Tag Archives: Gregory Batsleer

SCO / Batsleer: Seven Last Words

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Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh

Over a few hours on the Saturday at the start of Easter week, it was possible to bask in the calibre of choral singing of which Scotland can boast.

In the afternoon, at St Michael’s Church by Linlithgow Palace, the NYCOS National Boys Choir revealed the fruits of their residential course at Gartmore. The hiatus of the pandemic has produced an odd imbalance where the older Changing Voices cohort currently outnumbers the trebles and altos of the NBC itself, but the varied programme still boasted a confident, if unseasonal, This Little Babe from Britten’s Ceremony of Carols alongside some Schubert and fine arrangements of sea shanties and spirituals.

In time, some of these older lads may find themselves on the Young Singers programme that refreshes the superbly-balanced Scottish Chamber Orchestra chorus where two of those currently keep the tenor section at a strength most amateur choirs can only dream of.

It does seem unfair on both sides to pitch the SCO Chorus into such a competition, however, as their concert that evening demonstrated. Director Gregory Batsleer’s ensemble are simply in a different league, as their opening motets by Renaissance composer William Byrd immediately proved. This is repertoire we usually hear in concert from small professional chamber choirs, and to hear the overlapping text in the closing  “Jerusalem desolata est” sung by nearly 50 voices in the glorious acoustic of Greyfriars was a joy.

A cannily-chosen Scottish premiere of Daniel Kidane’s Be Still – inspired by the experience of the Covid pandemic – provided a string interlude to set the stage for the combination of SCO strings and singers in James MacMillan’s Seven Last Words from the Cross.

If the work is quintessential MacMillan, it now seems astonishing that he composed it so early in his career, and disappointing that such a masterwork is not heard more often.

Sharing some material with his equally bold clarinet work, Tuireadh, that is partly because it requires great skill in the voices, and indeed in the technical precision of the string playing. One of the things that distinguished this immaculate performance was the interplay between the two. That is to the fore in the dialogue between stratospheric sopranos and the low strings in the third part, Verily, I say unto thee, today thou shalt be with me in Paradise, with its parallel solo from the orchestra leader, but it is a continuous process in the work.

The writing for the choir inevitably remains foremost in the memory – beautifully resonant bottom notes as well as those high frequencies, immaculate ensemble singing from the altos and those remarkable tenors. But the instrumental playing is only a hairs-breadth behind, and after the representation of the nails being driven into the cross, it is the violins who have the moving last bars of Christ’s dying breath.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Christopher Bowen

SCO Chorus/Batsleer

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Great Hall, Stirling Castle

As chorus director and conductor Gregory Batsleer pointed out, the performers on stage in the restored, if slightly jaded, splendour of the Great Hall of Stirling Castle have an excellent view to the National Wallace Monument and the Ochil Hills which matched the heaven and skywards theme of most of the works he had programmed.

He conceded, however, that the audience is not in the same privileged position, so it was down to the choir to communicate that. Thankfully the SCO Chorus is capable of reaching heights other ensembles can only aspire to.

The two newest works in the programme were, perhaps, furthest from that theme as well as closest to home. Andrew Carvel is a tenor in the choir as well as a composer and wrote his setting of Psalm 150, which lists a suggested instrumentation for the Lord’s Praise, for a BBC broadcast from St Andrew’s and St George’s Church in Edinburgh. With its fluxing music, it is recognisably hymn-like, but a long way from congregational.

The SCO’s current Associate Composer, Jay Capperauld, contributed a setting of a contemporary poem by Fife-based Niall Campbell. The Night Watch is about the joyous sleeplessness of caring for a newborn, a sort of inverse lullaby which Capperauld has set to use the individual and sectional talents of the choir, especially the pure-toned sopranos.

Less than a month after the Dunedin Consort singers gave a memorable performance of Tarik O’Regan’s Scattered Rhymes, it was a joy to hear another of his choral pieces, The Ecstasies Above. Setting Edgar Allan Poe’s Israfel, which recognises the beauty of the archangel but also his otherworldliness, the piece is full of rhythmic challenges as well as shifts in dynamics. With instrumental support from a quartet of SCO players – violinists Gordon Bragg and Amira Bedrush-McDonald, violist Brian Schiele and cellist Philip Higham – those sopranos were once again on star form.

They did not have the whole show to themselves, however, and the full-voiced basses sounded remarkably Russian for John Tavener’s Syvati, the choir’s drones and Eastern intervals complemented by Higham’s cello from the minstrel’s gallery, from where he also played Tavener’s contemporaneous cello solo, Chant.

The other liturgical works in the programme were Roxanna Panufnik’s Kyrie after Byrd, inspired by the 16th century composer and less than a decade old, and the opener from James MacMillan’s Strathclyde Motets, from 2007 and ideally voiced to introduce the sound of the choir in this historic venue.

If there was an enticement for the uninitiated to buy tickets, it was in Ralph Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, regularly voted the public’s favourite classical piece. Few, however, would have heard it in this arrangement by Paul Drayton, in which Bragg’s violin had a choral accompaniment and the instrumental soloist only had our full attention in the closing bars.

Using a brutally condensed version of the George Meredith poem that inspired the composer (fewer that a tenth of the lines of verse), the score is mostly wordless and demands a broad range of techniques from both the full choir and a number of  individual voices within it. Like much else in the recital, it proved a demonstration of the technical mastery of the SCO Chorus.

Keith Bruce

SCO / Batsleer

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City Halls, Glasgow

The tune in the opening movement of the Bach concerto in this week’s Scottish Chamber Orchestra programme may be one of the more familiar by the composer, but remarkably it was probably also the only instantly recognisable melody in the entire concert – especially when the other composers were Mendelssohn, Schumann and Schubert.

The concert was chiefly a platform for the orchestra’s remarkable chorus and – conducting all bar the Bach – its director Gregory Batsleer. Few amateur choirs could tackle the repertoire, but the SCO Chorus made deceptively light work of it, particularly the Schubert Mass in A Flat that took up the whole of the second half.

It is a glorious showcase of choral singing, but a challenging one. At its heart is a setting of the full Latin text of the Credo, in which the four soloists only come on board for the Amen, and at the centre of that section there is a transition from the crucifixion to a belief in the resurrection that is as musically eloquent as in any mass setting of any era.

The Credo follows a Gloria that is an absolute corker of a choir piece, much more integrated with the singing of the four soloists, and with a fugue that Schubert was apparently persuaded to revise because it was deemed too tricky to perform. Batsleer and the SCO Chorus stuck with the original version.

Those soloists were a story in themselves, because contracted soprano Ruby Hughes became unwell after Thursday’s Queen’s Hall show and Emma Morwood – who is one of the choir’s vocal coaches – stepped in at the last minute, her voice leading off many of the quartet’s contributions. If she pushed her first entry in the opening Kyrie a bit, that was excusable. The blend with mezzo Idunnu Munch, tenor Thomas Walker and bass baritone Callum Thorpe gelled as the work progressed, and the Benedictus trio, with pizzicato cello accompaniment, was another memorable highlight of the score. It was Thorpe who sat that one out, but he has a beautifully precise, resonant instrument which there will be another opportunity to hear in Scottish Opera’s French music concert programme in March.

The choir’s contributions to the first half offered a contrast, opening with Mendelssohn’s hymn-like Verleih uns Frieden, chamber music in scale with the low tones of cello, bassoon, and bass underscoring the singers, and closing with Schumann’s Nachtlied, a masterclass in orchestration to compliment voices, from the horn, brass and timpani of the opening to the clarinet and oboe ornamentation later.

For all its melodic familiarity, the Bach in between was also rare fare, as the C Minor concerto was performed in a 1920 “reconstruction” for two violin soloists, rather than for harpsichord or violin and oboe. Directed by leader Stephanie Gonley, who also took the “oboe” part, leader of the SCO’s second violins Marcus Barcham Stevens was the other soloist. The main interest, however was in the radically different, and very precise, ensemble sound of the 18-piece string orchestra (plus harpsichord) in the outer movements. Bach the precursor was, as ever, also the palette-cleanser.

Keith Bruce

Pictured: Gregory Batsleer