Tag Archives: James MacMillan

What makes a Symphony?

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A new symphony by James MacMillan sets the ball rolling on his new association with the Hallé Orchestra. It’ll be the same but different, he tells KEN WALTON

Beethoven completed nine, as did Mahler. Sibelius made it to seven, while Mozart notched up 41 to Haydn’s 106. Sir James MacMillan is just about to reveal his Sixth and insists he’s not finished yet.

We’re talking symphonies of course, and in particular this latest one from MacMillan, which has especial significance in that its world premiere in Manchester on Thursday also marks the start of his new collaboration this season with the Hallé Orchestra as featured composer. Besides such an important Hallé commission, the coming year also includes MacMillan’s powerful 2021 Christmas Oratorio (under conductor emeritus and soon-to-be-80 Sir Mark Elder) and his famously profound Easter setting from 1994 of Seven Last Words of the Cross, conducted by the composer.

MacMillan is genuinely excited on several counts, not least that he holds a deep affection for Manchester itself. “I had a real job there, one of the few I’ve ever had, lecturing at the university in the 1980s,” he recalls. Throughout the Noughties he was back in the northern metropolis as conductor-in-association with the BBC Philharmonic, succeeding Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. “I got to conduct a lot of new music there for almost a decade.” It was also a period that spawned significant commissions, not least his Third Symphony “Silence”.

Now his allegiance is to Manchester’s rival orchestra, though not on wholly unfamiliar territory. “A few years ago the Hallé asked me to write a piece for Mark Elder’s final days as chief conductor. I wrote Timotheus, Bacchus and Cecilia, which involved hundreds of performers from the whole Hallé family, three different choral groups and full orchestra. That was my introduction to the orchestra.’ From that sprung this exciting new association, which he describes as “multi-faceted”, extending from mainstream concerts to outreach involvement and recordings of his own music on the Hallé label, including the Sixth Symphony.

Has he experienced anything of Andy Burnham’s “Manchesterism”? “I don’t talk about politics anymore, but I did meet him when I was down for Timotheus,” MacMillan replies. What I will say is I was very impressed with the Hallé, who they got to go to their concerts, loads of local mayors, lots of business people. It’s obviously an operation that’s run extremely well. Manchester seemed a very musical place, a vibrant city to engage with.”

The “Hallé Family” premiered MacMillan’s Timotheus, Bacchus and Cecilia in 2024 (photo: Alex Burns)

But let’s get back to the new symphony, which MacMillan describes as very different from his last one, “Le grand Inconnu”, a choral symphony premiered at the 2019 Edinburgh International Festival by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and The Sixteen under Harry Christophers. And let’s consider MacMillan the Symphonist, a genre he perceives as mystifyingly totemic within any composer’s lifelong work. Mahler’s words to Sibelius – “a symphony must contain the whole world” – spring to mind. 

“It’s very hard to define what a symphony is nowadays,” he admits. “There’s a whole range of 20th century symphonies that don’t fit any template. Lots of composers have just given up, seeing them as outdated.” MacMillan clearly hasn’t, having composed them at various staging posts in his life. “The six I’ve written are very, very different, but there’s a breadth of utterance that is big in each one, even the Second [1999], which is for chamber orchestra, yet still intensely focussed and dark.”

More importantly, he adds, there’s a fundamental distinction between the symphonies and my other orchestral works. “A tone poem like The Confession of Isobel Gowdie is not a symphony, nor is the more recent Concerto for Orchestra. I can’t quite account for it other than these pieces materialise from a different mindset. There is definitely something in that Mahlerian concept of trying to embrace something big, whether it be the world, history, the family. Musically a symphony has to be through-composed, interconnected.”

It’s no accident that his purely symphonic output is more periodic than frequent. “It’s important for me to leave sufficient time between these to allow whatever happens in, say, five or six years to go deep down subliminally into the mind and come out in a transfigured form. Speaking to young composers last week we talked a lot about aesthetic and style, how it changes over the years, creeping up on you without noticing it. That’s certainly what has happened to me. In one sense I feel as if I’m doing the same thing all the time, yet I’m kind of reinventing the wheel with every symphony, because none of them emerge the same.”

The Sixth, he explains, has a completely odd construction – “five movements, the first four of which are very short.” A glance at the score confirms their elemental brevity: the opening movement for woodwind only; the second for percussion, piano and timpani; the third for brass; and the fourth for strings and harp. “These are little aphoristic interludes, then the whole orchestra comes together for the lengthier final movement.” 

So what’s it all about? “I’ve often cited Elgar’s Enigma Variations as a work that fascinates me, the way he made these musical portraits of friends, naming them only enigmatically. I’m doing something similar here. These are secret portraits of family members, now departed, that have had a big impact on me. It’s not important for me to mention who they are, just that they greatly influenced me, musically or otherwise. It’s very personal for that reason. The fifth movement has a kind of mourning aspect, much more substantial, more through-composed.” 

Expect more affectionate character sketches, then, than the ones contained in MacMillan’s viperish 2004 work A Scotch Bestiary, which took vicious aim at some Scottish archetypes and figures from his more combative younger days – including the critics.

At this point in his career – he’s now 67 and enjoying a comfortable home life in rural Ayrshire – MacMillan exudes an air of calm, thoughtful reflection and gently mischievous humour, even though he’s as busy as ever juggling a never ending stream of compositional deadlines, international commitments, and directing the award winning Cumnock Tryst Festival, which he founded twelve years ago in the Ayrshire town of his birth. 

Pianist Ethan Loch opens the 2026 Cumnock Tryst

He’s particularly proud of the latter, which will consume his attention after this week’s Manchester premiere. It runs from 1-4 October, opening with a recital by the blind young Scots pianist Ethan Loch, and later featuring the likes of saxophonist Jess Gillam, euphonium star David Childs, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the Cumnock Tryst Festival Chorus, and a spectacular closing concert by The Wallace Collection and The Cooperation Band paying tribute to the late John Wallace, former principal of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, which features his extravagant surround-sound reimagining of Giovanni Gabrieli’s 1615 Canzoni et Sonate,

Meanwhile the creative cogs keep turning, and the thing that is most important to MacMillan professionally, he says, is thinking time. “The piece I’m writing just now I’ve been thinking about for years, and while I’m writing that I’m thinking about the next piece, which is a double concerto for cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason and Brazilian guitarist Plínio Fernandes. My mind is obsessed with getting it right, terrified I’m getting it wrong. It’s keeping me awake at night.” 

Strangely, MacMillan insists, “that’s the best way – to be obsessed with something years in advance.” Who knows, the sounds of that golden Ninth Symphony could be gestating even now! 

The Hallé Orchestra opens its 2026-27 Season with the world premiere of James MacMillan’s Symphony No 6 on Thursday 24 September at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall. The concert will be recorded for future broadcast by BBC Radio 3. Full details at www.halle.co.uk

The Cumnock Tryst Festival runs from 1-4 October at various venues in Cumnock. Full details at www.thecumnocktryst.com

2026 Cumnock Tryst Revealed

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This year’s Cumnock Tryst, which runs from 1-4 October, will conclude with a major tribute to John Wallace, the trumpeter, composer and former principal of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland who died earlier this year.

“We mark his memory and his legacy for Scottish music this year in a special way”, announced Festival director James MacMillan, whose own trumpet concert, Epiclesis, was written for Wallace in 1993. “John attended last year’s Tryst festival and was looking forward to participating in this one,” he added. 

Instead, the final two days of this year’s event will not only feature Wallace’s eponymous brass ensemble, The Wallace Collection, but will see them team up with The Cooperation Band in Wallace’s own arrangement of Giovanni Gabrielli’s 1615 Canzoni et Sonate. For this Venetian-style spectacular Festival finale (4 Oct) the massed players will be spread around the encircling galleries of Cumnock’s Old Church. “It will be the ultimate surround sound experience,” promises MacMillan.

On the previous day, The Wallace Collection teams up with The Cumnock Tryst Festival Chorus and local young singers in the town’s Barony Hall for an ambitious programme under the baton of Eamonn Dougan. Besides music by Vaughan Williams, John Rutter and Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds, there’s the world premiere of a new work by American composer AJ Harbison.

Thursday’s opening concert (1 Oct) showcases the talents of the young blind Scots pianist Ethan Loch, who came to prominence winning the keyboard category of the BBC Young Musician competition in 2022. He has since appeared as soloist with the RSNO, BBC SSO and Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. His recital in Cumnock’s Trinity Church features some of his own music alongside that of Gluck, Liszt, Debussy and Chopin.

Other visiting classical artists include the high-profile saxophonist Jess Gillam and virtuoso euphonium player David Childs. Both feature in the Festival’s only orchestral concert (2 Oct) by the BBC SSO: Gillam taking front stage in MacMillan’s own Saxophone Concerto; Childs in the same composer’s Where the Lugar Meets the Glaisnock, a work MacMillan describes as a “love-letter to the town where I grew up”. 

Childs also teams up with pianist Christopher Williams in Trinity Church for a Saturday morning recital (3 Oct), while Gillam presents a colourful spread that afternoon with her own Jess Gillam Trio in music ranging from Corelli and Sidney Bechet to Nadi Boulanger and George Gershwin. 

The overall Festival template remains familiar. The Cumnock Hour (2 Oct), in partnership with the Boswell Book Festival, sees writer and broadcaster Stephen Johnson discuss his new book – Music Lessons: Seven Composers and What They Taught Me – which explores how “dark” music helped him during difficult times. Earlier that day The Unbroken Thread showcases care and share initiatives undertaken by the Riverside Centre with pupils from Hillside School in collaboration with Drake Music Scotland and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

Artists appearing at the late night Festival Club include contemporary folk from the Hannah Rarity Trio (1 Oct), a tribute to Stéphane Grappelli by the Seonaid Aitken Quintet (2 Oct), and music theatre cabaret, CAMPS After Dark!, from Cumnock’s own theatre group.

This year’s Promenades at Dumfries House (4 Oct) are given over to local young talent, including Kilmarnock pianist Ethan Chan.

The 2026 Cumnock Tryst runs from 1-4 October. Full details at www.thecumnocktryst.com

Cumnock Tryst Ensemble

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Cumnock Old Church

In the hours running up to the opening concert of this year’s Cumnock Tryst festival, footage of East Ayrshire’s head of education Linda McAuley-Griffiths ridiculing the value of music’s place in the school curriculum was running rampage on social media. “I’m no really seeing the point of a wean knocking seven bells out of a glockenspiel,” was her careless remark caught on camera at a September council meeting. She has since apologised and said her words were taken out of context.

It was hard to ignore the crassness of McAuley-Griffiths’ comments as this year’s festival opening concert got under way. It featured the Cumnock Tryst Ensemble, a flexible instrumental collective established last year as a high-calibre performance group populated by some of Scotland’s most prominent musicians. Equally, though, it functions as a resident resource for the educational and community projects spearheaded by Tryst founder and globally famous composer Sir James McMillan, himself a product of an East Ayrshire schooling. 

This was the Ensemble’s own showcase, an assorted combo of flute and strings, and a programme of mainly contemporary works that utilised various permutations within. At this concert’s heart, though, was the shadow of founder-cellist Christian Elliott, who died earlier this year and the age of 41, and whose memory was central to a programme tinged with personal reflection and homage. 

Individually, the performances were often touching, at times scintillating. As an opener, Duncan Strachan’s unaccompanied cello struck a neat conversation between the ecstatic freneticism and meditative acceptance underpinning MacMillan’s Easter-inspired And he rose. Violist Felix Tanner completed the brief MacMillan solo coupling with In memoriam, written three years ago to mark the passing of Julliard String Quartet violist Roger Tapping, its moments of despair challenged by an intense virtuosity.

With Judith Weir’s St Agnes, a simple elegy for viola and cello, the air of contemplation prevailed, yet its intriguing play between playing styles – bowed legato tropes punctuated by pizzicato flourishes – felt like a gathering release en route to the heightened exchanges of Weir’s The Bagpiper’s String Trio, quirkily excitable but with ghostly undertones. Violinist Gordon Bragg made his first appearance here, bringing a top-end gloss to the ensemble. 

The third brisk movement from Heitor Villa-Lobos’ Assobio a Jato (Jet Whistle) introduced flautist Ruth Morley, her duo performance with Strachan electrically-charged in its inexorable journey to a soaring catharsis, only then to be calmed by Lisa Robertson’s enchanting Dlùthas for solo violin, inspired by the composer’s own wistful improvisation in Midlothian’s Rosslyn Chapel – though possibly also by Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending. Morley re-took the stage for her own quietly animated Whisper.

What followed verged weirdly on the burlesque, the RSNO’s eccentric principal double bass Nikita Naumov playing for laughs as he introduced Julius Goltermann’s Souvenirs de Bellini – a predictably lugubrious set of difficult variations for cello and bass, even more so in what seemed like a touch-and-go performance at times. Nor, despite the obvious virtuosity on display, was Naumov’s solo performance of Emil Tabakov’s Motivy as defined is it might have been, some moments leaning dangerously towards heavy metal.

What had been missing thus far in the programme was a piece involving the full ensemble, a factor remedied in the closing performance of New Cumnock-born Jay Capperauld’s superbly crafted Schiehallion!. Commissioned in 2023 by King Charles for the Honours of Scotland ceremony in Edinburgh, and based on Scottish tunes selected by the monarch, Capperauld’s acute sense of characterisation, succinct originality and wit is laid bare. Harmonic ingenuity, imaginative texturing, and the sheer joy expressed in this sparkling music was met by a spirit of delivery to match.

It also pointed retrospectively to a weakness in the design and presentation of this programme. Up to a point, it had felt a bit like a routine school concert – one act off, one act on, too much unstructured chat between items, and maybe let’s get the sad stuff out of the way first. Could the church space have been more creatively purposed, Robertson’s lovely Dlùthas, for instance performed from one of the empty balconies? More imaginative production and choreography would have made all the difference.

Ken Walton

(Photo: Stuart Armitt) 

EIF: Colin Currie / King’s Singers

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Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

In his early days, James MacMillan looked up to Steve Martland, a slightly older composer whose hard-edged style (and thorny politics) appealed to the young MacMillan seeking to hone his own identifiable voice in the 1980s. Fast forward forty years and the presence of a saucy new MacMillan commission within a programme designed around Martland’s belligerent Street Songs was – for those of us old enough to remember – a pertinent reminder of that influential link.

Of course, Martland is no longer with us – he died 12 years ago at the too-early age of 58 – so these performances by percussionist Colin Currie (on marimba) and The King’s Singers, signalling the start of the Edinburgh International Festival’s Queen’s Hall series, were strikingly nostalgic. 

The four songs – Poor Roger, Green Gravel, Jenny Jones and Oranges and Lemons – may not be Martland’s most consistently riveting pieces, but there’s no mistaking the combative, mischievous minimalism underpinning them that was once the feisty hallmark of the “bad boy” composer and his eponymous hi-energy band, of which Currie himself was a member.

Add to that The King’s Singers’ championing of the Street Songs (originally performed and recorded late last century with Evelyn Glennie) and Currie’s own five-year association with the legendary vocal group, and the connective potential of Saturday’s line-up was plain to see.

Poor Roger, with its multi-layered “Hippety Hops”, wasted no time in charging the atmosphere, the marimba’s muted insistence a kinetic dynamo to the Singers’ nimble acrobatics. Before the hypnotic freneticism of Green Gravel, Stanley Glasser’s Zulu-inspired Lala Mntwana offered a moment of sweetness and repose. The ensuing step back in time – to the haunting 17th century motet, Death Hath Deprived Me, of Thomas Weelkes – served its purpose in setting the mood and context for Roderick Williams’ contemporary response to that very composer, his own Death, Be Not Proud, rearranged for this programme for singers and marimba. 

This performance captured well the tempered anguish, neatly calibrated dissonance and expressive gestures of Williams’ poignant homage. Its final moments, like a ghostly reference to the original Weelkes, were strikingly reminiscent – and just as effective – as the plaintive homecoming ending achieved by Britten in his magical Lacrymae. 

The soft pop ballad Alive, by Brighton-born composer Francesca Amewudah-Rivers, offered a momentary glimpse of the old Saturday Night TV King’s Singers’ sound, itself a perfect way in to MacMillan’s A Bunch o’ Craws, a hilarious and virtuosic skit on the children’s ditty “Three Craws Sat Upon a Wa’”. With seven “craws” now in on the action (including a spoof vocal contribution from Currie) the focus was on quick fire entertainment, and a Glaswegian patois –  including the well-worn Taggart cliché “There’s been a murder!” – from the singers that would easily have passed muster in Sauchiehall Street on a Saturday night. When MacMillan lets his hair down like this he proves himself an absolute master of his craft.

The second half completed the Martland sequence – an a cappella Jenny Jones that occasional sagged intonation-wise, and the versatile play-acting of Oranges and Lemons. It also brought us the sultry, atmospheric South African story-telling of Peter Louis van Dijk’s Horizons, sung, clapped and finger-clicked to haunting effect.

Missy Mazzoli’s Year of Our Burning, written in 2021 in response to the pandemic offered another “world premiere arrangement”, which lived more for its precious moments than as a convincing whole. So, too, Bryce Dessner’s Tromp Miniature for solo marimba had more an air of background music than anything more compelling. 

Compelling is exactly what’s needed in any encore, which Joe Duddell’s arrangement of Everything Everything’s I Want A Love Like This delivered to an audience hot for more. Martland, one sensed, would no doubt have approved.

Ken Walton

(Photo: Jess Shurte Photography)

2025 Cumnock Tryst Launched

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Sir James MacMillan’s Cumnock Tryst Festival enters its second decade this October, a sure sign that the award-winning East Ayrshire festival – most recently recipient of a Sky Arts Award and a second Royal Philharmonic Society Award – has earned its spurs. 

It was a proudly relaxed MacMillan last Saturday who revealed the 2025 Festival Programme in Cumnock’s St John’s Church before handing over to the a cappella vocal ensemble The Sixteen, whose concert of Renaissance and contemporary repertoire played no small part in attracting the capacity, in some cases well-travelled, attendance. 

Harry Christophers’ precision-engineered choir are not actually appearing at this year’s Festival, but its long association with The Tryst made a perfectly legitimate case for its hybrid presence at the weekend. Having appeared in the 2014 inaugural Festival and several others since, MacMillan’s own close association with the group and their joint ongoing support from the London-based Genesis Foundation, represents a bond that has spawned numerous projects geared at supporting emerging artists, especially young composers.

Saturday’s concert, Voices of Angels, highlighted one of these initiatives. Alongside seraphically-inspired Renaissance gems by Palestrina, Victoria and the biographically-colourful Francisco Guerrero (who twice survived attacks by pirates while on pilgrimage to the Holy Land), were genuinely exultant works by three young composers – Lucy Walker, Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade and Millicent B James – clearly having benefitted from MacMillan’s mentorship and such immersive performances by Christophers’ crack choristers.

It’s with voices, in fact, that the forthcoming Festival, which runs from 2-5 October, kicks off. What began with a mega-choral day for young singers throughout the various Ayrshire regions this Spring, conducted by incumbent choral gurus Eamonn Dougan and Andy McTaggart, reaches its apotheosis as the opening Three Ayrshires Choral Day on 2 October. The same day sees an evening appearance by the recently-formed Cumnock Tryst Ensemble, with music by Judith Weir, Villa-Lobos, Jay Capperauld and the UK premiere of MacMillan’s In Memoriam, all part of a programme that will now pay tribute to the cellist Christian Elliot, a founding member of the Ensemble who died recently.

In other key classical events, baritone Roderick Williams makes his Cumnock debut with the Carducci Quartet in his own arrangement of Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin. The BBC SSO and Cumnock Tryst Festival Chorus present the Scottish premiere of Texan-based Taylor Scott Davis’ Magnificat alongside MacMillan’s Benedicamus Deum caeli from The Strathclyde Motets. The National Youth Orchestras of Scotland Camerata present a wind ensemble version of Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier. Perth-born pianist Alasdair Beatson plays Beethoven, Benjamin and Debussy at Dumfries House. The Festival ends with a Nordic finale from vocal collective Sansara with music exploring Scandinavian and Celtic connections.

There’s also a rare chance to hear the fruits of a relatively unsung project, Musicians in Exile, which has been running for some time now in Glasgow, spearheaded by the conductor Paul MacAlindin under the umbrella of his Govan-based orchestra The Glasgow Barons. Made up of asylum seekers now living in Scotland, these instrumentalists perform music that integrates the styles of their respective homelands, resulting in a unique stylistic fusion (4 Oct).

The less formal side of The Tryst continues with late-evening jazz from Bill Jones’ Renaissance Swing Band (2 Oct), traditional music from fiddler Alasdair Savage & Friends (3 Oct), and the conversational Cumnock Hour (3 Oct) in which poet Michael Symmons Roberts and Hebrides Ensemble artistic director Will Conway dig deep into the story of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, which the composer wrote while detained in a World War II prison camp. 

The relevance of that? The Hebrides will perform the Messiaen in one of the Tryst’s extended series of year-round concerts on 1 February 2026 at Dumfries House. 

Full programme and booking details for the 2025 Cumnock Tryst are at www.thecumnocktryst.com

SCO: Ad Absurdum

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City Halls, Glasgow

The programme was entitled Ad Absurdum – “to the point of absurdity” – and it lived up to its name. In a good way. For this was a collection of music that mostly walked on the wild side. That’s not necessarily a label you’d attach to James MacMillan’s seminal early work Tryst, but the company it kept – the barmy creative mind of Jörg Widmann and a side to John Adams seething with cartoonesque irony – smacked of ballsy insurgence and irreverent fun. As SCO principal viola Max Mandel’s introductory remarks pithily warned us, there was comedy in this music …… of the alternative variety.

If MacMillan’s Tryst – a work dating from the 1989 St Magnus Festival that first established his definitive orchestra style (his first big popular success, The Confession of Isobel Gowdie, came a year later at the BBC Proms) – offered a more serious opening gambit, this was a performance by the SCO under chief conductor Maxim Emelyanychev that highlighted the inspired individualism and latent edge of the then young MacMillan. 

Those screaming clarinets countering the pulsating strings at the start, the paradoxic blood-curdling serenity of the contrasting second section, the dagger-like shards that challenge any prevailing calm, and ferocious dances ignited by incendiary rhythms, all fused tantalisingly together as a potent reminder of where it all began for this now ennobled composer.

Then came the fun and fireworks, firstly in Widmann’s extraordinary trumpet concerto ad absurdum, effectively the title track of the evening – a breathless moto perpetuo that, had the musicians been paid by the note, would have secured them a considerable fortune for the gig, not least its soloist, Israeli-Russian trumpeter Sergei Nakariakov. His was a mind-blowing display of supersonic tonguing, Schnittke-like exaggeration, virtuosic eccentricities and infinite stamina, not to mention the infectious musicality through which he elicited lyrical nuance from a swarming volcanic morass.

The same composer’s Con Brio threw the spotlight on the orchestra itself. To some extent it’s a skit on Beethoven, written originally to partner two of his symphonies, pitting snapshots of his idiosyncratic rhetoric – often just an isolated chordal explosion or momentary quote – against a sea of hi-octane musical psychedelia. Both Widmann pieces were a veritable showcase for the SCO’s in-house expertise, not least a solo theatrical break by timpanist Louise Lewis Goodwin that a frenzied Keith Moon would have been rightly proud of.

All of which led to John Adams’ Chamber Symphony, disarmingly mis-titled, in that any perceived influences (declared by Adams himself) from a similarly-named precedent by Schoenberg were instantly swept aside by the more dominant and truculent sway – also self-declared – of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale and Milhaud’s street savvy La Création du monde. 

An animated Emelyanychev inspired a performance of sizzling energy and infinite hues. The compact 15-strong ensemble sounded way greater than the sum of the parts, invoking the raw jazz-infused menagerie of the opening Mongrel Airs, the weird bittersweet cool of the central Aria with Walking Bass, then in Roadrunner a helter-skelter race to the finish line reinforced by the grizzly synthesiser presence. A glorious end to a night of infinite surprises, breathless excitement and unrelenting absurdity.

Ken Walton

Cumnock Tryst: Music of Land Reclamation

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Barony Hall, Barony Campus, Cumnock

“Composition is a major part of the Scottish music curriculum,” proclaimed Sir James MacMillan in his preamble to an event that effectively showcased what his Cumnock Tryst festival is doing to invigorate that very discipline in East Ayrshire schools. The problem is, it’s not always treated as such, was very nearly dropped by SQA a few years ago, and it’s not an area that every music teacher feels naturally comfortable with.

That’s clearly not the case at Robert Burns Academy, where even the head of music, Ronan Boyle, had his own composition featured alongside seven short works by his Advance Higher Music class. These were created as part of a Tryst initiative that catapulted upcoming Ayrshire composer Gillian Walker into the school over a period to work with the youngsters, and which culminated on Day 2 of this year’s 10th Birthday Festival in an hour-long omnibus presentation called The Music of Land Reclamation. 

All eight works were performed in sequence against a screened backdrop of images from a stunning project by photographer Simon Butterworth – Abstract Excavationism: The Art of Industrial Land Reclamation – that the pupils had selected as initial triggers for their respective works. These were uniformly short (as SQA guidelines prescribe), individually characterised (dictated by their unique choice of photos), and helpfully drawn together through their generic scoring for flute, clarinet and cello. 

Performed by a professional ensemble – Lee Holland, Butterworth himself and Naomi Pavri respectively – and under the seated direction of MacMillan, the music was heard in it best possible light, even if the cellist’s music took occasional flight, seemingly propelled by the school hall’s air conditioning. Ever the professional, the performances continued seamlessly.

Witnessing such sincere and concise responses to Butterworth’s photographs was a joy. As he explained in his introductory comments, what started off as exploratory snapping around opencast mining sites in Ayrshire and Lanarkshire was transformed by the onset of drone photography, giving Butterworth (whose day job is as a clarinettist with the BBC SSO) literally a birds eye view of the scarred landscape below. Realising the extent to which the captured images aligned with his own passion for the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock, Barrett Newman and their likes, he reversed the creative process, basing the photography on actual paintings. 

It was clear from the pupils’ own introductions that this had inspired fertile ideas for structuring, texture and mood. Stephanie’s A Constellation on Land envisioned a glittering effervescence captured in her chosen photograph. Amber contrasted dissonant machinery with chirpy birdsong. Chelsie wove a Burns’ air into her iridescent The Fuzzy Tartan, Freya’s Insomnia did what it said on the tin, keeping us fully awake to relish its captivating contrasts, and setting us up for Mr Boyle’s own Tainted Restoration.

Joshua made the most of an additional bass clarinet in formulating the darker reaches of Light vs Dark (Chiaroscuro). The evocative textures of Leah’s neatly-engineered Snowed In fed sweetly into another Freya’s Whispers of the Wood, its playful dialogue and slick contrasts signing off this ambitious project on a well-deserved high.

Ken Walton

(Picture: Stuart Armitt)

Dunedin Consort/Mulroy

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Glasgow University Memorial Chapel

The naming of much-loved tenor soloist Nicholas Mulroy as Associate Director of Dunedin Consort may have looked like a cosy in-house appointment, but this programme, which has toured Scotland and ends the ensemble’s 2023/24 season with a concert at London’s Wigmore Hall on Wednesday, knocks any such notions into the proverbial cocked hat.

Entitled Scattered Rhymes – the name of the most substantial recent work, by composer Tarik O’Regan – it was a masterpiece of compilation, linking early and contemporary music in a deeply considered way, and often astonishing in execution.

For those who think they know what to expect from an a cappella concert by this group, there was plenty of that. It began with James MacMillan’s Behold, you are beautiful, my love, written for the wedding of the composer’s son Aidan and setting words from the Bible’s Song of Solomon, later included Palestrina and closed with Tomas Luis de Victoria setting texts from the same source. A parallel, and mirroring, stream of words came from 14th century Italian poet Petrach, the text for O’Regan and the 16th century Flemish composer Adrian Willaert.

Many a choir could tackle the MacMillan with some confidence, but elsewhere these musicians were required to produce singing of extraordinary complexity with virtuosic technique. In that, Scattered Rhymes itself was the most striking example.

 A quartet of singers produced, together and sometimes individually, a hugely challenging declamation of the Italian verse, with constant changes of rhythm, dynamics and time signature, while the rest of the choir had equally varied music, setting Latin from an anonymous contemporary English poet and found in the Arundel manuscripts in the British Library. The unlikely gloss Mulroy provided – that O’Regan told him the 1971 rock song Won’t Get Fooled Again by The Who was another inspiration – turned out to be remarkably helpful in listening the work’s structure.

That was just one of many unusual and rewarding pathways the conductor’s sequence of music took us down. The world premiere of the set was Caroline Shaw’s Companion Planting, a Dunedin Consort commission from one of the most in-demand composers on the planet. Her own lyric had many similarities to the early texts in the recital, using the horticultural metaphor to compare the wonders of nature with the joys of a rewarding human relationship.

The music was as attractive as everything she writes, and used some of the techniques she has explored in her other vocal pieces in the most subtle, understated, but brilliantly effective way.

Nor were these the only highlights of the programme. Some distance from the music for which he is best known, Gavin Bryars’ Petrarch-setting A la dolce ombra is from his Fourth Book of Madrigals and not only linked precisely with the O’Regan in its text, but also explored the same metaphorical territory as the Shaw.

The other recent, and unfamiliar, treat, came from the pen of Canadian composer Stephanie Martin. Rise up my love, like the MacMillan using the Biblical source, is also full of flora and fauna and the word-setting –  long, flowing lines filled with crisp ear-catching repetitions – was as fine as anything else in the programme.

Keith Bruce

Cumnock Tryst

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Various venues, Cumnock

It’s hard to believe The Cumnock Tryst is approaching the significant landmark of its first decade. Nine years ago, local boy, now globally-celebrated composer, Sir James MacMillan founded the event, modelled on the likes of Orkney’s St Magnus Festival, in the hope it would play its part in accelerating the cultural and economic revival of the former mining-dependent Ayrshire town. 

It has certainly proved sustainable. MacMillan’s contacts book may have been essential in enticing celebrity names from the classical world and beyond, but just as imperative has been the Festival’s catalysing effect on generating projects involving local people that impact so positively on their social and cultural well-being. 

The 4-day 2023 Festival was no exception, witnessing on the one hand the magnetic persona of Australian-American opera star Danielle de Niese, the electrifying a cappella vocal ensemble Tenebrae and leading Scots folk singer Findlay Napier; while on the other, such big-hearted community events as BIG Saturday!, back-to-back concerts in the new Barony Hall of Robert Burns Academy, a central hub in the sprawling multi-school Barony Campus newly built on the edge of the town.

Both hour-long concerts – “In the Stars” and “Darkness into Darkness” – were the culmination of a three-year project celebrating the legacy of the local coalfields, in which schools and older community groups (including the now well-established Festival Chorus) engaged with composers and songwriters to create their own musical responses. These were performed by the participating groups with professional support from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under MacMillan’s direction.

I witnessed Saturday’s earlier event, “In the Stars”, notable for its slickness of presentation and stylistic variety the challenge produced: from Doon Academy, an attitudinal percussion number with narration by singer-songwriter Karine Polwart; from Netherthird Primary Choir the catchy Elder of the Woods; from Logan Primary the whimsical Crow from Crow Wood; and finally Robert Burns Academy’s vocal pop number, The Colour Room, its title borrowed from an actual Cumnock hairdressing salon.

Dalmellington Brass Academy had set the mood with brass band composer Andrew Duncan’s Knockshinnoch 1950, a robust tribute to an historic local mining accident. Further short orchestral links written by Duncan, Electra Perivolaris, Michael Murray, Gillan Walker and Jay Capperauld, and ranging in temperament from Murray’s brooding and mysterious Visions of the A-Frame to the minimalist lustre of Capperauld’s Zenith, secured a vital continuity, and a vehicle to offset the successive performers’ comings and goings. With MacMillan’s riotous football tribute, Eleven, a pugnacious BBC SSO blew the final whistle. 

Friday evening offered a stimulating juxtaposition between the sacred and the secular. The former was delivered by Nigel Short’s excellent a cappella vocal ensemble Tenebrae in a programme entitled I Saw Eternity, referring to the Scottish premiere of MacMillan’s eponymous anthem, a work written specifically to partner Bach’s motets.

Which is precisely what Tenebrae did, coupling that and more by MacMillan’s choral settings with two of Bach’s loveliest cantatas, Komm, Jesu Komm and Jesu Meine Freude. The Bach interpretations were supreme, drawing an uplifting combination of homogenous perfection and nuanced elasticity from the singers. The choral partita format of Jesu Meine Freude, while immense, even symphonic in scope, maintained its intimacy throughout. Intonation was electrifyingly spot-on.

MacMillan’s music provided freer scope for Tenebrae’s expressive war chest. The three Tenebrae Responsories, reminiscent in many ways of Bruckner’s motets and driven by the same spiritual potency and molten ecstasy, gave rise to some of the programme’s most heightened thrills, some reaching a level of intensity so penetrating that this modest venue – St John’s Church – almost strained to contain it.

After the liquid density and visionary warmth of I Saw Eternity, the programme ended with his Miserere, a pertinent endpoint, and a hugely transformative one as MacMillan’s famous “Tryst” melody – a recurrent feature in many of his works – appeared in its original completeness like an awakening sunburst. Something of a Götterdämmerung moment.

Along the road at the Dumfries Arms Hotel, Friday’s late-night slot was given over to folk musician Findlay Napier, his affable repartee and earthy lyricism like beer and crisps to the earlier sacred sustenance at St John’s. From Hamish Imlach’s Cod Liver Oil and Orange Juice to his own The Blue Lagoon (a sardonic response to the famous Glasgow chippy’s claim of having served Justin Bieber a haggis supper), Napier, through smiling charm and gentle ribbing, gradually reeled in an slow-burning audience. A more liberating cabaret-style setting might have loosened inhibitions quicker.

Danielle de Niese struck gold immediately with her audience in Thursday’s Festival opening recital in Old Cumnock Church, which featured two brand new songs written for her by MacMillan, their emotionally introspective core perfect as a preface to Poulenc’s highly-charged operatic one-acter, La Voix Humaine.

If the Poulenc – in which a fraught woman’s telephone call to her unseen lover confirms his wish to end their relationship – was the natural outlet for de Niese’s red-hot theatricals, so too MacMillan’s songs, setting words by Michael Symmons Roberts, played directly to this versatile soprano’s hot-blooded instincts. 

The unfettered spirit defining both MacMillan songs – the questioningly enigmatic Soul Song and the sparkling abandon of The Vows – was charismatically captured by de Niese and pianist Matthew Fletcher, whose mutual response to the music’s crystalline sparkle never missed a trick. MacMillan and Symmons Roberts intend to add further songs to the collection.

The most intriguing aspect of the Poulenc was to witness it in this version for piano-only accompaniment. Again, Fletcher’s own dramatic instinct multiplied its effectiveness, attuned perfectly to the breathtaking, at times breathless, spontaneity of de Niese’s solo portrayal. It was a mesmerising performance, de Niese piercing the character’s rawest emotions, minimal props throwing the spotlight wholly on the feverish restlessness of a truly intoxicating score.

Ken Walton

Photos: Stuart Armitt

SCO / Emelyanychev

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City Halls, Glasgow

It helps to get off to a good start. That’s as much the case for journalists – are you still with me? – as it is for musicians, be they performers or composers. This SCO programme, guided by the impishly convincing eccentricity of chief conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, was all about good attention-grabbing openings.

First up, those three arresting chords that herald Mozart’s overture to The Magic Flute, in this case supercharged with electrifying brutality, yet still seriously solemn to the core. It was a call to attention no one could ignore, least of all the SCO whose response was instant and penetrating. 

Then, as if to intensify the conflict inherent in Mozart’s final opera – an intellectual discourse steeped in the symbolism of Enlightenment ideals and Freemasonry disguised, as all good satire is, within pantomimic nonsense – Emelyanychev played feverishly with the music’s jostling extremes. Responding to the stern chords, a hell-for-leather fugue bristled with red-hot energy, superbly intensified by sparky symphonic jousting, individual instruments firing out motivic one-liners like petulant points of order only to be countered by matching reaction. In total, and in every sense, what an opener.

The tone changed completely for Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony and an introductory 8-bar cello and bass melody that cast a sense of mystery and awe, its simple melodic framework woven with unhurried deliberation and expressive wholesomeness, almost complete in itself. 

What impressed here and beyond was the intoxicating sensitivity Emelyanychev drew from the SCO, every utterance freshly conceived, every detailed moment worth savouring. Again, his role was simply to set the scene and inspire freedom within a performance that oozed spontaneity within his prescribed vision. With such casual, but never laboured, tempi the impression was one of leisure well spent. If ever there was an argument for Schubert leaving these two movements as they were (he did sketch out ideas for a third movement) this was it. 

As openings go, a deafening whistle blast from a referee is something guaranteed to send the adrenalin into overdrive. It did so – timpanist Louise Lewis Goodwin doubling pointedly on said whistle – in James MacMillan’s Eleven, a succinct concert work about football written last year and premiered by the SCO on tour in Antwerp, now receiving its UK premiere. Raucous, impetuous, and symbolising everything in the “beautiful game” from terrace chants and on-pitch exuberance to post-match melancholy, it’s typical of MacMillan that he finds musical depth and allure in such a commonplace scenario.

Even the number eleven presents him with intellectual stimulus, feisty combative themes that seem to snap off prematurely (twelve possesses more rounded proportions, but would be less provocative), dense harmonies that mask the familiarity of such familiar tunes as “Auld Lang Syne” (I wasn’t aware it had common football usage?) and flavour the unexpectedly demure ending to an otherwise bombastic entertainment. 

Emelyanychev certainly viewed his own solo role in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 22 in E-flat as genuine entertainment. He performed on, and directed from, the fortepiano, intrinsically a delicate instrument, but played here with such incisive sparkle that, even in those moments where the orchestra surged powerfully, the Russian’s playful motions were still enough to convey his intentions.

Nor did he stick religiously to the written score, something the famously spontaneous Mozart would no doubt have approved of. Where he felt the urge, Emelyanychev casually threw in impromptu right-handed flourishes, either stolen from existing instrumental lines or fruitily embellished, though never at the expense of the composer’s core material. In that, this enlightening performance was charmingly authentic, with some initiatives – such as occasionally cutting the string ripieno down, concert grosso-style, to solo quintet – that sharpened the intimacy. 

Then there was Emelyanychev’s quirky opening, a moment that caught us all on the hop, where the pre-match tuning process morphed almost unnoticed into an improvised fortepiano transition, its final paused chord providing the expectant springboard to the music proper. It’s not often the very opening note of a Mozart concerto brings with it an appreciative snigger from the audience, but such is Emelyanychev’s confident appeal, and such was the power of this unexpected gesture. He encored with the slow movement from Mozart’s similarly-scored K.488 concerto.

Ken Walton 

RSNO / Heyward

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

One of the most exciting aspects of any orchestral concert can be the dynamic struck up between the conductor and the concerto soloist. It can be synergic or combative, thrustful or accommodating; it can result in an explosive sum that is greater than the parts, or a resigned cancellation of opposites that merely produces benign compromise. 

The outcome arising from the partnership of Russian pianist Denis Kozhukhin and American conductor Jonathon Heyward in Grieg’s popular Piano Concerto with the RSNO – both late replacements for the advertised Joyce Yang and Edo de Waart – was up there in the starry high ground, Kozhukhin’s feisty unpredictability bouncing off the efficient and alert Heyward in a way that multiplied the enjoyment. 

Mostly, it was a thrill-a-minute roller-coaster ride, Kozhukhin’s dry, side-stepping whimsy close to mischief-making, which the cooler-headed Heyward did well to translate into as tidy an orchestral response as was possible. There were certainly hairy moments where absolute coordination was challenged, but that in itself created an explosive tension that ensured this Grieg was anything but run-of-the-mill.

It was clear, even in the familiar opening piano cascade, that it was to be Kozhukhin’s way or the highway. Reaching deep into the keys, every degree of touch had meaning and intent. The outer movements sizzled with bold and athletic musicality, the central slow movement found him toying with its lyrical quietude. There was possibly more in colour terms that Heyward could have coaxed from the RSNO, but this was ultimately a powerful showcase to which both artists contributed vital thoughts and crackling energy.

Before that, the 29-year-old conductor – newly appointed as music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra – had proved his quiet adeptness in James MacMillan’s 2017 orchestral reworking of an earlier 2009 choral setting of the Miserere, now called Larghetto for Orchestra. Given its similarity in character to Samuel Barber’s famous Adagio for Strings – that same heavenly lyricism, its unhurried richness and warmth – you wonder to what extent the title is a deliberate allusion.

But it is MacMillan through and through, luxuriously devotional, haunted initially by subliminal references to his own famous Tryst melody (think back to Karen Cargill’s sung performance of that two weeks ago with the RSNO, forming part of the Three Scottish Songs) which finally appears, fully harmonised, in the heart-stopping closing bars. Heyward captured the reflective stillness of the work, but also its moments of heightened sentiment.

He ended with Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, choosing to do so without controversy or novelty, simply expressing it in calm, rounded terms. If that was to play down the maximum theatricality of the opening movement and paint the Scherzo in honest unsensational light, there was no lack of individuality in the organic shaping of the Allegretto and exuberant flourishes of the finale.

It’s worth mentioning the encouraging turn-out on Saturday for an RSNO Glasgow series that has struggled with audience numbers so far this season. A very good sign.

Ken Walton

Cumnock Tryst: King’s Singers

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Trinity Church, Cumnock

For 55 years The King’s Singers have remained a popular, stable and self-regenerating national musical treasure. Bursting onto our telly screens in the sixties – notably on peak-time Saturday night variety shows – the posh boys from the poshest Cambridge college charmed the nation’s ears with a smooth spread of bespoke a cappella originals and arrangements, anything from hifalutin’ Byrd to down-to-earth Beatles. Now, like a collective Doctor Who, in their umpteenth reincarnation, the group are held with great affection as widely as ever.

It was easy to see why in this easy-flowing, classy Cumnock Tryst programme they presented on Friday night. It was a loosely-assembled sequence of “celebrations”, but with each King’s Singer contributing personably to the intertwining spoken narrative and its various nods to the centenary years of Hungarian modernist composer György Ligeti and Walt Disney, Byrd and Weelkes’ quatercentenaries, Vaughan Williams 150th, among others, what looked thinnish on paper materialised as an absorbing hour-plus feast of first-class entertainment.

What also contributed to the freshness of the presentation was the interpretational signing for the hard of hearing by Paul Whittaker. Even for those of us unfamiliar with this language, Whittaker’s expressive physicality was a fascinating, added dimension that enhanced the presentation meaningfully and beautifully, all the more helpful when the complexity of some of the music occasionally obscured the clarity of the texts.

The musical journey was smooth but adventurous. Days from Even Such is Time by Bob Chilcott (a former King’s Singer) offered a crisp and contemporary call to action, before the silvery perfection of Renaissance anthems and motets by Byrd and Weelkes. The joy in these earlier works was to witness that six-part group’s instant switching between moments of luxurious homogeneity and pertinent internal combat. 

The programme featured two of Ligeti’s whimsical Lewis Carroll settings from Nonsense Madrigals, as much theatrical as musical delights, the preamble to which – notably the Lobster Quadrille – causing considerable mirth with the evening’s other signer as he attempted to translate the near impossible and implausible.

A brief whiff of Vaughan Williams – his willowy Shakespearean setting of Over Hill, Over Dale – gave way to two short pastoral works by Swedish composer Hugo Alfvén, the calm simplicity of In Our Meadow and bucolic spring of And The Maiden Joins The Ring. But with a sudden change of tack, the multi-ethnic background of American-born Gabriella Lena Frank made its mercurial mark in the animated obstinacy and wit of Hechicera (The Sorceress), brilliantly captured in an effervescent performance.

James MacMillan may not be celebrating a significant birthday of his own this year, but who was to deny The King’s Singers the indulgence of simply celebrating his presence at the festival he founded, and the fact he has written so much over the years for the ensemble? 

They opened their short set with the iridescent unpredictability of In The Blue Lobster Cafe, a spicy setting of poet Michael Symmons Roberts, before enchanting this Cumnock audience with the composer’s easeful arrangement of John Cameron’s O, chi, chì mi na mòrbheanna, and of his famously melting melody to William Soutar’s poem, The Tryst.

The transition to Disney songs was swift, the singers dispensing with their music stands and formalised stance to regroup in close-harmony huddle, a cosy engagement that charmed the heart-warming lyricism of Toy Story 2’s When She Loved Me, and inflamed the raucousness of Dumbo’s When I See An Elephant Fly.

But it was to The Beatles that this immaculate ensemble turned for a couple of non-negotiable encores: Chilcott’s silken arrangement of Yesterday, the melody mostly entrusted to Patrick Dunachie’s light and airy countertenor;  and the lesser-known Honey Pie, Jonathan Howard’s sudden razzy Louis Armstrong interjection sealing his reputation as the King’s Singers jester-in-residence.

With perfection at every turn, not least in the unshakeably purity of their intonation, the King’s Singers brand seems assured for another half-century at least.

Ken Walton 

SCO / Emelyanychev

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Perth Concert Hall

James MacMillan’s new Violin Concerto No 2, given its world premiere last week by co-dedicatee Nicola Benedetti, boasts a lengthy list of co-commissioners – The Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Swedish Chamber Orchestra, Adam Mickewicz Institute and Dallas Symphony Orchestras – so we can safely assume it is guaranteed to have several key performances in the immediate future.

It was with the SCO that the honour of presenting the very first performance of this intriguing concerto fell, part of the orchestra’s opulent, and clearly popular, season opener in Perth. At the helm was chief conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, a musician of mesmerising unpredictability, never boring, often illuminating, willing to take daring chances where others wouldn’t.

So what would he, and what would Benedetti, make of a work that MacMillan composed during lockdown, additionally dedicating it to a Polish composer he much admired, Krzysztof Penderecki, who died in 2020? In recent interviews, he had alluded to a work of sincere intimacy, freshly explored musical solutions and very personal flashes of wit and reflection.

If this initial performance didn’t appear to capture all of these, it did challenge the listener to make sense of a work that is dizzily transient in style, novel in the imaginative relationships it explores between soloists and orchestra, and tough in the perception of its overall shape.

In this initial performance, both Benedetti and Emelyanychev seemed, at times, preoccupied with resolving the last of these points. There were so many individual moments to savour: the playful succession of “conversations” to be had with individual players in the orchestra, from the soloist’s pugnacious encounter with timpani to a lustrous engagement with lead violin, Joel Bardelot; or such lighter episodes where MacMillan slackens the tension with parodic interjections of Scots reels or German burlesque. But there was also a discomforting fragmentation in Benedetti’s overall presentation that suggested this is a work she has to live with for a while to get fully to grips with. 

That said, the poise she brought to that heart-stopping moment where the opening material recapitulates, and the delicacy of those final bird-like exchanges with the flutes, were as ravishing as they were conclusive. 

As for the rest of this programme, the term mixed fortunes comes to mind. It opened brilliantly with John Adams’ The Chairman’s Dances, extracted by the composer from his first opera, Nixon in China. The impact was immediate, Emelyanychev’s vital downbeat setting the incessant mechanised energy in motion as if switching on a light, then drawing endless detail from the constantly shifting textures, and variously caressing the score’s more restful episodes with wit, airiness and finesse. 

Where he succeeded with the Adams in extracting the absolute best from the SCO, that was not always the case in Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony. Emelyanychev took massive liberties with this – an opening Adagio so laboured-over it risked being dismembered, and a general overindulgence that threatened the symphony’s natural momentum, provoked nervous mishaps with exposed entries, and ignored some dubious brass intonation. 

Not all of it fell flat, the central movements far tighter in spirit and execution than the outer ones, and therein a sizzling clarity from the orchestra. But as a whole, this was not a performance that always knew where it was going.

Ken Walton

Further performances at the Usher Hall Edinburgh on Thu 29 Sep; and City Halls, Glasgow on Fri 30 Sep

The Carnyx Speaks

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John Kenny resurrects not one but three iron age Carnyces at this year’s Cumnock Tryst. KEN WALTON finds out more from the man who brought the awesome instrument back to life, and previews the local aspects of a very Ayshire festival.

Ever wondered what the bestial image on the VoxCarnyx masthead is? Those in the know, or inquisitive enough to have looked it up, will recognise it as the topmost section of the carnyx, an instrument dating back to the iron age, fragments of which were first discovered buried under a Banffshire farm in 1816. 

The fearsome bronze head, with hinged jaw and sprung wooden tongue, appeared to be the bell of a 2000-year-old brass instrument. It took till the1990s to put the theory to the test, when trombonist John Kenny, encouraged by Scots composer and music historian John Purser,  joined an archeological project aimed at reconstructing the carnyx both visually and as a functioning musical instrument. 

With support from the National Museum of Scotland and metal craftsman John Creed, the eventual first sight and sound of the reconstructed carnyx – an awesome man-sized construction comprising a lengthy blow tube, imposing boar’s head and named the Deskford Carnyx after the parish in which the original was found – was at the National Museum’s reopening ceremony in 2011. “We didn’t know what we were going to come out with,” Kenny recalls, fearful that such a beautiful object might simply sound like “a rather inert tube”. “It turned out to be magnificent,” he says. 

So much so, that the world now has more magnificent specimens, and for the first time in 2000 years three carnyces will perform together this weekend at James MacMillan’s Cumnock Tryst festival. Saturday’s programme in St John’s Church, Ancient Voices, features Kenny’s ensemble Dragon Voices and a sequence of works by Kenny himself, 20th century French film composer Francis Chagrin, and a brand new work by Purser, whose poetry also weaves a narrative throughout the entire concert..

“We start with modern brass instruments, then work right back to the earliest proven examples we have of human beings creating musical sounds using lip vibration,” Kenny explains. Besides the trio of carnyces, Dragon Voices – an ensemble also consisting of Kenny’s son Patrick and former pupil Ian Sayer – perform on ancient sea horns. “In the iron age, Celtic craftsmen led the world in the art of making giant horns or trumpets out of beaten bronze and they were of extraordinary quality,” he adds.  

Purser’s new work, Gundestrup Rituals aims to illustrate their uniqueness and is based on images found on the Gundestrup Cauldron, a richly decorated silver vessel discovered in a Danish peat bog and dating from the early iron age. Included among these is a powerful representation of three carnyces being played at once. 

The carnyx players on the Gundestrup Cauldron (National Museum of Denmark)

For those who imagine the sound of the carnyx to echo its warlike appearance, be prepared for a surprise. “They will be amazed at the extraordinary versatility of the instrument,” promises Kenny. “Yes, the traditional idea of it as a war horn is true. It can be very violent and powerful with a massive range of five octaves, depending on the ability of the performer. But it is also capable of a huge dynamic range, coloured by the strange combination of its unique harmonic series and resultant vibrations.” 

The biggest revelation for Kenny in exploring its possibilities was to discover how quietly and uniquely mysterious it could sound. “Using modern brass players’ techniques actually resulted in quite a boring sound,’ he explains. “On modern brass instruments, we try to make uniform sound, and also tend to work in groups dedicated to our ideas of melody and harmony. These are very modern ideas in terms of the organisation of musical sound. 

“So we had to discard those standard techniques in order to explore the natural potential of the instrument. As a musician and composer it was for me a Tabula Rasa moment, working with a blank page, a bit like that sudden moment in the14th century when artists, working also as alchemists, discovered how to make oil paintings. Here, with the carnyx, was another extraordinary moment working with new colours.”

Such possibilities, and the fact the original carnyces appeared to have been “ritually dismembered” before burial, led Kenny to believe the symbolism of the carnyx was just as likely to be as sacral as it was bellicose. “It’s actually much more effective when played gently and quietly.” Ancient Voices sets out to illustrate that infinite diversity.

Dragon Voices with the three carnyx reconstructions by John Creed. Image: Ali Watt

The clash of sounds ancient and modern pervades much of the classical content of this 2022 Cumnock Tryst, which runs Thursday 29 September to Sunday 2 October. The Kings Singers (Fri 30 Sept at Trinity Church) celebrate a vast international lineage of a cappella choral writing that stretches from English Renaissance giant William Byrd to the whimsical Lobster Quadrille of György Ligeti, by way of Vaughan Williams and original Kings Singer, Bob Chilcott. There’s music, too, by MacMillan himself and a lighter-hearted send off of close-harmony Disney numbers.

On Sunday (Dumfries House, 2pm & 4pm) Latvian pianist Arta Arnicane unveils an Ayrshire curiosity, the piano music of Douglas Munn, an eminent Mathematician who lived in Troon until his death in 2008, and whose compositions – recently released on CD – are both skilful and charming.

If imported professional artists represent a smaller proportion of the line up this year, that, says MacMillan, is deliberate.  “That trend has certainly grown over the years. It’s always been part of the Festival’s raison d’être to encourage a sense of ownership and deep involvement by local community groups, and to get them involved with the visiting professionals in different ways.”

Thus the combined involvement of local amateur dramatic group CAMPS and Strings N Things with BBC SSO musicians (Merchant City Brass) in Saturday’s A Musical Celebration of the Coalfields in Cumnock Town Hall; or Friday’s compositional collaboration between Drake Music Scotland, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland singers and local pupils from Hillside School in Blue Sky Counterpoint at the new Barony Campus.

Even the big festival finale on Sunday evening at Dumfries House – billed as the Scott Riddox Memorial Concert in memory of the locally-known singer – is an entirely local showcase with big ambitions. After individual contributions from the Ayrshire Symphony Orchestra under conductor John Wilson, The Festival Chorus and CAMPS, all the ensembles will come together under MacMillan’s baton for a performance of Gavin Bryars’ iconic Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet.

The 2022 Cumnock Tryst runs 29 Sept to 2 Oct at various venues in Cumnock. Full details at www.thecumnocktryst.com

Top picture: Jane Salmon

MacMillan in St Petersburg

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This weekend (27 Nov), St Petersburg’s famous Philharmonia, which is celebrating its centenary, will stage the first of three major concerts this season by the music society’s Academic Symphony Orchestra featuring the music of Sir James MacMillan. The Scots composer has been appointed the Philharmonia’s composer-in-residence for the 2021-/22 season. All five works included in the series will be receiving their Russian premieres.

Saturday’s opening concert is conducted by Alexander Titov, formerly a regular guest conductor with the BBC SSO. It features MacMillan’s orchestral fantasy Britannia – what will Russian audiences make of its explosion of quotes from Celtic reels and Elgar to Knees up Mother Brown? – and Larghetto, his 2017 orchestration of an earlier Miserere for a cappella double choir.

Vassily Sinaisky conducts the second concert on 18 Dec which includes the 2019 orchestration of Ein Lämplein verlosch, written originally for string quartet, which takes its title from the first song in Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. MacMillan conducted this highly personal response to the early death of his own granddaughter in an online concert earlier this year by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (see VoxCarnyx reviews).

For the final St Petersburg programme on 5 Feb, the composer is travelling to Russia himself to conduct The Confession of Isobel Gowdie, the orchestral work that catapulted him to international fame at the 1990 BBC Proms, as well as the short Saxophone Concerto, written in 2017 for Australian virtuoso Amy Dickson and the SCO. It will be played this time by a Russian soloist. 

MacMillan, who was in St Petersburg last year giving lectures courtesy of the British Council, said he was delighted to be associated with “a historical musical organisation with links to so many great Russian composers of the past, such as Shostakovich, and to be brought under the umbrella of what is such an important year for the venue and its famous orchestras.” 

It is unclear at this point if the performances will be available online. “I understand that is the intention,” said MacMillan.

Further information at https://www.philharmonia.spb.ru/en/

SCO: MacMillan / Currie

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Perth Concert Hall

Two Scottish premieres provide the entrance and exit to this latest online SCO programme, once again recorded in Perth. In charge is conductor/composer Sir James MacMillan, opening with one of his own works. He’s later joined by Scots virtuoso Colin Currie in a concerto specially written for the percussionist in 2008 by the late Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara. 

Both works possess an inner beauty, which gives this entire concert – Sibelius’ Suite No 2 from his characterful music for Shakespeare’s The Tempest provides a connecting bridge – a overarching aura of accessible warmth and glowing humanity. 

Originally written for string quartet, MacMillan’s short opener, Ein Lämplein verlosch (“A little lamp went out”), takes its title from the first song in Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, but surely resonates as a deeply personal response to the early death several years ago of MacMillan’s own granddaughter. This enchanting performance certainly captures a spectral innocence radiating from ephemeral string harmonics, its questioning fragmentation, and a lingering sense that its feet never quite touch the ground.

When they do, briefly, there is a mixture of joy and pain, expressed with Brittenesque clarity and succinctness. MacMillan refers to it as an “instrumental distillation of this grief”, which rings very true in this nuanced performance by the SCO strings.

Nothing could be more contrasted than the huge, bulbous ripe tune that sets the ball rolling in Rautavaara’s concerto, a work subtitled Incantations. It’s as big and brassy as any west end musical signature hit, a surging wave of tonal extravagance deliberately soured by chippy dissonance. No sooner has it made its impressive presence felt than it subsidies, acting more as a blank canvas to which Currie adds spicy detail and characterisations.

Set traditionally in three movements, the opening Pesante lives up to its name, the various internal dialogues asserted by the soloist weighted by the gravitational pull of the orchestra. One brief moment, where the percussionist evokes a mood of utter serenity, forewarns of the ensuing Espressivo, a central movement whose Debussy-like opening heralds a feast of shamelessly indulgent easy listening. 

If Rautavaara’s contribution to the finale appears minimal, to some extent padding, it’s because the dominating feature is Currie’s own mammoth cadenza, as if the composer has handed over the reins and said “show us what you can do”. What transpires is both mesmerising and seamlessly integrated within the prevailing style, and heralding Rautavaara’s eventual sign-off, which is an even more colossal statement of the opening theme. It’s big, bold and conclusive, which the SCO addresses with the required chutzpah.

As for the Sibelius, MacMillan displays an obvious affinity with the unpretentiousness of this theatrically-inspired suite, eliciting the gossamer-like delicacy of the wispy Intermezzo, Grieg-like chunkiness in the brief musical portrait of Prospero, and a gorgeous Palm Court snugness in Sibelius’ magical depiction of the kind-hearted Miranda. A tad more schmalz in the Dance of the Nymphs and less constraint in the final Dance Episode is all that was needed to satisfy the wilder side of this delightful score. 
Ken Walton

Ayr Choral Union: Masterworks

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The vaccine roll-out in the UK may be the most important work the National Health Service is doing at the moment, but regular encounters with Ayr Choral Union should also be available on prescription.

Following the same model as the online Messiah last October, but with the bonus of choir director Andrew McTaggart joining the same quartet of soloists – soprano Catriona Hewitson, mezzo Penelope Cousland, tenor Ted Black and baritone Colin Murray – this was a greatest hits package from the Ayr chorus, hosted on Zoom. It is not a platform suited to audio collaboration, so hearing the choir sing together is not an option, but McTaggart and the 150 others who joined him do not allow that to stand in their way. The community of singers were all muted, but they could be seen lustily joining in with the young professionals on a programme that began with Handel’s Coronation Anthem Zadok the Priest, and included selections from Bach’s St John Passion, Mendelssohn’s Elijah, the Requiems of Brahms, Mozart and Faure, and contemporary work by Ola Gjeilo, Morten Lauridsen and the choir’s patron Sir James MacMillan.

Sir James had actually been part of the coaching sessions, guiding the choir through the Lux Aeterna from his Strathclyde Motets at one of their online meetings prior to this concert. Others were sectionals, with the soloists joining McTaggart to work on the repertoire. When they are permitted to sing together again, Ayr Choral Union will be nearer match-fit than many choirs.

The accompaniment for this concert was a string quartet (Katrina Lee, Kirstin Drew, Aaron McGregor and Alice Allen) filmed in Glasgow Cathedral with Andrew Forbes on keyboards. He was also responsible for editing the contributions of the singers and players together in what was a very slick split-screen operation. There was some lovely ensemble work from the quartet – notably on the Mozart Lacrymosa and Gjeilo’s Northern Lights – and McTaggart sometimes popped up in duplicate, conducting and singing, including a fine solo Libera Me from the Faure Requiem.

Not only has Ayr Choral continued to work through the pandemic, it has also been raising money for charity, regardless of the lack of ticket money for the coffers. In her upbeat introduction to the concert, choir president Kate Wilson may not have used the words “deficit be damned” but the implication was there.

So if your choir needs a kick-start after Covid, get in touch and see if they’ll share their fine film for a few quid. Just say VoxCarnyx sent you.

Keith Bruce

How Lonely Sits the City

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Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh

Newly-appointed Associate Director of Dunedin Consort Nicholas Mulroy and Head of Artistic Planning David Lee have been at great pains to stress that this thoughtful all-vocal programme, which is available to watch until December 19, was dreamed up before the pandemic changed all our lives.

It is not difficult to see why, because although this selection of work, ancient and modern, could hardly be more appropriate for our times, to have conceived it as such might invite accusations of miserabilism.

The early music pillars of the recital are the three-sections of Orlande de Lassus’s five-part setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, and a two-part motet by William Byrd, also concerned with the allegorical Christian interpretation of the destruction of Jerusalem in the Old Testament. The 1945 work by Rudolf Mauersberger that found the same textual inspiration, and which gives the concert its title, sits in the middle.

Alongside are two works from 2009, Cecilia McDowell’s I Know That My Redeemer Liveth and James MacMillan’s Miserere, and a brand new commission in Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade’s Vigil 1.

Intended to be heard live or not, this is the choir performing together for the first time since March, and the resonance of many of the words they were given to sing must have contributed to the commitment audible from all twelve singers, four of them young new recruits. Superbly recorded by Matthew Swan, with album-release quality balance between solo voices and ensemble in every configuration required across the concert, the Dunedin has never sounded better, and that is a high bar to reach. The blend of the men’s voices in particular on the closing Miserere was beautifully captured.

While the MacMillan is already a contemporary classic and the Byrd a favourite of professional choirs, other memorable moments came in the shorter modern pieces. Although designed to sit alongside Brahms and echo Handel, there are resemblances to the popular contemporary choir staples of Eric Whitacre and Morten Lauridsen in the Edinburgh-educated McDowell’s setting of the Messiah-familiar words from the book of Job. In the Mauersberger, composed after the destruction of the chorus-master’s home city of Dresden, the technical attention to detail is particularly noticeable, both in the vocal balance and in the careful selection of camera shots to match the music. The Consort’s video partners, Arms & Legs, do another fine job here.

The Cruttwell-Reade commission will surely quickly find a place in the repertoire. Both intricate and accessible, it too looks back to earlier forms (Lutheran chorales) and has the superb device of using both the original German text of the Rilke poem and an English translation, with the ensemble split into three SATB choirs. The singers’ clarity of diction here, and indeed throughout, was faultless.

The new concert is accompanied by a 20-minute conversation between Nicholas Mulroy and Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade on the Consort’s YouTube channel. It is an exemplary introduction to a new piece of music and well-worth any music-lover’s time.
dunedin-consort.org.uk
Keith Bruce

Image: Nicholas Mulroy and Dunedin Consort at Greyfriars Kirk