Tag Archives: Karen Cargill

BBC SSO: Pelleas et Melisande

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City Halls, Glasgow

If few complain that Beethoven wrote only one opera, Debussy’s singular contribution to the canon is a frustration. Pelleas et Melisande may be a musical masterpiece, but by way of comparison it would have been good if the composer had completed his planned As You Like It and written some music for a robust heroine like Rosalind and a confirmed cynic like Jacques.

As it is, his adaptation of Maurice Maeterlinck’s symbolist play is unique, and not only in the composer’s own catalogue. Its tale of a mysterious princess who has lost her memory as well as her crown, and is drawn into the dysfunctional family of another court by the older, greying Golaud to become the obsession of his handsome younger brother is set to a wondrous orchestral score and asks the principal singers (and the audience) to do without the arias and ensembles that are the tasty morsels of opera heritage. Debussy was following in the footsteps of Richard Wagner, specifically Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal, but forging his own individual path.

Like Scottish Opera’s Tristan earlier in the month, there is a lot to be said for a concert performance that in this case sidesteps all the symbolic water features, towers and dungeons in the story and lets the score do its work. That said, the luxury cast of singers here would grace any staged production stylishly. Bass Alasdair Miles sang the role of Arkel in David McVicar’s beautiful Scottish Opera production in 2017, Huw Montague Rendall has been acclaimed as “the Pelleas of his generation” and Sophie Bevan, who has sung Melisande in Dresden, gave a nicely nuanced reading here of what is a tricky amorphous role.

It also is not an especially showy part for a soprano. Karen Cargill, as Genevieve, had the more ear-catching music of Act 1 although Melisande’s music does perk up once she has Pelleas to sing with. Montague Rendall, who alone sang from memory, has the ideal voice for the role, which straddles tenor and baritone range, while David Stout, who sang Golaud, is a baritone of richer lower strength, exactly as his music requires. His first entry in Act 1 was immediately commanding, and he brought a fine acting game to the performance as well.

The smaller roles – Richard Morrison’s Shepherd and Doctor and young soprano Beth Stirling in the (short) trouser role of Yniold – were no less well sung, and Stirling made a memorable young lad, even if the inclusion of her superfluous Act 4 scene, which is almost always cut from staged productions, made the second half seem very long indeed.

That decision of conductor Ryan Wigglesworth was understandable – a concert performance might as well include every note in the score – but it did make this an epic Pelleas, finishing fully three and a quarter hours after it began (including the interval). The extended demise of Melisande at the end of Act 5 seemed very long indeed, exquisitely written though it is.

For all of that time, Wigglesworth’s direction was exemplary, attentive to all the details and with excellent balance, including the off-stage elements of brass, percussion and a chorus of the RCS Chamber Choir, prepared by Andrew Nunn. There was terrific playing from all the wind soloists, the harps of Helen Thomson and Sharon Griffiths, and Chris Gough’s horn section.

The  BBC SSO strings were, however, the real stars of the evening, and for much of the time Wigglesworth seemed relaxed enough to enjoy their playing as much as the audience did. Brooding and intense when that was called for, and spicy in the more sensuous music, from the first violins to the basses, each section had memorable ensemble moments, and many of them.

Keith Bruce

The performance is repeated at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall on Sunday from 3pm and was recorded for future broadcast on Radio 3, after which it will be available for 30 days on BBC Sounds.

Picture: Huw Montague Rendall

SCO / Emelyanychev

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City Halls, Glasgow

Alongside world class musicianship and a breadth of programming that leaves few ears unengaged, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s 50th anniversary season has been distinguished by very thoughtful and original programming. This concert, built around the world premiere of a new choral work by Sir James MacMillan, was a stunning example of that.

MacMillan’s Composed in August – not a diary note but the real title of the Robert Burns lyric known mostly by its first line Now Westlin Winds – is an SCO commission with partner organisations in Estonia and Sweden. Once they have had their premieres, it is likely to become a very popular piece with choirs, challenging in parts but tune-filled, and unusual in being a secular work from MacMillan for these forces.

The singers have to employ a range of techniques and the excellent SCO Chorus members were as assured in their diction of the rhythmically overlapping phrases as in the wordless music at the gentle finish. The instrumental music is for the SCO’s standard set-up, with the odd extra string player, and echoes the pastoral music of the Baroque era in the strings, horns and woodwind birdsong while still bearing the clear signature of the composer. With a wealth of different music over the five stanzas, it is an exquisite piece.

The work of two Ayrshire lads was followed by a Mancunian’s impression of Orcadian celebration, with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s perennially popular An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise. There are few conductors who so obviously enjoy their work as Maxim Emelyanychev, but the young Russian was in ecstatic form here, enjoying all the theatre of the piece with foot-stomping enthusiasm. That included a tray of drams being brought on for himself and leader Stephanie Gonley as the work slides into inebriation, greeted with a hilarious massed “slanj” of hipflasks from the chorus, still seated in the choir stalls.

If the larks set up the arrival of piper Robert Jordan, in full regalia, from the back of hall to perfection, there was also a characteristic precision in every detail of their performance – especially the “tuning up” moment, which Emelyanychev surely recognised as being a gag partly at his own expense.

The programme began with a French composer’s way with Scots romanticism, Berlioz’s Rob Roy overture, which takes Burns’s tune Scots Wha Hae and finds a lot of different things to do with it. With some period instrumentation, it is a curious and fascinating response to Sir Walter Scott’s novel, full of colour and a reminder, perhaps, that the melody makes a strong claim to National Anthem status.

The overture teed-up a superb performance of the same composer’s La mort de Cleopatre with mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill on her best form. Rather than a soloist at the front of the stage she was embedded in the music, but at the same time gave an expressive reading that was straight off the opera stage. The low string pulse that sets up her welcoming of death sounded startlingly contemporary, and emblematic of how this orchestra and its associates span the centuries.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Karen Cargill by Nadine Boyd

SCO / van Soeterstede

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City Halls, Glasgow

The old cliché about the odd numbered Beethoven symphonies out-lasting the evens never really worked with the Pastoral, and a remarkable run of performances of No 4 in pre-pandemic times made a very eloquent case for it as well.

Symphony No 8’s relative brevity to those on either side of it mean it is sometimes especially belittled, including by the composer himself, but also makes it an attractive programming option. Its compact arc can create the temptation for conductors to keep the orchestra on a tight leash until the boisterous finale, but French conductor Chloe van Soeterstede was having none of that.

Ideal for the smaller forces of a chamber orchestra, the Eighth is brisk from start to finish and van Soeterstede made sure that pace – while never slacking – was very accurately measured. There is much musical jest and japery in the work, in unexpected notes and combinations of instruments, staccato chords and offbeat accents, and the conductor missed none of the gags. She also found an element of darkness in the Minuet’s septet of solo cello, horns, pizzicato basses, clarinet and bassoon that set up the pell-mell finish perfectly.

It was the culmination of a fine programme that had begun with the Symphony No 1 of neglected 19th century German composer Emilie Mayer. Some of Mayer’s songs featured in Golda Schulz’s recital of lost works by women composers at last year’s Edinburgh Festival, and here was evidence that her orchestral works – she wrote a further seven symphonies – are also ripe for rediscovery.

The models of her male predecessors in her homeland are much in evidence early on in the symphony, but she then goes very much her own way, with some starling changes of pace and direction later on. As with the Beethoven, this was a score very well suited to an ensemble with 24 strings.

In between was the star attraction of mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill, singing the six songs of Les nuits d’ete that might have been written for her, had Hector Berlioz not in fact orchestrated them for his second wife, thus creating the first example of such a cycle.

It does have a lovely shape to it as well, beautifully communicated by Cargill, from the optimistic opening Villanelle, through the darkness of bereavement and loss, to the relatively upbeat, if uncertain, closer, L’ile inconnue. Scotland’s international singing star was on absolutely magnificent form, her superb instrument of burnished tone across the whole of its range, but always all about engaging the attention of the listener on a one-to-one basis.

There was plenty of instructive example here for the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland students in attendance. Their intensive study with Cargill this coming week will culminate in a Cumnock Tryst recital in the Ayrshire town’s Trinity Church on Saturday April 28.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Chloe van Soeterstede by Olivia da Costa

Scottish Opera: Il trittico

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Theatre Royal, Glasgow

When Scottish Opera first announced its 2022/23 60th anniversary season, the plan was for Sir David McVicar to stage all three short operas of Puccini’s Il trittico on the one set with an ensemble cast. At some point along the line that bold notion fell by the wayside, and only one singer – soprano Francesca Chiejina, making a memorable company debut – appears in all three pieces (as does actor Keith MacPherson in small silent roles, including the lively corpse of Buoso Donati in Gianni Schicchi).

The set designs, by Charles Edwards, who is also working with Scottish Opera for the first time, are grand and bespoke for each story, to the impressive extent of a moving barge docking at the quayside at the start of Il tabarro (The Cloak), and the splendidly angular tapering perspective of the cluttered room where Donati dies and Schicchi tricks his family out of the juiciest cuts of his estate.

In between sits the problem piece of the trio, Suor Angelica, the convent-set story of an unmarried mother, a child given up for adoption, another family legacy and the mortal sin of suicide. As mezzo Karen Cargill – terrific in the piece as Angelica’s domineering aunt, “The Princess” – promised in her interview with VoxCarnyx, McVicar manages to redeem Sister Angelica with an inspired staging of the work. Alongside Cargill there are characterful cameos from Chiejina and Scottish Opera Emerging Artist Lea Shaw, and Edwards and McVicar have created what is one of the best uses of a staircase in music theatre since The Sound of Music.

The other crucial ingredient is the performance of Korean soprano Sunyoung Seo in the title role. Another company debut, she is a real find, with a glorious voice across her range, quite thrilling at the top and full of emotional heft, combined with a magnetic stage presence and acting skill. The ending of Suor Angelica has been condemned as sentimental nonsense, but she, and the young lad playing the ghost of her dead child, made it genuinely moving in McVicar’s staging.

She is just as effective as Giorgetta in the soap opera love triangle of Il tabarro, for all its cliches of melodrama. Her complex characterisation matches that of Roland Woods as her barge-skipper husband Michele, and her voice is well paired with that of Russian tenor Viktor Antipenko as Luigi (yet another company debut).

There are no weak links in the vocal casting in those first two operas at all, and that high standard of musicianship on stage is paralleled in the pit across the whole evening, where conductor Stuart Stratford steers a huge orchestra, including some exotic instrumental colours, through a terrific account of a score that is Puccini at the very pinnacle of his powers.

Where Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica are immaculately paced by McVicar and Stratford, Gianni Schicchi comes roaring out of the blocks like a whippet on speed – a riot of colour in set, costumes and sound, and delighting in its hectic ‘70s sitcom aesthetic. That frantic activity builds to Lauretta’s showstopping aria O mio babbino caro (the best-known music in the whole four hours and Francesca Chiejina’s big moment) and then runs out of steam. Woods is fine as Schicchi, but not as funny as some of the Donati family clowning around him, and marooned upstage for too much of the time.

It is an odd lapse by McVicar, who is a master of naturalistic theatrical narrative in opera, but the broad comedy of the most often seen part of this trilogy fails to communicate as confidently as the tragedy of the two earlier tales.

Keith Bruce

Playing hard

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As she prepares for Scottish Opera’s new production of Puccini’s Il trittico, mezzo Karen Cargill talks to Keith Bruce

Sir David McVicar’s new production of Puccini’s problematic late-career triple-bill Il trittico will, Scottish Opera has said, address the difficulties inherent in staging its three contrasting stories in a single evening with adaptable staging and an ensemble cast.

The success or otherwise of the approach will become clear at the Theatre Royal on Saturday, but the presence in the company of Scotland’s star mezzo-soprano, Karen Cargill, already signals a departure from the plan.

Cargill will be seen only in the central – and most problematic – of the three pieces, singing La Principessa in Suor Angelica, the thoroughly nasty regal aunt of the titular heroine. While the first story, Il tabarro (The Cloak), is a dramatic dark tale of love and murder on a barge, and the last, Gianni Schicchi, a fun comedy that is often seen as a stand-alone, the sentimental convent-set all-female Sister Angelica is about unmarried pregnancy, suicide and redemption.

It is possible to draw interesting parallels with the composer’s own life from the original story by librettist Giovacchino Forzano (who also wrote Schicchi), but the fact that the venerable Kobbe Opera Guide devotes just a single paragraph to Suor Angelica while finding two pages of things to say about the other two parts of Il trittico speaks of the way the middle tale is often regarded.

Unsurprisingly, Cargill thinks that McVicar’s version will sort any problems. Her own casting certainly bodes well, as it builds on her acclaimed performance as Mere Marie in Poulenc’s Dialogues de Carmelites at the New York Met. In fact she will return to that role in a new production by Barry Kosky this summer, the first time Glyndebourne has tackled the work.

“The Principessa is an extraordinary character because she is so hard, which is a treat to play, because I don’t get to play many characters like that.

“She is a little like Mere Marie in Carmelites, who is someone who has a strong belief system – the Word of God is everything and it dictates how she reacts and communicates. Mere Marie is often seen as a real baddy, but I don’t think she is in the way the Principessa in Suor Angelica is.”

The scene between The Princess and her niece is the dramatic heart of the tale. Arriving to have Angelica renounce her claim on the family fortune, she brutally tells her that the baby she gave up is dead. Patricia Bardon tried to soften the delivery of the crucial line in a touring Opera North staging a few years ago, but that will not be the way Cargill delivers it for McVicar.

“It is a test not to show compassion, because Sunyoung Seo, who is playing Angelica, is so gorgeous and so immersed in the whole thing. The aria I have is angular but dramatic, so it has that romantic Puccini language but with a hardness there.

“I’ve seen so many of David McVicar’s shows over the years, and I always thought that it was the type of story-telling that I want to do. That’s the beauty of this job, that you get to play complex characters who are not one-dimensional.”

As for the contention that Suor Angelica is the sentimental weak link in Il trittico, Cargill is having none of it.

“This production is emotionally direct and truthful. The thing with David’s work is that all the characters are recognisably human. It’s emotional but not sentimental – it’s direct.

“I don’t know why it is less admired because I think it is an extraordinary piece. I think people will fall in love with it, because of how it is done.”

The production is part of  a busy year for the mezzo, who recently seemed to be taking a step back from her performing schedule when she accepted a post as Interim Head of Vocal Studies at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

“There’s been quite a bit of travel recently, just when you’d got used to being at home, for the first time in 20 years.

“Once this closes I go to Brazil for Bluebeard’s Castle with Sir Richard Armstrong and the Sao Paulo State Symphony. I am going a few days early rather than just turn up and sing, so I’m in Brazil for ten days.

“Then there’s an SCO tour of Berlioz’s Les nuits d’ete [St Andrews, Edinburgh and Glasgow], before a  teaching residency and a concert at Sir James MacMillan’s Cumnock Tryst. I drive to Glyndebourne the day after that and start on the Monday.

“I couldn’t give the Head of Vocal Studies job the full energy that I wanted to give it, and sing at the same time. I would have had to have stopped singing, and that’s my addiction. But I still want to work with young singers and share real information.

“So I’m no longer head of department but still an Associate Artist, so this year I work with third and fourth year undergraduates. It’s about eight visits across the year, and I am taking two sopranos, a mezzo, two tenors and a baritone to Drumlanrig Castle at the end of next month, at the end of which they perform at the Tryst.

“I encourage students to listen as widely as they can but also not to become locked in to what someone else does. That emotional freedom and curiosity about how to perform a piece is important. Music is about joy and communication and you must not lose the ability to play around with that.”

Recently signed to the big international agency Askonas Holt, Cargill happily lists works (the Trojans by Berlioz and any number of Verdi roles) and theatres (La Scala, Milan and Sydney Opera House) that she hopes lie in her future.

“If it happens, great, but if it doesn’t that’s OK. You have to be realistic. I’ve never had a set path of things I want to accomplish. I’d love to sing Carmen but I don’t think it will ever come my way.”

Puccini’s hard, bad Princess is what obsesses her at the moment, and she is excited about revisiting the Poulenc, a work she first sang as a student in Glasgow.

“It is the most extraordinary music. There is a constant sense of unease, you never get to relax in Carmelites. The Kosky production could be radical and I’m up for that – we should all be challenged every day.”

Scottish Opera’s Il trittico opens at Glasgow’s Theatre Royal on Saturday March 11 for three performances, followed by two at Edinburgh’s Festival  Theatre. Full details scottishopera.org.uk

RSNO / Hahn 

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall 

The day after a scratch orchestra had played film music to a reportedly packed house in a concert organised by a commercial promoter, it was disappointing that the RSNO was greeted by a half-filled hall for a programme of equally attractive concert music with the bonus of a Scottish premiere from the country’s best-known living composer performed by an international star. 

That soloist was mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill and the Three Scottish Songs were new orchestrations by Sir James MacMillan only previously heard in March this year, when the singer was Ian Bostridge and the orchestra the Britten Sinfonia. 

Superficially, they make an odd trio, the first two in Scots and intimate words of love and loss composed by MacMillan to sound akin to folk songs of an earlier era. The third, The Children, also sets words by William Soutar, but written in English and a harrowing evocation of the war-time loss of innocent lives, written during the Spanish Civil War. Its sound-world is entirely different, distinctly in the composer’s style, and as explicit as the text. 

There is, however, a consistently spare style to all three, Cargill beginning the first two unaccompanied and singing solo for most of the first stanza of The Children after an initial chord. The composer uses only strings and percussion, and the instrumental silences are often as eloquent as the music in his arrangements, with the focus always on the singer, at least until the cataclysmic percussive conclusion. 

Who knows how Bostridge, whose Englishness makes him a great interpreter of Noel Coward’s songs, coped with the linguistic transition inherent in the set, but it presented no difficulty to Cargill and there was in her interpretation a clear line from the personal to the universal. What links all three of William Soutar’s poems is the veracity of their emotional truth and MacMillan and the mezzo masterfully communicated that. 

The concert was to have been conducted by Maestro “Sasha” Lazarev, the orchestra’s Russian Conductor Emeritus, whose presence was impossible because of the global situation. Perhaps his absence was linked to the number of empty seats, but if so, those who stayed away missed a debut on the podium that was worth witnessing. 

Austrian conductor Patrick Hahn is still in his 20s, and already has a list of senior posts in Germany on his CV, and apparently sings cabaret songs and plays a mean jazz piano as well. Taking over the existing RSNO programme this week, the spare essence of the MacMillan was bracketed by huge orchestral stuff – three movements from Khachaturian’s ballet Spartacus, and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 4. 

A diminishing number of folk must now hear the former and see a tall ship in full sail battling the waves, thanks to its use in the BBC TV drama The Onedin Line, and that will certainly not be the case for the young conductor. That theme was presented here at the centre of a suite that started quietly but swiftly unleashed the full power of the symphony orchestra and concluded with a triple-time section to rival the Armenian composer’s other great waltz, which the touring RSNO played as an encore under conductor Peter Oundjian, and a great brass climax. 

Tchaikovsky 4 also featured in an Oundjian touring programme. Hahn took the work at his own very measured pace, a quietly deliberate way with the dramatic opening that paid dividends later. I don’t think I have heard the orchestra play quite so quietly before the first clarinet’s entry. There was a very precise ebb and flow in the pizzicato Scherzo too, and a full range of contrasts and dynamics in the Finale – and another huge finish. I’d wager that the whizz-kid from Ganz will be back. 

Keith Bruce 

BBC SSO / Chauhan

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City Halls, Glasgow

Alpesh Chauhan set himself a mighty challenge in a BBC SSO programme that receded from the tipping point of Austro-German Romanticism in the first half to its full-blown meaty excess in the second. It was in the mountainous journey of the latter – Bruckner’s “Romantic” Symphony No 4 – that the SSO’s young associate conductor had the biggest opportunity to really flex his creative powers.

The first half was anything but a simple warm up, though the opening bars of Webern’s Op 1 Passacaglia bore the distinct uncertainty of a cold start. After the theme’s initial pizzicato statement the tempo wobbled, the instrumental coordination disconcertingly slack. Chauhan establish rhythmic control quickly enough to capture the inevitability of the work’s post-Wagnerian ebb and flow. Climaxes surged, but the missing factor in this performance was the vital detailed dovetailing of instrumental colours. That’s where the soul and momentum of this music lies.

The arrival of Scots mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill for Schoenberg’s passionate Song of the Wood Dove from his epic cantata Gurrelieder, presented here in the composer’s reduced chamber version of 1922, was a moment of instant transformation. The work is a perfect fit for Cargill’s gloriously versatile voice, whether in the rich lower depths of the opening and much beyond, or in her topmost notes as the work reaches its emotional peak.

Her integral position within the small instrumental group did nothing to limit the expressive breadth and intensity of her performance. Indeed, it helped cement the overall cohesiveness and nuanced precision of the delivery, Chauhan underpinning Cargill’s high-voltage opulence with the neat, harnessed incision of the tight-knit chamber ensemble.

Then the massed ranks for Bruckner’s Fourth, brass splayed across the upper balcony somewhat threateningly but also excitingly. Chauhan’s approach was mostly clinical, which certainly facilitated the efficient flow of the symphony, and allowed its many build-ups to shake the rafters and tingle the spine. There were plenty notable moments, whether in the melancholy poise of the Andante or the rapture of the Scherzo’s outer sections.

The problem with Bruckner, though, is combining the engineering of a performance with the overriding realisation of its soul and purpose. There was a prevailing sense here that the latter was sold short. As with the Webern, Chauhan’s grasp of the big picture was tenuous, with too many psychological hiatuses and a resulting tendency to stall the momentum and invoke nervousness in some of the orchestral response. That was inevitably disappointing.

Ken Walton

This concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Tuesday 1 March, and is then available for 30 days via BBC Sounds

BBC SSO / Chauhan

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City Halls, Glasgow 

Does the BBC SSO have its eye on Alpesh Chauhan as a possible successor to Thomas Dausgaard as principal conductor, whose contract ends next year? He’s certainly an interesting prospect – young, determined and confident – though Thursday’s appearance with the SSO revealed once again that, while he ignites a spark in certain areas of repertoire, his mastery of such core Romantic repertory as Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 6, the “Pathétique”, is still work in progress.

Chauhan opened this live broadcast programme with Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No 2, a work completed by the composer three decades after leaving it unfinished, which consequently bears the post-Romantic excess of his pre-dodecaphonic music but with the ultra-clean textural discipline of his maturer style. A reduced SSO ensemble made the most of the challenge, producing a gritty, precise and virtuosic performance.

But it was the calculated insistence on Chauhan’s part that characterised it. The initial journey from soft teasing woodwind phrases to the seething tumult of the first big climax was as much a result of pumped adrenalin as clear thinking. And where the first movement wrestled with its dense emotional heat, the second – initially an assertive, jaunty Con fuoco – pinned its outgoing exhilaration on a combination of Schoenberg’s stabilising old-style rhythmic regularity and the elusiveness of its post-Romantic language.

This was the big hit of the evening, with mezzo soprano Karen Cargill’s pre-interval encore of Richard Strauss’s idyllic Morgen well up there with it. The latter followed Cargill’s official contribution to the programme, Erich Korngold’s achingly beautiful Absecheidslieder (Songs of Farewell), which suited the characteristically molten, earthy quality of her lower voice. 

In the opening song the mood was one of reflective seduction; the powerful Wagnerian in Cargill coloured the ensuing Dies eine kann mein Sehen with a thrilling euphoric glow; the more mystical Mond, so gest du wieder auf, with its otherworldliness and ethereal religiosity, gave way to the deeply personal Gefasster Abschied, sumptuously Straussian in mood and manner.

It was hard at times to catch all of Cargill’s performance above the wholesome orchestration, and the higher reaches of her voice seemed a little less comfortable than usual, but there was no escaping the emotive connection she has with this music, and with the exquisite Morgen that followed, featuring also the poised, poignantly understated solo violin of SSO associate leader Kanako Ita. It was just a shame that no-one saw fit to give her the curtain call she so thoroughly deserved.

Chauhan’s Tchaikovsky was a curious combination of fluid efficiency and heavy-duty indulgence. The latter turned the opening movement into a journey plagued by too many wrong turnings – agonising extremes of tempi, especially the slow ones, that jarred with the overall flow and which effected audible signs of insecurity at key attack points. When he let the music express itself in the central movements, however, things made much more sense. From that, the finale emerged with convincing gravitas, albeit susceptible – as in several previous instances – to a brass section given too free a rein at the expense of the modest string forces. 

Ken Walton

Available to stream or download for 30 days.

Cumnock Tryst: Karen Cargill

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Trinity Church, Cumnock

In an earlier era – one without, perhaps, the baleful influence of Richard Wagner – it is intriguing to wonder if Robert Schumann might have composed more than one opera. Certainly, in her performance of his song cycle Frauenliebe und Leben, international opera star Karen Cargill suggested a sensibility to create something less epic than the big German Romantic projects he contemplated.

For Cargill, Clara Schumann’s Sechs Lieder, Opus 13 and Robert’s Opus 42 set of eight are both the work of the couple together. This was something of a change to the pre-announced programme to open Sir James MacMillan’s returned long weekend of performances in East Ayrshire. The published brochure lists a showcase for female composers, with Clara followed by Fanny Mendelssohn, Pauline Viardot and Amy Beach.

Only Beach’s Three Browning Songs survived of the others, following the Schumanns with big Broadway renditions that rounded off the recital in grand style. The major loss was of five of Viardot’s Russian songs, in their German translations, which might have been something of a bridge to Cargill’s new Linn disc of French repertoire, Fleur de mon ame, none of which she sang here.

Her partner on the recording, Simon Lepper, was also her foil in Cumnock, the familiar foundation for her first performance in front of an audience in 18 months, something she clearly found an emotional experience.

In that time, as well as releasing that acclaimed recording of Debussy, Duparc and Chausson, the mezzo has been appointed interim head of vocal studies at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the Schumann songs are, as she pointed out, bedrock repertoire for young students. Cargill gave a masterclass in their performance here, alternating power with tenderness, communicating both sequences as narrative arcs of the rewards and pain of love, and persuasively presenting the settings of Chamisso’s popular verse cycle as the answer to the questioning note on which Clara Schumann’s Die stille Lotosblume ends.

This was, beyond argument, a superb way for the Cumnock Tryst to open its return, with Scotland’s major opera star making her debut at the event in an intimate recital a million miles from her high-profile life at the New York Met and elsewhere. If those Beach songs are as new to her as she said, she gave a definitive performance of them just the same, and then encored with a nod to her host in a William Soutar setting by MacMillan. Live-streamed from its first performances, the concert is available via the Tryst website for seven days.

Keith Bruce

Tryst Spreads Its Wings

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Sir James MacMillan’s Cumnock Tryst festival is expanding into new venues as well as embracing digital streaming over its four days at the end of September and start of October.

Alongside the usual range of church and other venues – and there are performances at Trinity, St John’s and Cumnock Old Churches as well as in the Town Hall and Dumfries Arms Hotel – the Tryst will this year use the new Barony Campus Hall in the Ayrshire town and the Morphy Richards Engineering Centre on Dumfries House Estate.

The festival runs from September 30 to October 3 and opens on the Thursday evening with the first appearance at the Tryst by Scotland’s star mezzo, Karen Cargill. With Simon Lepper at the piano, she will perform two concerts back-to-back, at 6.45pm and 8.30pm, to allow for maximum audience in a safely-managed environment. Her performance will also be live-streamed and available to watch for seven days.

Pianist Steven Osborne returns to the festival, this time in the company of Paul Lewis, to perform a programme of 20thcentury piano duets, mainly by French composers.

The festival’s artist-in-residence is saxophonist Christian Forshaw. He will be joining the singers of Tenebrae in a programme of early music for Passiontide and in a trio with singer Grace Davidson and Libby Burgess at the keyboard, as well as appearing with Sir James MacMillan and the Robert Burns Academy Concert Band in a public workshop entitled Improvise!

That is only one facet of an education programme that also includes the launch, at the Barony Hall, of a new book by MacMillan and Tryst chief executive Jennifer Martin, Creative Composition for the Classroom.

The new venue at Dumfries House Estate will welcome the returning Hebrides Ensemble. Like Cargill and Tenebrae, they are also performing twice, in their case at 2pm and 4.30pm on the Sunday.General booking for this year’s programme opens on Monday August 9. www.thecumnocktryst.com

RSNO / Lowe / Cargill

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RSNO Centre, Glasgow

A “technical issue” resulted in Friday’s planned release of the RSNO’s first 2021 digital concert being delayed until Saturday. Given this glitch offered a version that chopped the final bars off Dvorak’s New World Symphony, the decision to delay was wise. There’s nothing worse than experiencing the same fate as the long distance runner whose legs buckle a few metres short of the finish line.

Be assured, the rectified version takes us all the way, with a rousing end to a performance in which conductor James Lowe and the orchestra finally feel at home with each other and a mutually conducive spark is lit. 

Lowe was brought in to replace Ryan Bancroft and a programme originally intended to feature violinist Midori in the world premiere on Glanert’s Violin Concerto No 2. In its place comes the popular Dvorak symphony and Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder with mezzo soprano Karen Cargill.

The opening work remains unchanged, Errollyn Wallen’s surging Mighty River, written in 2007 to commemorate the bicentennial of the signing of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. Like the political momentum gathering pace then for a lengthy ongoing liberation campaign, Wallen’s metaphor of choice is the unstoppable power of water, its vitality, the unceasing journey that a mighty river undertakes in search of the open sea.

Familiar tunes make their presence felt: Amazing Grace feeds through the opening bars like a shared opening prayer; the spiritual Deep River more immersed within the later fabric of increasingly frenetic textures. The language encompasses echoes of Copland’s fresh-faced dissonances, powering minimalism à la Reich or Adams, besides Wallen’s own lyrical, occasionally mystical fingerprints. It is a compendium of 20th/21st century Classical Americana underpinned by incessant, pulsating energy. 

This performance doesn’t quite get to grips with all that. It’s more matter-of-fact than edge-of-the-seat, more routine than gripping, especially where the vital underpinning rhythmic motor seems more content to chunter along than switch to overdrive.

Cargill’s presence in the five songs that make up Wagner’s gorgeous Mathilde Wesendonck settings provide a welcome instant transformation. The rich sonority of her lower range channels their emotional depth from the offset, Cargill brilliantly fractious in Stehe Still – a touch of the Wagnerian nasties – and glowingly ecstatic in Im Treibhaus, spine-chillingly intense in Der Engel and aptly dreamy in Traume.

Hans Werner Henze’s orchestration poses its own challenges, the highly exposed solo lines and curious colour mixes dependent on super-refined management. While Lowe’s direction provides inoffensive, efficient support for Cargill, it struggles to find the vital essence of Henze’s weird and wonderful intentions. They are more convincing than they sometimes appear here.

No lack of conviction when it comes to the Dvorak, despite niggling aspects of (recording?) balance that occasionally vulgarise the opening Allegro molto. Thereafter, there’s the leisurely Largo, sprightly Scherzo and wholesomely conclusive Allegro con fuoco to seal the deal on a programme that takes its time to fully settle.
Ken Walton

Available to view on www.rsno.org.uk

VOPERA: L’enfant et les sortileges

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London Philharmonic Orchestra

It has become a platitude to enthuse about how creatively artists have responded to the restrictions on their livelihood brought about the pandemic, but it is nonetheless undeniable. However, this production of Ravel’s short opera, a modernist parable to a libretto by Colette brought vibrantly up-to-date, raises the bar to new heights.

Director Rachael Hewer – with the help of somewhere around 100 other people – has made a version of a work that is a musical delight, if very much of its time in other ways, into a profound commentary on our times, at the end of which you may well find yourself choking back tears.

Objectively, it is an astonishing technical achievement. All the singers – and they range from well-known names (Karen Cargill is Maman) to youngsters in the early stages of their careers – recorded and filmed their parts at home, using the technology to hand. The 27 members of the LPO recorded the music in socially-distanced conditions, playing a reduced orchestration made by conductor Lee Reynolds.

Hewer and her technical team have taken the faces of their cast and chorus and put them into the animated world in which the production takes place, as seen from the perspective of the titular child, sung by Emily Edmonds and winningly performed on-screen by Amelie Turnage. On the bones of Colette’s French text, given fresh translation in subtitles by Hewer herself, much contemporary context is happily applied: the girl is unhappily home-schooling during lockdown, and the fantasy world she enters, through the screen of her laptop, includes a hospital ward with all the necessary PPE, a yoga class in the gym, a rolling news broadcast with subtitles becoming the headlines ticker-taping along the foot of the screen, and a Zoom meeting for the Dance of the Frogs, with all the now-familiar icons hand-drawn.

It is hard to believe that a full orchestra would serve Ravel’s highly-original score, with its elements of Broadway, cabaret and operetta, any better than the LPO musicians do here, and the singing is of a uniformly high standard, with brilliant solo turns (stratospheric stuff from Sarah Hayashi as The Fire) as well as the quite remarkable choral combination, given the way it came about.

Within those restrictions too, there is also some fine facial acting – Marcus Farnsworth’s child-hating armchair an early highlight, and Shuna Scott Sendall an animated gym-bunny cat.

Familiar London locations crop up in the animated world, but the film begins in a black and white version of the child’s domestic home, and ends, in glorious technicolour, in the world everyone involved wants to get back to, as a patchwork of gilded interiors of opera houses around the world fills the screen. All are empty, of course, with a single “ghost light” left burning.

To the closing choral lament, the animated characters begin to fill up the stalls, and L’enfant has the last word as she returns “home”, singing: “Maman!” It is at this point that strong men may well be reaching for their pocket square. Like I did.

Available on YouTube until December 16.
Keith Bruce

Scottish Ensemble/Cargill

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Cottiers Theatre, Glasgow

Scottish Ensemble artistic director Jonathan Morton is both an original and inspired creator of programmes and a great collaborator, and his group chooses its performance venues with great care. All of those attributes are in evidence in its first streamed film event for the Coronavirus era, and the Ensemble’s first performance since March.

Songs for Life sees the string group partner with mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill in a sequence of music that is as eclectic as anything it has done, filmed in Cottiers, the former church turned arts venue, bar and restaurant in Glasgow’s West End. Part of the charm of Cottiers is that it still, after many years, seems a work in progress – both Tramway and the Arches in the city were arguably diminished as much as they were enhanced by the spending of vast sums of National Lottery money – but its aesthetic proves rather too much of a temptation to the film-makers here. With many shots from the gallery above the musicians, much skilled and confident hand-held camera-work and even drone footage from high above the kirk spire, there is an awful lot going on, and the mobility of the images is often an attention-seeking distraction. Recording engineer Jonathan Green captures the sound in the theatre well – there is a real appreciation of the reverberant acoustic and individual players are quite distinct – but the spoken introductions recorded in the bar fare less well, particularly when Cargill is speaking. This is a particular shame as she tells a story that her many fans will recognise as illustrative of why she is such a captivating performer.

Thankfully there is also ample evidence for that in the recital, and, when she sings, Miranda Stern and Julyan Sinclair often have the sense to keep the focus on her expressive performance. Aside from the single glory of Purcell’s Dido’s Lament – every bit as heart-breaking as you might desire – and leading a closing choral Auld Lang Syne – the mezzo’s contributions come in pairs: two from Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn, two from Britten’s Charm of Lullabies, and two of Dvorak’s Love Songs. Those last four, in particular, are lovely original choices, matched by the varied instrumental pieces Morton places around them. They begin with a movement from Walton’s Sonata for Strings and end with the mesmerising Entr’acte by Caroline Shaw, the New Yorker who is very much flavour of the moment. With Janacek, Kurtag, Beethoven and more Britten along the way, lighter moments come in one of Chick Corea’s Children’s Songs and George Walker’s Lyric for Strings, sounding a close cousin of Barber’s Adagio.

Those moments are welcome because the darkness in some of the other material is often matched by the images on screen. But then we live in bleak times, even if playing and singing of the matchless standard evident throughout this hour and a quarter presents the promise of light in that darkness.

Scottish Ensemble’s Songs for Life with Karen Cargill is available to view until 12 February, 2021; single ticket £10, household ticket £20. scottishensemble.co.uk
Keith Bruce