Tag Archives: Matthew Rooke

RSNO / Niemann / Philbert

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

The orchestral backroom boys, so to speak, got a prominent showing with the RSNO this weekend. Mainly the percussion, but also – in Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, the programme finale – the wider rearguard ranks of woodwind and brass. That all seemed fortuitously appropriate especially as the evening’s concerto slot, a brand new timpani showpiece by Matthew Rooke – featuring RSNO principal Paul Philbert as soloist and making his last RSNO appearance before taking up a new post in Canada – was the centrepiece. 

It was anyone’s guess how Rooke, a charismatic Oxford-born composer of Scottish and Gabonese descent whose thoughts and music constantly reflect those divergent inborn influences, would approach such a rare challenge. There are timpani concertos out there – a thunderous, rhythmically-charged and visibly entertaining one for two timpanists by Philip Glass for one. Equally there are clues to the instrument’s solo potential in such bombastic outbursts as feature in symphonies by the likes of Berlioz and Nielsen. To some extent this was an extension of the latter, Rooke opting to position his soloist on a raised platform rear-stage, but visibly attached to his exotically-equipped percussion colleagues. Philbert, besides his undoubted technical skill, is nonetheless a dynamic showman, so all eyes and ears were fixed on him for the work’s Glasgow unveiling. 

The three-movement piece, called Tamboo-Bamboo (a multi-pitched Afro-Caribbean instrument borne out of slavery’s censorial extremes), proved to be a riot of celebration and atmosphere, its opening movement driven by an almost virulent blues energy, tinged with melancholy but fired by powerful rhythmic resilience. Already the restlessness of Rooke’s musical language felt all-consuming, an eclectic menagerie touching on everything from jazz to classical rock, at its height making fleeting feisty allusions to the giddiest extremes of John Barry’s 007 soundtracks. 

Philbert’s performance – which began with simple hand claps – was dizzying to watch, whether requiring him to rotate 360 degrees to cover speedy logistics, or sourcing infinitesimal sound effects such as the surreal zoological sound world of the central Nocturne. The final Masquerade went full carnival, wild and loose-limbed, only for its intoxicating climax to be tamed by introspective reflection. 

David Niemann’s alert direction was all the more remarkable for the fact he was replacing an indisposed Anthony Parnther – we were told the German conductor had interrupted his honeymoon to be in Scotland. But the real focus of this particular performance was on the indomitable Philbert, whose show-stopping execution proved a thoroughly memorable farewell to a highly-visible and distinguished seven years tenure with the RSNO.

Panufnik’s Third Symphony, Sinfonia Sacra, written in 1964 by the exiled Polish composer to commemorate a millennium of Christianity in his native country, summoned up its own distinctive champions from within the orchestra, the initial three Visions effecting a profound sense of religious theatre. 

From the first of these – a clarion-like flourish featuring four trumpeters spread across the choir gallery – the atmosphere switched dramatically to a luscious blanket of strings introducing the mystical Vision II, the third announced by a barrage of percussion. Niemann extracted animated precision from the orchestra, especially in the more extended final Hymn where Panufnik’s musical inspiration – the ancient Polish anthem Bogurodzica – surfaced in full amid the gathering conflict and resolution.  

While Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the Eroica, might have seemed in comparison like a reassuring old friend, Niemann had other plans. As regular Eroicas go, this one was of the brisk variety, the opening hurtling off the starting blocks like a hungry whippet. But it was also super-clean and full of unexpected surprises, Niemann directing us to elements within the score that often go unnoticed, especially from the woodwind. If some of it smacked of interpretational experimentation, it was also curiously exciting. Above all, and despite some evenness across the upper string sections, Niemann’s palpable motivation bore exhilarating results.

Ken Walton

Pelleas and Melisande

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Laidlaw Music Centre, St Andrews

The first night of a radical revision of a crucial work in the operatic canon this may have been – and one involving a good number of less-than-experienced talents at that – but there was an impressive atmosphere of relaxed professionalism around Byre Opera’s chamber version of Claude Debussy’s masterpiece on Wednesday evening.

Partly that may be explained by the extended gestation period the production has enjoyed, first announced to follow the St Andrews music department’s off-site double bill at Guardbridge back in June 2019. The creators of this production, music director Michael Downes and stage director Kally Lloyd-Jones, have lived with Matthew Rooke’s inventive reduction of the score and Janice Galloway’s new translation of the libretto through the pandemic, and the university’s new Laidlaw Music Centre has been completed and thoroughly tested as a home for it since Byre Opera’s last show.

Lloyd-Jones and her designer Janis Hart make the fullest use of the venue in their black-and-gold staging. It emerges from the architecture of the McPherson Recital Room, the adaptable 13-piece band in the midst of the action and the auditorium and off-stage areas part of the sonic mix. With mirrored cubes and flying arches becoming pools, caves, beds, towers and windows, and the cast proving themselves adept stage managers and follow-spot operators as well as actors and singers, the production is stylish and splendidly lucid. Maurice Maeterlinck’s symbolist narrative has the clearest exposition, helped in no small measure by a healthy leavening of ironic wit in Galloway’s dialogues between the characters.

Soprano Rachel Munro, who was Nora in Vaughan Williams’ Riders to the Sea in 2019, has a big sing as the supposedly silent Melisande, and is more than equal to the task, while her Pelleas, Sebastian Roberts, makes a remarkably assured step up from G&S to his first opera role. In the St Andrews way, these young people are students of mathematics and Classics, literature and languages, but their musical abilities are top quality. The cast’s sole professional singer is baritone James Berry, in the role of Golaud, whose conservatoire training (at RNCM) and experience in houses in England and Norway shows not just in his voice but in the authority he brings to the opera’s opening and the Act 4 scenes with Rebecca Black’s Yniold in particular.

The instrumentalists, led by Lucy Russell, first violin of the Laidlaw’s resident string quartet, the Fitzwilliam, have a very busy time of it, two of the violinists doubling on viola, and harpist Sharon Griffiths adding the timpani line to her part. Rooke’s arrangement also makes crucial use of Anne Page’s harmonium, and cuts nothing from the full score. It often sounds as if it might have come from the pen of the French composer himself, and seems very likely to find further productions.

Keith Bruce

Further performances June 17 and 19.

Picture: Rachel Munro as Melisande and James Berry as Golaud (by Viktoria Begg)

Debussy to Scale

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Byre Opera promises a fresh perspective on Pelleas and Melisande with brand new reduced orchestration and straight-talking translation, writes KEN WALTON  

On the face of it, music director Michael Downes and his Byre Opera team at St Andrews University seem to have set themselves an impossible challenge: to distill one of opera’s most psychologically intense libretti and musical scores down to chamber music dimensions, while also translating its mellifluous French narrative into plain English. 

Yet that’s exactly what they’ve done to Debussy’s symbolist opera Pelleas and Melisande, which the company performs this week in a reduced score specially created by composer Matthew Rooke and to a newly commissioned translation by novelist Janice Galloway. It’s a momentous occasion on several fronts. 

The production, directed by Kally Lloyd-Jones, marks Byre Opera’s first live production since 2019; it’s the first opera to be staged in the university’s new £14m Laidlaw Music Centre, and this new chamber version of Debussy’s landmark opera (first performed in its original form in 1902 with celebrated Aberdeen soprano Mary Garden as Melisande) is also the first ever re-scored version, permitted by its release from copyright in 2019, 70 years after the death of Maurice Maeterlinck, from whose play the libretto was shaped.

It was in a chance conversation in 2015 between Downes and Rooke in Berwick-upon-Tweed, where the latter was director of the border town’s Maltings Theatre, that Downes shared his wish to do a reduced Pelleas, and Rooke revealed that he had already started to make such an arrangement. 

‘We resolved then that we would stage the piece, though we could not have imagined it would take more than seven years to do so. Much of this delay, of course, has been due to Covid-19, which was for this project both immensely frustrating and highly productive, since it gave us the opportunity to test, refine and improve our new version in a way we could not otherwise have done,” Downes writes in an explanatory programme note. “The delay has also allowed us to present our Pelleas in the McPherson Recital Room, ensuring that our singers’ voices and Matthew’s orchestration are heard to best advantage.”

Also key to this production is Jonathan May, head of vocal studies at St Andrews and Byre Opera’s company manager, who has coached the student cast. The biggest challenge, he says, has been “the conversational nature of this piece”. “It’s like an escalator that just keeps moving. There’s very little structure. It’s a very challenging sound world to get used to, especially for such young voices.”

In that respect Rooke’s scaled-down orchestration has been advantageous. “If we accept that Debussy’s full score is like a wraparound blanket, this is more a cushion than a blanket,” May suggests. “But Matthew has done such an extraordinary job in maintaining richness in the texture, helped by the addition of a harmonium within the ensemble. As a result, the singers lose nothing in terms of instrumental support, but actually gain by not always having to cut through a big orchestra.”

Then there was Downes’ belief that the work should be presented in English, no easy task when the linguistic nuances between French and English are so fundamentally different. He approached Janice Galloway, a writer of proven musical sensitivity (she studied music at university, was librettist for Sally Beamish’s opera Monster, and in her novel Clara wrote a highly-acclaimed  fictionalised account of the life of Clara Schumann) whom he says “produced a libretto that is wonderfully fresh and contemporary without ever jarring with Debussy’s music.”

May, who is married to Galloway, offers some further insight. “Janice’s first reaction was ‘I can’t possibly do this, it’s not how I write’.” Persuaded to continue, however, he reckons the outcome actually adds to the power of an opera in which the characters, in French, rarely say what they mean. “Janice has succeeded in making the characters’ intentions clearer; they express more definite opinions, even if that has meant using the odd Scottish-ism to get the point across – at one point a character exclaims, ‘it hurted me’.”

Downes conducts three performances of Pelleas and Melisande this week (15, 17 & 19 June) with a cast consisting mainly of St Andrews students, joined by one outsider, baritone James Berry, who sings the role of Golaud. Sets are by the Scots-based theatre designer and filmmaker Janis Hart. Lucy Russell, lead violinist with the Fitzwilliam Quartet, heads up the 12-piece chamber ensemble.

Further information and tickets available at www.byretheatre.com