Tag Archives: James MacMillan

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/

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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