Tag Archives: Hebrides Ensemble

Hebrides Ensemble

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Perth Theatre

Following fairly swiftly on the recent tour of Arthur Keegan’s new companion piece to Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, together with its inspiration (review: Hebrides: Music for Time | VoxCarnyx), here was another bold programme from cellist Will Conway’s Hebrides Ensemble, built around a world premiere.

The environmental concern of that piece, Shifting Baselines, by Dave Maric, was the ostensible linking agent, but the work’s form, using a selection of recorded voices in its three movements, and the background of the composer, who played piano in the Steve Martland band, were certainly other factors.

Martland’s early solo piano piece, Kgakala (Sunrise), opened the programme, James Willshire’s performance of the picturesque score, full of technical flourishes with hints of stride left hand, suggesting some of the theatricality that would follow. The composer’s much later Reveille, for string quartet, bass, piano and tuned percussion, was just as effective at the close, as a call to arms in response to all the evidence of calamity we’d heard.

The central section of Maric’s piece uses a vox pop of people in Alyth and Perth expressing ecological concerns, while the recordings on either side were a litany of animals exterminated on a Scottish estate and a more recent official report on species threatened with extinction. The composer’s musical response – mostly written for the quartet with piano chords and snare drum rim-shots – was compelling, with very democratic sharing of the lead voice amongst the string instruments.

Three women composers added works to the programme for smaller ensembles, two of them originally heard at Aberdeenshire’s Sound festival. Georgina MacDonell Finlayson’s Silent Spring, presumably referencing Rachel Carson’s famous book, is for solo flute with tape of birdsong and spoken word, and the sound design was brilliantly mixed in this space, while flautist Cormac Henry demonstrated his extended embouchure techniques.

Aileen Sweeney’s The Wooden Web, inspired by more recent writing about the communication networks of trees, was a delight. The most traditional music-influenced work of the evening, its instruments are viola, cello and flute, with the spotlight again very equally shared, but it ended with voices when Henry’s singing was joined by the vocals of Catherine Marwood and Conway in the piece’s gentle conclusion.

Eleanor Alberga’s violin and piano sonata, The Wild Blue Yonder, dates from 1995. Alberga was born in Kingston, Jamaica but violinist David Alberman revelled in music that seemed spun from the East European gypsy dance vocabulary that colours so much classical music, becoming increasingly propulsive and vigorous before also ending in a gentler closing movement.

The outlier in the programme was George Crumb’s 1971 Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale), the theatrical piece that ended the first half and included Henry’s first vocalising. He, Willshire and Conway all donned masks (over their spectacles) as the score requires, and the lights were dimmed. The pianist spent as much time inside the instrument as on the keyboard, damping strings and introducing objects, Henry again needed his extended techniques as well as whistling, and he and Conway added some delicate percussion. It was a highly eventful eight movements, the whale song delineating periods of geological time, often expressed in very literal tick-tock fashion.

This thoughtful programme could perhaps have done with a little more detailed explanation than Conway’s brief spoken introduction and the composer’s note from Maric for his work alone, and it is not unkind to say that the stage management was fastidious rather than slick, but it was musically packed with interest. It is repeated at Kings Place in London tomorrow evening.

Keith Bruce

Hebrides: Music for Time

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Adelaide Place, Glasgow

All credit to British composer Arthur Keegan, not least for accepting an Olympian challenge to conceive a partner piece to Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. The latter, as iconic for its unique language and timeless spirituality as for the fascinating back story that led to its initial creation within a German prisoner-of-war camp, remains one of the 20th century’s most seminal, moving masterpieces.

What Keegan has produced – as demonstrated in its premiere performances by the Hebrides Ensemble while touring Cumnock, Edinburgh, Skye and Glasgow over the past week – does complete justice to the such a formidable task. Coalesce: Quartet for the Start of Life, commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society, is as much a homage to the Messiaen as a springboard from which Keegan’s imagination takes full independent flight. He addresses the genesis of time – “both biblical and biological” – as opposed to Messiaen’s Book of Revelations-inspired deliberations on the end of time.

As such, Coalesce’s impact in opening Hebrides’ “Music for Time” concert was instantly spellbinding. Scored for the same forces as the Messiaen – clarinet (Yann Ghiro), violin (David Alberman), cello (William Conway) and piano (James Willshire) – and initiated by a simple theatricality (two of the players processing from offstage during the opening bars), we witnessed what amounted essentially to a potent “atomised” splintering and reconstitution of the Messiaen sound world. 

From its fragile elemental opening, rich in atmosphere and awe, it was only a matter of time before Keegan’s purposeful writing revealed cleverly-integrated pre-echoes of Messiaen – snatches of exquisite birdsong and overall glittering euphoria. The performance keenly acknowledged these references, but equally embraced the genuine originality in Keegan’s writing, his solid command of texture, ingenious filtration of referenced material, and ability to surprise. What seemed like an added electronic backing towards the end, for instance, turned out to be the players muted vocalising. A magical closing moment.

At that point, would an instant segue into the Messiaen have added to the power of the musical coupling? Possibly. Instead, Keegan received well-earned applause, the players also requiring that moment to retune, leaving that question hanging teasingly in the air. Maybe worth a try at a future performance?

That said, the spell cast had lingered long enough to touch the opening of the Quartet for the End of Time, the subdued complexity of Liturgie de cristal acting like a mystical reset before the frenetic ecstasy of the Vocalise and Yann Ghiro’s agile monologuing in Abîme des oiseaux. If the Interlude proved more safety conscious than daringly playful, and despite some momentary lapses in absolute synchronisation, the onward journey offered up kaleidoscopic delights: Conway’s immutable cello playing in Louange à l’Eternité; the surreal sonic inventiveness of Fouillis d’arcs-en-ciel; Willshire’s supportive pianism; the infinite enchantment of Alberman’s solo violin in Louange à l’Immortalité climbing to its stratospheric sign-off.

More than anything, this was an inspired piece of programming. When the end result constitutes something much greater than the sum of its parts, you know you’ve witnessed a very special event.

Ken Walton

Hebrides Ensemble

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St John’s Kirk, Perth

The notion of the “Auld Alliance” between Scotland and France may well persist in the minds of the programmers of classical music concerts more than it does in any other sphere, so it is probably unfair to quibble that a very broad definition of “Scottish” was required to justify the Hebrides Ensemble’s use of it to entitle its debut recital at the Perth Festival.

The three composers representing the home side were Judith Weir (born in Cambridge), Sally Beamish (London) and Lyell Cresswell (Wellington, New Zealand). France, on the other hand, fielded representatives of Le Mans, Paris, Avignon and Biarritz: Jean Francaix, Claude Debussy, Olivier Messiaen and Maurice Ravel.

It was Ravel’s septet for string quartet, flute, clarinet and harp, Introduction and Allegro, that brought together all the players of this edition of cellist William Conway’s chamber group at the end of the programme. Effectively directed from the violin by Irish Chamber Orchestra leader Katherine Hunka, it was as notable for its dynamism and pace as for its melodic riches, and the rich ensemble sound these players produced in St John’s.

The concert began with Weir’s The Bagpiper’s String Trio, also rhythmically engrossing and democratic in its use of the instruments, although it began life as a showpiece for the range of a clarinet. The playful use of Scottish country dance rhythms and evocation of the sea made it an accessible way in to a varied evening where the pieces shared interesting inspirations.

Yann Ghiro’s clarinet featured immediately afterwards, in the opening movement of Francaix’s quintet, its deliciously French way with melody prefiguring the Ravel later. In the second half, Ghiro returned to the stage alone for the Abime des oiseaux movement of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, its use of birdsong nicely following Between Earth and Sea by Sally Beamish, where that is heard from Katherine Bryan’s flute, teamed with the rich-toned viola of Jessica Beeston and Sharron Griffiths’ harp.

Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane was commissioned as a showpiece for harp, but it has equally rich ensemble writing for the string quartet, in what was the second of the French sequence leading to that Ravel finish.

Those two quintets bracketed a real rarity, Cresswell’s Variations on a Theme by Charles Ives with Conway and Bryan. The dozen treatments of Ives’ setting of Songs My Mother Taught Me, ranging from thirty seconds to less than two minutes, are fascinating explorations of the textural possibilities of the combination of flute and cello. With the RSNO’s first flute on stage, its was easy to hear why the founder of the ensemble was eager to bring the piece back in front of an audience.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Lyell Cresswell

Perth Festival 2024

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The range of this year’s Perth Festival of the Arts may embrace Rory Bremner’s comedy and the funk and soul platter-spinning of Craig Charles but classical music and opera is still at its heart, with performances running right through its 11-day programme at the end of May.

The performance programme opens at Perth Theatre on the evening of Wednesday May 22 with a return visit from the Scots Opera Project, festival debutantes last year with Granville Bantock’s The Seal Woman (Perth Festival / The Seal-Woman | VoxCarnyx). This year the Project revives its Scots language version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, with a further matinee of the production the following Sunday.

Making their first appearance at the festival this year, somewhat surprisingly, are cellist Will Conway’s long established Scottish chamber group Hebrides Ensemble. Their programme visits an idea that has proved strangely popular in the post-Brexit era, celebrating the “Auld Alliance” between Scotland and France and mixing 20th century French music with the work of composers from, or at one time based in, Scotland.

The following week’s chamber music highlight is a visit from the pan-European Il Giardino d’Amore, founded and directed by Polish violinist Stefan Plewiak. Celebrating the tercentenary of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, the group will play, from memory, that Baroque favourite alongside the more recent responses to it from Astor Piazzola and Max Richter.

The Czech National Symphony Orchestra is at Perth Concert Hall on Saturday May 25 for the festival’s flagship concert. Regular touring orchestra with tenor Andrea Bocelli under the baton of its American conductor Steven Mercurio, the soloist for this concert is violinist Chloe Hanslip, playing the perennially popular Bruch Violin Concert No 1.  The rest of the programme is equally box office: Smetana’s Overture to the Bartered Bride, Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.

There is a thread of brass music running through the 2024 Perth programme that may well have its roots in the enthusiasm of chairman Craig Dennis. Children’s Classic Concerts, presented as usual by the ebullient Owen Gunnell, give two performances of Big Top Brass, featuring the Thistle Brass Quintet, and the following Saturday afternoon (June 1) The Fairey Band add a live soundtrack to the Aardman animated film starring Wallace & Gromit, The Wrong Trousers.

The Fairey Band also closes the classical programme with a performance of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition in Elgar Howarth’s superb arrangement, and that comes with its own visuals in the from of animated interpretations of the music created by Ion Concert Media with USC School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles.

Nigel Short’s first-class vocal group Tenebrae is in the splendid acoustic of St John’s Kirk on Friday May 24 with a programme that teams Herbert Howell’s Requiem with a new work by Joel Thompson, A Prayer for deliverance. In the same venue the following Monday duo New Focus, pianist Euan Stevenson and saxophonist Konrad Wiszniewski, bring their clever show exploring the relationship between classical music and jazz, The Classical Connection.

Scottish Opera’s Pop-Up Opera is at St Matthew’s Church for its regular visit to the festival, with two of Derek Clark’s half hour condensed versions of classics of the repertoire, The Merry Widow and Don Giovanni, narrated by Alan Dunn.

For full details and booking information visit perthfestival.co.uk

Nordic Music Journeys

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New Auditorium, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Later this year from 29 October and 3 November, a four-day festival in Glasgow, Nordic Music Days, will present the work of composers from the Nordic regions and Scotland, exploring close cultural connections, but just as importantly bringing us up to date with the pattern of current creative activity in these regions. With wider representation at Aberdeen’s sound festival (23-27 Oct) and a related Glasgow University-hosted conference on 29-30 Oct, the entire concentration of activity amounts to a 10-day collaborative bonanza.

It doesn’t stop there. The project’s Scottish curator, horn player and arts impresario Andy Saunders, has plans to embrace wider-linked activity in the lead-up. Last Saturday’s Nordic Music Journeys – three back-to-back hour-long concerts at the RSNO’s excellent rehearsal auditorium in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall – served as the all-important, to some extent defining, launch event.

It’s aim was to give a platform to new Swedish and Scottish music, performed respectively by Sweden’s Gageego! ensemble and Scotland’s Hebrides Ensemble, both flexible groups capable of multiple configurations, thereby ensuring varied programming. Gageego!, under its director Fredrik Burstedt, performed the two outer programmes; Hebrides took the central spot. A smattering of electro-acoustic works throughout widened the listening experience.

Nor was the event simply about performance. It was fascinating, between concerts, to participate in a peripheral speed dating session, designed to bring the composers into contact with industry colleagues and promoters, even allowing journalists like your intrepid VoxCarnyx scribblers to update themselves on the contemporary music scene in Sweden. The buzz was palpable, Saunders announcing the end of each four-minute “dating session” with an impertinent blast of his natural horn.

As for the music itself, the emphasis was on individual brevity, which naturally afforded a broad coverage of styles and approaches. 

Concert 1 by Gageego! opened sotto voce, with the quiet sensuality and suppressed intimacy of Benjamin Staern’s From Hilma Scenes, before treading wilder waters with the sinewy, provocative complexities of Henrik Denerin’s Collide and acid clarity of Mika Pelo’s Abandoned, inspired by his and his son’s “urban explorations” of hauntingly abandoned city spaces still discoverable in post-unification Berlin. 

Electro-acoustic contributions included Mirjam Telly’s Apparitions, rather like the restless product of an electronic toy box; and Time’s Arrow by Lars Bröndum, effectively throwback postured performance art (with the composer at the controls) in the manner of a Stockhausen tribute act. 

While Gageego! allowed the composers a moment to introduce each of their pieces – some pointlessly reading what was in the programme note – Hebrides, in the central concert, were more streamlined with their delivery of the Scottish repertoire. Aileen Sweeney’s moody Siku found lone cellist and ensemble director William Conway as dimly lit as the shadowy atmospherics of Sweeney’s evocative music, segueing into the nature calls and Gaelic soundscape of Fraser MacBeath’s electronic work, Mar gum biodh an teine air do chraiceann. 

Glasgow University lecturer Jane Stanley’s Lalla Rookh followed, its combination of words (a letter written in 1874 by William Thomson, Lord Kelvin to his sister Elizabeth in 1874) and natural horn (played by Saunders) evoking a lively sonic illumination to the spoken text. The earthy substantiveness of Gemma MacGregor’s Betrayal, excerpted from her 2017 St Magnus Festival opera The Story of Magnus Erlendsson, found the perfect complement in Fergus Hall’s intimately sensitised Laig Beach for solo violin. 

Beyond the visceral originality of Finn O’Hare’s ääni (the most imaginative and proportionally satisfying of all the electronic works), and the desperately disturbing textures of Rylan Gleave’s Heartstrings, Oliver Searle’s skilfully woven Harbour Dreams, from his Dalriada Trio, brought this Scots-themed concert to a distinguished conclusion.

Gageego!’s closing programme furthered the Swedish cause with another cocktail of varied styles. Marie Samuelsson’s The Lion was surprisingly effervescent, like a skittish caricature of the true beast. A long-titled electronic work by Sune Mattias Emanuelsson, built around deconstructed medieval chant, seemed a little loose-limbed, unfocused in its intent. Ylva Fred’s Motor Music for piano quartet trod fertile, filigree ground and a final adrenalin rush that stopped just short of minimalist rock, against which Madelaine Isaksson’s Capsuled Time seemed powerfully ruminative and claustrophobic.

But the most interesting voice in this final programme was that of Alfred Jimenenz, whose With Voice for flute, cello and piano proved utterly compelling. Its deliberate constraint, expressive intensity and the sheer boldness of its techniques (rarely did the pianist actually use the piano keys!) was mesmerisingly original and profoundly impactful.

Ken Walton 

Keep up to date with Nordic Music Days 2024 at www.nordicmusicdays.org

The Night With… Festival

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The Engine Works, Glasgow

The bold assertion by contemporary music evangelist Matthew Whiteside that the first festival under the banner of his concert series, The Night With … ,  aims to give classical music its own Glastonbury may not bear very rigorous scrutiny, but neither is it entirely nonsense.

The opening sessions established an atmosphere that was relaxed and informal, making full use of the post-industrial venue’s spaces, without disrespecting the music in any way. A food truck dispensed sustenance between sessions and a “Parlour” hosted conversations away from the performances, while the programme alternated between two areas, permitting a seamless flow of sounds, even if the planned schedule very swiftly began to slip.

The Hebrides Ensemble took The Night With … into new areas, and not solely because the quintet featured a concert grand, played by James Willshire. Cellist Will Conway’s ensemble, completed by violinist David Alberman, flautist Emma Roche and Yann Ghiro on clarinet, represents an older generation of players, and that was paralleled in some of the music they chose, from more established names than have been the regular fare at Whiteside’s events.

The oldest piece was Seven Pierrot Miniatures by Helen Grime, a Hebrides commission from 2010 which references Schoenberg in its structure and in some of its sound but makes complete sense in its own terms – sonically theatrical, especially in the exchanges between the top line instruments.

That sense of drama was also present in the world premiere of the Ensemble’s set, Rylan Gleave’s Leave John, take Michael, its possibly punning title also suggestive of liturgical choral work. If the quintet’s sound was sometimes hymn-like, it was at a distance, with percussive use of the piano and abrupt changes of dynamics and tonality. Most startling of all were the most conventional moments – a straightforward popular song-style modulation and a quaintly resolved final chord.

David Fennessy’s duo for violin and cello, Changeless and the changed, while beautifully played, perhaps sat rather oddly in the middle of a programme which was framed by two more quintets. It opened with Mingdu Li’s Superposition and Measurement, a quantum physics-inspired piece by the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Masters student that was premiered at the conservatoire’s 175th birthday celebrations last year, and closed with Stuart MacRae’s lockdown composition from 2020, Ursa Minor. It probably presented the group at its most integrated and was, in its pictorial and atmospheric way, the ideal work with which to end.

The festival had begun by referring back to previous incarnations of The Night With … through a set by virtuoso violist Garth Knox that included pieces he played in 2019 at Glasgow’s Hug and Pint, by RCS composition student Nora Marazaite and self-composed. The second of his Entropies, entitled Pluie, was precisely titled not just in its sound but in its effect on the weather at the food truck, while his closing duet with fellow viola player Ruth Gibson, Still Points, repurposed the familiar “Theme by Thomas Tallis” that Vaughan Williams used to distinctive effect, much as Knox’s Microtonal Blues had earlier radically revised Muddy Waters.

But, perhaps surprisingly, its was the work of two dead composers that will be remain in the memory from Knox’s festival-opening gambit. The Prologue to Gerard Grisey’s Les espaces acoustiques was specifically requested by Whiteside for its exploratory meaning as the event’s first utterance. Kaija Saariaho’s exquisite Vent nocturne (Night Wind), was composed for and dedicated to the viola-player by the Finnish composer, who died in June this year, and he played it in her memory.

Keith Bruce

Two Night Stand

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Matthew Whiteside talks to Keith Bruce about the festival of new music that has sprung from his concert season The Night With . . .

With dismal news recently about long-established events south of the border in Dartington and Cheltenham, this might not seem the most auspicious time to be launching a classical music festival, but Glasgow-domiciled Irish composer Matthew Whiteside is not a man to be looking over his shoulder at events elsewhere.

Since he arrived in the city to do a masters degree at the Royal Conservatoire, Whiteside has been an entrepreneurial force for new music in and beyond Scotland, his undergraduate student concert promotions at Queen’s in Belfast blossoming into a concert season visiting a touring circuit of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Belfast under the banner “The Night With . . .”

Next month, The Night With . . . becomes a two-day festival in Glasgow’s newest post-industrial venue, The Engine Works in Maryhill. On Thursday and Friday December 14 and 15, the two spaces on the site will have a rolling programme of 15 performances featuring five new commissions among a total of 12 world premieres.

There are in the line-up composers and performers that will be familiar to fans of The Night With . . . season concerts, but in the festival they sit alongside work by more established names both from home and abroad, Caroline Shaw, Alvin Lucier, Kaija Saariaho and Terry Riley on a list that also includes Helen Grime, Stuart MacRae, David Fennessy, Janet Beat and Claire McCue.

In part that is down to the involvement of the Hebrides Ensemble, whose Thursday concert opens the programme in the venue’s larger space.

“The Hebrides is an ensemble I’ve wanted to work with for a while,” says Whiteside, “but because of the venues I’ve used, an acoustic piano is not usually something I can programme and that’s one of their core instruments. For the festival I’m hiring a piano, so we can do that repertoire and we’ve commissioned a piece from Rylan Gleave for them to play.”

Paul McAlinden’s Govan-based Glasgow Barons are also bringing a chamber group to the party and their programme includes work by another Scotland-based Northern Irishman, Gareth Williams, as well as William Sweeney’s 1989 Sharakan for quintet and electronics.

The other large ensemble taking part is United Strings of Europe. Their Thursday night concert includes a new work written by Whiteside, teaming the strings with soprano Emily Thorner.

“United Strings of Europe is a scale of ensemble [13 players] that we couldn’t have toured with The Night With . . .,” say the composer. “Their leader and artistic director, Julian Azkoul, is first violin on my album, Entangled, and I’ve made them an arrangement of my Sixth Quartet.”

As well as Whiteside’s new work, United Strings of Europe will be playing Claude Vivier’s Zipangu and Henryk Gorecki’s Three Pieces in the Old Style at Whiteside’s instigation. “That’s a pairing that has been in my head for about 15 years,” he says.

Thorner has her own programme on the Friday, opening with a Berio Sequenza and including works composed specially for her.

Viola virtuoso and established The Night With . . . associate Garth Knox opens the event on Thursday afternoon, and he appears again on Friday in an ensemble that also includes Xania Pestova Bennett on Magnetic Resonator Piano. Her presence over the two days begins with a recital featuring two works for the instrument submitted to a call for scores from The Night With . . ., by Ollie Hawker and Rebecca Galian Costello.

“The Magnetic Resonator Piano is essentially 88 guitar e-bows that resonate all the strings of the instrument,” explains Whiteside, “so you can crescendo the piano from nothing, and have infinite sustain. It is like a crossover between a digital synth and a piano, and does things a piano shouldn’t do. It’s utterly stunning!”

As he has done with his season concerts, Whiteside will be recording everything at the festival, and a live album should appear in the Spring. Completing the synergy, one of the Friday concerts, by Ensemble 1604 and show-casing composer Timothy Cooper, is a live iteration of an upcoming studio release on TNW Records.

This side of Whiteside’s practice, as a passionate spokesperson for fairer treatment of musicians by streaming companies, as well as a self-made expert on techniques and pitfalls of selling your own music, will shortly arrive in book form.

“During the pandemic I started lecturing and giving webinars about how to self-release your music,” says Whiteside. “It’s not talked about in the classical world at all, although universities and tertiary education institutions are getting better at introducing their students to the business of music.”

“The webinars were selling out and people were really enthusiastic about the information I was giving them. There was a clear demand for more resources, like a book.

“It’s basically sharing my own experience and knowledge of releasing music. It goes into rights and registration, and distribution, but also recording sessions and the psychology of talking to performers, how to mark up a score, cover art, and the business of branding.”

If that seems like a packed 180 pages or so – and available for Christmas, the composer hopes – it is backed up by links to more information on his website. And that is not the end of Whiteside’s current entrepreneurial agenda.

“One of my other hats is as an agent for contemporary classical and avant-garde music, placing music with film and TV producers.

“I’ve gone to Los Angeles twice and had meetings with teams at Disney, Universal and Sony to tell them: ‘I’ve got all this weird stuff; the next time you’re doing a film like Shutter Island, come to me.’ It’s a long game but I’m building those relationships and that’s another side of where I’m going with TNW record label. Synchronisation could generate income in tens of thousands of dollars for composers.”

As well as taking an agent’s percentage, Whiteside is himself one of those composers and he sees none of his other work as separate from that essential self-description.

“It is not a distraction from composition, because I see it as being all part of the same thing. I write the music that I want to write, and I take any opportunities to sell it on. I just can’t be arsed waiting for gatekeepers!”

The Night With . . . festival is at Glasgow’s Engine Works on December 14 & 15.

https://thenightwith.com

Pictures: Soprano Emily Thorner and violist Garth Knox

Orcadian Feast

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Resourcefulness and imagination have never been so important in keeping events like the St Magnus Festival alive, its director Alasdair Nicolson tells KEN WALTON.

How many of us remember the perverse pleasure of the popular afternoon TV programme Ready, Steady Cook, where contestants challenged celebrity chefs to concoct a feast out of random ingredients purchased for a mere fiver? Despite such meagre resources, creativity and resourcefulness took flight, appetising results emerged. 

To some extent, that’s how Alasdair Nicolson has approached this year’s St Magnus Festival, the event he has directed for the past 12 years, and which is, he admits, still weathering the after-effects of Covid. “Right now, as things gradually return to normal, we’re having to be especially resourceful,” he insists. 

“There’s no overarching theme this year. The programme is more about a set of things I think are interesting, or a set of people I know – emerging artists or old friends – who are very good. Last year we were nearly back from Covid, but it was still odd. This year feels we’re getting there, still not at full capacity, but doing well with ticket sales.

A quick glance at the programme, which runs from 16-23 June, shows that the ingredients are infinitely more exciting than any arbitrary cucumber or carrot. The meat of the festival is still classical music, but complementing that are folk, ballet, theatre, poetry and visual arts events, with the traditional involvement of local performers offsetting the incoming presence of visiting artists.

As ever, Nicolson eschews the predictable. What is it with the accordion this year, I ask in relation to what seems like a veritable squeeze-box infestation, dominated by the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland’s entire Accordion Ensemble? “I’m just a lover of the accordion,” he says. “As a composer, I’ve written for it in various combinations. I also taught a composition course for accordion in Lithuania. So, personally, I have skin in the game.”

Central to this major segment of programming is Scotland’s latest accordion sensation, the young Glaswegian Ryan Corbett. Following his solo triumph last year in Orkney, and his fast-rising profile further afield, he’s here this time in two duo partnerships, one with Edinburgh-born trumpeter Aaron Akugbo, the other with his own teacher Djordje Gajic playing Stravinsky’s Petrouchka in St Magnus Cathedral.

If that isn’t quirky enough, the charismatic Ragazze Quartet from the Netherlands, known for their unconventional approach to the medium, certainly are. Nicolson encountered them while sitting in his car. “I was driving and listening to the radio when I heard them playing Schubert’s Die Winterreise and thought, this is wonderful, but it’s not supposed to be on string quartet. It worked so well in refocussing Schubert’s original [song cycle].” The Raggaze will be joined in this by baritone Maarten Koningsberger. 

In another of their three programmes, the Quartet teams up with Dutch pianist Nikola Meeuwsen in Shostakovich’s ebullient Piano Quintet. Again, the idea came to Nicolson through chance. “His parents in Holland live next door to friends of mine, who told me about him. I tried him out and realised putting him together with the other Dutch musicians made complete sense.” Meeuwsen, still only 20 and the youngest ever winner of Amsterdam’s Grachtenfestival Prize, also plays his own solo recital, the Age of Refinement, on Saturday. 

Other artists this year include: the 17th/18th century specialist ensemble Florilegium, reenacting in one of its programmes Leipzig’s legendary Coffee House concerts with music by Bach and his contemporaries; and the Scots-based Hebrides Ensemble, including an “immersive promenade concert” “Solstice of Dark and Light – Wind Water Earth Fire” in St Magnus Cathedral, combining music, art and poetry.

Atmosphere plays its part, too, in two solo performances by the young Black Isle cellist Finlay Spence: one on Hoy in which he plays Bach, Boyle, Beamish and Berio; the other on South Ronaldsay which includes the world premiere of a new commission, Fadhail, by Uist composer Padruig Morrison. 

On a larger scale, Scottish Ballet brings its steamy, critically-acclaimed production of A Streetcar Named Desire to Kirkwall’s Pickaquoy Centre. “We had to ask them to bring another show as well, given that Streetcar comes with a high guidance rating,” Nicolson explains. “Otherwise, I’d have had to field the complaints!” The solution was Nutcracker Sweets, a potpourri from past and present Scottish Ballet productions culminating in scenes from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker.

Equally exciting for Nicolson is the world premiere of Thora, David McNeish’s new play based on the mother of Magnus mentioned in the ancient sagas, directed by Gerda Stevenson. McNeish was a minister on Orkney and before that a doctor. “He worked on it originally when [Orcadian actor, theatre director and vocal coach] Kristin Linklater was still alive, and it was really meant for her,” Nicolson says. “It’s a powerful piece because it brings a woman into the Magnus story, and one who actually survived him.”

Ask the St Magnus director what makes the Festival tick today, seven years after the death of its iconic founder Sir Peter Maxwell Davies  and especially after the trials of Covid, and the answer falls somewhere between pragmatism and optimism. “If anything, we’re much more aware of how much everything costs. The challenge is to match the expectations people have from the Festival’s traditions and history against what is really possible. 

“The fact is, we’re still managing to do a largely music-based festival, trying to bring in things local people ought to see as well as setting out stuff that will bring audiences in from elsewhere. Most importantly Orkney folk themselves are still an integral element.” This year’s Johnsmas Foy – Waves and Tangles: A Countrywoman’s Diary – celebrates Orcadian poet and nature writer Bessie Skea, whose legacy was overshadowed by her more famous contemporary George Mackay Brown. The local Festival Chorus presents its own performance of Fauré’s Requiem under Hallè Chorus director Matthew Hamilton.

Times might be tougher, but with just the right ingredients and some creative flair St Magnus is making the best of uncertain times.

The 2023 St Magnus Festival on Orkney runs from 16-23 June. Full information at http://www.stmagnusfestival.co

Hebrides Ensemble

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RSNO Centre, Glasgow

We’re getting used to the mayhem associated with the mad music of Jörg Widmann, through his associations with Scottish Orchestras (he’s back this week with the RSNO) and in his multiple personae as composer, conductor and clarinettist. It was in the first of these roles that he made his mark again over the weekend, when his 5-movement Octet featured in a thoroughly pleasant afternoon recital by the Hebrides Ensemble.

The event was part of the RSNO’s new partnership activity with smaller Scottish ensembles, which in Glasgow’s music calendar has added a occasional new Sunday treat. This one, consisting of eight mixed instrumentalists matching the requirements of Schubert’s famous Octet, offered a programme that dressed old works in new attire.

It should have opened with Cassandra Miller’s About Bach, but with the Hebrides’ artistic director and cellist William Conway unfortunately indisposed, that risk wasn’t taken. Though inevitably disappointing – appetites were whetted for the Canadian-born composer’s music several weeks ago when Lawrence’s Power and the SCO gave a compelling account of her new viola concerto “I cannot love without trembling” – the resulting programme, albeit shortened, had a satisfyingly purposeful flow to it.

The theme remained intact, opening with Mozart’s re-tailored couplet for string quartet of his own Andante (from the Symphony No 8, KV48) and one of the five Bach Fugues transcribed as K405. They made perfect bedfellows, bringing one genius mind into direct touch with another.

That eased the passage into Tom David Wilson’s Three Schuberts, a reimagining of short selected works by the earlier composer in which Wilson takes tasteful liberties, using the full mixed octet resources to apply hyperactive twists and modernist techniques. Thus the impish eccentricities of Schubert’s Moment Musicaux No 3; the supercharged sound world of Erlkönig, its adapted instrumentation lending it the same melodramatic OTT-ness of a Midsomer Murders soundtrack;  and the quivering spookiness of Der Leiermann (The Hurdy-Gurdy Man) from the song cycle Die Winterreise.

All roads led to the grand finale, Widmann’s Octet, which took the art of reimagining to its furthest extremes. We had the benefit of replacement cellist Christian Elliott, who had performed it with Widmann himself, to prepare our ears for the zaniness to come. Clear references to Schubert were few and far between, including the famous octet whose scoring configuration it replicates.  

Nonetheless, a fearless performance was all that was needed to take Widmann’s wile and wit in the nature of its intentions. Tingling Stravinsky-like chords and timbres lit up the Intrada; the Menuetto, a scherzo (joke) in its literal sense, played mischief at every turn; the extended loveliness of the Lied Ohne Worte took us deep into the weirdly oscillating world of microtones; while the Intermezzo and Finale steered a manic course from full-on riot and surreal intensity to resolution. 

Very Widmann, but as for Schubert……….?

Ken Walton 

Glasgow Cathedral Festival

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Artistic Director Andrew Forbes and his small team achieve a minor miracle each year with their long weekend of diverse and often bold and experimental music in the superb environment of Glasgow Cathedral. Saturday evening’s programme was a good indicator of that range, and the unique atmosphere the building provides.

Cellist William Conway’s Hebrides Ensemble brought a programme that was diverse in itself, beginning with a quartet by Mozart and ending with a work for the same forces by Krzysztof Penderecki – the Polish composer to whose memory Sir James MacMillan has dedicated his new violin concerto.

Although Conway himself played in all but one of the five works, much of the focus in the recital was on Yann Ghiro and Scott Dickinson, principal clarinet and principal viola in the BBC SSO, with violinist David Alberman the other member of this edition of the versatile group.

Mozart’s Adagio for Basset Horn and String Trio might only have become such in the hands of German musicologist Ernst Lewicki, but its melodic material is familiar from the composer’s repurposing of it and the lead instrument is one for which he had a demonstrable enthusiasm.

Penderecki’s Quartet exploits the similar tonal range of the clarinet and viola in its opening and closing movements as the cello and violin add single note “drones” to the sound. The clarinet is also to the fore in the sprightly and slightly bluesy Scherzo; only in the third movement Serenade is there a more democratic share of the lead line.

The other curiosity by a big name was Leonard Bernstein’s Variations on an Octatonic scale, five bite-sized miniatures that fuelled his Concerto for Orchestra. They were performed here by Conway and Ghiro, and the fourth, with its staccato clarinet and pizzicato cello was a particular delight.

The programme was completed by two newer works from composers living or working in Scotland, David Fennessy and Helen Grime. Almost the definition of minimalism and restraint, with much use of harmonics, Fennessy’s Changeless And The Changed is a duo for violin and cello that takes a single musical idea, botanical in inspiration, and explores it thoroughly. To See The Summer Sky, by Grime, pairs violin and viola with the lower instrument often taking the lead, especially in the faster sections of the score.

If the Hebrides’ package presented an opportunity to hear music that rarely has an outing, the event that followed was a one-off delight. De Profundis: A Tribute to Scottish Miners began life at the East Neuk Festival five years ago, performed in smoky half-light in The Bowhouse, the former agricultural building that has become the festival’s main large venue.

This revisiting of the work by John Wallace, his professional brass-playing colleagues in The Wallace Collection, and Tony George, the tuba-playing director of the Tullis Russell Band who is now working with The Cooperation Band, also involved Renfrew Burgh Band. The massed brass also included, unbilled, a few players from Fife who simply wanted to be involved again and were prepared to travel to do so.

If the pit-invoking haze was less dense this time, the lighting and use of the building was twice as spectacular. The score Wallace has created, mining material from settings of Psalm 130, Out Of The Deep, ranges from classic brass band sound to choral polyphony, constantly in flux and with the glorious punctuation of a virtuosic trumpet solo from on high and a robust percussion interlude. From the quire of the cathedral, Brenda Craig recited the four poems that are part of the piece, one of them miner/writer Joe Corrie’s The Image o’ God.

Word had clearly got out that this was a spectacular not to be missed and the Cathedral Festival team were rewarded by a very good attendance for an occasion that will live long in the memory.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Hebrides Ensemble by David Lee

Hebrides on Film

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A bold new film series reveals the inner workings of the Hebrides Ensemble, writes KEN WALTON

We’ve got used to the digital alternative to live concert attendance resulting from the Covid-19 lockdown. Many will agree that the resulting listener experience of concerts streamed to our homes was necessary and welcome, if never quite as vital or participatory as the real thing. But it’s with us now, possibly for keeps, and it has a valid role to play so long as it can be justified in bringing added value. 

It’s not just the big boys – our national orchestras, opera company and festivals – that are making something of it. A strikingly creative example comes from the more diminutive Hebrides Ensemble, which is not even one of Creative Scotland’s current RFOs (Regularly Funded Organisations), though it is undoubtedly one of Scotland’s most ambitious chamber ensembles. 

Its forte is in contemporary music, its workforce small and adaptable. It has been active now for three decades – the 30th anniversary celebrations were stymied by the pandemic – and under artistic director and cellist William Conway, it has established standards of performance that are as exceptional as they are explorative.

Take a look at the Hebrides website and you’ll find a link – surprise, surprise – to “Inner Hebrides”, a project featuring five individual members of the group who each present their own thoughts and performances in an unfolding series of 40-minute films released successively over five weeks. They are beautifully produced (by Glasgow-based Flux Video), each programme is highly personal and often quirky, and the locations – ranging from an East Renfrewshire windfarm to Edinburgh’s Arthur’s Seat – take us well away from the traditional concert hall.

Already available from the week-by-week releases are spotlights on BBC SSO principal violist Scott Dickinson (released 22 Oct), violinist Zoë Beyers (29 Oct) and BBC SSO principal clarinettist Yann Ghiro (5 Nov). Still to come (12 Nov) are the penultimate film by former BBC SSO principal flautist Charlotte Ashton – she recently shifted her day job to the Royal Northern Sinfonia in Newcastle – and a final release by Conway on 19 November. 

Dickinson’s film is set amid the vastness of Whitelee Windfarm on Eaglesham Moor, its endless forest of turbines inhabiting the triangular junction of East Ayrshire, South Lanarkshire and East Renfrewshire through which Dickinson is seen cycling and talking between his phenomenal solo performances of Beamish, Britten, Kurtág, Hindemith and Watkins, among others, recorded in the lockdown quiet of the visitor centre.

For this was a project that began life as a Creative Scotland-funded lockdown initiative. “They were filmed back in March and April,” explains Nick Zekulin, who has recently taken up his new position (after leaving the National Youth Orchestras of Scotland earlier this year) as general manager of the Hebrides Ensemble. He’s glad the creators took time to get the final cuts right. “As everyone found out, creating content of this calibre does not happen quickly.” 

Taking time has also served key future aspirations. “One of the questions arising from the growth of online content during the pandemic is how to share that content. We’ve identified the need to develop our website and support its wealth of content by building our social media profile,” says Zekulin. 

“We also see our future as encompassing three key areas of activity: live performance, outreach and education, and digital, and addressing the last of these will be as challenging as it is exciting. Concert films are all very nice, but the opportunity to do much more than that, using media in a much more creative way as we’ve begun to do with Inner Hebrides, will be the real clincher.”

Inner Hebrides reveals the positive action behind the words. From Dickinson’s windswept wilderness idyll, the series then takes us to the utilitarian Coleman Pumping Station in Shrewsbury where Beyer introduces and performs music by Benjamin, Saariaho and more Kurtág. 

Ghiro’s clarinet programme, ranging from the multi-tracked New York Counterpoint of Steve Reich to Messiaen and MacMillan, is reflective of the player’s reputable quirkiness, evident in the gentle humour of his personable delivery, and the clever use of synchronised filming that enables Ghiro’s four colleagues to provide a remotely constructed drone in William Sweeney’s atmospheric Òran-Buidheachas. 

Still to come are Charlotte Ashton’s captivating programme filmed in the historic crypt of Glasgow Cathedral, featuring Debussy’s enchanting Syrinx and Alistair Savage’s wistful St Andrew’s Lament for the victims of the 2013 Clutha Bar disaster. Hebrides director Will Conway completes the set with music by Judith Weir, Fennessy, Britten, MacMillan and even more Kurtág, recorded atop Arthur’s Seat and in Edinburgh’s Institut français d’Écosse 

It’s no accident that the some composers reappear over the course of the series. “That gives us the flexibility to re-package the content from time to time, perhaps with a later focus on Kurtág, or a theme centring on the Scottish composers,” Zekulin explains. 

And he knows there’s an audience for it. “It’s so much easier to get useful analytics from digital activity than from live performance. We know who is enjoying it, how they’re enjoying it and where they’re coming from to engage in it. A quarter of people logging on to these films are staying through to the very end, which is a significant number.”

And let’s not forget that live service from Hebrides has also resumed. The group has already featured at major festivals this year, Lammermuir and Cumnock Tryst among the most recent, and there will, Zekulin promises, be news soon of a 2022 concert season. “We’ll be starting in February with a concert of new music by disabled composers in collaboration with Drake Music Scotland at the Queen’s Hall.” Anything beyond that is still under wraps. Meantime, enjoy the films.

Inner Hebrides films are available to view via www.hebridesensemble.com

Dunedin Consort / Hebrides Ensemble

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Dunedin Consort/Hebrides Ensemble: Passio

St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh

If, as originally planned, this collaborative performance of Arvo Part’s 1982 setting of the Passion from the Gospel of St John had toured Scotland, the opportunity to hear it sung and played in different acoustics would have been very enticing.

Instead, there is just this single outing, broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and filmed for streaming from April 17. In lieu of the tour, the radio transmission certainly whets the appetite for the opportunity to watch. How are voices distributed in the vast Cathedral? And how much of the extraordinary depth to the sound is down to clever sound-mixing and microphone placement rather than the natural reverberation?

A liturgical work quite unlike any of the others heard in the Easter season, the Estonian composer asks for a very particular set of forces. The Evangelist is portrayed by a vocal quartet and an instrumental one of violin, oboe, cello and bassoon, Christ by bass Matthew Brooke, fresh from the same role in the Dunedin’s Bach St Matthew Passion, and Pilate by tenor Hugo Hymas. The St Mary’s Choir and the Cathedral organ add crucial punctuation to the narrative.

Those last elements are often in the audio foreground when they arrive, while the solo characters, while clear enough, sound some way off, as if speaking from history. The complex narrative voice of singers and instrumentalists sits in the centre, combining in different combinations. It is not clear why Part chooses certain vocal ranges and instrumental timbres to express particular Biblical verses – although emotional impact may be key – but there is a detectable technical method in his use of pitches among the players and singers in the pursuit of his “tintinnabulation” process.

If the first impression is of music that springs from the earliest chants of Part’s adopted Orthodox faith, it swiftly becomes clear that something much more contemporary is going on, even if the complexity of its harmonic structure is well-hidden behind the sometimes glacial pace. This is music that has little in common with the American minimalists with whom the composer is sometimes bracketed, altogether less showy and much more reliant on moments of silence throughout the score. The rests in the notation are as important as the notes, particularly when the role of the church’s acoustic is taken into account.

All this is beautifully measured in this performance, conducted by William Conway of the Hebrides Ensemble. The work asks a great deal of its singers, with some particularly challenging leaps in the lines sung by Hymas’s Pilate, but there is an almost studied lack of drama by comparison with the operatic Passions of Bach, even in choral interjections like the command “Crucify him!”

Part’s style of theatre requires concentration, as he homes in on a very precise definition of what constitutes the Passion story, culminating in the last uttering of Jesus on the cross “It is finished”, after which the choral response is in an altogether changed register and tone, more akin to the Lutheran chorales of Part’s upbringing. It is, however, a very understated moment of catharsis.

Keith Bruce