The magic of modern musical minimalism lies in its simplistic repetition, organic gear shifts, and compulsive rhythmic propulsion from which springs an addictive Rock-style tension and, in the best examples, a transcendent euphoria. The fathers of that invention were, of course, the American minimalists, among them Steve Reich, whose music was the nucleus of this latest SCO New Dimensions programme – Steve Reich+ – curated and directed by star Scots percussionist Colin Currie.
Who better to engage with Reich’s music than Currie, whose longterm performance association with the now 89-year-old composer has given him a first-hand insight that set the second half of this concert ablaze? It included Runner, dating from 2016, and the earlier Double Sextet of 2002, both as fascinating to the eye as to the ear, given their stereophonic use of mirrored ensembles.
Currie’s innate rhythmic presence as a percussionist proved the perfect credentials for invigorating these relatively late pieces, both of which lean to the Reich of old – edgy, motorised impetus heightened by cellular organic transformation – yet harness moments of softened, more reflective charm.
The more heavily-scored Runner, an evolving play on different note durations, benefitted from a vitally sustained performance, rich in textural ingenuity and contrast, compulsive in its unstoppable drive to the finish. If the outer sections of the Double Sextet preserved the mechanistic excitement, with notably virtuosic elan, the ghostly reveries of the calming central movement took us to another, more introspective world. But only briefly.
This being a New Dimensions programme, Currie turned his attention in the first half to younger compositional voices – also friends of his – whose representative works owed varying indebtedness to Reich. First up was Joe Duddell’s Snowblind, the only work of the evening in which Currie jointly functioned as soloist.
Written originally in 2001 for the former BT Scottish Ensemble, much of it oozes Reichian DNA, the moto perpetuo marimba-led dynamism of the opening Vivace dizzyingly incessant, the final moments equally so after the woozy pseudo-Baroque pastoralism of the central Lento. It wasn’t always the tidiest of performances, and there is something very Tippett-like in Duddell’s writing – a kind of self-effacing intangibility – that felt frustratingly incomplete.
Not so Helen Grime’s River, this being the UK premiere of a work first performed in 2023 by the Staatsorchester Hamburg in its wonderful riverside concert hall. From the very outset, Currie capitalised on the fuller colour spectrum and textural flexibility explored by Grime in her vivid soundscape. From rapid watery flurries to milky calms, spectral luminescence to dark undercurrents, and a final swirling representation of the river’s passage to the sea (signing off with a tangible nod to Britten’s Peter Grimes), this may have been the most un-Reichian music of the evening, but in spirit it certainly played its part.
The RSNO had had a somewhat chaotic week, which included chief executive Alistair Mackie deputising in the trumpet section for Thursday’s Aberdeen Music Hall concert, and other last minute changes to the line-up present on stage for Saturday’s Glasgow one making the printed programme a most unreliable document.
Guest conductor Nodoka Okisawa was already in charge of a complicated programme that mixed new music with popular classics in a way that seemed designed to work together, but were as often polar opposites.
Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Festival Overture opened the first half and Stokowski’s arrangement of Debussy’s Clair de Lune the second, and perhaps if they’d been elsewhere the conductor may have relaxed into them more. As it was, they were well-played but seemed to lack heart. Even the big string swell that is the climax of the Tchaikovsky was far from emotional, and the fact that Stokowski’s orchestration failed to make the final cut of Disney’s Fantasia did not seem as absurd as usual.
The work at the heart of the programme, a new Trumpet Concerto: night-sky-blue from Helen Grime, was also not especially easy to love. It was, of course, immaculately played by the global star for whom it was written, Hakan Hardenberger, but it remains in the mind for a lot of things it is not.
The work is not especially virtuosic for the soloist, and although it employs the mute that made Miles Davis distinctive, it was not at all jazzy. Those sections, at the start and the finish, were the warmest points of dialogue with the orchestra, however. In the middle of Grime’s scheme, the soloist’s reference to Baroque examples of the trumpet concerto genre – and perhaps to the instrument’s brass band heritage as well – seemed more at odds with the accompaniment.
It was also never particularly easy to align the concerto with its declared inspiration of the experience of being in a scented night garden, but that may only be a personal impression.
The works that completed the evening related more obviously to their titles. Takemitsu’s How Slow the Wind sat very well, following the Debussy, whose music influenced the Japanese composer, and itself a declared influence on Helen Grime. It was also quite beautifully played, by the strings in particular in an RSNO reduced to chamber orchestra size.
Back to symphonic strength for Rachmaninov’s Isle of the Dead, they were on fine form for that work as well, but as with the Tchaikovsky, Okisawa seemed to be guiding a somewhat restrained performance of the work. Its inspiration in a mono-chrome reproduction of a popular painting is well known, and the composer’s “colouring-in” with distinctive musical textures was again meticulously-rendered. The strange tensions in the piece seemed less threatening than they should be, however, even if the statement of the composer’s favourite plainchant theme could not have been more resonant.
Helen Grime’s skill as a song writer has been well aired in 2024. In March with the SCO her settings of Philip Larkin, Sandra Cisneros and Jane Hirshfiled, under the collective title It will be spring soon, explored the notion of joy. In her latest song cycle, Folk, commissioned and premiered last week by the BBC SSO in its season opener with charismatic soprano Claire Booth as soloist, the subject matter was alluringly sinister.
With texts rooted in Manx folklore, adapted for the composer by Zoe Gilbert from her eponymous novel, Folk invites exactly the kind of hyperbolic performance that Booth invested in it – outwardly quixotic, inwardly dark, seductive qualities instantly triggered by the incendiary clarion call that introduced the opening Prick Song. Its folksy playfulness gave way to the crystalline virtuosity of Fishskin, Hareskin, Booth’s electrifying versatility matched by the captivating sparkle that conductor Ryan Wigglesworth elicited from a pliant, invigorating SSO.
Water Bull Bride proved the most excitable, at time most brutal, of the four songs, its quick-fire narrative inspiring the fullest theatrical showmanship by Booth before ceding to the final song, Long Have I Lain Beside the Water, a telling lament overlaid by a persistent brass motto not dissimilar to the one that opens Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.
If that was in fact Grime’s intention, it was to be be tested after the interval in that very symphony, the connection strikingly articulated in Mark O’Keeffe’s declamatory trumpet solo. Where Wigglesworth had demonstrated alertness and illuminating exactitude in the songs, however, he was less convincing in his nurturing of this Mahler.
The opening two movements struggled to establish their onward purpose, critical gear changes prone to awkwardness and uncertainty, the conductor’s attention centred more on overzealous management than directorial overview. Even when the Scherzo took flight, inspired by increased fickleness of spirit and magically countered by the luxurious spirituality of the pivotal Adagietto, there was still a lingering sense of containment that threatened to stifle the Finale, albeit swept aside by the emergent power of its liberating climax. Too often, such crowning moments were sadly neutered by a clunking framework.
Claire Booth talks to Keith Bruce about the Helen Grime premiere she is giving with the BBC SSO this week and her brace of recordings to mark Schoenberg 150.
Predictably, the BBC SSO is selling its season-opener under the baton of Chief Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth (Thursday at Glasgow City Halls, repeated Friday at Aberdeen Music Hall) on the second half’s performance of Mahler 5 with its cheery Death in Venice Adagietto, one of classical music’s cross-over bankables.
Before audiences indulge in that familiar wallow, however, there is a rather special first half: the world premiere of a substantial new work by Helen Grime, a composer with family roots in North East Scotland and significant friendship with both the conductor and the soloist, soprano Claire Booth. It is entitled Folk, and is a four-song orchestral cycle inspired by Zoe Gilbert’s award-winning novel, and, more obliquely, the mentoring of the late composer and conductor Oliver Knussen.
“It doesn’t say ‘commissioned by Claire Booth’ on the score but the idea came from me,” the singer explains.
“Helen and I were both very close to Oliver Knussen, as was Ryan Wigglesworth. Oli was so generous in promoting other people’s work, when he died I was conscious to try and build something in the group of musicians that he has encouraged. It felt so right to try to put something together with Helen.
“I adored Zoe Gilbert’s book Folk, which is sort of a UK version of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, with a community of characters that are both real and slightly non-human. In Zoe’s novel some of the characters have come from the sea, or have wings for arms, but they are rooted in this northern community. As soon as I read it I thought I’d love to see it brought to musical life.
“I approached Helen with the book and said I’d love us to do an orchestral piece based on it. She loved the book as well, so Zoe, Helen, her publisher and I had meetings about how we might do it and who we might collaborate with. Given Helen’s own Scottish heritage and with Ryan at the BBC Scottish it felt like the right group – and it may go to Aldeburgh next year where both Ryan and I have strong affiliations.
“The strength of the commission is not only the music but also that we are all invested in it. Although he worked very hard on his own music, what Oli Knussen loved was to curate a concert of other composers’ work. Ryan and I met him at the same time and we became friendly through that. The composers that Oli enabled included both Helen and Ryan, and we are a group of like-minded souls who look at music in the same way.”
Composer Helen Grime (portrait by Benjamin Ealovega)
The outsider was quickly brought into the fold.
“Zoe was tasked with creating a libretto from her book. There were conversations about which of the characters would create an overview of the world she created. We decided on four of the stories and Zoe distilled their essence into a first person narrative.
“The first song is a right-of-passage for the boys in the community and it is a vibrant earthy start, and then there are three female characters who have their stories. It is not poetry, but is led by the drama. That’s great for a performer, because while it is lovely to put over esoteric poetry, it is always nice to come at a work from a dramatic perspective.”
Although much distanced in years and style, there is a parallel with the concert piece that has occupied much of Booth’s attention in 2024, Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, in structure and the forces onstage.
“The Grime is a substantial work of four songs of about the same duration, but it is very different from the Strauss and definitely won’t be Helen’s four last songs! It is also a large-scale work and that’s the joy – there are more similarities than differences, I think.
“There is a breadth of repertoire that informs everything I do: they might seem contrary but to combine singing the Four Last Songs with Britten or with this new work is what music-making is all about.
“The wonderful thing about doing the Strauss is that it is such a perfect reminder of the importance of singing well. It is a great challenge to the singer, and I’m thrilled that my voice has developed to the point where I can approach that piece and know I can give a strong account of it. Far from it feeling like an insurmountable Everest, it is so beautifully written that it allows you to really sing these huge sweeping melismatic lines.”
The other composer that has commanded the soprano’s attention this year is Arnold Schoenberg.
“Schoenberg 150th birthday has been an opportunity to highlight his work but I’ve sung Schoenberg almost as much as I’ve sung Birtwistle. He’s one of the composers that have accompanied me throughout my career and particularly his Pierrot Lunaire, which was why I was delighted to work on that and bring something out this year.
“I think I’m the first British artist to record it since Jane Manning’s very special recording in the 1980s and if I can do one tenth of what she did in terms of advocation of new music I’ll be delighted.
“I’ve done many performances of Pierrot Lunaire in my time, starting with working with Pierre Boulez and including working with Jane, so I feel confident in what I bring to the work.
“People rightly say there are different ways of approaching it, but there are notes on the page and there are performers who don’t sing them. We wouldn’t think of doing that with other repertoire – there should be an ease and a fluidity to Sprechgesang, but it is not ‘free’. Schoenberg complained that he never heard an accurate performance, so it mattered to him.
“The vocal line is absolutely part of the instrumental sound-world. The chord and harmonic structures have to be accurate. Then you can have all the fun you want with the characterisation, as you might do with a role like the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro.
“Ensemble 360 and I were working together towards a live show and we cohered immediately so decided to get more out it, contextualising the piece with other composers’ responses to that Pierrot figure. Instead of presenting it with another work of Second Viennese School brilliance, our disc comes with a smorgasbord of Schumann, Amy Beach, Thea Musgrave, Kowalski and Debussy.
Her other Schoenberg project continued her partnership with pianist Christopher Glynn.
“The lieder disc that I’ve done with Chris Glynn is the fourth in a series of retrospectives of composers whose vocal music is probably not the most important part of their output. We started with Percy Grainger, then Edvard Grieg, pairing his piano music with the songs, then Modest Mussorgsky, whose operas seem male-focused but whose songs often have female protagonists.
“Schoenberg would have been an obvious next step, even had it not been his anniversary. We don’t really know his lieder, and audiences and promoters alike can dismiss Schoenberg as solely somebody who wrote in a complex atonal style that they have decided is ‘difficult’.
“I believe audiences wouldn’t think it difficult because of all the other stuff we now listen to, and our disc has dirty cabaret songs, religion-inspired stuff, folk songs and highbrow art songs. The guy had such breadth, purely in his vocal writing, and there was so much we didn’t have space and time to include.
“When you think how much of the film and pop music we know could not have been written without having an understanding of atonality, there are too many promoters that don’t give audiences the opportunity to hear Schoenberg’s music. I hope this will encourage young singers to learn his songs.”
All of which has perhaps meant that Booth has been seen less on the opera stage than some of her fans might like. She was an acclaimed Rosina in the first revival of Scottish Opera’s Tom Allen-directed Barber of Seville in 2011 and has sung both soprano roles in the well-travelled Harry Fehr staging of Handel’s Orlando, first seen at the Glasgow’s Theatre Royal earlier the same year.
“Some artists spend their entire career in the opera house, and that has never been my life. I can’t complain that I’ve spent less time on the opera stage in the last few years when the three-operas-a-year that other singers will do is not for me. I wouldn’t have the breadth of projects I enjoy if I had worked in that way.
“I am so excited about collaborating on my own projects that sometimes taking a large portion of time to do an opera can be hard to make work. I haven’t taken an active step back, it’s just the way my career has gone.
“I’d love to do Shostakovich and more Janacek, and a few more Handel roles. It’s characters that attract me, like Lady Macbeth of Mstensk, and Jenufa is my desert island choice, but I’m not sure anyone is going to cast me in that so I’ll just sing it in the bathroom.”
Claire Booth sings Helen Grimes with the BBC SSO on Thursday in Glasgow and Friday in Aberdeen. Expressionist Music, with pianist Christopher Glynn, is on Orchid Classics and Portraits of Pierrot, with Ensemble 360, is on Onyx Classics.
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.
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.
Given all that has happened – or failed to happen – in recent years, it says a lot for the enthusiasm of the SCO for German conductor Clemens Schuldt that this was, by my reckoning, his fourth return visit in the past five years. By way of comparison, the soloist for this concert, Colin Currie, revealed that it was his first concert in the city since he moved back to Scotland and bought a home in Glasgow in November 2019.
Thus we have waited a long time to hear the 2018 Percussion Concerto written for him by Edinburgh-raised Helen Grime. It was a touching gesture that Currie dedicated the performance to two composers of an earlier generation – Lyell Cresswell and John McLeod – who died recently and had been an inspiration to both of them.
The work turns out to be a fascinating addition to the expanding catalogue of concertos the virtuoso percussionist has caused to be written. Rather than compose an explosive demonstration for the soloist with an accompaniment and underscore from the chamber orchestra, Grime has given Currie the lead with all the musical material – and there’s a lot of it – and invented a vast range of responses to it from the full palette of orchestral sounds at her disposal.
Currie’s “follow me” start on tuned percussion is immediately answered by slap bass and trumpet blasts and as the piece develops the percussive sounds of timpani, harp and celeste are crucial supports, as are the vibrant double bassoon, cor anglais and E flat clarinet colours in the winds.
The soloist is rarely required to hit the untuned percussion very hard, but some of the writing is very fast indeed. The third of three unseparated movements has a long marimba solo before it ends on a shimmer of glockenspiel, string harmonics and breath effects on the horns.
Grime’s radical modernity was framed by works of Beethoven, Haydn and Anton Eberl, the latter two overtures to operas about islands and women. While Eberl’s Overture to The Queen of the Black Islands made you feel you had seen the opera in its full-on drama, Haydn’s for The Uninhabited Island rather made one yearn to see a full staging of the shipwreck story.
Completing the programme was Beethoven’s Symphony No 4, a work that seems to have featured regularly in Scottish concert schedules of late. Schuldt’s version came in very clearly delineated chapters, with a very bouncy second movement Adagio and huge enthusiasm for the rhythmic games of the Scherzo. Among the fine wind solos, first bassoon Cerys Ambrose-Evans stood out.
