Tag Archives: Jess Gillam

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

SCO / Glassberg

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City Halls, Glasgow

Although the wide range of age in the audience and a DJ working in the foyer are not unusual at Scottish Chamber Orchestra Friday evening concerts, there was a fresh and unfamiliar feel to this one with saxophone star and broadcaster Jess Gillam the soloist.

The conductor on the podium was Ben Glassberg, last seen in the City Hall stepping in at short notice to deputise for Ryan Wigglesworth for a BBC SSO programme in the autumn that was very much of the chief conductor’s devising. The orchestra itself, although led by Stephanie Gonley, had just five principals in their places, and the many guests on the platform made sure that none of the regular faces were missed.

The programme began with a work of the SCO’s recent illustrious past. Sound and Fury was written for the orchestra early in the tenure of Anna Clyne as its Associate Composer and premiered with Pekka Kuusisto conducting. It is a wonderful piece that begins as a rethinking of early classical music – Haydn in particular – and contains some rich string writing, including a beguiling Eastern melody, and culminates in a taped reading of Macbeth’s last soliloquy in Shakespeare’s play.

That sounds an odd journey in print, but makes wonderful sonic sense as a musical score, and one clearly written for chamber orchestra forces.

The other two works without Gillam were for the 24 string players alone. George Walker’s Lyric for Strings has a genesis oddly adjacent to that of Samuel Barber’s better-known Adagio, as the two were students together. Walker’s work is also elegiac but more varied within a tighter time-span. It made a lovely interlude in the concert’s first half.

The second half began with Caroline Shaw’s Entr’acte, which also nods to Haydn (and Beethoven) and has become a very popular modern piece in its string ensemble version. With a lovely harmonics solo from Gonley and a guitar-like one from guest principal cello Caroline Dale, its pizzicato passages, ranging from robust to very quiet, present a particular ensemble challenge for this number of musicians – one to which Glassberg and this group rose with ease.

Entr’acte is a work in the repertoire of the Scottish Ensemble, and the central piece of Gillam’s trio of works was written for them in the mid-1990s when Dave Heath was a very busy composer-in-residence. The Celtic has since had a second life in a version for soprano sax rather than violin soloist, which suits the music very well, which is a sort of three-movement love-letter to Scotland.

The opening one, Ceilidh, clearly owes a debt to the most pictorial music of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, while the slow Lament for Collessie, which should be the proud boast of the Fife village where the Heath family made their home, featured an exquisite duet between Gillam and guest first viola Jessica Beeston. The boisterous finale, The Cooper of Clapham, links Fife with the London home of a craftsman maker of flutes (Heath’s own instrument) but also serves extraordinarily well as a celebration of the range of the soprano sax.

The other two pieces Gillam played were composed especially for her. She closed, save a party-piece encore of Pequena Czarda by Pedro Itturalde, with Rant!, written by her teacher John Harle, whose role as populariser of classical sax she has taken on with gusto. Following nicely on from the Heath, its uses folk melodies from her native Cumbria, and also, unmistakably, a chord sequence from The Beatles’ Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

The newest work in the programme was Dani Howard’s 2024 Saxophone Concerto, which closed the first half and proved to be another delightfully bespoke composition. With a central slow movement of defiantly unresolving ambience, its scoring cleverly emulated the sound of the larger members of the saxophone family, with a particular role for Maximiliano Martin and William Stafford, resonantly playing their clarinets in the low chalumeau register.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Christopher Bowen

RSNO / Heyward & Gillam

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Soprano saxophonist Jess Gillam invariably presents herself in striking primary colours – Saturday’s electric red trouser suit was a typically dazzling sartorial statement set against the workaday black of the RSNO – but when it comes to the music, the Cumbrian live-wire embraces every hue and its attendant emotions.

She had the perfect vehicle for that in Anna Clyne’s mercurial concerto Glasslands, written for Gillam in 2023 (after the performer’s success with their earlier collaboration, the rascally Snake and Ladder), premiered in Detroit that year, and now receiving its Scottish premiere. Where the work itself is a restless torrent of demonstrative contradictions, Clyne drawing on her Irish descent  and its folklore to explore the wild ritualism of the wailing Banshee, Gillam brought it vividly to life in an extraordinarily animated, virtuoso performance.

There’s no introduction, just a seismic eruption of screaming rhetoric that hits the listener like an electric shock. Gillam savoured the moment and its instant effect, issuing cascades of notes with shrill precision and bloodcurdling ferociousness, establishing a signature trope that was to persistently assert its structural significance throughout the 25-minute concerto.

Yet this is a piece that defies simplistic transparency, as Gillam proved in the theatricality of her delivery, ever the unpredictable protagonist pushing the orchestra, indeed the listener, in directions they never expected to go. 

The RSNO, in sharp form under Baltimore Symphony Orchestra conductor Jonathon Heyward, played with equal spontaneity and flamboyance. Where Gillam switched the mood, their response was immediate. The interplay was exceptional, sometimes as radiant amplification of the solo line, at other times engaged in frenetic dialogue, but just as easily offering enticing background comment, anything from belligerent slap bass to dreamy mysticism. 

From the high drama of the opening movement, through the released tension of a slow movement introduced by its gorgeously soulful saxophone-cello duo, to a jaunty finale (at times cartoon-like) counterbalanced by dense Philip Glass-like sonorities, Hayward’s prescriptive lead facilitated the big picture without sacrificing the excitement within.

Likewise Shostakovich’s daunting Eighth Symphony, a work written during the Second World War and ostensibly hewn out of wartime gloom (and more clandestinely a daunting comment on the oppressiveness of Stalinist Russia), fared well under Heyward’s unfussy pragmatism. He stuck to the letter of the score, eliciting grim determination from the opening Adagio, its gnawing, dogged anguish all the more telling as a result. 

The sneering irony of the Allegretto made its point with ample curtness; then the homeward sequence – the machine-like demonism of the Allegro non troppo with its cataclysmic climax, spilling into the desolation of the Largo (those eerie flutter-tongued flutes) before a bittersweet transformation to the symphony’s major key Finale, its quizzical extremes barely resolved by ultimate questioning. 

Ken Walton 

(Picture credit: Katie Kean)

NYOS / Hasan

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

The area of music making likely to have suffered most over these past two years of Covid-enforced hibernation has surely been the communal opportunities lost to youngsters in the formative years of their musical development. To see the National Youth Orchestras of Scotland spring back to life last week, in particular the public concerts presented in Edinburgh and Glasgow by the organisation’s flagship Symphony Orchestra, was a heartening sign that the seeds of recovery are beginning to shoot.

An intrepid NYOS fielded a mighty contingent for its substantial and demanding programme of Respighi, John Harle and Shostakovich. Key to inspiring and galvanising it were two intriguing personalities, still young, but established in their fields of enterprise: British-born conductor Kerem Hasan, a 30-year-old alumnus of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, now chief conductor of the Tiroler Symphonieorchester of Innsbruck; and the virtuoso saxophonist Jess Gillam as soloist in a work specially written three years ago for her by Harle.

Gillam was not only the star turn, but an irrepressible force of nature whose electrifying presence, let alone her exuberant blue and yellow sartorial creation, demanded nothing less in return from the orchestra. Harle’s music – the suite Briggflatts, based on the autobiographical poem by the British modernist Basil Bunting – played its own part as a vital stimulant, driven much by an infectious motorised minimalism, restless rhythmic unpredictability, rich jazz-infused melodies and a high-voltage Rant that converts its base material, Cumbrian folk music, into a delirious foot-stamping finale.

But all eyes were on Gillam, whose visible egging-on was the motivating linchpin, encouraging Hasan and the orchestra to take risks they may not otherwise have considered. If such encounters with danger took the performance to the very brink, it inspired nothing less than an explosive triumph.

To some extent Respighi’s ruminative symphonic poem, Fountains of Rome, which opened the programme, could have done with some of that same alertness, not in the brash sense, but in stencilling out its scented, filigree colours. There were magical moments, from poignant solo contributions to deliciously atmospheric nuancing by the upper strings. Hasan shaped the performance with meaningful organic flow and perceptive delicacy. At times, though, it just seemed to lose its immediacy and luminescence.

Shostakovich’s Symphony No 10 offered a very different challenge, technically daunting and driven emotionally by the composer’s feverish thoughts at the time of writing,1953, just after Stalin’s death. Again, Hasan captured the broad picture magnificently, from the tortuous granite-like intensity of the opening movement, through the abrupt second movement scherzo and personalised nocturnal reflection of the third, to the ultimate raging force of the finale. 

There was no escaping the eager responsiveness of the young players, even when the briskness of the scherzo sent the upper strings into a near-calamitous flurry. It was ultimately an overall success, but symbolic too, perhaps, of what the pandemic has done to young people. They desperately need regular opportunities again to express themselves with full confidence and in tandem with each other. Good to see them back on track.

Ken Walton

Jess Gillam and Zeynep Ozsuca

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Perth Concert Hall

Had he not died four centuries ago, composer John Dowland would have surely been astonished to see the company he has been keeping this week at Perth Concert Hall.

Having featured in the first of this week’s Live and Unlocked recitals, bringing performers together with an audience for the first time in over a year, when his songs bracketed a diverse recital by contralto Jess Dandy, he popped up again on Thursday in the programme of saxophonist Jess Gillam.

One of his best-known tunes, Flow my tears, was her sole delve into the distant past alongside 20th century masters Francis Poulenc, Kurt Weill and Astor Piazzolla and the very-much-with-us Meredith Monk and Graham Fitkin.

The Poulenc oboe sonata, which he dedicated to Prokofiev, is very well-suited to the more robust dynamics of the soprano saxophone, the instrument Gillam played throughout. It is very colourful music for both the soloist and pianist, languid lines in the company of much spikier material, as was true of the whole set.

The short Monk solo, Early Morning Light, was close kin to Dowland’s song, preceding the precisely-titled Dappled Light, commissioned by Gillam and Ozcusa from Luke Howard. The sound you have in your head, suggested by those two words, is exactly what the piano plays.

Fitkin’s Gate gave Ozcusa a terrific rumbling jazzy underscore to a very demanding sax line, with long eloquent phrases. Gillam’s breath control on this was quite superb. It is a real virtuoso showpiece and her relaxed delivery of it was exemplary.

Composed in Paris, after his first successes with Brecht and before his American career, Kurt Weill’s Je ne t’aime pas is 1934’s statement of the same sentiment as 10cc’s I’m Not In Love, and again spoke across 400 years to the Dowland, which preceded it.

Paralleling the Poulenc was Piazzolla’s Histoire du Tango, a sonata in all but name, its four movements tracing the music the Argentinian re-invented from the start of the 20th century to the time of its composition (1985) in generational chunks. With a big ballad tune (Café 1930) at its heart, there was plenty for Ozcusa to get her teeth into as well as Gillam, and as much Bartok as bossa-nova for aficionados to enjoy.

Keith Bruce