Tag Archives: Cheryl Frances-Hoad

RSNO / Sondergard

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

It could be a fanciful notion, but the briefest work in the RSNO’s diverse programme may have held the key to it. Mendelssohn’s Overture to Son and Stranger is obscure because the music-theatre work it prefaces was never intended for more than domestic purposes, to amuse family and friends.

The overture is a bright, lively six minutes for a small orchestra, instantly identifiable as the work of the composer, which prefaced Thomas Sondergard’s fine reading of Beethoven’s Symphony No 7 and followed a first half that had a distinct family feel.

It began with the first performance of a bespoke work for the RSNO Changed Voices, a choir of young men who have recently left behind the world of trebles and altos, which is celebrating its 20th birthday this year, although none of its current members will be of that vintage just yet.

For what also became a retiral present for its director since 2009, Frikki Walker, composer Cheryl Frances-Hoad and librettist Kate Wakeling collaborated with the young singers on You Have to be Realistic About a Perfect Day, its poetry derived from conversations in February, then set by the composer.

If the music was compelling, and followed a very readable arc from teenage angst to an energetic, colourful optimistic conclusion, its sumptuous orchestration also contrived to stay well out of the way of the young voices, which yet lack power. It was a singularly successful commission.

If any of that cohort of singers pursue a career in music, they may well learn the two famous numbers among Vaughan Williams’ setting of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Songs of Travel: opener The Vagabond and Whither Must I Wander?. On Saturday they were performed, alongside the other seven, by Swedish baritone Andreas Landin.

He was making his debut with the orchestra (and returns at the end of the month as one of the quartet of soloists for Mozart’s Great Mass in C) but knows Glasgow well, as he is the husband of Thomas Sondergard, now in his eighth season as RSNO Music Director, with six as Principal Guest Conductor before that.

Landin’s career is chiefly on the Scandinavian opera stage, where he is Don Giovanni soon, but he did not over-dramatise the Vaughan Williams songs, their orchestration by Roy Douglas as well as the composer but very much of a piece.

Heard in full, those familiar late Victorian party-pieces are balanced in the cycle by the more wistful Youth and Love and elegiac In Dreams and it was on those that the soloist’s voice, and especially his full-toned upper register, shone.

Sondergard’s Beethoven Seven was the final triumph of this eclectic evening, the main feature after a diverting supporting programme. With the orchestra’s core staff players in their places and no extras, this was a lean and vigorous RSNO, playing swift, clean, dynamic Beethoven. Sondergard took a brief pause before the Presto third movement, but otherwise it was a non-stop rendition of what is the composer’s most ebullient symphony. Those repeated swells of sound were always sharp-edged and the variations in tempi and volume flowed with eloquent precision.

Keith Bruce

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

BBC SSO / Wigglesworth

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City Halls, Glasgow

Edward Elgar’s well-documented disappointment in the lukewarm reception accorded the premiere of his Second Symphony is more often remarked than that reaction itself. If the audience in 1911 expected memorable melodies and a climactic finale, they might indeed have been confounded by the piece.

The BBC SSO’s Chief Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth perhaps chose to end his first year with the work more because it is a suitably big piece for a season finale, requiring large forces on stage to perform the rich orchestration, rather than from a desire to leave the City Halls audience with a spring in its step and a song in its heart.

It was the conclusion to a concert that began with Richard Strauss’s rampantly colourful tone-poem Till Eulenspiegel, which not only shared those qualities, but was a fun place to start – especially in this particularly lively performance by the SSO musicians. From the opening statement of Till’s tune by guest first horn Christopher Gough onwards, the “merry pranks” of Strauss’s romp through the adventures of the medieval folk-hero were played with enthusiastic vigour, including fine E flat clarinet from Adam Lee.

Laura van der Heijden brought as much energy to the world premiere that followed: the BBC-commissioned Cello Concerto composed for her by Cheryl Frances-Hoad. Wigglesworth will have earned the thanks of cellists for helping this piece to funded completion, as Frances-Hoad, a Menuhin School cellist herself, has given them a substantial new work.

While the focus is on the soloist from the start, the composer has created orchestration which sat well with the past masters of the art on either side of it in this programme. There were moments towards the end of the opening movement when Van der Heijden’s busy fingering was not completely audible above the orchestra, but that may have been intended, and the broadcast of the concert on Thursday May 25 should clarify the question.

The work has an environmental inspiration – very clearly explained in the composer’s lucid programme note – and the final movement, entitled Air, seemed to balance the forces onstage more successfully. The work’s heart, however, is the slow movement, Sea, which not only seemed to evoke its inspiration most successfully, but brought to mind the classic concertos for the instrument by Dvorak and Elgar.

The latter’s Symphony No 2 featured the SSO strings in the top form we’d heard them all evening, with specific details, like the contrapuntal pizzicato bass line in the second movement, shining through. Great work from the trombones as well, while the five-strong percussion section, guest-led by Alasdair Malloy, put in a terrific shift.

Keith Bruce

Concerto partners

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Cellist Laura van der Heijden and composer Cheryl Frances-Hoad tell Keith Bruce how a Scottish world premiere came about

A very busy and multi-faceted musician, cellist Laura van der Heijden is not an especially regular visitor to Scotland, but she is the soloist with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in the next few weeks, oddly with both conducting Wigglesworths, Mark and Ryan, on the podiums.

The 2012 BBC Young Musician winner when she was just 15, Van der Heijden is playing Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No 2 with the SCO this week in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen, and then returns in the third week of May to premiere a new cello concerto written for her by Cheryl Frances-Hoad, one of Ryan Wigglesworth’s first commissions as Chief Conductor of the SSO.

“I am in panic learning mode at the moment!” she told VoxCarnyx. “It’s my first time with the Shostakovich as well and I wonder if there will be more flexibility with Cheryl’s piece, while with the Shostakovich everything is on the page. But then I have never played Shostakovich 2 with an orchestra either – so all will be revealed in the coming days!

“It was the SCO who suggested the Shostakovich and I have always wanted to learn and play it, so I said ‘yes’. There is so much dialogue between the orchestra part and the cello part – there are some of the coolest classical music moments in that piece.”

With composer Frances-Hoad also part of our on-line conversation, it is clear that the new bespoke concerto holds as much exciting promise for the soloist. The BBC commission will be heard in Glasgow’s City Halls, replaced in the SSO’s Aberdeen concert by the Walton concerto that was her victory piece in 2012. When both are broadcast, listeners may spot some shared vocabulary.

“I love the opening of the Walton concerto and that shimmering sound and that’s something that comes up in Cheryl’s piece. I also mentioned the Martinu cello concerto to her and the brass stabs that I love in that piece – and we’ve definitely got brass stabs in hers too. Those are textures that I really enjoy and both of those appear in the concerto.

“But I haven’t heard it live yet, and I think there’s a lot that I am going to be surprised by. There’s no way of experiencing what it will really be like before I meet with the orchestra – playing it through with the piano is not the same.”

The Frances-Hoad concerto has come together with such easy synchronicity, both player and composer seem mildly astonished.

“We only started talking about it in Spring of last year,” says Frances-Hoad, “so it’s amazing because these things usually take ages.

“Laura sent me a message saying she was interested in me writing a concerto for her and I was overjoyed as I have always really enjoyed her playing.

“We had some discussions and then Ryan Wigglesworth rang me and said he was interested in commissioning me to write a concerto for Laura and the BBC Scottish, so instead of having to raise funding, Ryan made it all fit magically into place.”

“I might have mentioned to him that I’d like to have something by you,” adds Van der Heijden, “but it did seem as if the BBC commission was unconnected with that.

“It’s the first time I’ve ever been involved in the process of commissioning a piece and although I’ve done other new works, this feels like a new adventure. We had quite a few conversations, but I knew Cheryl’s music speaks to me and my playing style and it would be something I could connect to.

“We spoke about some ideas behind the piece and that we’d like it to be inspired by the environment and be a celebration of nature, rather than some sort of climate crisis appeal. But that’s just the inspiration behind the music, and it doesn’t need any programme.”

For Frances-Hoad, who began her musical life as a cellist at the Yehudi Menuhin School, the big work is an important milestone in her composing career.

“When I was 14 or 15 I wrote a 15 minute cello concertina and that was what won me a BBC Young Composer Award in 1996. In 2013 I then wrote a piece called Catharsis for wind quintet, string quintet and solo cello. It was a cello concerto in ambition, but I haven’t written a proper cello concerto until now.

“I recently had an amazing year as a Visiting Fellow in Creative Arts at Merton College, Oxford – which extended to 20 months because of Covid – where I had a studio and made friends with people from different areas of study and wrote a lot of pieces inspire by stuff they told me about – it was just a really productive, wonderful time.

“So I asked one of the biologists for ideas when I was writing the cello concerto, and he told me about this phenomenon of algae in the ocean that feeds off sunlight and carbon and blooms and grows incredibly fast, making beautifully patterns in the sea.

“What I love doing as a composer is learning about things like that because it makes my mind work in a different way. In the second movement, the harmonies are my response to the life-cycle of the algae.

“It’s a mind-gym that means I come up with ideas that I wouldn’t have done. The piece is a celebration of the beauty and wonder of nature, rather than bashing heads together about the importance of its preservation.

“But at the same time I was always thinking about writing a proper cello concerto, and about the balance in the orchestration. I wanted it to be a fulfilling piece to play with a proper slow movement where you can really appreciate the soloist’s musicianship, and show-off the talents of the soloist.”

Laura van der Heijden plays Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No 2 in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall this evening with the SCO under Mark Wigglesworth. The concert is repeated at Glasgow City Halls on Friday and Aberdeen Music Hall on Saturday.

Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s Cello Concerto has its World Premiere at Glasgow City Halls on Thursday May 18. Soloist Laura van der Heijden plays the Walton Cello Concerto in Aberdeen Music Hall with Ryan Wigglesworth and the BBC SSO the following day.