Tag Archives: Glasgow Barons

The Glasgow Barons: Early Music Festival

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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

The Wallace Succession

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As he steps down as chairman of The Glasgow Barons, retirement is still a no-no for John Wallace, he tells KEN WALTON. He’s even been writing operas about Nicola Sturgeon and Joe Biden.

It’s ten years since John Wallace retired as the pugnacious principal of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Far from sailing off into the sunset, and now fast approaching his 75th birthday, the tireless Fifer – best known for his starring trumpet solo alongside Dame Kiri Te Kanawa in Handel’s Let the Bright Seraphim at the 1981 Royal Wedding – is busier than ever. “I suppose I’ve semi-retired,” he concedes. “I now watch things like Death in Paradise on telly.”

Mostly, though, he’s doing the things he enjoys doing when he wants to. Given the extent of that – chairing arts bodies and think tanks, running and performing in his longstanding brass ensemble The Wallace Collection, composing operas, masterminding school educational programmes in Fife through St Andrews University where he holds an honorary professorship – this is what most of us would consider full-time employment.

This week, he steps down after seven years as chair of Glasgow Barons, the groundbreaking music-based regeneration programme in Govan founded and run by another tireless Scot, conductor Paul MacAlindin, the centrepiece of which is the project’s eponymous orchestra. 

“Paul is a genius at getting things going among locals in this former shipbuilding town,” he says. “For a start he actually lives there, so understands the problems first hand. Besides the orchestra, which has done so much for new music and Scottish composers, the project has its own choir and goes into schools with its Baby Strings and Baby Brass programmes. Its Musicians in Exile initiative has been phenomenally successful in giving asylum seekers a sense of integration and belonging.”

On Thursday, Wallace himself will direct his farewell concert, which reflects the very essence of the Barons’ successes. It features The Wallace Collection alongside Govan’s century-old Cooperation Band in Govan Linthouse Parish Church. Included is a performance of Jay Capperauld’s As Above So Below, written for the 2017 Cumnock Tryst Festival where it was premiered by The Wallace Collection and Ayrshire’s famous Dalmellington Band. 

“The balconies in Govan are perfect for the spatial element of this piece”, says Wallace, as they will also be for Derek Bourgeois’ Concerto for Brass Quintet and Brass Band, and Wallace’s full band arrangement of Giovanni Gabrieli’s polychoral Sonata No 20. 

He’s quick to stress that far from being the end of an era, there’s an element of transition attached to his departure. One of his Wallace Collection colleagues, fellow trumpeter Bede Willliams, is to take on the vacant chair. “Like all New Zealanders, he’s very get up and go. He has a lively interest in new music and in the social benefits music can have equally for younger and older people.” Williams is also head of instrumental studies at St Andrews University.

Nor is Wallace leaving to free up time for himself. “I’ve done seven years with Govan. It needs fresh energy. Rather than do another seven I felt it was time to cast around for younger blood.” Inevitably our conversation turns to certain American politicians who refuse to give way to younger blood. “Which brings us neatly to my operas,” chortles Wallace.

He’s keen to talk about a trilogy of short operas, the last of which – So Much Hot Air…… – features a certain Joe Biden, its title taken from actual words spoken by the US President at COP26 in Glasgow. The characters also include Boris Johnson and Greta Thunberg. “Boris’s words are all his, and for Biden I’ve scored in a tenor banjo to colour his music. Greta’s the only one who talks any sense so she’s surrounded by a combination of alto flute and harp.”

As for the earlier two operas, the first, Opsnizing Dad, deals with dementia and how healthcare might look by the end of this century. “My daughter-in-law had written this short story about dementia which won a prize. I thought it would be brilliant to set it to music, full of aphorisms and really concise.” The second, They Two Fush, is altogether more satirical, dealing with the recent infamous contretemps between Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond. “It’s a rather lurid comedy set in Nicola’s living room.”

Wallace has begun a recording process with Opsnizing Dad already committed to disc on his own label, complete with two preview tracks from They Two Fish – an “independence Tango” and the closing number, “Time for a cup of Tea”. Central to his preferred casting is Scots tenor and broadcaster Jamie McDougall. “I’d always imagined these operas as small things that would suit [Glasgow’s] Òran Mór or television, and with Jamie in my mind’s eye,” Wallace explains. “He’s such a fantastic character actor.  For the COP 26 opera, McDougall is perfect for the Boris role.”

It doesn’t bother him much that live performances are proving slow to materialise. Opsnizing Dad did receive one in St Andrews, and was even nominated in 2021 for an Ivor Novello Award. “I didn’t mind being beaten in the end by Thomas Ades, who couldn’t attend the ceremony because he was conducting his own opera that night at La Scala Milan. Such is the calibre of that particular pool, Ades in his great big ocean, me in my dub in Langside.”

And that’s the thing with Wallace, whose modesty comes with good humour. “I just get on with things, and once they’re done they’re past, and it’s time to get on with something else,” he chuckles. 

Which rather undersells his lifelong contribution to British music: the ambitious Fife kid who made it to King’s College Cambridge from Buckhaven High School; the trumpeter whose stellar orchestral career spanned principalships with the LSO, Philharmonia and London Sinfonietta; whose solo career saw him premiere trumpet concertos by Arnold, Maxwell Davies, MacMillan and Muldowney; whose leadership of the RCS led on to his influential spearheading of the Music Education Partnership Group, which continues to influence political support for music tuition in schools; who late in life has returned to composition – including the completion and recording of a monumental Symphony for Brass Band he began as a student – and is just as content working with school children in Fife as performing with The Wallace Collection on the world’s stage. 

Will he ever fully retire? “I don’t think so,” he muses. “I’m like a musical lollipop man now, trying to guide kids repeatedly across the same crossing. Them getting so much joy from their music gives me satisfaction. Unless I’m happy in myself, I’m never happy. Right now, I’m happy!”

John Wallace’s Glasgow Barons’ Farewell Concert featuring the Wallace Collection and Cooperation Band is at Govan Linthouse Parish Church on Thu 29 Feb 7.30pm. Full details at www.glasgowbarons.com 

For information on CDs by The Wallace Collection, including the opera Opsnizing Dad, go to www.thewallacecollectionshop.world

iuchair Ensemble

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Govan Old Parish Church

Govan, all too often, gets a bad press. Yet in recent years, thanks to the lively initiatives of socially-minded conductor Paul MacAlindin and his Glasgow Barons organisation, this rough-by-reputation satellite Glasgow community’s historic Old Parish Church has been a centre of regular classical music activity. If it’s not the Glasgow Barons themselves – a proficient and enterprising freelance orchestra – MacAlindin programmes interesting guests with intriguing music. 

On Thursday it was an emerging Glasgow-based vocal ensemble, something akin to a rarefied boy band specialising in hits from the Medieval and Renaissance canon. For their hour-long programme, the iuchair Ensemble focused on one of two key masses by the 15th century Franco-Flemish composer Petrus de Domarto. 

At its time – probably the 1450s – the Missa Spiritus almus was deemed a challenging venture into the world of 4-part mass writing, its unapologetic dissonances and rhythmic freedom edgy and daring, if counter to the tastes of some, including 15th century theorist Johannes Tinctoris, whose adverse critique of the time apparently damned the music to reasonable success by notoriety.

In the vast, shadowy jadedness of Govan Old, the pungent early evening sun picking random targets to illuminate (unfortunately not the black-clad singers visually muted in a permanently dark spot), the four male voices brought a patent enthusiasm to a carefully measured performance. It wasn’t always perfectly in tune, which rather dulled the impact of Domarto’s built-in harmonic tensions, but it did have a certain rawness of tone that gave character to this unfamiliar, explorative music.

Nor, as per its original liturgical function, was the Mass presented as a continuous entity, interjected appropriately by relevant plainsong and motets. Among them were Johannes Touront’s florid 3-part O Florens Rosa, sung distantly from the “east end”; Guillaume DuFay’s gritty Ave regina caelorum, intoned in a rugged continental style; and Leonel Power’s Ave maris stella, which seemed extraordinarily uncouth in its harmonic construction – those parallel octaves! – yet proved fascinating as an earthy reflection of its primitive origins.

In all, the iuchair Ensemble – joined in parts, with a certain funkiness, by Bodhrán player Craig Baxter – unveiled a sequence of repertoire that demands deep understanding of its fragile quirks, unrefined experimentation and historical context. There was much in their performance that proved fresh and enlightening, even where the occasional imbalance of voices – was it tiredness in the demanding top tenor line? – slightly rocked the boat. We left having learnt something new.

As an added bonus on exit, and save for the muffled mass drumming of a distant marching band in rehearsal, the quiet streets and summer evening glow gave Govan the aura of a leafy suburban sanctuary. Reputations can be misleading.

Ken Walton

Glasgow Barons / MacAlinden

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Pearce Institute, Govan, Glasgow

There was a note at the end of the printed programme for this concert that encapsulated what the Glasgow Barons are all about. “Please feel free to applaud as you feel,” it read.

The audience, arranged in a curve of seating around the players and close enough to see every note realised by the players, did not need asking twice. There are assuredly those who would have sniffed disparagingly, but the Govan Music Festival ticket-buyers clapped every movement of Anna Clyne’s cello concerto, Dance, and filled all the available gaps in Sibelius’s Symphony No 2 with applause. Did that impair the performance or our enjoyment of it? Not a jot.

The rest of the programme for the week-long festival is diverse indeed, with folk and rap, school choirs and the launch of a hip-hop album, but it all springs from the work of Glasgow Barons artistic director Paul MacAlinden. The conductor’s own concert sensibly opened with something that many in the audience would already know, Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.

Like composers of yore, Barber re-used the hit tune from the slow movement of his string quartet many times but this was the best-known version, and a perfect opener in the way it uses the sections. There was some variation in the use of vibrato within those – and more consistency in the lower strings – but MacAlinden was more concerned with the overall balance and shape of the piece.

It turned out to be the best possible work to preface the Clyne concerto, with Bartholomew LaFollette as soloist, because the composer’s sound palette for the opening movement is very similar, before the cello enters at the top of its range, joined by the similar frequencies of flute, oboe and bowed percussion. The elegiac melody of the third movement also seems to owe a little to Barber’s influence.

Each section of the work is named for a single line from a verse by Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet whose work has inspired many composers. That’s particularly clear in the second movement, “If you’ve torn the bandage off”, when LaFollette had a great deal more to do and the orchestral music was full of Eastern sounds, rhythms and accents. The fourth movement, “In your blood”, looks to earlier Western music, beginning with the structure of a canon and then subverting it with wind machine, gong, timpani and tuba.

Dance is a big piece, as much an ensemble work as a virtuoso showpiece, although LaFollette brought a compelling intensity to his part. MacAlinden and his team deserve huge credit for giving the Clyne its Scottish premiere.

There were a lot of good things about the Barons’ Sibelius 2 as well, although it was sometimes a little over-powering in the venue, and the conductor could perhaps have done more to keep the sound at a sensible level. Having said that, the first pizzicato crescendo was right on the button and sitting in the firing line of brass and timps on one side and five horns on the other was often rather thrilling.

Keith Bruce

Glasgow Barons / Whistlebinkies

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Film City, Govan Town Hall

It’s often said that the test of a new piece is not so much its premiere as its revival as a second performance. It’s taken 30 years for someone to resurrect Eddie McGuire’s Riverside, in its day a novel and, according to the Glasgow Barons Orchestra’s founder and conductor Paul MacAlindin, the first ever example of a major work combining folk group and orchestra. So well done to him for rescuing it from obscurity and performing it at the very heart of Govan, the Clydeside community that inspired it.

Commissioned originally by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and first performed by the SCO and McGuire’s own Whistlebinkies folk group as part of Glasgow’s 1991 Mayfest, it’s a fresh and accessible expression of the River Clyde’s importance in shaping the existence of a community once dominated by the workaday reliability of its former shipbuilding industry. 

A near-uninterrupted thread of folk melodies echo that sense of social confinement, briefly offset by the Chinese-flavoured middle section inspired by a cruise ship tour by the Whistlebinkies down the Yangtze River and through which McGuire captures the universality expressed in the complementary presence of pentatonic melodies.

MacAlindin conducts this filmed performance, recorded in Govan Town Hall and available online, which is visually enhanced by periodic black and white film footage of Govan at its industrial height. 

That’s a useful counterpoint to McGuire’s music, which has a ghostly lugubriousness about it. Rising from rumbling, amorphous beginnings, the folk melodies enter surreptitiously before establishing themselves as the driving force of a tempered conversation between orchestra and folk group. There is nothing particularly euphoric about Riverside, more a questioning reflection on the mundanity of industrial life, where the warmth of human spirit is contained, but not extinguished, by the strictures of routine survival.

It is also, I think, a work that might be best experienced in the flesh, both from the player and audience perspectives, where the subtleties of nuance defining the respective classical and folk idioms can be lived rather than observed. 

But this is yet another impressive initiative from MacAlindin – nominated in last year’s RPS Awards for his wider groundbreaking work with refugee musicians in Govan – and his enterprising Barons, more of which will be rolled out over the coming months. There is genuine belief and affection throughout this performance, and a visible interaction among the musicians that translates into spirited musical response. Above all, it brings a forgotten work back to the community that first gave it life.

Ken Walton

Available to watch at https://vimeo.com/661006336 

RPS Awards

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There has been much understandable mutual congratulating on social media in Scotland after the announcement of the shortlists for the 2021 Royal Philharmonic Society Awards. The pioneering spirit of music-making in Scotland is well represented, and there are Scots in the running in many categories.

Conductor Paul MacAlindin, founder of the Govan-based Glasgow Barons orchestra, is up against veteran director of Ex Cathedra Jeffrey Skidmore and Royal Conservatoire of Scotland alumnus now at BBC National Orchestra of Wales Ryan Bancroft in his category.

Tenor Nicky Spence is nominated in the Singer category, where his rivals are mezzo Jennifer Johnston and Scottish Opera’s Alice Ford in Falstaff, Elizabeth Llewellyn.

Violinist Nicola Benedetti is nominated for the Instrumentalist award, and the concerto written for her by Mark Simpson is up for Large Scale Composition.

The Ensemble award boasts two nominees in the Dunedin Consort and the Nevis Ensemble and the Inspiration award includes nominations for Orkney Camerata and Orkney Winter Choir, and Aberdeen Saxophone Orchestra for its online partnership with the Phoenix Saxophone Orchestra of Market Harborough in Leicestershire.

The winners will be announced at a ceremony in London’s Wigmore Hall on November 1.

royalphilharmonicsociety.org.uk/awards/rps-awards

Pictured: Orkney Winter Choir and Orkney Camerata rehearsing in St Magnus Cathedral

Pandemonium: Sweeney

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The Galvanisers, SWG3, Glasgow

Govan’s ongoing online music festival, Pandemonium, moves northwards across the River Clyde this week with the release of a single performance of William Sweeney’s suite for strings, Sian Orainn. The venue is The Galvanisers, part of the former Clydeside industrial yard now known as SWG3, and perfect as an adaptable bare-bricked performance space for these socially-distancing times.

That ruggedness is ideal for Sweeney’s atmospheric treatment of the South Uist songs that are the basis of the suite’s six-movement sweep, and which the strings of the Glasgow Barons Orchestra – a slick freelance band under Pandemonium’s artistic director, Paul MacAlindin – embrace completely as a resonant soundboard. The irrepressible folk muse casts its spell at every turn and in numerous hues.

Written for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s Highlands and Islands Tour in 1989, these six songs range from the patriotic to the pious, the romantic to the pragmatic. And while Sweeney conserves the traditional melodies themselves, his treatment of them, both virtuosic and affectionate, gives fresh character and dimension to their central presence. 

The galvanising unisons of “O my country” are a sturdy framework to the episodic solos that intersperse, immediately countered by the pragmatic motorised pace of “Have you seen Euphemia”, a waulking song with a catchy, jaunty gait. Ghostly heterophony adds wistfulness to the third song, shades of English pastoralism strike a foreign note in Buxom Mór, before the painful fate of the cook-in-the-pot drake – the one moment where the string ensemble falters from its otherwise solid togetherness – gives way to the solemn density of “Praise to the Saviour”.

MacAlindin’s players, led by Ben Norris, are a young outfit with fire in their belly. Between the many solo demands of Sweeney’s hauntingly coloristic score, and the mix of translucent and full-bodied texturing he variously calls upon, the Barons’ lustre and finesse capture the iridescence of these alluring pieces.
Ken Walton 

Watch the concert via Vimeo at glasgowbarons.com

Pandemonium: Tchaikovsky

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Pearce Institute, Govan

The title conductor Paul MacAlindin chose for The Glasgow Barons season of filmed concerts for the Covid era, Pandemonium, might better suit the other work Tchaikovsky wrote in 1880, The 1812 Overture, with its booming canons celebrating Russian resistance to Napoleon. The composer, however, thought that a worthless piece of hackwork and was dismayed by its popularity, while the Serenade for Strings, a suite of four movements of meticulous construction that falls, purposely, just shy of being symphonic, was a labour of love of which he was very proud.

His ideal ensemble to perform it would probably be rather larger than the one MacAlindin has around him in this performance, but the conductor draws the fullest sound from his socially-distanced players, many of them – although by no means all – familiar faces from Scotland’s top-notch youth orchestras and the back desks of our professional bands. MacAlindin keeps a very precise beat at all times and this is a very crisp performance that underlines the inspiration of Mozart and earlier baroque music in the score.

That purpose of the composer is especially evident in the opening and closing movements, and the final bars of both here brought to mind the “old style” of Edvard Grieg’s almost contemporary Holberg Suite. The Waltz and Elegy in between, however, are prime Tchaikovsky, the tune of the former as fine as anything in his first ballet score, Swan Lake, from a few years earlier.

The Elegy is no less melodious and altogether more complex, and is particularly beautifully paced here. Special credit should go to the single double bass of Stirling’s Daniel Griffin, carrying the root of the movement through all the variations of key and dynamics around him.

That light and shade is also enhanced by the acoustic of the Macleod Hall, which is the orchestra’s home in Govan’s Pearce Institute. The showcase it is having in this series is a nice counterpart to the more lavish profile other Glasgow venues are enjoying through online Celtic Connections concerts.

The big noise of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture might have more in common with work at the John Elder (soon to be re-named Fairfield) shipyard that Sir William Pearce had taken to the peak of its international reputation in 1880, but the Serenade for Strings is a more fitting memorial to the pioneering businessman who would be dead at 55 before the end of the decade, and memorialised in the name of the community building at the start of the new century.

Watch the concert via Vimeo at glasgowbarons.com

Keith Bruce

Glasgow Barons Pandemonium

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The Govan-based orchestra Glasgow Barons, founded and directed by Paul McAlindin, has announced an ambitious and eclectic digital season of seven concerts filmed in Glasgow venues and building into an archive available free to view via Vimeo.

The series begins on Thursday January 7, with a programme of songs of exile, set to an electronic score by Hamish MacLeod and filmed by him with sound engineering by Tim Cooper at Govan and Linthouse Parish Church. MacLeod is joined by Hannah Rarity, Midya Xan and Aref Ghorbani in exploring repertoire that ranges from Gaelic songs of the Highland Clearances to Kurmanji Kurdish and Farsi lyrics of life as a refugee in Scotland today.

MacLeod and Cooper are also behind the realisation of the Thursday January 28 concert, entitled Flux, for which composer Matthew Ward has worked with Shona MacKay and Nick Olsen from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland on a five-movement suite exploring the power and memory of water.

The MacLeod Hall of Govan’s Pearce Institute is the venue for performances of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings (January 21) and Thea Musgrave’s Night Windows (Wednesday January 13). On the latter the orchestra is joined by oboe soloist Amy Turner. Concerts of William Sweeney’s Sian Orainn, originally written for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and of Alasdair Nicolson’s Stramash, commissioned by the City of London Sinfonia, have been filmed at SWG3 on the other side of the Clyde, and are premiered on February 4 and 11 respectively.

The season concludes with a live recording of Steg G’s new album Live Todays on March 4, featuring new pieces by RCS graduates Aidan Teplitsky – entitled Almost Achilles, Always the Heel – and by Kevan O’Reilly – Scotland versus Scotland.

The films are part of the orchestra’s residency project with Glasgow Life and will be available from 7pm of the day of release  via glasgowbarons.com and remain online for a year.