Tag Archives: Cumnock Tryst

Cumnock Tryst: Launch Recital

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Cumnock Old Church

No need to worry when one of the extraordinary Kanneh-Mason clan call off a concert engagement. Among seven talented siblings there will always be one who can step into the breach. For this occasion – the now customary annual Cumnock Tryst Launch Recital – it was down to pianist Jeneba Kanneh-Mason to fill the shoes of her cello-playing older brother Sheku, currently recovering long-term from a persistent hand injury.

The event itself served two aims: for Festival founder and artistic director Sir James MacMillan to reveal his 4-day programme for the upcoming 2026 Cumnock Tryst Festival in October (see details here); and to fulfil the Tryst’s wider policy of programming one-off concerts throughout the year. 

On Saturday, nothing whatsoever was lost by the familial substitution. In her well-balanced hour-long Cumnock programme, 23-year-old Jeneba Kanneh-Mason glided through a sequence of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and Florence Price that exhibited not only a supercharged technique, but also a deep-rooted curiosity of the music’s inner soul, its emotional and stylistic challenges, and most teasingly its intellectual surprises. 

She opened with Bach’s Partita No 5 in G. This was a performance that gripped from the moment she touched the keys, her finger work distinguished by exhilarating definition, her detailed interpretation akin to acute forensic analysis of the music’s inner workings. The directional flow over the seven movements was effortlessly compelling, the final Gigue arriving like some wild contrapuntal maelstrom. 

Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in D minor, the so-called ‘Tempest’, provided more open space for Kanneh-Mason to explore. It’s a work dating from the composer’s troubled exile in Heiligenstadt, reflected in the questioning mood and contrasting tempi of the opening movement. There was certainly a structural understanding of that in Kanneh-Mason’s considered approach, its understated nature feeding over into a slow movement filled with lyrical eloquence, yet downplaying any suggestions of unrest in the left hand’s suggestive drum rolls. If by this point the sonata felt a little like work in progress for the pianist, she redeemed herself with a Finale brisling with dramatic verve. 

Two Chopin Ballades followed: No 3 in A flat, an easeful stream of Romantically-expressed storytelling, which the pianist delivered with easeful enchantment; and No 4 in F minor, an altogether more beguiling work, which Kanneh-Mason responded to with both Siren-like allure and fiery intensity. 

She ended her recital with Fantasie Nègre No 1 in E minor by the early 20th century African-American composer Florence Price. The piece itself invokes a menagerie of influences, a heavily-used spiritual – “Sinner, Please Don’t Let This Harvest Pass” – holding its own amid a swirling sea of Liszt, Brahms, snatches of Impressionism, hints of jazz, you name it. Not the most convincing piece of music, but saved by another flawless, persuasive performance from Kanneh-Mason.

Ken Walton

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

Cumnock Tryst: Roderick Williams/Carducci Quartet

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Trinity Church, Cumnock

In Crail Church during the East Neuk Festival earlier this year, young baritone James Newby gave a remarkable performance of Schubert’s first major song cycle Die schone Mullerin which emphasised the disturbed existential angst of the protagonist.

Introducing his own radical revision of the work, Roderick Williams confessed to wishing he had tackled it as a younger man, and his very different reading gave us not the live trauma of a jilted lover falling apart but the regretful tone of an older man looking back on troubled times.

The boldness in Williams’ recital was in his own arrangement of the instrumental accompaniment for string quartet. The piano part is so integral to Schubert’s vision – and its playing (by Joseph Middleton in the case of Newby’s concert) key to its success – that the absence of it in the familiar opener, Das Wandern, could not help but jar.

The softer edge to the music, even if cellist Emma Denton in particular often added percussive pizzicato, undoubtedly altered the experience, but equally it suited Williams’ more wistful tone – or perhaps his approach deliberately matched his arrangement.

Whatever, it was a new way to listen to a familiar piece and as the ear attuned, one that revealed much about it. With the piano part mostly covered by the other players, quartet leader Matthew Denton sometimes added an extra obligato line – the usually unheard voice of the Fair Maid of the Mill herself. There was more of a sense of the landscape in which the songs are set, rather than simply the viewpoint of the smitten singer.

By the time we arrived at Morning Greeting, the next song that really enjoys a stand-alone life, the lush string arrangement was assuredly a positive advantage and the sequence that song starts was a highlight of the whole performance.

From then on, Williams added more drama and spice to his delivery, which was all to the good. The self-deception of Mein!, envy of Der Jager, and cynical side-eye of Die liebe Farbe brought changes of timbre in his vocal delivery, although the relaxed delivery of the German verse and technical precision across his entire range never faltered.

The final song, Des Baches Wiegenlied, was beautifully recast by the quartet, its rocking rhythm especially good in the hands of the strings. It also restored the sense that we had been given a glimpse into past grief that had proved eminently survivable.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Stuart Armitt

Cumnock Tryst Chorus/BBC SSO | NYOS Camerata

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Barony Hall, Cumnock | Cumnock Town Hall

One of the truly local successes of James MacMillan’s Cumnock Tryst festival has been its very own Festival Chorus. Populated by singers from the wider Ayrshire diaspora – including much of the Tryst management and MacMillan himself on Saturday – it has played an integral part in defining the home-grown element of the event, not least its willingness to address challenging contemporary repertoire over the years.

The beauty of American composer Taylor Scott Davis’ Magnificat, however, of which this was the Scottish premiere, is the extent to which this half-hour-long work lends itself to such enthusiastic amateur outfits. Written to a predominantly singable formula – the soft-centred comfort blanket of Rutter-like lyricism and golden harmonies never far away – and illuminated by a filmic orchestral glow courtesy here of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, this left ample freedom for conductor Eamonn Dougan to elicit the unpretentious expressiveness behind the notes. For the listener, it was a sincere and comforting ride. 

If eclecticism was in full view, so was the Texan-based composer’s craftsmanship in knitting together a stream of recognisable influences. Where the energised sparkle of the opening spoke freely of John Adams, such was the sweep of ongoing references – fleeting echoes of so many Hollywood soundtracks – that the magpie-like mind of John Williams seemed a permanent resonance.

Scott Davis, the Texan-based composer, was himself in Cumnock to witness the performance, members of his Texan choir also making the trip to swell the vocal masses. Thus the red-ripe confidence greeting the opening Magnificat anima mea, the silken underpinning of ravishing solos by soprano (and former Scottish Opera Emerging Artist) Catriona Hewitson, the subdued acquiescence of the Et misericordia, and the ultimate euphoria of the Gloria.

This wasn’t a long concert – most of the Cumnock programmes come in at around an hour apiece – but it was a fulfilling one, opening with a deliciously light-fingered, joyously articulated account by SSO players of Dvorak’s Serenade for Wind Instruments (the added cello and double bass essential, but so like cuckoos in the nest) under MacMillan’s direction. A brief a cappella choral performance of MacMillan’s own wholesome six-part communion motet Benedicimus Deum caeli (from the Strathclyde Motets) followed, deftly conducted by chorus director Andrew McTaggart.

All of this took place in the Barony Hall, the central auditorium within Cumnock’s Robert Burns Academy, which worked really well acoustically, save for a vigorous air-conditioning system that gave intermittent life to a rack of tubular bells at points when they weren’t prescribed.

NYOS Camerata conducted by Matthew Coorey

Earlier, Saturday’s afternoon concert was in a rather chilly Cumnock Town Hall, so thankfully we had an hours’ worth of Richard Strauss to warm the cockles and counter the remnants of Storm Amy outside. This featured the National Youth Orchestras of Scotland Camerata, a kind of elite squad at the apex of the NYOS family, performing ex-Berlin Philharmonic oboist Nigel Shore’s classy wind ensemble distillation of Strauss’ opera Der Rosenkavalier under the baton of British-based Australian conductor Matthew Coorey.

Word is that some last-minute call-offs had required emergency changes to the ensemble line-up, which may have accounted for the unevenness, even some nervousness, in the score’s adrenalin-fuelled opening flourish and other key tutti points. Yet there were plentiful moments where character and skill took hold, such as those deliciously flighty figurations from the flutes, or the oboe’s plaintive lyrical poignance. 

Coorey’s taut direction brought alertness and cohesion to a monumental task. Yes, there were instances that tested the young musicians, but there was seldom a moment where Strauss’ calorific masterpiece didn’t feel like a meal you simply didn’t want to end.

Ken Walton

[Photo credit: Stuart Armitt]

Cumnock Tryst Ensemble

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Cumnock Old Church

In the hours running up to the opening concert of this year’s Cumnock Tryst festival, footage of East Ayrshire’s head of education Linda McAuley-Griffiths ridiculing the value of music’s place in the school curriculum was running rampage on social media. “I’m no really seeing the point of a wean knocking seven bells out of a glockenspiel,” was her careless remark caught on camera at a September council meeting. She has since apologised and said her words were taken out of context.

It was hard to ignore the crassness of McAuley-Griffiths’ comments as this year’s festival opening concert got under way. It featured the Cumnock Tryst Ensemble, a flexible instrumental collective established last year as a high-calibre performance group populated by some of Scotland’s most prominent musicians. Equally, though, it functions as a resident resource for the educational and community projects spearheaded by Tryst founder and globally famous composer Sir James McMillan, himself a product of an East Ayrshire schooling. 

This was the Ensemble’s own showcase, an assorted combo of flute and strings, and a programme of mainly contemporary works that utilised various permutations within. At this concert’s heart, though, was the shadow of founder-cellist Christian Elliott, who died earlier this year and the age of 41, and whose memory was central to a programme tinged with personal reflection and homage. 

Individually, the performances were often touching, at times scintillating. As an opener, Duncan Strachan’s unaccompanied cello struck a neat conversation between the ecstatic freneticism and meditative acceptance underpinning MacMillan’s Easter-inspired And he rose. Violist Felix Tanner completed the brief MacMillan solo coupling with In memoriam, written three years ago to mark the passing of Julliard String Quartet violist Roger Tapping, its moments of despair challenged by an intense virtuosity.

With Judith Weir’s St Agnes, a simple elegy for viola and cello, the air of contemplation prevailed, yet its intriguing play between playing styles – bowed legato tropes punctuated by pizzicato flourishes – felt like a gathering release en route to the heightened exchanges of Weir’s The Bagpiper’s String Trio, quirkily excitable but with ghostly undertones. Violinist Gordon Bragg made his first appearance here, bringing a top-end gloss to the ensemble. 

The third brisk movement from Heitor Villa-Lobos’ Assobio a Jato (Jet Whistle) introduced flautist Ruth Morley, her duo performance with Strachan electrically-charged in its inexorable journey to a soaring catharsis, only then to be calmed by Lisa Robertson’s enchanting Dlùthas for solo violin, inspired by the composer’s own wistful improvisation in Midlothian’s Rosslyn Chapel – though possibly also by Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending. Morley re-took the stage for her own quietly animated Whisper.

What followed verged weirdly on the burlesque, the RSNO’s eccentric principal double bass Nikita Naumov playing for laughs as he introduced Julius Goltermann’s Souvenirs de Bellini – a predictably lugubrious set of difficult variations for cello and bass, even more so in what seemed like a touch-and-go performance at times. Nor, despite the obvious virtuosity on display, was Naumov’s solo performance of Emil Tabakov’s Motivy as defined is it might have been, some moments leaning dangerously towards heavy metal.

What had been missing thus far in the programme was a piece involving the full ensemble, a factor remedied in the closing performance of New Cumnock-born Jay Capperauld’s superbly crafted Schiehallion!. Commissioned in 2023 by King Charles for the Honours of Scotland ceremony in Edinburgh, and based on Scottish tunes selected by the monarch, Capperauld’s acute sense of characterisation, succinct originality and wit is laid bare. Harmonic ingenuity, imaginative texturing, and the sheer joy expressed in this sparkling music was met by a spirit of delivery to match.

It also pointed retrospectively to a weakness in the design and presentation of this programme. Up to a point, it had felt a bit like a routine school concert – one act off, one act on, too much unstructured chat between items, and maybe let’s get the sad stuff out of the way first. Could the church space have been more creatively purposed, Robertson’s lovely Dlùthas, for instance performed from one of the empty balconies? More imaginative production and choreography would have made all the difference.

Ken Walton

(Photo: Stuart Armitt) 

2025 Cumnock Tryst Launched

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Sir James MacMillan’s Cumnock Tryst Festival enters its second decade this October, a sure sign that the award-winning East Ayrshire festival – most recently recipient of a Sky Arts Award and a second Royal Philharmonic Society Award – has earned its spurs. 

It was a proudly relaxed MacMillan last Saturday who revealed the 2025 Festival Programme in Cumnock’s St John’s Church before handing over to the a cappella vocal ensemble The Sixteen, whose concert of Renaissance and contemporary repertoire played no small part in attracting the capacity, in some cases well-travelled, attendance. 

Harry Christophers’ precision-engineered choir are not actually appearing at this year’s Festival, but its long association with The Tryst made a perfectly legitimate case for its hybrid presence at the weekend. Having appeared in the 2014 inaugural Festival and several others since, MacMillan’s own close association with the group and their joint ongoing support from the London-based Genesis Foundation, represents a bond that has spawned numerous projects geared at supporting emerging artists, especially young composers.

Saturday’s concert, Voices of Angels, highlighted one of these initiatives. Alongside seraphically-inspired Renaissance gems by Palestrina, Victoria and the biographically-colourful Francisco Guerrero (who twice survived attacks by pirates while on pilgrimage to the Holy Land), were genuinely exultant works by three young composers – Lucy Walker, Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade and Millicent B James – clearly having benefitted from MacMillan’s mentorship and such immersive performances by Christophers’ crack choristers.

It’s with voices, in fact, that the forthcoming Festival, which runs from 2-5 October, kicks off. What began with a mega-choral day for young singers throughout the various Ayrshire regions this Spring, conducted by incumbent choral gurus Eamonn Dougan and Andy McTaggart, reaches its apotheosis as the opening Three Ayrshires Choral Day on 2 October. The same day sees an evening appearance by the recently-formed Cumnock Tryst Ensemble, with music by Judith Weir, Villa-Lobos, Jay Capperauld and the UK premiere of MacMillan’s In Memoriam, all part of a programme that will now pay tribute to the cellist Christian Elliot, a founding member of the Ensemble who died recently.

In other key classical events, baritone Roderick Williams makes his Cumnock debut with the Carducci Quartet in his own arrangement of Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin. The BBC SSO and Cumnock Tryst Festival Chorus present the Scottish premiere of Texan-based Taylor Scott Davis’ Magnificat alongside MacMillan’s Benedicamus Deum caeli from The Strathclyde Motets. The National Youth Orchestras of Scotland Camerata present a wind ensemble version of Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier. Perth-born pianist Alasdair Beatson plays Beethoven, Benjamin and Debussy at Dumfries House. The Festival ends with a Nordic finale from vocal collective Sansara with music exploring Scandinavian and Celtic connections.

There’s also a rare chance to hear the fruits of a relatively unsung project, Musicians in Exile, which has been running for some time now in Glasgow, spearheaded by the conductor Paul MacAlindin under the umbrella of his Govan-based orchestra The Glasgow Barons. Made up of asylum seekers now living in Scotland, these instrumentalists perform music that integrates the styles of their respective homelands, resulting in a unique stylistic fusion (4 Oct).

The less formal side of The Tryst continues with late-evening jazz from Bill Jones’ Renaissance Swing Band (2 Oct), traditional music from fiddler Alasdair Savage & Friends (3 Oct), and the conversational Cumnock Hour (3 Oct) in which poet Michael Symmons Roberts and Hebrides Ensemble artistic director Will Conway dig deep into the story of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, which the composer wrote while detained in a World War II prison camp. 

The relevance of that? The Hebrides will perform the Messiaen in one of the Tryst’s extended series of year-round concerts on 1 February 2026 at Dumfries House. 

Full programme and booking details for the 2025 Cumnock Tryst are 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

Scotland’s new arts funding landscape

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Creative Scotland, the arts funding body, has acted to ensure that arts organisations spend less of their time making application to Creative Scotland (CS) for money.

In a widely-welcomed, if overdue, comprehensive realignment of its grants portfolio, making use of £34m increase in the Scottish Government’s budget allocation to culture, a total of 251 organisations now benefit from Multi-Year Funding, 141 of them for the first time. A further 13 are in a “Development” queue with a view to their inclusion in years to come.

The announcement puts a much larger proportion of Scotland’s arts sector on a stable financial footing, with the assurance of CS support for the coming three financial years. It also frees up staff time from the rigours of annual application to the quango, potentially to seek support from other sources.

Among those awarded multi-year funding for the first time were classical music festivals Sound in Aberdeen, Fife’s East Neuk Festival and Ayrshire’s Cumnock Tryst, founded by Sir James MacMillan. Music education initiatives The Benedetti Foundation and Sistema Scotland also now receive a multi-year award, as does the Govan-based Glasgow Barons.

There were increases in support for Orkney’s St Magnus Festival, Scottish Ensemble, Red Note, Paragon and Dunedin Consort.

The largest award goes to the Edinburgh International Festival, whose grant is increased to £3.25m in 2025/26 and will rise to £4.25m in 2027/28. One of the Festival’s most significant partners in recent years, the National Youth Choir of Scotland, also receives an increase of over 70% in its CS award, which is increased to £346,635 annually.

Francesca Heygi, EIF Chief Executive said yesterday: “We are grateful for the International Festival’s uplift in funding, which recognises the unique role we play in connecting Scotland to the world, and gives us a firm foundation from which to build.”

The core grant to the Festival had not been increased since 2008.

Creative Scotland has been unable to match the ambition of Scotland’s arts organisations  as outlined in their funding applications, but those already in receipt of Multi-Year Funding see an average increase of 34% in the coming year, rising to 54% in years to come.

Two classical music organisations, the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland and Hebrides Ensemble, were named among 13 recipients from a separate £3.2m Development Stream Fund, with a view to them joining the Multi-Year Funding list in the future.

The loser in the announcement was Cumbernauld’s Lanternhouse Theatre, where Dunedin Consort has developed recent productions and Scottish Opera premiered its latest Opera Highlights tour last week, which has lost its long-term funding, a decision described by chief executive Sarah Price as “devastating”.

Picture: No more cuts? – National Youth Choir of Scotland performing at EIF 2024 (credit Jess Shurte)

Cumnock Tryst: Music of Land Reclamation

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Barony Hall, Barony Campus, Cumnock

“Composition is a major part of the Scottish music curriculum,” proclaimed Sir James MacMillan in his preamble to an event that effectively showcased what his Cumnock Tryst festival is doing to invigorate that very discipline in East Ayrshire schools. The problem is, it’s not always treated as such, was very nearly dropped by SQA a few years ago, and it’s not an area that every music teacher feels naturally comfortable with.

That’s clearly not the case at Robert Burns Academy, where even the head of music, Ronan Boyle, had his own composition featured alongside seven short works by his Advance Higher Music class. These were created as part of a Tryst initiative that catapulted upcoming Ayrshire composer Gillian Walker into the school over a period to work with the youngsters, and which culminated on Day 2 of this year’s 10th Birthday Festival in an hour-long omnibus presentation called The Music of Land Reclamation. 

All eight works were performed in sequence against a screened backdrop of images from a stunning project by photographer Simon Butterworth – Abstract Excavationism: The Art of Industrial Land Reclamation – that the pupils had selected as initial triggers for their respective works. These were uniformly short (as SQA guidelines prescribe), individually characterised (dictated by their unique choice of photos), and helpfully drawn together through their generic scoring for flute, clarinet and cello. 

Performed by a professional ensemble – Lee Holland, Butterworth himself and Naomi Pavri respectively – and under the seated direction of MacMillan, the music was heard in it best possible light, even if the cellist’s music took occasional flight, seemingly propelled by the school hall’s air conditioning. Ever the professional, the performances continued seamlessly.

Witnessing such sincere and concise responses to Butterworth’s photographs was a joy. As he explained in his introductory comments, what started off as exploratory snapping around opencast mining sites in Ayrshire and Lanarkshire was transformed by the onset of drone photography, giving Butterworth (whose day job is as a clarinettist with the BBC SSO) literally a birds eye view of the scarred landscape below. Realising the extent to which the captured images aligned with his own passion for the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock, Barrett Newman and their likes, he reversed the creative process, basing the photography on actual paintings. 

It was clear from the pupils’ own introductions that this had inspired fertile ideas for structuring, texture and mood. Stephanie’s A Constellation on Land envisioned a glittering effervescence captured in her chosen photograph. Amber contrasted dissonant machinery with chirpy birdsong. Chelsie wove a Burns’ air into her iridescent The Fuzzy Tartan, Freya’s Insomnia did what it said on the tin, keeping us fully awake to relish its captivating contrasts, and setting us up for Mr Boyle’s own Tainted Restoration.

Joshua made the most of an additional bass clarinet in formulating the darker reaches of Light vs Dark (Chiaroscuro). The evocative textures of Leah’s neatly-engineered Snowed In fed sweetly into another Freya’s Whispers of the Wood, its playful dialogue and slick contrasts signing off this ambitious project on a well-deserved high.

Ken Walton

(Picture: Stuart Armitt)

Cumnock Tryst: Steven Osborne

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Trinity Church, Cumnock

ROBERT Schumann’s Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood) are open to interpretation, and it was emblematic of the fascinating programme Steven Osborne debuted to open the 10th birthday edition of The Cumnock Tryst that the pianist chose to offer a brief guide to the 13 short pieces verbally before he played a note.

Whether they are simply a wistful adult view of childhood or contain a deeper psychological picture of the composer, it was an invitation to sit up and tune in to the recital this most thoughtful of players had structured.

Crucially, the set contains at least two melodies well known beyond their original context, and that set the tone: some top tunes, masterly keyboard technique and a sequence of choices that engaged the brain as well as the heart.

The earliest piece followed, Bach’s Jesu, joy of man’s desiring. It too has a rich back-story, becoming especially popular in the mid-20th century performances of Myra Hess. Here it was immediately followed by Lumen Christi, composed in 1997 by our festival host, Sir James MacMillan. His use of a liturgical Easter chant in the brief piece sounds a little like a musical box, and after we had heard a sparkling Prokofiev Prelude we returned to that idea with the Musical Snuff Box composed by Anatoly Liadov, a composer every bit as troubled as Schumann.

That lovely miniature ends like a musical box in need of winding, and Osborne followed it with a third Russian, Rachmaninov and his unmistakable flamboyant signature arrangement of Fritz Kreisler’s Liebesleid.

There ended that distinct section, before a time-shift to the sequence that followed, perhaps more eclectic superficially, but no less carefully thought-through, and clearly all close to the performer’s heart.

Beginning with keyboard studies on Scottish Folk Tunes by Osborne’s contemporary at St Mary’s Music School, James Clapperton, it visited the catalogue of Judith Weir with her 2017 piece, Chorale for Steve (remembering American composer Steve Stucky), before seamlessly moving into jazz mode.

Playing three of his own transcriptions of recordings of improvising, with a fourth as an encore, Osborne was in territory he has made his own, but here given welcome sustained exposure. Keith Jarrett, unsurprisingly, featured large, his My Song – one of his loveliest melodies – opening the sequence, and, in the encore from his Vienna Concert album, closing it.

In between Osborne “became” two more very different and distinctive jazz pianists: Bill Evans playing Gershwin’s I Loves You Porgy and Oscar Peterson doing his Art-Tatum-on-speed thing with the very early James Hanley jazz standard, Indiana.

45 years ago, when he was 53, British jazz pianist composer and band leader Stan Tracey recorded a fine album of solo piano music which he wryly entitled “Hello Old Adversary!” At the same age, Steven Osborne’s relationship with the Steinway grand is more like that between Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer – and what fabulous fun they are able to have together!

Keith Bruce

Picture by Stuart Armitt

Colin Currie Quartet

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Boswell Centre, Auchinleck

In the second leg of its current Scottish Tour, the Colin Currie Quartet found itself pounding the beat, literally, in Auchinleck on a sunny Saturday night. Were they a delicate string quartet, the experience might have been diminished by the counterpoint of children screaming happily in the play area immediately outside the town’s amenable Boswell Centre. 

But Currie’s ensemble is, as most of this East Ayrshire town will now know, an all-percussion collective with the fire power to overcome the most rumbustious opposition. No competition? Well, almost. One dramatic musical silence gave way to a shrill playground countdown, one of those lighthearted moments where chance interruptions turn to memorable highlight.

Little in this compelling programme, promoted by the Cumnock Tryst Festival as part of its extended year-round activity, proved anything less than compelling. The mere sight of these four black-shirted virtuosi – Currie himself, Owen Gunnell, Adrian Spillett and Sam Walton – huddled in successive configurations, was powerfully visceral, given the physicality involved and the heated communication between them.

The two opening pieces by American percussionist and composer Andy Akiho were from his trailblazing Seven Pillars project, their accumulating might coloured by intricate rhythmic conversations and textures tickled by the curiosities posing as instruments – empty wine bottles, a kitchen sieve and much more bric-a-brac besides. What these guys can’t do with everything but the kitchen sink simply isn’t worth talking about.

What the young Scottish composer (and accordionist) Aileen Sweeney has done with her new work Starburst is well worth mention. This was the subtlest music-making of the evening, opening with the gentle unfolding of a basic motif on delicate hand chimes, reaching its highpoint with a hypnotising rock groove, before unwinding to a hushed conclusion. It gave short shrift to the notion that all percussion playing carries a health warning.

In Dave Maric’s nature-inspired Nascent Forms for mallet instruments the emphasis on quick fire repetition was mesmerising in itself, the performance scintillating for its dextrous precision and intoxicating interaction. For their send-off, the quartet turned to four drum kits and the Reich-like adrenalin rush of Julia Wolfe’s Dark Full Ride. Yes, it veered towards the deafening at times, but with a sense too of artful exhilaration as this dazzling floor show powered towards its final emphatic thump.

Cumnock Tryst founder and artistic director also used this celebrity occasion to announce his plans for the 10th Festival Programme, which runs from 2-6 October, one day longer than previous events. Among the artists featuring will be pianist Steven Osborne, British tenor Joshua Ellicot, the excellent Maxwell Quartet, folk music from Alastair Savage and Friends and locally-based Seán Gray, and jazz from the Tommy Smith Youth Jazz Orchestra and The Euan Stevenson Trio. Local groups also feature, notably the Tryst Festival Chorus and Dalmellington Brass Band among others in a special Tenth Birthday Gala Concert. 

MacMillan also announced the launch of a new Cumnock Tryst Ensemble, consisting of some of Scotland’s finest classical musicians, led by cellist, improviser and composer Christian Elliott. 

Ken Walton

The Colin Currie Quartet continues its current tour in Castle Douglas (27 April) and Biggar (28 April). Details at www.colincurrie.com

Full details of this year’s 10th Cumnock Tryst Festival are available at www.thecumnocktryst.com 

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

Cumnock Tryst: Arta Arnicane

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Dumfries House

From its first announcement, back in October 2013, Sir James MacMillan’s intention for The Cumnock Tryst has been that it serves and reflects the community where he was raised. Inevitably there have been times, however, when the programme of music performed by professional visitors and the inclusion of contributions from local amateurs have seemed some distance apart.

On the last day of this year’s programme, in the august surroundings of the restored splendour of Dumfries House, that was emphatically not the case.

On Sunday afternoon, in the lovely recital room in the house itself, Latvian pianist Arta Arnicane fulfilled a promise to herself and to an amateur composer from nearby Troon when she played a recital that featured the music of Douglas Munn alongside that of Debussy and Martinu. Munn, who died in 2008, and his wife Clare, who was present, had supported Arnicane as a student and now she is returning the favour in championing his compositions, which also feature on a recently-released recording.

She opened with Martinu’s Butterflies and Birds of Paradise, a trio of pieces that would also be unfamiliar to many listeners, but a glorious discovery. Akin to French Impressionism at the start, the final work also had hints of Mussorgsky’s Pictures and segued beautifully into a Nocturne by Munn from 1944, written when he was just 15 years old.

Unlike some of the other pieces on the Toccata Classics album, it was not revised by Munn after his retiral from a stellar career as a mathematician, so any minor corrections to the score were the pianist’s own. The teenage composer was clearly modelling his work on Chopin, but his own talents were considerable.

Following three of Debussy’s Estampes – La soiree dans Grenade played with special finesse and the Ayrshire rain returning to the grounds of Dumfries House for Jardins sous la pluie – Arnicane played three of Munn’s Preludes. The most substantial of these, in D major, could, as the pianist said, equally have been entitled “Ballade” and dates from the end of his years composing, before the maths took over, when he was still just 18. It and its predecessors are the work of a young man with a remarkable gift for melody who must have been a pianist of considerable technical prowess himself.

Sir James MacMillan and Ayrshire Symphony Orchestra

The “Pavilion” at Dumfries House is a semi-permanent structure so far from being a marquee that gilt-framed mirrors and pictures hang on two of its walls. Alongside the function suite at Cumnock’s Dumfries Arms Hotel, where the Tryst’s closing ceilidh would happen, it gives the festival a fine new space, large enough to accommodate the amateur Ayrshire Symphony Orchestra and the Cumnock Tryst Festival Chorus.

They were joined by a second choir of members of the Cumnock Area Musical Production Society – a music-theatre group with the best acronym ever – for the Scott Riddex Memorial Concert, celebrating one of their members. Sir James shared conducting duties with the orchestra’s conductor John Wilson in a programme that was as diverse and entertaining as it was deeply moving, beginning with a movement from Greig’s Holberg Suite and concluding with a 28-minute version of Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet that included all the singers and players.

With principal oboe Joanna Senior the soloist in Ennio Morricone’s music from The Mission soundtrack, the orchestra’s first violin was a crucial instrumental voice in the two new songs by MacMillan that the chorus premiered. Part of the Tryst’s evolving celebration of the area’s mining heritage, Blackcraig Hill and A Fire of Ages set poetry by a soprano, Maggie Broadley, and a bass, Allan McMillan, from within their ranks. Those, and the Bryars that followed, were the sound of the Tryst making its own precise, individual and remarkable mark – and a nonsense of any distinctions between music-makers of all ages and commitment.

Keith Bruce

Pictures by Stuart Armitt

Cumnock Tryst: Ancient Voices

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St John’s Church, Cumnock

Journalists are frequently minded to avoid the temptation not to let the facts get in the way of a good story. There’s no doubt that the tale of the ancient carnyx is a story worth telling. This 2000-year-old Celtic instrument, with the fearsome head of a boar and wavering tongue, was originally discovered as buried fragments two centuries ago in Scotland by archaeologists. In more recent years a multi-disciplined team of enthusiasts has reconstructed the carnyx, not once, but several times. The question is, does the reality of its musical quality equate to the sexiness of its origins and its striking, physical beauty?

There have been previous opportunities to test that on single examples, but on Saturday at the Cumnock Tryst festival we heard for the first time three of these instruments played simultaneously in a new work by John Purser, the composer, historian, playwright and poet whose mammoth radio and book project of the 1990s, Scotland’s Music, gave birth to the carnyx project.

Gundustrup Rituals was the final destination in this hour-long presentation, Ancient Voices, performed by the man whose expertise as a trombonist enabled him to join forces with Purser and metal craftsman John Creed and conceive the all-important performance techniques that would bring the recreated carnyx to life. 

He was joined in Cumnock by two other trombonists and carnyx acolytes, Patrick Kenny and Ian Sankey – the trio collectively known as Dragon Voices – in a quasi-dramatic show-and-tell that extended the instrumental armoury to giant conch shells, cow horns and Irish bronze age horns. The music running up to the grand finale was largely by Kenny himself, with a fanfare by the eccentric French film composer Francis Chagrin incorporated within an opening, initially antiphonal, sequence for modern trombones. Well, that’s why that the printed programme told us; it was hard to distinguish it if you didn’t know it.

Then Kenny’s attention turned to the primal menagerie of ancient blown instruments, a series of short pieces designed to demonstrate the awesome potential of their primitivism, performed with the younger players constantly shifting up and down the aisles, each segment prefaced with punchy verses from Purser’s poetic pen. Largely improvisational in style, with call and response in abundance, and the odd shock of a sudden piercing fortissimo, this quasi-dramatic part of the concert was like a teasing, preparatory warm-up to the main event.

When it came, Purser’s new work was a vision and sound to behold, three gleaming carnyces (with a fourth alongside looking like a sub on the bench) issuing a sonic repertoire that extended from subterranean gargles and sombre, low-lying pre-Brucknerian close-harmonies, to high-pitched triumphalism and those hair-raising moments where cacophony gave way to the golden perfection of a major triad.

Again, words played their part in translating the images that inspired this piece – one of these depicts three figures playing carnyces simultaneously – into such a spunky, ritualistic performance. “We are three”, chanted the players, a kind of post-Dumas declaration of unity. I, for one, enjoyed the spectacle; and yes, the facts spoke for themselves.

Ken Walton

Picture: Stuart Armitt

Cumnock Tryst: King’s Singers

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Trinity Church, Cumnock

For 55 years The King’s Singers have remained a popular, stable and self-regenerating national musical treasure. Bursting onto our telly screens in the sixties – notably on peak-time Saturday night variety shows – the posh boys from the poshest Cambridge college charmed the nation’s ears with a smooth spread of bespoke a cappella originals and arrangements, anything from hifalutin’ Byrd to down-to-earth Beatles. Now, like a collective Doctor Who, in their umpteenth reincarnation, the group are held with great affection as widely as ever.

It was easy to see why in this easy-flowing, classy Cumnock Tryst programme they presented on Friday night. It was a loosely-assembled sequence of “celebrations”, but with each King’s Singer contributing personably to the intertwining spoken narrative and its various nods to the centenary years of Hungarian modernist composer György Ligeti and Walt Disney, Byrd and Weelkes’ quatercentenaries, Vaughan Williams 150th, among others, what looked thinnish on paper materialised as an absorbing hour-plus feast of first-class entertainment.

What also contributed to the freshness of the presentation was the interpretational signing for the hard of hearing by Paul Whittaker. Even for those of us unfamiliar with this language, Whittaker’s expressive physicality was a fascinating, added dimension that enhanced the presentation meaningfully and beautifully, all the more helpful when the complexity of some of the music occasionally obscured the clarity of the texts.

The musical journey was smooth but adventurous. Days from Even Such is Time by Bob Chilcott (a former King’s Singer) offered a crisp and contemporary call to action, before the silvery perfection of Renaissance anthems and motets by Byrd and Weelkes. The joy in these earlier works was to witness that six-part group’s instant switching between moments of luxurious homogeneity and pertinent internal combat. 

The programme featured two of Ligeti’s whimsical Lewis Carroll settings from Nonsense Madrigals, as much theatrical as musical delights, the preamble to which – notably the Lobster Quadrille – causing considerable mirth with the evening’s other signer as he attempted to translate the near impossible and implausible.

A brief whiff of Vaughan Williams – his willowy Shakespearean setting of Over Hill, Over Dale – gave way to two short pastoral works by Swedish composer Hugo Alfvén, the calm simplicity of In Our Meadow and bucolic spring of And The Maiden Joins The Ring. But with a sudden change of tack, the multi-ethnic background of American-born Gabriella Lena Frank made its mercurial mark in the animated obstinacy and wit of Hechicera (The Sorceress), brilliantly captured in an effervescent performance.

James MacMillan may not be celebrating a significant birthday of his own this year, but who was to deny The King’s Singers the indulgence of simply celebrating his presence at the festival he founded, and the fact he has written so much over the years for the ensemble? 

They opened their short set with the iridescent unpredictability of In The Blue Lobster Cafe, a spicy setting of poet Michael Symmons Roberts, before enchanting this Cumnock audience with the composer’s easeful arrangement of John Cameron’s O, chi, chì mi na mòrbheanna, and of his famously melting melody to William Soutar’s poem, The Tryst.

The transition to Disney songs was swift, the singers dispensing with their music stands and formalised stance to regroup in close-harmony huddle, a cosy engagement that charmed the heart-warming lyricism of Toy Story 2’s When She Loved Me, and inflamed the raucousness of Dumbo’s When I See An Elephant Fly.

But it was to The Beatles that this immaculate ensemble turned for a couple of non-negotiable encores: Chilcott’s silken arrangement of Yesterday, the melody mostly entrusted to Patrick Dunachie’s light and airy countertenor;  and the lesser-known Honey Pie, Jonathan Howard’s sudden razzy Louis Armstrong interjection sealing his reputation as the King’s Singers jester-in-residence.

With perfection at every turn, not least in the unshakeably purity of their intonation, the King’s Singers brand seems assured for another half-century at least.

Ken Walton 

A composer’s champions

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The piano music of Troon’s Douglas Munn has a showcase at the end of Cumnock Tryst 2022. KEITH BRUCE talks to his widow, Clare.

That Ayrshire man Douglas Munn’s legacy in his professional field of mathematics is secure seems in little doubt. As Dr W D Munn he held professorships at the Universities of Stirling and Glasgow and he was still publishing internationally-admired work in his particular algebraic specialism well beyond retirement.

In his latter years, however, Munn was as concerned with the after-life of the fruits of his skill as a composer of piano music, revising – and in some cases completing – work he had written in his teens and very early twenties.

Since his death in 2008, Munn the musician has been fortunate to be championed by three loyal women: his widow Clare, his sister Lesley, and Latvian pianist Arta Arnicane, whom he and Clare met at the 2001 Scottish International Piano Competition and went on to assist with accommodation and practice facilities through her studies at the Royal Scottish Conservatoire (then the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama).

This weekend that work reaches a moment of posthumous celebration, appropriately near to his Troon home, when Arnicane plays Munn’s music in Dumfries House on the final day of Sir James MacMillan’s Cumnock Tryst festival. The recital follows the release of an album she recorded at home in Riga which collects his complete catalogue for solo piano, handily clocking in at just under an hour of music and released on Toccata Classics.

Clare still lives in the Munn family home in Troon, and when we spoke earlier this week, I interrupted her playing the piano – “winding down”, she said, from the stress of emptying the couple’s Glasgow flat before it is sold.

“There was never a day went past without us playing the piano, either separately or together. The maths conferences used to have a lot of musicians and we played together at those,” she said.

“We also played at the university club, including many of the most famous pieces in the piano duet repertoire. I especially remember pieces by Debussy and Lutoslawski. I’ve still got my family Steinway, which belonged to my Cambridge grandparents and it still sounds pretty good. It’s been well looked after.”

It was, as is perhaps abundantly clear, music that brought the couple together.

“We were married for nearly 30 years,” Clare explains, “and we met through music in Salzburg, at a summer school organised by Glasgow University’s Extra-Mural Department. I had graduated from the Royal Academy of Music and was a young music teacher in London, and I went there with a flatmate on holiday and met Douglas.

“I think I quite impressed him, because the first time he invited me to Scotland I climbed to the top of Ben Nevis.”

That was in the 1960s, and it was the start of a slow-blooming relationship.

“It was a long distance romance,” laughs Clare. “I lived in Australia for 11 years, where I was teaching, and Douglas came out and lectured there. I think we did surprise everybody when we eventually got married in Sydney in 1980 and Douglas persuaded me to come back to Scotland.”

Portrait of Munn by his mother Elizabeth

“Douglas’s mother was a teacher and had brought up her children after the death of their father at the end of the Second World War. She and her husband were both accomplished artists and members of the Paisley Art Institute.

“My father sang in the King’s College Chapel and my mother trained as a pianist and I had musical siblings – my younger sister was a violinist in the BBC Symphony Orchestra.”

Steeped in music as Clare and Douglas Munn were, they were supporters of Scotland’s orchestras and opera company, and of the conservatoire. Douglas was the Glasgow University representative there as well as serving on the board of St Mary’s Music School in Edinburgh.

“We bought a flat in the West End of Glasgow and used it while my husband was teaching at the university and I was a piano and a violin teacher,” said Clare.

During that time the couple met composer James MacMillan and his wife – a long friendship that links the early years of both marriages to this weekend’s event. They also got to know composer Eddie McGuire.

“It was Eddie who encouraged Douglas to dig out his music and have it stored at the Scottish Music Centre. That spurred Douglas on to start the revisions.

“The first little Prelude was written in 1944 [when Munn was just 15], and he continued to compose and play through his student years until the mathematics took over, although I do remember him finishing off the Sonatina and singing the tunes from it in the mid-80s.”

Given her teaching background, there was also encouragement of young musicians. The Ayrshire String Orchestra that plays in Dumfries House following Arnicane’s recital on Sunday includes a couple of Clare’s former pupils.

It was the commitment to young talent that introduced the couple to the Latvian pianist.

“Arta came to Glasgow to take part in the Scottish Piano Competition, when John Lill was on the panel,” said Clare. “We heard her play a Chopin study quite remarkably well, and Douglas said: ‘That girl is extremely good.’ I invited her to come and play in the flat and then we were able to offer her some accommodation when she was in between competitions.”

The Munns were in time invited to Arnicane’s wedding in Riga to Florian, who is a German cellist. They perform as a duo and now live in Zurich, where they have two sons, and the pianist has not stopped championing the music of Douglas Munn, including it in her solo recitals.

The recording of the complete Munn canon was made in 2019 in the studio of Riga Radio in Latvia, and the Toccata release comes with a fulsome booklet including notes by the pianist herself, a Maths colleague of the composer, David Easdown, and Munn’s sister Lesley Duncan, a journalist at The Herald. Crowning the package is the cover portrait of her son by his mother Elizabeth.

Arta Arnicane (pictured at top) plays Douglas Munn, Debussy and Martinu at Dumfries House, Cumnock at 2pm and 4pm on Sunday October 2 as part of Cumnock Tryst.

The Carnyx Speaks

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John Kenny resurrects not one but three iron age Carnyces at this year’s Cumnock Tryst. KEN WALTON finds out more from the man who brought the awesome instrument back to life, and previews the local aspects of a very Ayshire festival.

Ever wondered what the bestial image on the VoxCarnyx masthead is? Those in the know, or inquisitive enough to have looked it up, will recognise it as the topmost section of the carnyx, an instrument dating back to the iron age, fragments of which were first discovered buried under a Banffshire farm in 1816. 

The fearsome bronze head, with hinged jaw and sprung wooden tongue, appeared to be the bell of a 2000-year-old brass instrument. It took till the1990s to put the theory to the test, when trombonist John Kenny, encouraged by Scots composer and music historian John Purser,  joined an archeological project aimed at reconstructing the carnyx both visually and as a functioning musical instrument. 

With support from the National Museum of Scotland and metal craftsman John Creed, the eventual first sight and sound of the reconstructed carnyx – an awesome man-sized construction comprising a lengthy blow tube, imposing boar’s head and named the Deskford Carnyx after the parish in which the original was found – was at the National Museum’s reopening ceremony in 2011. “We didn’t know what we were going to come out with,” Kenny recalls, fearful that such a beautiful object might simply sound like “a rather inert tube”. “It turned out to be magnificent,” he says. 

So much so, that the world now has more magnificent specimens, and for the first time in 2000 years three carnyces will perform together this weekend at James MacMillan’s Cumnock Tryst festival. Saturday’s programme in St John’s Church, Ancient Voices, features Kenny’s ensemble Dragon Voices and a sequence of works by Kenny himself, 20th century French film composer Francis Chagrin, and a brand new work by Purser, whose poetry also weaves a narrative throughout the entire concert..

“We start with modern brass instruments, then work right back to the earliest proven examples we have of human beings creating musical sounds using lip vibration,” Kenny explains. Besides the trio of carnyces, Dragon Voices – an ensemble also consisting of Kenny’s son Patrick and former pupil Ian Sayer – perform on ancient sea horns. “In the iron age, Celtic craftsmen led the world in the art of making giant horns or trumpets out of beaten bronze and they were of extraordinary quality,” he adds.  

Purser’s new work, Gundestrup Rituals aims to illustrate their uniqueness and is based on images found on the Gundestrup Cauldron, a richly decorated silver vessel discovered in a Danish peat bog and dating from the early iron age. Included among these is a powerful representation of three carnyces being played at once. 

The carnyx players on the Gundestrup Cauldron (National Museum of Denmark)

For those who imagine the sound of the carnyx to echo its warlike appearance, be prepared for a surprise. “They will be amazed at the extraordinary versatility of the instrument,” promises Kenny. “Yes, the traditional idea of it as a war horn is true. It can be very violent and powerful with a massive range of five octaves, depending on the ability of the performer. But it is also capable of a huge dynamic range, coloured by the strange combination of its unique harmonic series and resultant vibrations.” 

The biggest revelation for Kenny in exploring its possibilities was to discover how quietly and uniquely mysterious it could sound. “Using modern brass players’ techniques actually resulted in quite a boring sound,’ he explains. “On modern brass instruments, we try to make uniform sound, and also tend to work in groups dedicated to our ideas of melody and harmony. These are very modern ideas in terms of the organisation of musical sound. 

“So we had to discard those standard techniques in order to explore the natural potential of the instrument. As a musician and composer it was for me a Tabula Rasa moment, working with a blank page, a bit like that sudden moment in the14th century when artists, working also as alchemists, discovered how to make oil paintings. Here, with the carnyx, was another extraordinary moment working with new colours.”

Such possibilities, and the fact the original carnyces appeared to have been “ritually dismembered” before burial, led Kenny to believe the symbolism of the carnyx was just as likely to be as sacral as it was bellicose. “It’s actually much more effective when played gently and quietly.” Ancient Voices sets out to illustrate that infinite diversity.

Dragon Voices with the three carnyx reconstructions by John Creed. Image: Ali Watt

The clash of sounds ancient and modern pervades much of the classical content of this 2022 Cumnock Tryst, which runs Thursday 29 September to Sunday 2 October. The Kings Singers (Fri 30 Sept at Trinity Church) celebrate a vast international lineage of a cappella choral writing that stretches from English Renaissance giant William Byrd to the whimsical Lobster Quadrille of György Ligeti, by way of Vaughan Williams and original Kings Singer, Bob Chilcott. There’s music, too, by MacMillan himself and a lighter-hearted send off of close-harmony Disney numbers.

On Sunday (Dumfries House, 2pm & 4pm) Latvian pianist Arta Arnicane unveils an Ayrshire curiosity, the piano music of Douglas Munn, an eminent Mathematician who lived in Troon until his death in 2008, and whose compositions – recently released on CD – are both skilful and charming.

If imported professional artists represent a smaller proportion of the line up this year, that, says MacMillan, is deliberate.  “That trend has certainly grown over the years. It’s always been part of the Festival’s raison d’être to encourage a sense of ownership and deep involvement by local community groups, and to get them involved with the visiting professionals in different ways.”

Thus the combined involvement of local amateur dramatic group CAMPS and Strings N Things with BBC SSO musicians (Merchant City Brass) in Saturday’s A Musical Celebration of the Coalfields in Cumnock Town Hall; or Friday’s compositional collaboration between Drake Music Scotland, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland singers and local pupils from Hillside School in Blue Sky Counterpoint at the new Barony Campus.

Even the big festival finale on Sunday evening at Dumfries House – billed as the Scott Riddox Memorial Concert in memory of the locally-known singer – is an entirely local showcase with big ambitions. After individual contributions from the Ayrshire Symphony Orchestra under conductor John Wilson, The Festival Chorus and CAMPS, all the ensembles will come together under MacMillan’s baton for a performance of Gavin Bryars’ iconic Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet.

The 2022 Cumnock Tryst runs 29 Sept to 2 Oct at various venues in Cumnock. Full details at www.thecumnocktryst.com

Top picture: Jane Salmon

Cumnock Tryst: Historical Fiction

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St John’s Church, Cumnock

Saxophonist Christian Forshaw describes his approach to his latest album, Historical Fiction, as being “the same kind of process authors of the genre use, where they’ll take a skeletal framework of history and then weave their own narrative around that.” 

The result, on disc, is mesmerising, the crystalline purity of Grace Davidson’s soprano performance in music ranging from the medieval Hildegard of Bingen to Baroque masters Handel and Purcell working hand on glove with Forshaw’s improvisatory dialogues and the composed links that give seamless continuity to the entire performance.

Presenting it live as part of last weekend’s Cumnock Tryst Festival, with Libby Burgess on organ instead of the original Alex Mason, proved more of a challenge. The venue, the Ayrshire town’s modest St John’s Church, seemed a tad too claustrophobic for a concept that cried out for both physical and acoustical opulence. 

There was still ravishment and a quintessential purity in Davidson’s pitch-perfect singing of Purcell’s Fairest Isle and Gibbons’ beautifully evocative The Silver Swan among others, around which Forshaw’s responsive commentary cast an illuminating halo. But all of that, even Forshaw’s own set pieces, seemed locked firmly within the apsidal chancel of the church, confining the resonating glow that the nave-seated audience would love to have fully shared.

That same containment went against the ritualised nature of the performance. The idea was sound, from Davidson’s solitary plainsong entrance to the chess-like shifting of positions by her and Forshaw, dependant on where the spotlight should focus, that animated the flow. They simply required more room and fewer obstacles to negotiate. The killer blow was a power cut minutes from the end, leaving the organ impotent, and sabotaging the final idyllic Dowland song, Come Heavy Sleep.

In the right place, a cathedral perhaps, this would have been a much more moving experience. Historical Fiction, it seems to me, belongs to a more mystical, ethereal setting. And a more reliable power supply.

Ken Walton

Cumnock Tryst: Lewis/Osborne

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Trinity Church, Cumnock

When a couple of ace pianists get together and sound indistinguishably as one, the outcome is pure magic. Not that we needed Saturday’s keynote recital at James MacMillan’s Cumnock Tryst Festival by Steven Osborne and Paul Lewis to discover that. Their recent Hyperion recording, French Duets, is already a testament to their unique symbiosis as duettists. Hearing the same music in the flesh, however, took us to another level.

Osborne and Lewis are serious-minded musicians, Lewis especially, whose brooding stage persona generally conveys an intellectual intensity void of whimsy or idle chit-chat. It fell to Osborne – more comfortable perhaps with audience repartee – to sweeten the load through introductory thoughts and anecdotes, and the odd jokey interchange with the unexpectedly mischievous Lewis.

All of which set a suitably relaxed context for music that variously sang sweetly, touched on the sensuous and exotic, bristled with biting irony, even evoked the subtlest perfumes. Both took it in turns to handle the upper part, not that it made much difference to the outcome. When it comes to music, Osborne and Lewis share the same intuitive sensitivity of touch, melodic shaping and rhythmic nuance.

Applying it to Fauré’s tuneful Dolly Suite they turned this favourite of fumbling amateurs into a masterclass in lyrical ingenuity. Simple on the surface, there are treasures within, melodies that defy expectation, inner thoughts that deserve to be heard just enough to make their presence felt. What a joy to hear these so effortlessly revealed and yet so meaningfully contained within the broadest frameworks.

Poulenc’s belligerent Sonata for Piano Duet signalled a sudden change in delivery, the emphasis now on terse detachment and pounding dissonance, yet mindful of the bittersweet charm that pervades its calmer moments, and balanced neatly by a later performance of Stravinsky’s Trois Pièces faciles, just as edgy and acerbic, but with leaner, sharper textures. 

It would hardly have been a representative French programme without Debussy and Ravel, and it was here that Osborne and Lewis really took our breaths away. The sense of mystery and potency of colour conveyed in Debussy’s Six Epigraphes antiques was spellbinding, the contrasting piquancy of the Petite Suite illuminating and jewel-like. Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite seemed the perfect finale, its fairy-tale imagery captured magnificently in a performance that summed up in one the previous triumphs of a great evening.  

Ken Walton 

Available to stream via the Festival website, www.thecumnocktryst.com, until 8 October

Cumnock Tryst: Tenebrae / Forshaw

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Cumnock Old Church

Before a simple, effective – and almost unbearably moving – arrangement of the hymn Abide With Me was performed as an encore by the six singers of Tenebrae and saxophonist Christian Forshaw, the choir’s director Nigel Short acknowledged the inspiration of the Hilliard Ensemble and Jan Garbarek in this combination of talents.

Much though I love the ECM recordings Garbarek and the Hilliards made – and Officium is now closing in on 30 years old – there was more warmth, and a quite distinctive sound, to the world premiere of this sequence by Tenebrae and Forshaw, under the title of the Orlando Gibbons hymn Drop, drop slow tears.

This was the choir’s debut at Cumnock Tryst – 2021’s alternative to the absence of Harry Christophers and The Sixteen perhaps – and part of Forshaw’s residency at the festival. James MacMillan has helped foster a collaboration that sounds very much as if it has legs, not least because the arrangements the saxophonist and Short brought to the project seemed very much cut from the same cloth.

Not all the music was presented in an altered state. The hour or so began with the Gibbons sung “straight” and ended with a Short arrangement that sounded close kin to Forshaw’s earlier treatment of Thomas Tallis’s O nata lux. Short also brought some creative use of the acoustic of the space, a high soprano delivering Hildegard von Bingen from “off-stage” and he himself instigating a semi-processional Incipit Lamentatio Gregorian chant.

Forshaw, who mostly performed from the pulpit but joined the singers to replace the contralto with alto sax on later Tallis, added compositions of his own to the mix. The modern language of Renouncement was nicely answered with Victoria’s Reproaches and In paradisum gave a rare showcase to the bass-baritone of the group.

In Garbarek fashion, Forshaw often favoured the soprano instrument, sometimes in dialogue with the choir’s soprano, but as well as alto he also added some subtle bass clarinet to the mix. Yes, Tenebrae and Forshaw owe a debt of recognition to the musicians who sold so many albums of sax and early vocal music, but Drop, Drop Slow Tears takes the recipe in a direction that is all their own.

The sound on the streamed version of this concert, which is available until Friday October 8, is superb, and the camerawork limited and unshowy, so not distracting. It is possible, however, that the Tryst may wish it had been able to devote more budget to the filming when the programme becomes more widely appreciated.

Keith Bruce

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