Tag Archives: Dunedin Consort

In the Belly of the Beast

Posted on by

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow

Less is more. The truth underlying that paradox could so easily be applied to In the Belly of the Beast, a dramatic presentation by the Dunedin Consort (in collaboration with Mahogany Opera and Hera) that pulls together three Cantates Bibliques by the French Baroque composer Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, lasts around an hour, and employs merely two singers and three instrumentalists. Friday’s Glasgow performance was the penultimate in a tour that in recent weeks has taken in Edinburgh’s Assembly Roxy, the Aldeburgh Festival and Spitalfied Music Festival, ending last Saturday in Whitehaven.

A common thread are the Old Testament biblical heroes featured respectively in the three cantatas, each thrown into crisis in response to their relationships with God: Adam’s guilty disobedience; Jonah’s rebellious flight to sea; Jephthah’s foolish bargaining of his daughter’s life. And of course the music: three evocative cantatas by a composer who was exceptional for her time – the first woman composer to be performed at the Paris Opera and active during the late reign of Louis XIV. 

Where Friday’s performance especially succeeded was in revealing the wealth of imagery and emotion contained in De la Guerre’s music, especially with such minimal forces. It said much, too, of the three musicians – Liam Byrne (musical director and viola da gamba), Eric Thomas (theorbo) and Alice Earll (violin) – that they could collectively unleash an expressive range far greater than the visible sum of their parts. 

In that sense they were more than simply an effective engine room for a drama played out with sharp minimalist focus by sopranos Carolyn Sampson and Mariana Rodrigues, under the economic stage direction of Jennifer Fletcher. Sampson played a solo multi-character role in Adam, the highpoint of which was the hero’s expressive and expansive final aria acknowledging life’s brevity. At this point, and with Sampson’s soulful clarity, the exhilaration effected by De la Guerre’s evocative music made its mark.

Rodrigues’ take on Jonah offered an appropriately stormier appeal, a shriller, more animated delivery in tune with the maritime imagery, but nonetheless capable of darker reflection. Where the two sopranos came together in the opening duet to Jephthah – a moment of great rejoicing before the realisation of Jephthah’s promise to sacrifice his daughter in return for victory in battle – this production swung into overdrive. The vocal interaction was electrifying.

As a theatrical spectacle – aided by Ingrid Hu’s designs with lighting and projection by Ben Moon – simplicity and practicality were to the fore. Nothing much physically happened, but nor in the end did it need to. As ever with Dunedin, the performances were stylish and exceptional. Mention, too, is owed to Toria Banks, whose slick translations offered contemporary poetic relevance to the texts without devaluing a single note of De la Guerre’s exquisite music.

Ken Walton

(Photo: Andy Catlin)

Dunedin Consort / Shibe

Posted on by

Perth Concert Hall

Viola de gamba virtuoso Liam Byrne is the most recent recipient of the valuable Glenn Gould Bach Fellowship which supports musicians with ambitious plans pertaining to the exploration of Baroque music, and he brought that expertise to the table for this recital which teamed Sean Shibe’s lute with four string players.

Byrne was paired with the Dunedin Consort’s Learning and Participation Manager Lucia Capellaro on the viola de gambas, sitting opposite two Dunedin regulars, Huw Daniel and Rebecca Livermore on baroque violins, with Shibe’s lute in the middle.

It was an interesting, and unusual, line-up, and a fascinating development of a side of the guitarist’s multi-faceted practice that may have its origins in his residency at the East Neuk Festival.

It was there we first heard Shibe explore the early music found in the collections of Fife country houses, scores that revealed how well-travelled the gentry of Scotland had been in the 16th and 17th centuries and how the music they collected, especially in France, was performed at home alongside that of their native land.

So it was here, in a programme that pivoted around a Suite in D by Marin Marais, brought to Scotland in a manuscript in the composer’s own hand that now resides in the National Library of Scotland and pre-dates its French publication. That work encapsulated where the researches of Byrne and Shibe overlap, as well as illustrating why their explorations are far from being of mere academic interest but are chiefly about bringing very fine early music back into performance.

This programme was all about clever juxtapositions and segues from one country to another, all within that earlier era. There was music that is much better known than the Marais – notably Jean Baptiste Lully’s Airs and Dances from Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, which closed the concert, and John Dowland’s Lachrimae Pavan.

The latter ran straight into a suite by English composer Christopher Simpson and another of those had opened the programme – beautiful works whose requirements had undoubtedly shaped the line-up on stage and which were indicative of the early work Byrne champions. As with the Marais, which reduced the quintet to duo and trio ensembles, this was vintage music soulfully played, in Byrne’s case on an original instrument of the period.

Shibe’s selections from the Panmure, Bowie, MacFarlane and Rowallen manuscripts in the collection of the National Library of Scotland often sounded more recognisable to ears used to Scots traditional music, especially the solos for Huw Daniel to demonstrate his folk fiddle expertise.

Byrne describes himself as a player of very old and very new music  (David Lang, Nico Muhly and Donnacha Dennehy have all composed for him), and that is not so unusual among Early Music players. Shibe’s musical life is less easily compartmentalised, but once again he has found, in the Dunedin Consort, ideal collaborators for his musical excursions.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Stuart Armitt

Dunedin Consort / Gordis

Posted on by

Adelaide Place, Glasgow

The Dunedin Consort has been a unique part of the Scottish musical landscape for three decades now, not always in its current format as a flexible, all-encompassing Baroque ensemble capable of mixing and matching its instrumental and vocal resources to order. Nor has it escaped the occasional threat of extinction in the face of funding wrangles. That’s all in the past. Today’s Dunedin is well and truly fit for purpose, with a performance strategy that combines world-leading scholarship, tip-top performance standards, international prominence and award-winning recognition.

That applies even to the most intimate of presentations, such as Thursday’s French Connection programme (repeated Friday in Edinburgh’s Greyfriars Kirk), which featured a mere four players led by American guest harpsichordist Lillian Gordis, charged with tracing the seminal evolution of instrumental chamber music across the first half of the 18th century.

It amounted to a glowingly affectionate and eminently stylish musical soirée. The visual intimacy of these performances was matched by an easeful conversational interaction among the players – Gordis joined by Matthew Truscott (violin), Jonathan Manson (viola da gamba) and Rosie Bowker (flute). A quintessentially restrained and collaborative virtuosity, besides resonating with the simple soft-lit ambiance of this former baptist church venue, connected meaningfully with an assortment of illustrative pieces by Bach, Telemann, Rameau and the earliest of the featured composers, one Elisabeth Jaquet de la Guerre.

La Guerre’s Trio Sonata in B flat, despite dating from 1695, bore clear signs of where the forthcoming half-century was heading, its bright and breezy opening punctuated by quirky rhythmic hemiola, later tempered by deliciously deviant chromaticism. It followed Rameau’s Premiere Concert from his 1741 Pièces de clavecin en concerts, a thing of refinement if more of a slow burner than his Cinquième Concert that was later to close the programme.

That later Rameau’s liberating use of the viola da gamba, Manson now free to indulge in pungent double stopping and explore the topmost extremes of his instrument, proved a powerfully dramatic summation to the Bach and Telemann that preceded it. In Bach’s Trio Sonata from The Musical Offering, besides being the most substantial work in the programme, Gordis and her team dug deep into its polyphonic complexities and chromatic ambiguities. The musical interchange, refined yet movingly expressive, was as instinctive as it was disciplined.

Bach’s Trio Sonata in C major (organists will know it in its solo version for that instrument) provided a lithe opening to the concert’s second half, its slow movement tinged with neatly-aligned sensuousness. Then to Telemann’s Paris Quartet, an intriguing complement, suggesting perhaps that – of the two composers – he may have been much more of a party animal than Bach. A performance that fully embraced its whimsy, its menagerie of brightly-lit counterpoint, its exploration of instrumental freedom, its joie-de-vivre, was a potent reminder of Telemann’s equal standing in the fiercely-competitive German High Baroque.

If anything, this was a presentation that could perhaps have done with a little more informality, some words (Gordis spoke briefly once) to further contextualise the music. Then again, these inspired performances (let’s just forget the momentary confusion that led to one player starting the wrong piece) had plenty to say by themselves.

Ken Walton

RSNO & Dunedin / Søndergård

Posted on by

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

It’s a rare Saturday night that sees a period instrument performance of Handel’s Water Music serve as programme buddy to a full-fat orchestral précis of Wagner’s complete Ring Cycle. Throw in a fascinating new piece by the Scots composer Neil Tòmas Smith, which combined the stylised delicacies of the Dunedin Consort (instruments and voices) with the voluptuous meatiness of the RSNO, and the unlikeliest of combinations was complete.

This was the final instalment of a three-year collaboration between these two accomplished outfits, and if it proved nothing else, it’s that niche-ism has its place in musical performance, but just as excitingly that crosscurrent programming – where ancient meets modern – can produce a synthesis made in heaven.

There was, nonetheless, a satisfying chronology to this concert. It opened with the freshest of intimacies, the diminutive Dunedin Consort filling Glasgow’s biggest symphonic hall with the Suite No 3 from Handel’s Water Music. Led by violinist Jane Gordon, it was a masterclass in nuance as it applies to Baroque performance practice. For besides the actual sound quality and crystalline contrapuntal precision, these players rendered the various dance movements with a choreographed physicality that echoed the litheness of Handel’s musical invention. 

The phrasing was as impeccable as it was exquisite, be it a high-speed Rigaudon or graceful Minuet. The tonal balance was bold but stylistically tempered – how lovely to witness the unforced mellifluousness of the recorders – and inventive too when, for instance, the violas made their presence solidly felt in the final Gigue. The perfect aperitif.

So to the premiere of Smith’s Hidden Polyphony, the RSNO now filling the stage around the Dunedin, joined also by the soprano Anna Dennis, a quartet of Dunedin singers (moving gradually around the upper circle gallery) and conductor Thomas Søndergård. 

It’s not the first piece combining modern and period performance to be featured in this artistic collaboration – previously programmed works by Jorg Widmann and Heiner Goebbels have explored their own solutions – but Hidden Polyphony justified its own proposition, which is “to shine a contemporary light” on a culture in 16th century Scotland that spawned a golden age of polyphonic composition, including the sacred music of Robert Carver.

Carver’s music – including his masterful O bone Jesu – finds its way into Smith’s 20-minute score, as does the illustrative poetry of William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas, and other interweaving musical fragments gleaned from ancient library sources. The overall impact, the juxtaposition of Smith’s modernist language with ghostly references to the earlier music, was both dramatic and enchanting. 

Søndergård directed a performance that highlighted the conflict – seething, tumultuous declamations and dazzling orchestral acrobatics, from which snippets of smooth polyphony emerged and disappeared like ghostly mirages. Anna Dennis’s soprano voice was a vivid sepulchral presence, snatching high-pitched notes from thin air with magical perfection. It was hard not to sense a leaning towards James MacMillan’s music in the volcanic intent of this score, and in its disconcertingly calm resolve, an a cappella Carver setting literally receding into the distance.

It was maybe a tough ask to expect Henk de Vlieger’s The Ring: An Orchestral Adventure – an ambitious distillation of Wagner’s four massive Ring operas stripped down to a one-hour potted symphonic summary – to fully capture the original’s full-on potency. And while this was a performance of plentiful merit, spirit and imagination, peppered with thrilling climactic peaks and solemn troughs, not to mention the awesome spectacle and indulgent wholesomeness of four harps and a phalanx of Wagner tubas, it was also a lingering reminder that the true power of Wagner’s totemic creation lies in the all-embracing completeness of its visual, vocal and orchestral dimensions. 

How I yearned for the seductive rhapsodising of the Rhine Maidens, some wailing Valkyries, an impassioned Siegfried, or a glowingly sacrificial Brünnhilde. Or, for that matter, a riot of Nibelung anvils numerous enough to sound more fearsome than china cups clinking at a genteel tea party. 

Ken Walton

Dunedin: St Matthew Passion

Posted on by

RSNO Centre, Glasgow

Through a quirk of bad 18th century business acumen and the consequent cessation of dedicated provision, the people of Leipzig, in Bach’s day, were effectively starved of opera. Or were they? Saturday’s slick, riveting, often animated performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion by the Dunedin Consort presented a strong case for the argument that what was missing from the opera house in the mercantile Thuringian city’s musical life was more than made up for by an inherently theatrical church music tradition.

Of course, it could never have been so obviously demonstrative. They were Lutherans after all. The theatricality was channelled through the music: in the Matthew Passion’s case a vivid dramatisation of the Easter story “pictorialised” by the visual interplay of double chorus, double orchestra and dramatis personae from within, and a sequence of fast-flowing narrative, choral commentary, rapt show-stopping arias and those reassuringly familiar (to German churchgoers) Chorales, knitted together as dynamic story-telling.

It’s been a mark of John Butt’s pugnacious directorship of the internationally acclaimed Dunedin Consort that such historically-informed performances as this – fully-mastered period instrument playing, a down-scaled concentration on the vocal contingent (one-to-a-part), smart but pliable tempi – say so much that is powerful, refreshing and revelatory about works many of us grew up with in less-informed times.  

If a hint of caution tempered the opening chorus, the fact it quickly dissipated suggested a necessary acclimatisation to the needle-sharp acoustics of the RSNO’s New Auditorium. Thereafter a thoroughly streamlined affair ensued, not just by the aforementioned forces, but including too, in key choruses, a clarion-like treble phalanx of the RSNO Youth Choir. This particular performance – the other two over the weekend were in Edinburgh and Perth – formed part of the Dunedin’s programming partnership with the RSNO.

At floor level, the stereophonic symmetry of the adult choruses and orchestras was an invigorating sight as well as sound, its rigid geometry offset by the itinerant to-ing and fro-ing of the eight singers as they exercised their dual roles as soloists and ripieno. It was that sense of role-playing, where spotlit action gave rise to third-party reaction, that fuelled our constant fascination as observers. 

From tenor Hugo Hymas’ heroic omnipresence as the narrating Evangelist (not to mention the stamina required for his additional arias) and Ashley Riches’ magisterial Christus, to the multifarious contributions of countertenor James Hall (wretchedly wholesome in his opening aria), the lyrical fluidity of Frederick Long’s bass-baritone, and Joanne Lunn’s rapturous soprano among others, the switches from homogenous chorus members to personalised characters were seamlessly achieved. 

Similarly, obbligato instrumentalists rising from their seats to partner solo arias did so with a stage presence that matched their virtuosity. Foremost were leader Huw Daniel’s heart-stopping solo violin (from memory) in Erbarme dich, the snaking oboe da caccias of Alexandra Bellamy and Oonagh Lee, and Jonathan Manson’s nimble expressiveness on viola da gamba.

With such instinctive expertise to hand, Butt’s role – besides his active contribution to the organ continuo – may have seemed essentially gestural at times, but that would be to downplay the vital response and emotional intensity he elicited from his top-notch team. It may not be opera, but close your eyes and this St Matthew Passion was a theatre of the imagination.

Ken Walton

Dunedin Consort: The Quality of Mercy

Posted on by

St Aloysius Church, Glasgow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Nicholas Mulroy by Jen Owens

Dunedin Consort / Mulroy

Posted on by

Cumbernauld Theatre

The theme of night-time is far from unusual in selections of art songs for recordings and recitals, and Through the Night with Henry Purcell sounds too much like a programme title on the post-Classic FM iteration of BBC Radio 3, but this evening in the company of the Dunedin Consort’s Associate Director Nicholas Mulroy and a sextet of Baroque instruments was a carefully-considered compilation.

Although the tenor was the star of the show, and an ever-informative guide through it, Purcell’s Evening Hymn and O Solitude, together with songs from The Fairy Queen and the Odes, were evenly balanced by instrumental music, composed by Georg Muffat and Giovanni Battista Draghi as well as Purcell and played by two violins, two violas, cello and theorbo, led by Matthew Truscott.

Truscott’s violin was Mulroy’s duet partner on The Plaint from The Fairy Queen, but every member of his group was on their mettle throughout. The two violas gave the sound a rich chordal middle register, while the rhythm section of Toby Carr’s theorbo and Jonathon Manson on cello was precision itself.

Two Muffat Sonatas from Armonica Tributo were a pan-European complement to Purcell’s Shakespearean London, coupling poised, courtly French influence with flash Italianate virtuosity, and Manson was outstanding in the central movement of the first of those. It sat at the centre of a first half that was especially well-constructed, flowing smoothly between the songs and the instrumental music, ending with Purcell’s praise of the moon as “Glittering Queen of Night”.

The music after the interval was also full of riches, with two odes to St Cecilia, by Draghi and Purcell, at its heart, but seemed a little less successfully sequenced. Mulroy’s more expressive singing, in Be Welcome then, Great Sir and Now the Night is Chased Away, was deadened a little by the theatre acoustic and will likely benefit from the church resonance of other venues on the tour.

What this location provided was an enveloping darkness to suit the theme of the recital. The printed programme provided the texts of the songs, but being able to read them was unnecessary, such was the clarity of the tenor’s diction. The timbre of Mulroy’s voice suits these songs very well indeed, even if we hear them more often in the repertoire of counter-tenors.

Each half began with a Purcell Fantazia, the first of those “Upon One Note” and introducing the second viola, whose job it is to maintain that constant C. The composer’s “Curtain Tune on a ground” from his score for a production of Timon of Athens was a rarer little instrumental gem.

Keith Bruce

Tours to Northesk Parish Church, Musselburgh on Thursday February 6, Motherwell Cathedral on Friday February 7, St Michael’s, Linlithgow on Saturday February 8 and Beacon Arts Centre, Greenock on Sunday February 9.

Portrait of Nicholas Mulroy by Raphaelle Photography

Dunedin / Carolyn Sampson

Posted on by

Perth Concert Hall

It was billed as ‘Carolyn Sampson sings Bach’, but that only happened at the end of the programme and perhaps undersold the rest of it, not least the remarkable modern work by Canadian composer Jocelyn Morlock which was the singer’s contribution to the first half.

Golden is the completion by Morlock of a piece begun by her late teacher Nikolai Korndorf. As she herself died in her early 50s last year, the work, based on an image of rebirth inspired by swimmers in a mineral pool in Manitoba, is doubly poignant. It is an extraordinary 10 minutes, beginning with percussive noises and breathy whispering (from the instrumentalists as well as Sampson) and growing through an incrementally developing strings part – with first violin Matthew Truscott to the fore – to a denouement in which the soprano’s wordless vocal was followed by her playing of two precisely tuned/filled wine glasses.

It was a world away from Bach’s cantata Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen, except that virtuoso technique was required for both, from the singer and from trumpeter Paul Sharp, whose baroque instrument was her foil in the outer movements, the two soloists backed by the 14-piece ensemble of strings and keyboards.

The music in the middle, however, is very different: a lovely aria with spare continuo that showcased Sampson’s expressive voice, her precise articulation over her full range, and breath control that seemed effortless. Tellingly, she rarely consulted the score on the music stand in front of her.

The piece culminates in a glorious Alleluia aria that is not just a showpiece for the singer – although it is very much that – but also a wonderful eruption of ensemble sound.

The instrumental works on the programme, by Handel and Locatelli, were equally core repertoire for this outfit, and the current personnel seemed particularly well integrated. Truscott shared much of the direction with John Butt, and not only when the latter swapped places with Stephen Farr from harpsichord to chamber organ to be soloist on Handel’s Organ Concerto in B flat, HWV 290, playing the intricate top line that was a party piece for the composer himself. It was followed after the interval by a Concerto Grosso in which the Largo was a highlight with a lower strings and organ underscore gradually taken up by the violins.

The Locatelli was a perfect opener for the programme, Truscott making an early mark with his soloing and the whole band concluding the work with a perfectly poised last few bars. On this sort of form there is no debate that the Dunedin Consort is one of the finest Baroque ensembles in the world, and Sampson could hardly be heard in finer company with her own superb vocal instrument.

Keith Bruce

Lammermuir: Albert Herring | Dunedin | Denk

Posted on by

Various venues, East Lothian

An organisation that has never had its troubles to seek, the present difficulties of Creative Scotland may be traced to the announcement during last year’s Lammermuir Festival that the event would receive no further funding – and the festival’s robust response to that decision.

In the professional media and the free-for-all of its “social” cousin, the debate about depleted arts funding in Scotland has now become predictably polarised between those who put the blame at the door of the Scottish Government and those who condemn the quango. Meanwhile artists and arts organisations persist in producing the goods, as Lammermuir is doing.

It has some valuable friends, both in its supporters, whose lobbying produced some reversal of the Creative Scotland decision, and its creative partners.

Directly-funded Scottish Opera is one of those, and it now gives its audience elsewhere a chance to see the work it makes for Lammermuir. That means the clever production of Britten’s Albert Herring which played Haddington Corn Exchange will also be seen in repertory with Donizetti’s Don Pasquale in Glasgow and Edinburgh this autumn.

Those transfers will require some re-design because Daisy Evans’ production sat very snugly in this venue, with a 13-piece band, under conductor William Cole, playing their socks off. The ensemble cast was a little uneven individually, but terrific as a group, with some outstanding solo turns and a very accomplished performance by tenor Glen Cunningham in the title role.

What Evans’ staging demonstrated was that the social satire of Eric Crozier’s libretto still works alarmingly well almost 80 years after the work’s premiere, and in a way it might not have done two or three decades ago. It’s a shame then, that some of the business did not match the detail of the text – and Britten’s immaculately tailored music. It is easy to overlook such small anomalies in revivals of Mozart or Verdi, but it jarred here.

A Dunedin Consort visit to Crichton Collegiate Church, near Pathhead and actually in Midlothian, has become another important Lammermuir ingredient. The star vocal soloist this year was counter-tenor Alexander Chance, who is surely now at the absolute peak of his abilities.

Those who have heard Chance’s voice fill Edinburgh’s Usher Hall would know that he needed much less than full-power in this small church’s impeccable acoustic, much used for chamber recordings. In precision and detail, from the notes on the score through inspired ornamentation to perfect Latin diction, Chance was flawless on repertoire by Vivaldi and others who made their name in the Vienna of the 18th century.

He didn’t have it all his own way, however, with familiar Dunedin instrumentalists including violinists Matthew Truscott and Huw Daniel, cellist Jonathan Manson, oboist Alexandra Bellamy and Jan Waterfield on chamber organ joined by bassoonist Inga Maria Klaucke, whose circular breathing with an early instrument on a Vivaldi concerto opened a revelatory programme.

It seems remarkable now that American pianist Jeremy Denk was not very well known in the UK when he first visited Lammermuir as a bold mid-pandemic hero in 2021, because he now looks so perfectly at home in the multi-purpose arena of Dunbar Parish Church.

His solo recital there was classic Denk, a second half of Brahms and Schumann played with just the right balance of precision pianism and performative expression, preceded by a delicious smorgasbord of pieces by female composers from Clara Schumann and Louise Farrenc to Missy Mazzoli and Phyllis Chen.

Presented in pairs that matched older composers with (mostly) living ones, it was as eloquent a case for the variety of women’s musical voices as any musician has devised, and would send any players in the audience in search of the works of Cecile Chaminade, Amy Beach, Ruth Crawford Seeger and Meredith Monk.

Denk’s first appearance in Dunbar this year was a demonstration of the possibilities of the venue. It reunited him with violinist Maria Wloszczowska for all four of the sonatas of Charles Ives, to celebrate the composer’s 150th birthday.

Their performances were virtuosic and compelling, but the genius of the concert was the presence of local choir Garleton Singers, conducted by Stephen Doughty, and a wind band from East Lothian Schools and the local community. The choir, stage left, sang half a dozen hymns through the programme – melodies that appeared in different guise in the sonatas – and the instrumentalists, at the back of the space, added three John Philip Sousa marches, as played by the street bands heard by the composer, directed by his father.

The first of those was The Liberty Bell, best known in Britain as the theme tune for Monty Python’s Flying Circus. If a voice had then intoned “And now for something completely different”, it would not have been wide of the mark.

Keith Bruce

Pictures by Sally Jubb and Stuart Armitt

The Glasgow Barons: Early Music Festival

Posted on by

The Glasgow Barons: Early Music Festival

Govan Old Parish Church, Glasgow

Behind Govan Old, now a reliquary of engraved monuments from Glasgow’s very earliest days rather than a place of worship, where the Govan Ferry once plied, a new footbridge across the Clyde is taking shape, linking the ancient origins of the city with its trendier modern barrios of Finnieston and the West End.

That bridge is emblematic of the partnership between The Glasgow Barons, the musical initiative of Paul MacAlindin, and the University of Glasgow across the river, which nurtured many of the musicians who featured in the first festival of early music in the city for 30 years or more. The senior figure was John Butt, Gardiner Professor of Music at the university and artistic director of the Dunedin Consort, who brought a quartet – possibly the ensemble’s smallest-ever iteration – to the festival on Saturday night.

Friday evening’s programme of vocal music – to which the building is eminently well-suited – was provided by musicians who met studying at Glasgow: an octet, Cantus Firmus, and the four-piece iuchair Ensemble, whose appearance last summer in Govan had inspired this festival weekend.

Warwick Edwards and the Scottish Early Music Consort established an early music festival in Glasgow in the 1990s, but the city dropped the ball while the era went on to top the classical charts regularly and, especially in the Jonathan Mills years, move centre-stage at the Edinburgh International Festival.

Audiences at Govan Old suggested an appetite to be filled, and a varied menu was provided by this first festival. The top attraction of three chamber music concerts was the Saturday evening performance by the Dunedin: flautist Katy Bricher, violinist Huw Daniel and Lucia Capellaro on viola da gamba and cello joining Butt at the harpsichord.

In a sense, their programme was a “sampler album” of music the Consort has championed in recent years. Notably that meant the inclusion of the Violin Sonata No 1 by Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, the French composer whose Biblical cantatas featured in the Out of her Mouth concerts last summer, and Telemann’s Paris Quartet No 1, nodding towards the Leipzig 300 programme earlier this year. Music by Bach and Handel – including a lovely encore showcasing Bircher – completed the recital.

Bach was the most up-to-date of the composers in the programme by organist Andrew Forbes that followed, but his informative sequence was about how Pachelbel, Buxtehude, Sweelinck, Muffat and Scheidt were heard in more recent times – and a compelling case for the instrument in Govan Old, which has been maintained but requires a proper overhaul.

On Friday evening, the last-minute reversal of the Cantus Firmus programme was entirely to its benefit, with a fuller account of a mass by Nicolas Gombert in the first half and the mix of Mexican and Spanish renaissance polyphony after the interval, culminating in the most familiar music of Tomas Luis de Victoria.

The male voice quartet that started it all, iuchair Ensemble, delivered the earliest and most original singing, however. On the feast day of St Anne, they recreated the plainchant of the 12th century, with some ornamentation of their own – some of it composed by tenor Joshua Stutter.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Dunedin Consort by Campbell David Parker

Dunedin Consort/Mulroy

Posted on by

Glasgow University Memorial Chapel

The naming of much-loved tenor soloist Nicholas Mulroy as Associate Director of Dunedin Consort may have looked like a cosy in-house appointment, but this programme, which has toured Scotland and ends the ensemble’s 2023/24 season with a concert at London’s Wigmore Hall on Wednesday, knocks any such notions into the proverbial cocked hat.

Entitled Scattered Rhymes – the name of the most substantial recent work, by composer Tarik O’Regan – it was a masterpiece of compilation, linking early and contemporary music in a deeply considered way, and often astonishing in execution.

For those who think they know what to expect from an a cappella concert by this group, there was plenty of that. It began with James MacMillan’s Behold, you are beautiful, my love, written for the wedding of the composer’s son Aidan and setting words from the Bible’s Song of Solomon, later included Palestrina and closed with Tomas Luis de Victoria setting texts from the same source. A parallel, and mirroring, stream of words came from 14th century Italian poet Petrach, the text for O’Regan and the 16th century Flemish composer Adrian Willaert.

Many a choir could tackle the MacMillan with some confidence, but elsewhere these musicians were required to produce singing of extraordinary complexity with virtuosic technique. In that, Scattered Rhymes itself was the most striking example.

 A quartet of singers produced, together and sometimes individually, a hugely challenging declamation of the Italian verse, with constant changes of rhythm, dynamics and time signature, while the rest of the choir had equally varied music, setting Latin from an anonymous contemporary English poet and found in the Arundel manuscripts in the British Library. The unlikely gloss Mulroy provided – that O’Regan told him the 1971 rock song Won’t Get Fooled Again by The Who was another inspiration – turned out to be remarkably helpful in listening the work’s structure.

That was just one of many unusual and rewarding pathways the conductor’s sequence of music took us down. The world premiere of the set was Caroline Shaw’s Companion Planting, a Dunedin Consort commission from one of the most in-demand composers on the planet. Her own lyric had many similarities to the early texts in the recital, using the horticultural metaphor to compare the wonders of nature with the joys of a rewarding human relationship.

The music was as attractive as everything she writes, and used some of the techniques she has explored in her other vocal pieces in the most subtle, understated, but brilliantly effective way.

Nor were these the only highlights of the programme. Some distance from the music for which he is best known, Gavin Bryars’ Petrarch-setting A la dolce ombra is from his Fourth Book of Madrigals and not only linked precisely with the O’Regan in its text, but also explored the same metaphorical territory as the Shaw.

The other recent, and unfamiliar, treat, came from the pen of Canadian composer Stephanie Martin. Rise up my love, like the MacMillan using the Biblical source, is also full of flora and fauna and the word-setting –  long, flowing lines filled with crisp ear-catching repetitions – was as fine as anything else in the programme.

Keith Bruce

Dunedin Consort: Leipzig 300

Posted on by

Perth Concert Hall

During his pre-concert remarks, Dunedin Consort director John Butt implied that this early 2024 recreation of what Johann Sebastian Bach was composing exactly 300 years ago in Leipzig may be the beginning of a longer exploration of his cycles of weekly-composed cantatas. If so, the first one was perhaps undersold as an excellent start to the project, bringing together the University of Glasgow professor’s universally-admired scholarship, a quartet of fine singers and an expanding ensemble of versatile instrumentalists.

As is well known, Bach was third choice for the Leipzig composer and choirmaster job, and Butt presented three of his cantatas performed at the start of 1724 alongside works by the other two, Christoph Graupner’s eight-movement Ouverture in E flat major preceding Telemann’s Viola Concerto in G, with Telemann’s setting of a German paraphrase of Psalm 100 between two of the Bachs in the second half.

Of the singers, bass Matthew Brook had the best of the night, with the Telemann cantata, a “voice of God” aria accompanied by oboes d’amore in Bach’s Jeus schlaft, was soll ich hoffen (BWV 81), the opening Recitative in Gleichwie der Regen und Schnee von Himmel fallt (BWV 18), and the opening Aria of Leightgesinnte Flattergeister (BWV 181), which he attacked with articulate verve. (If there was some numerological significance to the coincident recurrence of the digits in the catalogue numbers, Professor Butt was silent on that point.)

The other voices – soprano Julia Doyle, mezzo Helen Charlston, and tenor Nicholas Mulroy – each had their own solo high spots, including Doyle’s aria Mein Seelenschatz ist Gottes Wort, Charlston’s Wohl mir, mein Jesus spricht ein Wort and Mulroy’s Der schadlichen Dornen unendliche Zahl, where his duet partner was leader Huw Daniel’s expressive violin.

The four also combined expertly in the chorales, led by Doyle, and the tempi Butt found for those were always revealing – rarely do the chorus hymns sound so much part of the shape of the cantatas as they did here.

That rhythmic assurance was just as impressive among the instrumentalists, from the opening Graupner suite with its pizzicato passage and finale full of changes of pace, through violist John Crockatt’s solo turn on the Telemann concerto, to the superb continuo playing in the closing Bach, cellist Jonathan Manson on crisp, precise form as usual.

As well as playing the oboes, Oonagh Lee and Frances Norbury provided the recorders Bach added to the score of BWV18 for its Leipzig outing, where second violins Anna Curzon and Emilia Benjamin switched to violas, the only cantata Bach wrote requiring four of them, and no fiddles.

With the natural trumpet of Paul Sharp joining the ensemble later, the sonic palette was constantly finding new colours in a programme that showed exactly how music was developing three centuries ago. As is the practice of this ensemble, that lesson was always as entertaining as it was educational.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Julia Doyle by Louise O’Dwyer

Dunedin Consort: Messiah

Posted on by

St Aloysius, Glasgow

As the instrumentalists set off on the first steps of the marvellous journey that is Handel’s Messiah, it seemed that the opening “Sinfony” was even speedier than conductor’s John Butt’s brisk tempo of memory. And so it proved, with Part One – over which some versions dawdle for more than an hour – coming in at an incredibly brief 50 minutes or so.

Small wonder that tenor Anthony Gregory – most recently seen in Scotland as a memorably-characterised Count Almaviva in Scottish Opera’s Barber of Seville – added a little extravagant ornamentation to his “Comfort ye” while that was feasible. The topography of the “Every valley” that followed was exalted at pace, and that was characteristic of Butt’s direction to the end.

With the soloists stepping out from a chorus of three singers per section, in the Dunedin fashion, his Messiah is always light on its feet, but this performance, in the relatively unfamiliar resonance of the ornate church in Garnethill, was often quite startling. Despite that acoustic, the chorus “For unto us a Child is born” was as clear as it was fast, “His yoke is easy” rarely sounds quite so airy, and “All we, like sheep” gambolled more like Spring lambs.

That chorus ends what was the only sustained passage of more contemplative music – including a deeply moving “He was despised” from Bethany Horak-Hallett – and Part Two approached its conclusion with a fearsomely fast “Why do the nations?”, negotiated with enormous skill by both the string players and bass Matthew Brook.

This was a very fine line-up of soloists, bringing opera performances to the music and Charles Jennens’ inspired selection of Biblical texts. Horak-Hallett was billed as a mezzo but displayed a rich, full contralto range, and soprano Anna Dennis was on sensational form from her virtuosic turn in the Nativity story of Part One through a masterclass of vowel sounds in “How beautiful are the feet”, to technically masterful phrasing in “I know that my Redeemer liveth”, another aria that breathed afresh for being brisker. 

Butt included some music often omitted – not just the mezzo/tenor duet “O death, where is thy sting” in Part Three but also the rarely-heard chorus “Let all the angels of God worship him” and its preceding tenor recitative in Part Two – but the whole concert was still over in two and three-quarter hours, including an interval. Most importantly, the conductor’s tempi meant the narrative bowled along in an exhilarating fashion, and the work of the players and singers, whose diction was exemplary, was always precise and full of expression.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Bethany Horak-Hallett by Emma Jane Photography

Songs of Wars I Have Seen

Posted on by

New Auditorium, RSNO Centre, Glasgow 

You just wonder which came first: the RSNO and Dunedin Consort dreaming up their intriguing initiative to work together creating a subsidiary partnership series within the former’s main season; or whether such hybrid works as Heiner Goebbels’ Songs of Wars I Have Seen – which integrates period instruments with modern – sparked the idea of this slightly madcap collaboration in the first place.

Either way, Saturday’s mongrel presentation in the more intimate RSNO nerve-centre, the New Auditorium, within Glasgow Royal Concert Hall provided both a sense of respite within the RSNO’s heavy duty symphonic output, and an evangelical platform for the excellent Dunedin players (strings and continuo) to showcase their stylistic versatility to a more diverse audience.

The work, itself, was thoroughly refreshing – a 19-strong mixed ensemble piece based on spoken extracts (read variously by the musicians themselves) from Gertrude Stein’s Wartime Diaries, contained within a living room stage-set of assorted lamps and tables, and brightly illuminated by Goebbels’ eccentric score. The displacement of the musicians – early music contingent to the fore, the more raucous wind, brass and percussion behind them – emphasised the music’s stylistic elasticity.

It’s a musical solution Stein’s arbitrary reflections welcome, her thoughts ranging from the most mundane aspects of wartime (the replacement of sugar with honey) to its frightening realism and futility, either in the here-and-now or in the context of history repeating itself. 

In responding to the latter, Goebbels incorporates actual music from the troublesome 17th century by Matthew Locke, which is where the most striking juxtapositions in this performance occurred. Such magical, silken moments from the Dunedin Consort were like historical parentheses, misty cameos imbued with a ghostly intensity.

These were especially effective within the overall context of Goebbels’ wider musical adventure, which shifted restively in character. The idiomatic mutability of this performance was its defining strength, very much a high-end cabaret concoction of funky modernism, smokey jazz, even spacey electronics. Conductor Ellie Slorach’s sizzlingly taut direction ensured that every minute counted. 

And for all that Stein’s words often seemed to matter less at times than their musical response, the overall impact was quite compelling and strangely moving. 

Ken Walton

Dunedin Consort / Maxwell Quartet

Posted on by

Crichton Collegiate Church, by Pathhead/Dirleton Kirk

The multifaceted 2023 edition of the Lammermuir Festival – very possibly the most artistically successful in its history, making Creative Scotland’s absence as a supporter all the more absurd – revealed yet another face on its final Sunday. In two of its most architecturally beautiful and acoustically admired venues we heard very different sung music, composed centuries apart, that fitted their original purpose as places of worship.

Roddy Willliams closed his short but highly effective recital at Dirleton Kirk in the afternoon with the Five Mystical Songs of Ralph Vaughan Williams, setting lyrics by metaphysical poet George Herbert, in the composer’s own arrangement for piano (Christopher Glynn) and single strings (the Maxwell Quartet).

Herbert’s guidance to living the Christian life is still part of the liturgy of the church, and the unmistakable voice of the popular baritone sounded wonderful in the closing Antiphon: Let all the world in every corner sing, My God and King!

Less familiar were the settings of English Folk Songs by Vaughan Williams in the singer’s own arrangements for string quartet, which were as crisp as his own immaculate diction. Originally a lockdown project with soprano Mary Bevan and tenor Nicky Spence, Williams took on all the characters in these tales himself with changes of tone and timbre. In a varied selection from the composer’s vast archaeological project, Captain Grant was a geographically appropriate tale of an Edinburgh jail-break, while others dealt with lovers bereft, spurned and slightly soiled.

Preceding the songs and hymns, in the first half the Maxwells and Glynn combined forces for Elgar’s Piano Quintet, perhaps not obvious territory for this quartet but to which they brought their own folk-tinged style, to the music’s great profit. The work is full of changes of mood and tone, the haunted opening giving way to a dance tune that sounds almost Mediterranean, and a spooky carnival ride alternating with a stride across the South Downs in the finale. With a blended sound in the strings that only long acquaintance can bring, and assertive contributions from the pianist, this performance told its tale in what seemed a very swift 40 minutes.

Earlier in the day, at the well-off-the-beaten-track Crichton Collegiate Church (actually in Midlothian), the sequence of secular and sacred was reversed in soprano Nardus Williams’s recital with a Dunedin Consort quintet, led by John Butt from chamber organ and harpsichord.

Following on neatly from the Dunedin’s Out of Her Mouth production in June, featuring three of French composer Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre’s Biblical cantatas, this programme included her instrumental music alongside songs and solo cantatas by her female contemporaries and predecessors in Italy.

The convent composers featured in the first half may have had the Saviour and religious life as their subject, but they were clearly not cloistered from worldly desires and Williams brought real passion to her delivery, whether seated or standing. Singing from memory, she brought an expressiveness to these appeals for the bliss of Heaven or an encounter with the Christ-child that contrasted with the wry, more cynical tone of Barbara Strozzi in La vendetta, the song that gave the recital its title.

The lesson-telling of that and Costuma de grandi, the brilliant word-setting of Havete torto and the 12 minute mono-drama Hor che Apollo made the sequence after the interval a superb introduction to Strozzi, but the genius of the programme was the way it presented her work in context, with the Dunedin instrumentalists on top form.

The soprano – now happily a Dunedin stalwart – was the star however, in what was a beautifully nuanced, delightfully ornamented and utterly compelling performance.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Nardus Williams by Bertie Watson

EIF: Dunedin | Yeol Eum Son

Posted on by

Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

Fresh from their success with Mozart’s Mass in C at the London Proms, John Butt’s Dunedin Consort turned their attention to J S Bach for an Edinburgh Festival Queen’s Hall performance of all four Orchestral Suites. They are fascinating works, the composer drawing together prevailing features of the 18th century Italian and French styles to create a high Baroque sound that, if arguably German in character, is unarguably Bach.

Few understand that better than the excellent Dunedin players, responding to Butt’s innate knowledge of the composer and his refreshing and personable insight into Baroque performance style with complete assurance, mixed with an almost self-governing freedom and bountiful spontaneity. There wasn’t a moment in this concert where the music spoke without natural sparkle and captivating expressiveness.

What gave it all a pleasing aesthetic balance was the inherent diversity of the various suites themselves: two opulent D major ones, Nos 3 and 4 respectively, topped by glorious phalanxes of oboes and trumpets and which Butt, directing form the harpsichord, sensibly placed as the opening and closing works; the more delicately-scored C Major (No 1) and flute-dominated B minor (No 2) providing a softer, creamier centre. 

Stars emerged, but never out of context. Katy Bircher’s flute playing in the concerto-like B minor Suite was subtly prominent, the tenor of her performance proudly virtuosic yet generously integrated, tempered naturally by the delicacy of her period instrument. Minimum strings made for a sinewy, compact unit, fired by Bach’s dazzling writing and their own swashbuckling counter-play. In the larger-scaled suites, it was the martial thrill of the trumpets and timpani that blew us away. Bach as it should be, stimulating and sublime.

Tuesday’s Queen’s Hall recital by South Korean pianist Yeol Eum Son came from a later time zone, the heady Romanticism of the 19th century in the wake of Beethoven. That composer’s presence was both the climax of the programme and its fundamental starting point. Son’s second half featured a single work, Beethoven’s late Sonata, the ‘Hammerklavier’, and one that must have startled its original audiences.

For this pianist it seemed to represent a logical product of the composer’s earlier, though in many cases equally provocative, sonatas. She immediately embraced the irascibility of the opening, its splintered rhetoric and impatient questioning, a beast that is never fully tamed in the volatile first movement. Her Scherzo evoked, as it should, a more even temperament, crisp and lithesome, yet still with darker shadows hovering. There was tenderness and thoughtfulness in her Adagio, more cool than ethereal, tossed brutally aside by the sheer bullishness of the closing fugue.

Leading up to all this, Son chose a series of mainly variation-type concert pieces that traced a notional lineage from Beethoven’s pupil Czerny, through his own pupil Liszt to Bizet and the troubled French piano virtuoso Alkan. It was a colourful journey, beginning with Bizet’s kaleidoscopic Variations Chromatiques, a flowering of imaginative diversions germinating from the most perfunctory of themes. 

In Czerny’s Variations on a Theme by Rode (’La Ricordanza’), Son flouted her immaculate finger precision and effortless facility, not least in a final variation sounding like stride piano before its time, but not before stilling the atmosphere with the work’s simplistic theme. Liszt’s Trancendental Study No 9, also subtitled ‘Ricordanza’, emerged almost like a postscript, yet characterised by its own expansive eloquence.

Finally, Alkan’s Variations on a Theme of Steibelt took us to the interval, its childish theme mischievously deceptive, given the ensuing maelstrom of notes that increased exponentially as Alkan’s characteristic virtuoso demands breached the near impossible. Never a problem, though, for this engaging pianist. 

Ken Walton

Dunedin: Out Of Her Mouth

Posted on by

Platform Glasgow

Few would argue that the Dunedin Consort, an ensemble that not long ago faced financial oblivion and likely extinction, is now considered one of Scotland’s most creative and imaginative musical groups. Among its many achievements, it has found ingenious ways to contemporise the historical performance ethos in such a way as to preserve the early music movement’s fundamental integrity, often through daring collaborations with contemporary composers or similarly-minded collaborators.

Take this season finale, an opera-styled presentation called Out Of Her Mouth, which manufactures a continuous dramatic entity out of three early 18th century Cantates Bibliques by the Versailles-based composer Elizabeth Jaquet de la Guerre. Each centres on a separate biblical heroine – Susanne, Rachel and Judith – whose stories speak of sexual oppression and their inner strength in managing or conquering it.

To enable this, Dunedin has joined forces with Mahogany Opera and We Are Hera. Hera’s joint artistic director Toria Banks – her company focuses on presenting inclusive opera for women and gender minority artists – has translated and adapted the original texts to formulate a bullish, streamlined English libretto. Cardiff-based stage director Mathilde Lopez and designer Will Monks create a restless, visual menagerie unified by the constant onstage presence of all three singers. Dunedin’s four-piece period band is also a permanent fixture on a crowded stage.

The onus is on the singers to define their respective characters: Anna Dennis as a defiant Susanne; Alys Mererid Roberts as the duped but compliant Rachel; Carolyn Sampson taking the juiciest of roles as the bloodthirsty Judith. They do so with ballsy intent, Sampson ultimately stealing the show with consummate magnetism and the intoxicating power to endear and shock at the flick of a switch.

It helps that this final cantata is the strongest musically, its opening aria gilded with Purcellian polish and exuberance, its momentum sustained by both de la Guerre’s enlivened invention and Sampson’s engaging vocal and theatrical nuances. Where she contemplates her murderous act  – the beheading of the sleeping sex-pest Holofernes – the sentiment is vile, the music strangely enchanting, the dramatic irony hideously apparent.

If the boyishly-attired Dennis and Wellingtons-clad Roberts have less persistently inspired music to contend with, they take the lead from the animated ensemble, using force of personality to overcome the more prosaic conventionalism they are dealt. 

Where this often accident-prone production did struggle was in meeting the challenge of an unsuitable venue. Glasgow’s Platform, formerly The Arches, is essentially a cavernous brick-lined crypt beneath the railway lines serving Glasgow Central Station. Time and again, Out Of Her Mouth played counter to the enveloping roar of overhead trains. 

That was insurmountable, but there were other aspects of this show that suffered from issues either implicit within director Mathilde Lopez’s overheated production style or determined by a low-slung stage area that facilitated technical mishaps. 

Coordination between the sung/spoken word and projected text frequently went askew, even obliterated at times by the singers’ shadows or the towering theorbo. For such a compact space, Lopez chose unadvisedly to forfeit clarity for overcomplexity. Symbolic props ranged from a series of kitchen paper towels – unrolled to criss-cross the stage and at one point wrap around the cellist’s music – to water melons variously disembowelled or beaten to pulp, whose purpose was clearest when representing Holofernes’ head, mercilessly minced by Judith with a baseball bat. There was too much going on, with confusing consequences. 

Other venues in this tour may provide the production with the space it needs. After Glasgow, it heads for Edinburgh, York Early Music Festival and Spitalfields Festival in London.

Ken Walton 

Photo: Carolyn Sampson

Three Bible Her-Stories

Posted on by

Toria Banks, co-creator of concerts that rediscover a celebrated French composer, explains the Dunedin Consort’s latest programme to KEITH BRUCE

Incremental though change may often seem, the development in the breadth of repertoire concert-goers can now expect to hear is interestingly illustrated by the work recently undertaken by Edinburgh’s Dunedin Consort.

In this year’s Lammermuir Festival it is joined by soprano Nardus Williams for a concert of early music by women composers, two years after it brought to EIF the radical contemporary revision of Purcell by Errollyn Wallen, Dido’s Ghost. This from an ensemble whose reputation was founded on precision period readings of Handel and Bach.

The Dunedin is this week presenting a programme – in Findhorn, Glasgow and Edinburgh – that both excavates neglected repertoire by a woman composer from the early 18th century and premieres it in a brand new version.

Out of her Mouth is the umbrella title that has been given to three (of the 12) Biblical cantatas, mostly concerned with women in the scriptures, written by Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, who was a lauded composer in the court of France’s Sun King, Louis XIV, but whose music is very rarely performed in the 21stcentury.

The project was the brainchild of writer and director Toria Banks, whose company Hera has worked with the Dunedin and Mahogany Opera, who co-produced Dido’s Ghost, to bring it to fruition.

“We’ve been going for five years,” Banks explains, “and we programme operas by women, both current and historical and neglected. We have commissioned new work and explored repertory that is not being performed enough. Mahogany supported the development of an earlier project of ours and then came in to co-produce this after working with Dunedin on Dido’s Ghost.”

She describes the Cantates Biblique as “storytelling pieces of theatre”, their message unlimited by historical context. The chamber group onstage – harpsichord, cello and theorbo continuo with a solo violin – may be playing early 18th century music, but the staging is up-to-date.

“The set and costumes are neither lavish nor period. They are Bible stories of Judith, Rachel and Susanne, but they are very relevant, so we are telling them in an abstracted time and space, rather than in pre-Christian Israel or 18th century France when they were written.

“The music is fantastic, but what attracted me to these specific pieces by Jacquet de la Guerre rather than others was the relevance of the stories.”

The texts were written by the composer’s celebrated contemporary Antoine Houdar de la Motte, whose theatrical successes include the French play of the Portuguese story of Ines de Castro, long before Jo Clifford’s Traverse Theatre version inspired James MacMillan’s debut opera.

“I’ve written the new English version of the text,” says Banks, clearly relishing the challenge. “The libretti are very nimble for the period. In the text – and in the music – there are subtle shifts of perspective, from an ironic, distanced and slightly cynical approach to the subject matter to really hearty-rending sincerity.

“And although I wanted to bring out the female perspective of the characters more, but for a man writing in early 18th century France, there’s a real sense of interesting, well-rounded women in them.

“The technical challenge was to express all this in contemporary-sounding English, but I’ve left in some archaic touches where it feels like the character is being self-mythologising. On the one hand it is creative writing and on the other it is solving a complex puzzle.”

The question remains as to why this careful archaeology was necessary for a composer who was a favourite at court and revered beyond her death.

“In general French Baroque music is under-performed in this country,” Banks points out, “but I do think she has been more forgotten because she’s a woman. She was celebrated in her lifetime and she keeps appearing in lists of France’s ‘great composers’ through the 18th century. It’s only really post-Revolution that she disappears.

“In her lifetime she was right in the thick of it and never marginalised. She was in at the start of the fashion for French cantatas as well as at the start of the sonata as a fashionable form for instrumental music. Sometimes people try to explain her disappearance because her only opera was not a success, but that was in 1694 when almost all operas were failing.

“There is a big difference between her music then and in 1707 when she wrote the Cantates Biblique. She was a lauded young talent, but by the time she wrote these she was in her 40s and they are her mature work, with details that come from a place of confidence.”

Two female singers of comparable experience, Carolyn Sampson and Anna Dennis will sing two of the three, Judith and Susanne, while Rachel is in the hands of the younger Alys Roberts, found through an open call designed to give an opportunity to a less experienced but exciting talent as part of the project.

The composer is known to have sung the cantatas herself, and her sister was also a singer, and Banks describes the work as a gift to performers. She is understandably keen to continue the work of reintroducing Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre to modern audiences and has three more of the Biblical cantatas in mind.

“The one I’d like to do that is not expressly about a woman is Adam, which tells the story of The Fall, but does so without mentioning Eve at all. It is sung by a woman, and pins the blame for mankind’s misfortune entirely on Adam.”

Dunedin Consort’s Out of her Mouth is at Universal Hall, Findhorn on Friday, Platform, Midland Street, Glasgow on Saturday and Edinburgh’s Assembly Roxy on Sunday. Performances start at 8pm.

Pictured: Soprano Alys Mererid Roberts

Dunard Centre chief

Posted on by

Impact Scotland, the body behind the building of the new Dunard Centre in Edinburgh, has announced the appointment of Jo Buckley as Chief Executive Officer.

Buckley leaves the Dunedin Consort, where she has worked for over five years and is currently Chief Executive, to take up the new role at the start of September, overseeing the development of the new facility that will be a home for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

Impact Scotland chair Ronnie Bowie said: “Jo is an exceptional leader with countless strings to her bow: visionary company manager, in-demand music writer and scholar, and tireless champion of emerging musical talent, not to mention an experienced contributor to Scottish arts policy and assessment.

“Delivering Edinburgh’s first 21st century venue will require both experience and fresh thinking, and in Jo we’ve found an overwhelming supply of both.”

Jo Buckley said: “The Dunard Centre is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build a musical hub for a city that already hums with artistic possibility and talent, and which is ready to demonstrate to the world what it can do, all day, every day. 

“Like many colleagues and peers, I’ve watched the plans for the Centre develop over these past few years, and grown increasingly excited about the possibilities this one-off, intimate space will create: not just for classical musicians, but for artists of all styles, traditions and career stages.”      

She added: “It has been an extraordinary privilege to work with John Butt and the wonderful musicians and colleagues that make up the Dunedin Consort, and I’m determined to make the most of every last moment with the team.

“It’ll be a wrench to leave such fantastic colleagues, but I’m consoled by knowing our paths will cross again, not least in the auditorium of this wonderful new home for music!”

Dunedin: Matthew Passion

Posted on by

New Auditorium, RSNO Centre

I’ve been spoilt when it comes to Good Friday performances of Bach’s St Matthew Passion by the Dunedin Consort. It may have been nine years ago, but the memorable setting was on tour in Weimar’s historic Herderkirche, against a backdrop of Lucas Cranach’s vivid altarpiece and the very font used to baptise the composer’s son, CPE Bach, with a German congregation joining in the chorales that, in this sublime retelling of the Easter story according to Matthew, represent “the voice of the people”. Hard to forget.

The setting for this year’s Good Friday performance was very different, the secular modernity and bright functionalism of the RSNO’s home auditorium insisting largely on one key focus for the delivery of the spiritual message, the music itself. If part of me ached for the holistic “living history” experience of 2014, director John Butt and his nuclear cast of singers and period instrument players provided little short of a wholesome presentation to a near-capacity Glasgow audience.

Followers of Dunedin will be familiar with its ways: one singer to a part (double SATB chorus in this case) and proportionately minimalist twin band. The inevitable intimacy of such an approach – the soloists drawn from the vocal ensemble – brings with it a thrilling intensity and engagement that made this 3-hour-plus event fly past in a breeze. 

If anything, a bit of acclimatisation in the opening chorus, the first of two featuring members of the RSNO Youth Chorus as the soaring line of Ripieno Sopranos, left some aspects of balance – the otherwise efficient youth choir slightly under projected – in flux, but once tenor Andrew Tortise’s captivating Evangelist took firm hold of the narrative, sure-footed confidence wiped away any initial uncertainty. Indeed, Tortise’s performance – judiciously emotive in the best story-telling tradition – was the purposeful linchpin around which a versatile cast played out its drama.

That team spirit established a lightning fluency in delivery, the host of protagonists (from Jesus to Judas to Pontius Pilate) each enacted with searing individualised charisma, yet as a chorus, the vocal team retreated into homogenised near-perfection. Any sense of imperfection – single voices that momentarily edged above the parapet – was strangely, often beautifully, impactful. Those brief rabble-rousing chorus interjections around the trial scene sent shivers up the spine.

Individually, Edward Grint captured the bass role of Jesus with noble poignancy. Fellow bass Christopher Webb breathed fire into his assortment of character cameos, alongside multi-hued performances by sopranos Nardus Williams and Miriam Allan, tenor Christopher Bowen and countertenor Rory McLeery. But the ultimate showstopper was surely alto Jess Dandy’s soul-stirring aria Erbarme dich, sung with melting warmth and impassioned amplitude in liquid partnership with lead violinist Huw Daniel’s exquisite obligato solo.

That’s not to take anything away from other virtuoso instrumental contributions, such as Jonathan Manson’s free-flowing viola da gamba counterpoint to the bass aria Mache dich, or the sultry duetting oboe d’amores that embellish the soprano aria, Ich will dir mein Herze schenken. 

In all of this John Butt’s leadership counted for everything, impeccable timing that heightened the dramatic juxtapositions, expressed moments of deep sensitivity and chilling theatre in equal measure, and which triumphed in expressing the wonderment and relevance of Bach’s creative symbolism.

Ken Walton

« Older Entries