Tag Archives: Jonathan Morton

Scottish Ensemble & Heloise Werner

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Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow

Not for the first time, the idea of a chamber music concert in Glasgow’s grand galleries turned out to be better than the reality because of the challenges of the venue’s acoustic, so Jonathan Morton and the Scottish Ensemble pulled a rabbit from that tricky hat with the way they chose to end their performance.

The Danish String Quartet’s arrangement of the folk tune As I Walked Out requires the string players to whistle and encourages audience participation, and the ensemble appropriated it as their encore, trooping off the stage and through the audience whistling like linties.

The ruse made sense of the space in a way that forgave its earlier shortcomings, and even those were often balanced by thoughtful use of the long reverberation.

Most obviously that was in the amount of muscular pizzicato playing that featured in the instrumental programme, from the opening piece by Lithuanian composer Antanas Rekasius to the familiarity of the Barshai arrangement of the second movement of Ravel’s Petite symphonie a cordes.

There was a thread of contemporary responses to earlier music running through the evening that started with the Rekasius and included Tom Coult’s atmospheric Prelude (after Monsieur de Saint-Colombe) and UK-based Australian Lisa Illean’s clever arrangement of Chansons by Gilles Binchois.

That theme extended to the fascinating selections sung by guest soloist Heloise Werner which ranged from her Hermes Experiment bandmate Marianne Schofield’s settings of the songs of Julie Pinel and an animated and expressive reading of Barbara Strozzi’s Che si puo fare to her own semi-improvised Unspecified Intentions and more conventional Lullaby for a Sister.

In a revision of the published programme, Morton chose to follow that with his own arrangement of Pauline Viardot’s Berceuse, and, equally effectively, placed the Ravel ahead of the Strozzi song.

That made Errollyn Wallen’s Tree, a key piece for Werner which is the title track of the upcoming Hermes Experiment album as well as featuring on her own most recent disc, the climax of the night. Its balance of instrumental narrative from the strings with the last lyric of the evening from the soprano made it a suitable finale, save for that theatrical encore.

Perhaps, however, that procession revealed the static atmosphere of the rest of the evening and the school assembly nature of concerts in the gallery. The programme was only an hour and fifteen minutes long, but there was a lot of music in it and it is likely that the singer’s particular skills, and very skilled performance, seemed more integrated with those of the ensemble in other recitals on the tour.

The last of these Concerts for a Summer’s Night is at V&A Dundee this evening.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Heloise Werner by Eva Vermandel

Nordic Music Days: Scottish Ensemble

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Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow

There were certainly a lot of well known faces from the Scottish music scene in the audience at the opening evening concert of Nordic Music Days 2024 – an event whose history stretches back into the 19th century happening in Scotland for the first time. But that did not entirely account for the size of the audience, which caught the organisers on the hop a little. It is easy to underestimate Glasgow’s enthusiasm for new music.

The limited cabaret style seating in front of the stage was filled long before curtain-up, so much of the audience had to be content to stand or sit on the raw floor of the Old Fruitmarket for what proved to be a highly diverting hour and a half’s music, with a string quintet  from Jonathan Morton’s Scottish Ensemble as the house band.

They were joined by flautists Hanna Kinnunen and Maiken Mathisen Schau, bassoonist Nina Ashton and Amy Turner’s oboe for the opening work, under the baton of RSNO assistant conductor Derrick Morgan, in the only work requiring a conductor all evening.

Finnish composer Jukka Tiensuu’s Innuo set the bar high for the weekend’s music, with witty syncopated music for the strings, and scoring for the pairs of winds that gave them equally distinctive roles. It was great fun, a perfect opener, and a tough act to follow.

That task fell to Royal Conservatoire of Scotland masters student, and Glasgow University graduate, Seyoung Oh with her evocative impression of the disused Botanic Gardens rail station in the city. Amplification was important to all the music in the evening’s programme but nowhere more so than in her piece which mixed the live performance of the concentrated and intense string writing with ambient recordings and spoken word discussing Glasgow’s “period of transition”.

The balance between the elements was not perfect, but this was a first performance that demanded further outings, the Seoul-born composer bringing a forensic outside eye to the culture of the city.

A trio of Morton, Jane Atkins on viola and cellist Alison Lawrance took care of the following two works, Icelander Anna Thorvalsdottir’s Reflections and David Fennessy’s An Open Field (Come Closer, Come Closer), both demonstrating a keen sense of the place of their origin. Amplification was again crucial to the glacial pace of the former, while the Fennessy had more in the way of textural variation, its folk influences paving the way for the second premiere of the night that followed.

The composition of Qullaq – at half an hour, by far the longest work in the concert – teamed Oban fiddler Aidan O’Rourke with three singing and acting performers who are very well known in their native Greenland.

Joining O’Rourke and the Scottish Ensemble string quintet (completed by violinist Tristan Gurney and bassist Diane Clark) were Mike Fencer Thomsen, who has been described as Greenland’s Jim Morrison from his background in rock and pop, and Nive Nielsen, who leads her own group The Deer Children and has taken her songs to South by South West in Austin Texas. Hans-Henrik Suersaq Paulsen is directly descended from one the country’s most famous explorers, appeared in Borgen on television and his multi-disciplinary artistic practice extended to making the costumes for O’Rourke and the trio.

As that suggests, Qullaq was as much theatre as music. O’Rourke’s solo fiddle framed a variety of musical styles and his writing for the strings serving as an underscore to the quality vocal contributions from the Greenlanders, as well as some percussion and Nielsen’s electric rhythm guitar. Their traditional music featured as strongly as that of the Scotsman, with the text ranging from monosyllables to aphorism and one arresting section perhaps the Inuit equivalent of a field holler.

The end result was often moving, occasionally funny, and certainly made the case for all the ingredients deserving their place, moving easily between the elements in what sounded to be an overall palindromic structure.

It may have taken 130-odd years for Nordic Music Days to reach Scotland, but this collaboration surely discovered fertile ground for continued dialogue.

Keith Bruce

PERTH FESTIVAL: Scottish Ensemble

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The Byre, Inchyra, Perthshire

Had the Scottish Ensemble opened this year’s Perth Festival of the Arts in the manner it was originally contracted, rather than with an on-line concert and no live audience, there is no doubt it would have been an entirely different event. As it happened, and is available to Sunday May 29 via the festival’s website, it sits well in the sequence of concerts the group has filmed during the pandemic, adding another attractive venue to its imaginative list.

Perhaps artistic director Jonathan Morton may also have been less bold in the selection of works that led up to Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings to entice Perth to book in person, but the ten other composers to be heard here are sequenced with great skill in an international journey that manages to keep one foot at home in Scotland.

In effect the Serenade’s best known movement becomes the last waltz in an evening of dance music, and there is an atmosphere of the ceilidh in this converted farm building, more than living up to Morton’s promise of a programme of joyful and exuberant music.

The opening movement from Grazyna Bacewicz’s Concerto for String Orchestra certainly fits the bill, and if James MacMillan’s Memento, which follows, is the composer in haunting, folky mode, it is the bridge to the Scottish strain being given full expression in Anna Meredith’s Tullochgorum, not only a Scottish Ensemble commission but also a reminder that MacMillan conducted one of her earliest orchestral pieces during his association with the BBC Philharmonic.

If we might seem to return to Eastern Europe with Dvorak’s Waltz in D Major, that reckons without the trad fiddle session way Morton leads the piece, and something of that style continues in first viola Andrew Berridge’s solo line in a selection from Schubert’s 5 German Dances, rather more lively than its Minuet title suggests.

After that, the music becomes more of a challenge to dance to, for all its rhythmic intensity. The Transylvanian dance of Sandor Veress has the sort of challenging time signature that was catnip to jazz trumpeter Don Ellis with his band, before the biggest geographical leap of the programme takes us to Buenos Aires and “Summer” from Piazzolla’s Four Seasons.

The natural move to William Grant Still’s Danzas de Panama introduces a work that then goes somewhere else entirely, before the adventurous strings cross back over the Atlantic for two pieces by members of the Danish String Quartet, cellist Fredrik Schoyen Sjolin and leader Rune Tonsgaard Sorensen. There may be a nod to Danish court composer John Dowland here, but we are also firmly back at the ceilidh until Tchaikovsky waltzes us all home.

Available to view via www.perthfestival.co.uk

Keith Bruce