm, Jesu Komm and Jesu Meine Freude. The Bach interpretations were supreme, drawing an uplifting combination of homogenous perfection and nuanced elasticity from the singers. The choral partita format of Jesu Meine Freude, while immense, even symphonic in scope, maintained its intimacy throughout. Intonation was electrifyingly spot-on.

MacMillan’s music provided freer scope for Tenebrae’s expressive war chest. The three Tenebrae Responsories, reminiscent in many ways of Bruckner’s motets and driven by the same spiritual potency and molten ecstasy, gave rise to some of the programme’s most heightened thrills, some reaching a level of intensity so penetrating that this modest venue – St John’s Church – almost strained to contain it.

After the liquid density and visionary warmth of I Saw Eternity, the programme ended with his Miserere, a pertinent endpoint, and a hugely transformative one as MacMillan’s famous “Tryst” melody – a recurrent feature in many of his works – appeared in its original completeness like an awakening sunburst. Something of a Götterdämmerung moment.

Along the road at the Dumfries Arms Hotel, Friday’s late-night slot was given over to folk musician Findlay Napier, his affable repartee and earthy lyricism like beer and crisps to the earlier sacred sustenance at St John’s. From Hamish Imlach’s Cod Liver Oil and Orange Juice to his own The Blue Lagoon (a sardonic response to the famous Glasgow chippy’s claim of having served Justin Bieber a haggis supper), Napier, through smiling charm and gentle ribbing, gradually reeled in an slow-burning audience. A more liberating cabaret-style setting might have loosened inhibitions quicker.

Danielle de Niese struck gold immediately with her audience in Thursday’s Festival opening recital in Old Cumnock Church, which featured two brand new songs written for her by MacMillan, their emotionally introspective core perfect as a preface to Poulenc’s highly-charged operatic one-acter, La Voix Humaine.

If the Poulenc – in which a fraught woman’s telephone call to her unseen lover confirms his wish to end their relationship – was the natural outlet for de Niese’s red-hot theatricals, so too MacMillan’s songs, setting words by Michael Symmons Roberts, played directly to this versatile soprano’s hot-blooded instincts. 

The unfettered spirit defining both MacMillan songs – the questioningly enigmatic Soul Song and the sparkling abandon of The Vows – was charismatically captured by de Niese and pianist Matthew Fletcher, whose mutual response to the music’s crystalline sparkle never missed a trick. MacMillan and Symmons Roberts intend to add further songs to the collection.

The most intriguing aspect of the Poulenc was to witness it in this version for piano-only accompaniment. Again, Fletcher’s own dramatic instinct multiplied its effectiveness, attuned perfectly to the breathtaking, at times breathless, spontaneity of de Niese’s solo portrayal. It was a mesmerising performance, de Niese piercing the character’s rawest emotions, minimal props throwing the spotlight wholly on the feverish restlessness of a truly intoxicating score.

Ken Walton

Photos: Stuart Armitt

BBC SSO/Wilson

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City Halls, Glasgow

For all the strength of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra across all departments, this programme conducted by John Wilson was a real showcase for the strings, from the huge ensemble sound that opened the evening with the first movement of George Enescu’s Suite No 1 – underscored only by Gordon Rigby’s rumbling timpani – to the solo by leader Laura Samuel in the Fairy Garden conclusion of Ravel’s Mother Goose.

Nicely lit and filmed, with plenty of well-chosen instrumental close-ups, for a live-stream that seems to have been a one-time event now absent from the BBC i-Player, it was clearly audible that the opening work was being performed in an empty hall, and that reverberant acoustic suited it well.

Some echoey page-turning noises sat less happily in the midst of Lennox Berkeley’s Serenade for Strings, initially a complete sonic contrast to the ominous Enescu but ultimately becoming more edgy than its lush opening. As was noted in the concert commentary, there is evident of Berkeley’s Parisian training in that development, as there is in Vaughan Williams’s orchestral scoring of his song-cycle On Wenlock Edge.

Tenor Benjamin Hulett was making his debut singing that version, as opposed to the piano-accompanied one, and perhaps he began a little uncertainly, but he warmed well to the task at hand. Houseman was reportedly less impressed by this than other settings of his work, and if the poet’s reservations are understandable, the musical arc of the work was given full expression here by Wilson and the SSO. Is My Team Ploughing? is much less bleak than the familiar Butterworth setting, and Hulett captured its ambiguity beautifully before giving full voice to the longest song, Bredon Hill.

The orchestral coup of the concert was another first, the world premiere of a new edition of the complete ballet music for Mother Goose, the fullest version of Ravel’s suite restored to his 1912 intention, replacing the hotch-potch published in the 1970s. I cannot pretend to have picked up the additions and omissions that Wilson alluded to, but it is true that Ravel was working in an era when the whole sphere of publication and proof-reading was becoming more complex and sophisticated. If he missed out on the benefits of modernism it is more than time amends are made.

The detail of his scoring certainly deserves to be as beautifully played as it was here, with the harp, winds and celesta complementing those strings, continuing to demonstrate that distinctive ensemble coherence alongside the front-desk solo virtuosity.

Available on BBC Sounds. Now also available on the BBC i-Player.

Keith Bruce

Volkov’s New Commission Body

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Ilan Volkov, principal guest conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, has teamed up with violinist Ilya Gringolts, currently a Violin International Fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, to launch a new Zurich-based Foundation that will offer worldwide support for the composition, performance and funding of new music.

The I&I Foundation will aim to commission up to 20 new works each year from emerging composers from around the world beginning in 2021. Among the first five recipients is the young Manchester-based composer and improviser Lawrence Dunn, who is joined by others from Russia, Israel, Japan and the USA. 
Among the key aims of the initiative are commitments to streamlining the commissioning process, shortening the usual delays between commission and performance, and offering financial payment to composers at the start of the commissioning process rather than just at the end. The emphasis, according to Volkov, will be on shorter “micro-commissions” so that the process is as fast, efficient and effective as possible.

Volkov, who founded and curates the global contemporary music phenomenon Tectonics, that has an annual festival residency in Glasgow, is well known in Scotland for his championing of progressive new music with the BBC SSO ever since his original appointment as its principal conductor in 2003. 

“I love performing works by established composers, but for me, my most important role is to look towards the unseen,” he says. “With the foundation I look forward to starting a long and positive process of working with composers, helping them develop their careers, having their music heard, recorded and better known. If we then see some of these names suddenly being commissioned by huge organisations, then we’ll know we’ve done the right thing at the right time.”

Further information on www.iandifoundation.org