Tag Archives: COP26

RSNO / Midori

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Some things are worth waiting for, in this case Detlev Glanert’s intensely beautiful Violin Concerto No 2. It was originally earmarked for UK premiere by its dedicatee, American-Japanese violinist  Midori, as part of the RSNO’s 2020/21 season. When Covid struck the planned world premiere in Tokyo was cancelled, making a revised Scotland performance date last January, albeit streamed, the world premiere. That, in turn, proved unworkable. 

Finally it has happened, and last weekend’s Edinburgh and Glasgow performances gave us the very first airing of a work Glanert has subtitled “To the Immortal Beloved”, revealing its inspirational source as Beethoven’s famously passionate declaration of love, a letter written but never posted to a mystery woman, thought to be Josephine Brunsvik, in 1812.

Glanert takes three extracts from that letter as the emotional springboard for each of his three uninterrupted movements. In this performance, conducted by RSNO music director Thomas Søndergård, the key cadenzas appeared to have structural significance as apogees of the integral sections. Midori certainly treated them as such, the potency, and at times vehemence, of her playing symbolising emphatically their referential import.

But it was the journey to each of these that offered the true substance, an opening characterised by fitful gestures and antagonistic timpani instilling a dimension of unease that operates variously within the entire work, countered by a calming stream of lyrical consciousness that first materialises in the soloist’s initial appearance. 

Through the initial soul-searching turbulence, the ocean of calm that presents a near-idyllic respite at its heart, that magical moment where Glanert wraps the quietest of pianissimos by the soloist in a shroud of scintillating percussion, and in a home straight that reasserts the concerto’s underlying Romanticism, Midori and the orchestra performed with equal measures of heightened sensitivity and rubescent heat. 

It was, of course, just one work in an artful programme aligned to the current COP26 conference in Glasgow. Besides the Glanert – justified by Midori’s personal role as a United Nations Peace Ambassador – Søndergård conducted insightful performances of Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara’s electroacoustic menagerie Swans Migrating – the final short movement from his so-called Concerto for Birds, Cantus Arcticus – and Dvorak’s Symphony No 9 From the New World. 

The Rautavaara, combining a crescendoing swarm of taped birdsong with the RSNO’s expressive live performance, was the perfect mood-setter for the Glanert. As for the Dvorak, it was revelatory in the way Søndergård found new points to consider despite the symphony’s well-worn familiarity. It was as if he had taken fine sandpaper to its rougher edges, revealing as a result sensitivities in the scoring that are too often ridden roughshod over. 

That, and Søndergård’s instinctive ebbing and flowing of the tempi, guaranteed a symphonic experience that, to coin a topical phrase in Glasgow at the moment, eschewed “blah-blah-blah” in favour of fresh and productive outcomes.

Ken Walton

Available to view online until 31 January, purchasable at www.rsno.org.uk

Red Note Ensemble

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Perth Concert Hall

It may be unhelpful to say so, but there are certain tropes of the illustration of the climate crisis that are now in danger of becoming just more “blah, blah, blah”. Images of a collapsing glacier wall or plastic bottles bobbing in the ocean are now so familiar that the horror of them has long since dissipated.

Both were present and correct in the film that accompanied this premier of a new composition that is Red Note’s contribution to the artistic activity around COP26. At first the music sounded ominously at risk of going down the same route: fluttering harmonics and percussive use of the bodies of the string instruments and then chords of ambient disquiet from the entire nonet.

Fortunately, this far from unattractive but strangely familiar opening was merely the introduction to sub mari by Martina Corsini and Manuel Figueroa-Bolvaran. For Corsini, who is Weston-Jerwood Creative Fellow with the ensemble following her music studies at the University of the West of Scotland, this was a debut commission, and the singer-songwriter incorporated a showcase for herself at the heart of what was more a 30-minute suite with five distinct sections.

If her song, backed by young choir from Chile (Coro Allegro, directed by Francisco Espinoza) on film and Levenmouth Academy in Fife (directed by Alison Fleming) on tape, made the most immediate impact, it had also given the producers the biggest headaches. With plans for a live appearance by the young Scots scuppered by pandemic restrictions, Red Note artistic director John Harris revealed, in a discussion after the concert, that some pop music auto-tune trickery had been required to bring all the ingredients to the same pitch.

If that accounted for a slight stiltedness in the central section, it was more than made up for by the liquidity of the playing from Red Note’s professionals around it. The work’s inspiration lay in the scarcity of water in Figueroa-Bolvaran’s native Chile, compared to the threat it poses in Crosini’s adopted home of Scotland, and there was a parallel international landscape of sound in the music. Highlights included a memorable combination of Joanna Nicholson’s clarinet, Emil Chakalov’s violin and percussionist Tom Hunter’s floor tom, flautist Ruth Morley soloing over a backbeat of tribal drumming (again involving the strings as percussion instruments), and Malcolm MacFarlane’s gorgeously fluid Hawaiian-flavoured electric guitar.

The final movement, featuring the full group again, had a questioning tone that seemed absolutely correct, and the corollary to all the cliches that have become part of the environmental debate.

The work has further performances at Wellington Church, Glasgow on November 8, at 6pm, and in the Laidlaw Music Centre in the University of St Andrews on November 9, at 3pm.

Keith Bruce

Pictured: John Harris by Wattie Cheung

Vital Signs of the Planet

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

I am unconvinced that it added up as a concert programme, but there were some fine ingredients in the contribution of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland to COP26 in Glasgow.

Created in partnership with the Global Climate Uprising Festival invented by the LakeArts Foundation of the US, and supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, it was a showcase for a huge student orchestra of some 110 players under the baton of conductor Emil de Cou, and for half a dozen eloquent young activists from Africa, South America and Scotland whose testimonies separated the musical items.

Those young people would not be born when the first UN “Earth Summit” was held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. A film from that event prefaced this one, and prompted the thought that the youth of that era are the generation now being berated for their lack of action on the environmental crisis.

Bannockburn’s Natalie Sinclair, in her role as a National Geographic Explorer, gave an account of her research into whale song as the first of the spoken contributions, after Scots violinist Andrea Gajic was the soloist in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Accompanied by a string orchestra from within the huge forces on stage, it was a performance that grew in rhythmic assurance as the year unfolded, the hesitancy of Autumn more or less dispatched by Winter.

The third movement of Debussy’s La Mer and the broad-palette orchestration of the third movement of the Sinfonia Antartica by Ralph Vaughan Williams gave rein to the full forces on stage, when there were impressive contributions from horns, brass and on the hall’s digital organ.

The revelation of the programme, however, was  a piece the conductor had brought with him. Advent, by film composer Michael Giacchino, was commissioned to mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moonlanding. Post-graduate student Claire Lumsden had the starring role here with the wordless soprano solo throughout the work.

It was an evening where young Scots women like her were consistently in the spotlight. At its start a small group of pipes and drums had been notable for the precision and power percussion of its smallest, and sole female, member, and at its end pop star Natasha Bedingfield’s re-written and fully orchestrated version of her hit Unwritten was distinguished by the backing vocals of Rachel Lightbody, Cariss Crosbie and Emilie Boyd, collectively known as Little Acres.

Keith Bruce

Pictured: Claire Lumsden

Sound Goes Live

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Aberdeen’s soundfestival (19-24 October) resumes normal service this autumn with a week-long programme of live performances that includes over 30 premieres and a brand new series of half-hour Spotlight Concerts featuring emerging and local performers and composers. 

At the heart of the flagship contemporary music festival is a climate emergency theme recognising the forthcoming COP26 summit in Glasgow, which features specially commissioned works, environmentally-themed performances under the banner 1.5 Degrees, From the Coast and Distance, and a commitment from all visiting performers not to fly to the festival.

“With COP 26 putting the climate crisis to the fore we have commissioned and programmed pieces that explore the challenge that the world faces,” explained director Fiona Roberson. “We are particularly excited by our co-commission from Laura Bowler, Distance, with which we open soundfestival 2021.” It will be performed in Aberdeen by soprano Juliet Fraser with a live-streamed ensemble in the USA.

Young composers featured in the global warning programmes – also incorporating part of the new Spotlight series – include Jamie Perera, Georgina MacDonell Finlayson, Aileen Sweeney and Emily Doolittle, while established creators Pete Stollery, Pippa Murphy and Alistair MacDonald will direct workshop projects with local teenagers, helping them create electronic soundscapes from discarded waste material. The resulting “instruments” will be used in a performance of More More More, a work originally created for the London Sinfonietta by producer, writer and electronic musician Matthew Herbert.

Premieres in the wider Festival programme include works by Ailie Robertson, Luke Styles, Glasgow-based David Fennessy, and Tansy Davies’ Grand Mutation for violin, horn and piano, a co-commission streamed from France during last year’s virtual soundfestival. Among this year’s guest performers are Red Note Ensemble, the St Machar’s Cathedral Choir with organist Roger Williams and the New Maker Ensemble.

The Festival completes its five-year exploration of “endangered instruments” with a focus on the double bass. French bassist Florentin Ginot – a progressive champion of the instrument through his involvement with Ensemble Modern, IRCAM and Ensemble Intercontemporain – is this year’s artist-in-residence, and will appear as soloist and in various collaborations, including the world premiere of a new sound commission from Pascale Criton with the soprano Juliet Fraser. The scientific properties of the double bass can be explored in an interactive exhibition at Aberdeen Science Centre.

Robertson expressed delight that soundfestival has been able to return to near normal, albeit in line with ongoing COVID constraints.  “Programming a festival as we are emerging from lockdowns has not been the simplest task,” she acknowledges. “However, if we’ve learnt one thing over the past 18 months, it’s that it is important to adapt to your circumstances and just do what’s possible.”

Full details of Aberdeen’s 2021 soundfestival available at: www.sound-scotland.co.uk

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