Tag Archives: Nordic Music Days

Nordic Music Days: SCO / Manze

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City Halls, Glasgow

A programme of new music is not what Scottish Chamber Orchestra patrons have come to expect from the visits from Andrew Manze, but perhaps this contribution by the orchestra to the Nordic Music Days weekend suggests a broader remit since his appointment as Principal Guest Conductor.

The obvious reason for his presence on the podium was the Scottish premiere of Swede Anders Hillborg’s Viola Concerto, as he also conducted its first performance three years ago by its dedicatee, Lawrence Power, with the Royal Liverpool Phil.

The virtuoso violist is in a class of his own, and the work demands all his skill as it knocks any preconceptions about the capabilities and tonal colour of his instrument out of the park. As Manze mentioned, the work’s Covid-era composition can be heard in much of the writing, particularly the furious “Rage” of the opening movement, which has a reprise at the end.

It is redolent of Appalachia as much as Scandinavia, and there is an appeal to the work that suggests a global audience in mind, not least the closing string crescendo’s resemblance to The Beatles’ A Day in the Life, accompanied by a vocal cry from the players. That Hillborg took his bow wearing an Abbey Road album cover t-shirt was presumably no coincidence.

Behind the frantic bowing of the solo part, there is some very specific scoring throughout the concerto from slapped string basses to sustained chords on piano and SCO principal viola Max Mandel’s drone note beneath Power’s later cadenza.

The composer’s Swedish contemporary Madeleine Isaksson provided the short work that began the second half. Flows (Tornio) is the central part of a geographical triptych and much more recognisably “Nordic” with a compelling narrative arc in which its rich scoring dissolved to something much simpler.

There is nothing simple about James MacMillan’s Symphony No.2, which closed the concert. It is 25 years since the SCO gave its premiere and the piece is not ready to give up all its secrets yet. It’s a peculiar sort of symphony, the main course of the second movement framed by two much briefer – although hardly slighter – sections. Much of it would not readily be identified as bearing the composer’s signature at all and the audible influences range dizzyingly wide.

To the Wagner, Boulez and Berio he acknowledges, one could add Shostakovich and Messiaen, and – much less predictably – hints of Ravel and even a few bars akin to John Williams’ score for Star Wars. Manze brought an expansive intelligence to this performance which kept revealing its more fascinating depths. It is well worth tuning into the BBC Radio 3 broadcast of the concert for this work as much as anything else in the programme.

The composition that is likely to keep most listeners by their wireless sets, however, is the work that opened the evening. Jay Capperauld’s Death in a Nutshell was first performed by the SCO three years ago (shortly after the premieres of both the Swedish composers’ pieces, curiously), with MacMillan conducting. Capperauld was then made SCO Associate Composer (as MacMillan has once been), and has made an exemplary contribution in that role thus far. If this work was a factor in his appointment that would be no surprise.

Perfect Hallowe’en fare, its inspiration in the dioramas of crime scenes made by Frances Glessner Lee is remarkable and the programme notes which accompany it are a compelling read. They are far from compulsory, however, as the six-movement work is simply terrific music, and its Cluedo/Hitchcock vibe, complete with hints of Herrmann, comes with bits of theatre (percussionist Louise Goodwin’s claw hammer) and some glorious melodic material, often to match the grisliest stories.

Keith Bruce

This concert was recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Wednesday November 6, available thereafter on BBC Sounds.

Pictured: Jay Capperauld

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

Nordic Music Journeys

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New Auditorium, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Later this year from 29 October and 3 November, a four-day festival in Glasgow, Nordic Music Days, will present the work of composers from the Nordic regions and Scotland, exploring close cultural connections, but just as importantly bringing us up to date with the pattern of current creative activity in these regions. With wider representation at Aberdeen’s sound festival (23-27 Oct) and a related Glasgow University-hosted conference on 29-30 Oct, the entire concentration of activity amounts to a 10-day collaborative bonanza.

It doesn’t stop there. The project’s Scottish curator, horn player and arts impresario Andy Saunders, has plans to embrace wider-linked activity in the lead-up. Last Saturday’s Nordic Music Journeys – three back-to-back hour-long concerts at the RSNO’s excellent rehearsal auditorium in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall – served as the all-important, to some extent defining, launch event.

It’s aim was to give a platform to new Swedish and Scottish music, performed respectively by Sweden’s Gageego! ensemble and Scotland’s Hebrides Ensemble, both flexible groups capable of multiple configurations, thereby ensuring varied programming. Gageego!, under its director Fredrik Burstedt, performed the two outer programmes; Hebrides took the central spot. A smattering of electro-acoustic works throughout widened the listening experience.

Nor was the event simply about performance. It was fascinating, between concerts, to participate in a peripheral speed dating session, designed to bring the composers into contact with industry colleagues and promoters, even allowing journalists like your intrepid VoxCarnyx scribblers to update themselves on the contemporary music scene in Sweden. The buzz was palpable, Saunders announcing the end of each four-minute “dating session” with an impertinent blast of his natural horn.

As for the music itself, the emphasis was on individual brevity, which naturally afforded a broad coverage of styles and approaches. 

Concert 1 by Gageego! opened sotto voce, with the quiet sensuality and suppressed intimacy of Benjamin Staern’s From Hilma Scenes, before treading wilder waters with the sinewy, provocative complexities of Henrik Denerin’s Collide and acid clarity of Mika Pelo’s Abandoned, inspired by his and his son’s “urban explorations” of hauntingly abandoned city spaces still discoverable in post-unification Berlin. 

Electro-acoustic contributions included Mirjam Telly’s Apparitions, rather like the restless product of an electronic toy box; and Time’s Arrow by Lars Bröndum, effectively throwback postured performance art (with the composer at the controls) in the manner of a Stockhausen tribute act. 

While Gageego! allowed the composers a moment to introduce each of their pieces – some pointlessly reading what was in the programme note – Hebrides, in the central concert, were more streamlined with their delivery of the Scottish repertoire. Aileen Sweeney’s moody Siku found lone cellist and ensemble director William Conway as dimly lit as the shadowy atmospherics of Sweeney’s evocative music, segueing into the nature calls and Gaelic soundscape of Fraser MacBeath’s electronic work, Mar gum biodh an teine air do chraiceann. 

Glasgow University lecturer Jane Stanley’s Lalla Rookh followed, its combination of words (a letter written in 1874 by William Thomson, Lord Kelvin to his sister Elizabeth in 1874) and natural horn (played by Saunders) evoking a lively sonic illumination to the spoken text. The earthy substantiveness of Gemma MacGregor’s Betrayal, excerpted from her 2017 St Magnus Festival opera The Story of Magnus Erlendsson, found the perfect complement in Fergus Hall’s intimately sensitised Laig Beach for solo violin. 

Beyond the visceral originality of Finn O’Hare’s ääni (the most imaginative and proportionally satisfying of all the electronic works), and the desperately disturbing textures of Rylan Gleave’s Heartstrings, Oliver Searle’s skilfully woven Harbour Dreams, from his Dalriada Trio, brought this Scots-themed concert to a distinguished conclusion.

Gageego!’s closing programme furthered the Swedish cause with another cocktail of varied styles. Marie Samuelsson’s The Lion was surprisingly effervescent, like a skittish caricature of the true beast. A long-titled electronic work by Sune Mattias Emanuelsson, built around deconstructed medieval chant, seemed a little loose-limbed, unfocused in its intent. Ylva Fred’s Motor Music for piano quartet trod fertile, filigree ground and a final adrenalin rush that stopped just short of minimalist rock, against which Madelaine Isaksson’s Capsuled Time seemed powerfully ruminative and claustrophobic.

But the most interesting voice in this final programme was that of Alfred Jimenenz, whose With Voice for flute, cello and piano proved utterly compelling. Its deliberate constraint, expressive intensity and the sheer boldness of its techniques (rarely did the pianist actually use the piano keys!) was mesmerisingly original and profoundly impactful.

Ken Walton 

Keep up to date with Nordic Music Days 2024 at www.nordicmusicdays.org