Tag Archives: Ellie Slorach

RSNO / Slorach: Uprising

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

The presence of an RSNO Chorus stalwart alongside the young people in the drum troupe that is the voice of protest in Jonathan Dove’s new concert opera summed up what was special about this performance.

Under the baton of Ellie Slorach, and with the orchestra dressed down from their usual concert uniform, this was Scotland’s National Orchestra in best community-engagement mode. The Scottish premiere of Uprising, a new score by Dove with a libretto by April de Angelis, showed that the precise combination of form and function is not only the concern of designers of physical objects.

The opera is a story of climate activism, and one young woman’s scorned protest being taken up by her class-mates at school before adults join her against the authorities. It is an essential part of the work’s design that it involved the RSNO Youth Chorus and the untrained singers of the RSNO Chorus Academy. That Brenda Williamson, with over 50 years’ experience in the choir, should choose to make her contribution by leaving the alto section to hit a floor tom-tom instead of singing was entirely in the spirit of the occasion.

Dove’s music begins with an evocation of dawn, or creation, and proceeds through a week of eventful days that is clearly intended to recall the first book of Genesis, except that this is a fight against the destruction of the world.

Similarly, Lola Green is obviously supposed to remind us of Greta Thunberg, but deliberately cast as closer to home. In fact Thunberg will make a cameo appearance in the voice of a Youth Chorus member, when Lola’s one-woman protest at her school finds echoes around the world in an effective portrayal of social media’s beneficial role.

From the beginning, the eclectic score is full of obvious reminders of other operatic works. Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel is there in the dynamic of Lola’s family with her ambitious mother (Madeleine Shaw), more persuadable and domestic dad (Marcus Farnsworth), and eye-rolling phone-focused sister (Julieth Lozano Rolong). Britten’s Peter Grimes might be glimpsed in Lola’s outsider status, and the mystical world of Wagner’s Ring is often not far away.

The composer’s use of musical motif is certainly unmissable. Edwin Kaye’s swaggering but shallow Mayor was partnered by John Whitener’s tuba and Rhys Batt’s Doctor, summoned to “treat” Lola for her pessimistic obsession, by a sinister ensemble of winds.

The principals were terrific, particularly Ffion Edwards’s Lola, Shaw and Farnsworth, but just as important was the quality of the work from individual amateur singers in step-out roles, both from the Youth Chorus and the adult community cohort. Director Sinead O’Neill had done wonders to make the show happen, using such large numbers in such limited space, and there was never any lack of clarity in the storytelling, even when the narrative moved into a more magical reality in the second half and the threatened trees are given their own musical voice.

Perhaps the work seems a little unsure how to resolve itself, and dithers a little in the decision, but the choruses have some of their best music as it comes to an ending of understandably qualified optimism.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Katie Kean – Ffion Edwards and Julieth Lozano Rolong with RSNO and RSNO Youth Chorus

RSNO / Slorach / Keita

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SWG3, Glasgow

For a second year, Scotland’s national orchestra added a concert as part of Scottish Refugee Week to its summer calendar, this one quoting Emily Dickinson in its hopeful title ‘. . .a thing with feathers’ and featuring Senegalese kora virtuoso Seckou Keita.

One of the world’s leading players of the West African lute/harp, his last visit to Scotland was in the company of Welsh harpist Catrin Finch. He recently released an album, African Rhapsodies, recorded with the BBC Concert Orchestra and conductor Mark Heron, on which his new compositions have been arranged by Italian composer and bass player Davide Mantovani. A chamber orchestra-sized RSNO played four of them midway through a year of concerts of this new music in the UK and France, where the Orchestra National de Bretagne has taken up the work.

It is not to diminish those arrangements to say that they were well within the scope of the players of the RSNO – they were doubtless designed to present few challenges to professional musicians. What those we heard demonstrated was a remarkable diversity, highly appropriate to the event.

The strings-and-horns opening mimicked Germanic orchestral repertoire, while the string writing that followed recalled the work of Irishman Micheal O Suilleabhain. The conductor here was Ellie Slorach, who will also be in charge of the RSNO’s mouth-watering collaboration with Dunedin Consort on the music of Heiner Goebbels in October. If there were some initial problems of balance in this post-industrial space – brass, and even winds, over-loud – she quickly sorted them out.

Keita’s dedication to his grandfather, the second piece, featured some fine bass clarinet from Duncan Swindells, while the third dispensed with the strings altogether, a pealing-bells figure on the kora answered by brass and winds – a cadenza and ensemble structure that continued until its end.

The set concluded on a real high with Keita’s celebration of Sufi Saint Amadou Bamba, on which his lightning-fingered instrumental playing was paired with his rich baritone vocals and a fine trumpet obligato by RSNO principal Chris Hart.

In an evening that was as much “gig” as “concert” the support act was the equally-inspiring Joyous Choir from Maryhill Integration Network, under the direction of Clare Findon. After the difficulties of the pandemic, Glasgow’s international women’s chorus is on a roll to celebrate its 10th anniversary, with two more appearances this week, in Edinburgh at the Scottish Parliament and outdoors at Glasgow’s West End Festival.

Many of these voices were heard in the community chorus of Scottish Opera’s terrific production of Candide last August, and their own programme covers the globe as rapidly with songs of Native American, Turkish and Zulu origin in quick succession, mixing part-singing, unison, and solo-and-chorus as each demands. A showstopper is their reading of Italian liberation song Bella Ciao with a verse in Farsi.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Leighanne Evelyn Photography