Tag Archives: pekka kuusisto

SCO / Kuusisto / Dreamers’ Circus

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Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

It is customarily Pekka Kuusisto who springs the surprises on his annual visits to direct the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, but in Edinburgh on Tuesday – where his popularity with the audience assured not a seat was unsold – the crowd turned the tables.

Kuusisto’s programme also involved Dreamers’ Circus, a three-piece Nordic traditional music group who have been appearing at Glasgow’s Celtic Connections festival for over a decade but, surprisingly, were making their Edinburgh debut.

Pianist Nikolaj Busk introduced their second half opener as “a tune from Switzerland from 1532”. It turned out to be from the Geneva hymn book and known to Scots from its number in their old hymnary as The Auld Hundreth, All People That On Earth Do Dwell. The Queen’s Hall duly treated it as a Lutheran chorale and joined in, to the initial surprise, but gratification of the band.

Beethoven would have recognised the response as exactly what Bach would have expected from a church congregation, and that was fitting because the whole evening was built around Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.

The much-quoted summary of that work by Richard Wagner as “the apotheosis of the dance” is not especially useful to understanding it, and even putting that remark in the context of its entire sentence, as the programme did, doesn’t help a great deal. What Kuusisto did was to parse the symphony, preceding and interspersing its movements with music from the trio, much of it of their own composition, although traditional in style, and a fair amount of it orchestrated.

Those arrangements for the SCO to play were a million miles from Beethoven, and not only in details that meant the horn and brass players discarding their period instruments for modern ones. In style they were a little like the film scores of Bryce Dessner or Jonny Greenwood, and the most interesting of them, played before the interval and after the second movement of the Beethoven, transcended its song basis to become a fascinating contemporary passacaglia with a filigree piano figure.

When performing on their own, Dreamers’ Circus were always fascinating, Busk playing accordion as much as the Steinway, Rune Tonsgaard Sorenson the violin soloist of the night, and cittern-player Ale Carr, who played with Kuusisto and the SCO in a similar excursion on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons two years ago, doubling on fiddle himself. Small wonder the conductor felt able to concentrate on directing the orchestra, only picking up his own fiddle to join in the symphony’s boisterous stop-start rhythmic fourth movement.

And hugely exciting that last movement was, while the stop-start nature of this performance of Beethoven 7 never really impaired appreciation of the detail of Kuusisto’s individual reading of the score, full of colour with interesting pauses and tempo adjustments.

Even the separation of the end of the Scherzo from the Allegro con brio finale, which looked potentially problematic, worked, and the prefacing of the opening movement made a very different listen of its slow start before the symphony bursts into vigorous life. In this performance the slow march of the second movement was never likely to seem at all funereal.

As well as the featured soloists, plaudits should go to two of the guests in the orchestra ranks, Frenchman Yann Thenet at first oboe and American Nivanthi Karunaratne, whose playing of the demanding low line on natural horn made the third movement.

Keith Bruce

Concert repeated at Glasgow City Halls tonight and Aberdeen Music Hall on Saturday.

Portrait of Pekka Kuusisto by Kaapo Kamu

SCO / Kuusisto & Crawford-Phillips

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SCO / Kuusisto & Crawford-Phillips

City Halls, Glasgow

Entitled “Parabola” for reasons that were never entirely clear, this concert was all that survived of this SCO season’s planned residency with the orchestra by charismatic Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto – and pianist Simon Crawford-Phillips, with whom he shared conducting responsibilities as well as soloist status, was equally essential to its realisation.

The programme had its own arc, certainly, beginning with the young Benjamin Britten’s Young Apollo, from 1939, and ending with the mature Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No 88, from 150 years earlier, with three contrasting works by living composers in between. Everything  in it was well worth the hearing, and immaculately performed. If the works shared anything at all it was a rigorous sense of purpose, not a note wasted or added as superfluous garnish, and none over-long.

It’s assumed that Britten withdrew the vibrant compact tone poem for piano, string quartet and string orchestra Young Apollo because it celebrated a pre-Peter Pears infatuation. Separated from that context by the better part of a century and 50 years on from the composer’s death, it shines as a brilliantly-shaped use of its ingredients as well a showcase for a virtuoso pianist.

Crawford-Phillips was just as impressive on the podium for the work that followed, Marchentanze by Thomas Ades, his meticulous direction revealing a work ideally suited to Kuusisto and the SCO. The first movement’s crisp dialogue between the violin soloist and the winds (with guest players at first clarinet and oboe) was followed by a gorgeous melancholy folk fiddle tune, a third movement evocation of birdsong as eloquent as any, and a rhythmically-challenging finale that recalled the late ’60s experiments of jazz trumpeter Don Ellis.

After the interval, Crawford-Phillips conducted Sally Beamish’s Whitescape, co-commissioned by the SCO with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, and associated with her Frankenstein opera, Monster. The details here were in the percussion, mortar and pestle and strummed upright piano among Louise Lewis Goodwin’s armoury, alongside contrabassoon and overblown flute.

Kuusisto led the orchestra for that piece and did so as well as directing in the Haydn, which emerged as fresh and original as anyone who has heard his way with earlier music might expect. There were some terrific contradictory touches in his interpretation – sturm und drang in the Largo, and abrasive natural horn from returned former SCO principal Alec Frank-Gemmill in the third movement.

The most unusual work of the evening, however, was the one bang in the middle, closing the first half. Timo Andres is a Brooklyn-based post-minimalist and he was in the balcony to hear his Piano Concerto “The Blind Banister”. With Kuusisto conducting and Crawford-Phillips at the keyboard, it began in a manner that owed something to Philip Glass but quickly established a direction very much of its own.

As in the Beamish, the percussion section was crucial to the sound-world, and the conversation between soloist and strings also recalled the Britten. Kuusisto’s more organic conducting style suited the work, while the pianist’s cadenza before the closing third movement was bravura stuff – partly inspired by the one Beethoven wrote to rejuvenate his Second Piano Concerto apparently, but very much the composer’s own.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Pekka Kuusisto at Glasgow City Halls by Alan Peebles

SCO / Kuusisto

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City Halls, Glasgow

Time and Tides was no ordinary Scottish Chamber Orchestra gig, nor was it a typical SCO audience. But then, when has the versatile Finnish musical phenomenon Pekka Kuusisto – violinist, director and funky entertainer – ever made claims to doing things the traditional way? In this, the last of his current four-programme residency with the orchestra, it was anything but business as usual.

Nor were we short-changed. As well as two astonishing UK premieres – former SCO associate composer Anna Clyne’s violin concerto and a new song cycle by Helen Grime, written 2023 and 2021 respectively – Kuusisto, doubling on violin and miniature harmonium, teamed up with Scots fiddler Aidan O’Rourke to introduce some of the traditional melodies used by Clyne in her concerto. Thus, perhaps, the reason for the wider-sourced audience, one that was encouragingly young and vocal. And there was more besides.

First and foremost, this was a programme devised with arched intent. It began with a hint of provocation, the curved-ball dissonant writing of Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür as witnessed in his orchestral piece Lighthouse. Its combination of harshness, meatiness and slithery translucence, also its retro-Baroque inflexions, makes for an atmospheric gem. Under Kuusisto, and with the assured SCO strings, it had a beguiling, delirious impact. 

At the other end of the evening came Einojuhani Rautavaara’s avian curiosity Cantus Arcticus, surreal in the way he overlays a luscious orchestral landscape with a cacophony of recorded birdcalls, but also a kind of traditional night cap bringing us back to earth after the concert’s central highlights.

As previously mentioned, Kuusisto’s plan was to ease us into the Clyne Concerto – Time and Tides – by way of a stylistic gear change, he and O’Rourke intimately calming the air with folk tunes from Scotland and Finland, joined ultimately by some upper string backing in close harmony. If physically it wasn’t the smoothest transition, it served its purpose, sharpening the sensitivities required to appreciate the multiplicity of Clyne’s folk-inspired creation. 

Written especially for Kuusisto, his eccentricities were exploited – his knack of whistling while playing, his unlimited vocabulary of violin/non-violin skills – and built into a glittering suite of five movements that embraced everything from zany pastiche and wit to reflective soulfulness and airy pastoralism. Within this, the integrity of Clyne’s chosen folk songs – from Scotland, Finland and America – remained hauntingly intact, especially when the players added their own singing voices to the closing mix.

Helen Grimes’ It Will Be Spring Soon – optimistic texts by Philip Larkin, Sandra Cisneros and Jane Hirshfield set to luminous, opulent music – was delivered engagingly by one of its dedicatees, soprano Ruby Hughes (the other being violinist Malin Broman, whose obligato role was conveniently taken here by Kuusisto). Written with echoes of Britten, Grimes creates a magical relationship between the sprightly strings/harp scoring and the soprano’s controlled intensity. 

Just how effective the foyer presence of DJ Dolphin Boy (Andy Levy) was during the interval likely depends on personal experience, but with him tucked almost anonymously into a tight corner along from the interval drinks, I’m guessing his efficient efforts may have passed some people by. Good idea; more a venue issue perhaps.

Ken Walton

SCO / Kuusisto

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City Halls, Glasgow

THREE centuries on from its first publication, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons has withstood any number of revisions and re-interpretations. At the end of May, the Perth Festival of the Arts has a concert by Il Giardino d’Amore which includes the responses of Astor Piazzola and Max Richter alongside the original, and Nigel Kennedy, who took it to the top of the charts in 1989, revisited it again a decade ago.

Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto is 20 years Kennedy’s junior, and his soloist foil in this concert with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Swedish cittern-player Ale Carr, is not yet 35. They share the sort of eclectic musical experience straddling the classical and traditional music worlds that made this version of the old warhorse work as fresh and vital as anyone might wish.

With the SCO string players around them, mostly standing, Kuusisto and Carr turned the suite into a folk session, combined with the rhythmic rigour of the best baroque ensemble practice. With the support of the SCO front-deskers, Marcus Barcham Stevens (concert-master this week), Max Mandel, Philip Higham and Gordon Bragg, Kuusisto’s direction moved seamlessly between the music Vivaldi wrote and a varied selection of other tunes, some from Nordic traditional sources as advertised, but others from nearer home or familiar in the concert hall. Unpicking this tapestry would be complex and pointless – the intention was to present the result as a whole, Kuusisto’s “shoplifting”, as he styled it, creating additional cadenzas for the 18th century Venetian suite.

Kuusisto is not the first musician to think that Vivaldi might benefit from the addition of a rhythm guitar, but Carr’s contributions on cittern went far beyond that, looking every bit the axe-hero in his leather trousers. The Finn’s additions to the score also included some choreographed page-turning and humming by the ensemble and gleefully embraced a car revving in Albion Street outside.

The Italian composer’s representation of bird song in The Four Seasons shaped the rest of the concert programme. Only listeners as old as this writer will immediately associate the opening of Respighi’s suite Gli ucelli (The Birds), which itself repurposes earlier music, with Arthur Negus and the BBC TV antiques show Going for a Song.

When Grieg’s Holburg Suite is so regularly trotted out, it is strange that we don’t hear this colourful work more often. It is a perfect partner for the Vivaldi, full of colourful pictorial writing, with lovely solos for flute and oboe in particular and harp and celeste decorating the superb orchestration you would expect from this composer.

The icing on the cake of this clever programme was Andrea Tarrodi’s Birds of Paradise. Daughter of trombonist and composer Christian Lindberg, the Swedish composer has, in fact, written a Four Seasons of her own. The orchestrated version of Birds of Paradise, originally for strings, requires some extended techniques on strings and winds alongside bowed percussion to produce startlingly accurate ornithological imitation.

It begins, contrastingly, with specific subdivisions among the string players in a structure of overlapping phrases that alludes to American minimalism but produces a very different sonic result. As a contemporary addition to the musical aviary the piece was a fascinating seven minutes.

Keith Bruce

Pictured: Ale Carr

SCO / Emelyanychev

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City Halls, Glasgow

The music commentary cliché “luxury casting” is usually wheeled out to describe starry concert performances of operas like those that have distinguished Edinburgh International Festivals in recent years, but it seems appropriate to dust it off for this concert, smaller in scale but no less spectacular in success.

As part of what is shaping up to be a very memorable 50th anniversary season, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra has a three-concert residency from Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto, and he will also be directing the other musicians onstage in the other two. For the first, however, the SCO’s equally individual and idiosyncratic principal conductor Maxim Emelyanychev was in charge (he is very rarely “on the podium”), only ceding that position to Kuusisto for a specific moment around the cadenza of Magnus Lindberg’s Violin Concerto.

If there were any risks in having two such powerful personalities share the platform, the result was only positive. The Lindberg is a very clever, demanding work, using a Mannheim Mozart ensemble to create uncompromisingly 21stcentury music, and it requires both a rigorous strict time conductor and a virtuoso soloist – being both at the same time would be impossible.

Although he did not give the New York premiere, Kuusisto is surely the perfect soloist for the work, dealing with its technical demands – not least in that cadenza – almost playfully, but also finding emotional depth alongside its theatricality.

There was an element of theatre in the presentation of the entire programme, albeit a subtle one. From the positioning of the players for the four movement suite of music from Faure’s Pelléas et Mélisande, basses at the back and clarinets off to the right, through to the extra strings added for Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony, the music of his Eighth String Quartet in the 1967 arrangement by Rudolf Barshai, this was a concert always in a state of flux and without a single superfluous ingredient.

That was most obvious in the smallest ensemble of the evening, for Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks, where 15 musicians huddled around Emelyanychev, unusually perched on a stool, in the centre of the stage. Here that starry cast also included the five wind soloists, but elsewhere the spotlight fell as often on the strings, with cellist Philip Higham having a particularly prominent – and practically perfect – night.

The programme was a profound repertoire statement from a conductor, and indeed an orchestra, more readily associated with earlier music. It was, beyond debate, world class in execution and a magnificent statement of the range of the SCO’s capabilities.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Christopher Bowen

Taking the long view

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As the Scottish Chamber Orchestra celebrates its 50th birthday, long-serving viola player Steve King looks back – and forward – with Keith Bruce

It is one of the mysteries of music that orchestras – in Prague and Vienna, but also in Edinburgh and Glasgow – have an identifiable sound that survives changes of personnel over the decades. It is usually assumed that curatorship of that individuality is in the hands of the players that have been there longest while conductors, even those retained on contract, come and go.

As the SCO marks the golden anniversary of its first concerts with a 50th birthday programme, Steve King has just celebrated occupying the viola number four chair for 40 of those years. Not that he is one for looking back wistfully to earlier eras.

“I love the SCO now more than I’ve ever done,” he says. “It’s a brilliant orchestra. When we have extra players they always comment on how friendly it is and how passionate everyone is about making music. With our principal conductor at the moment, Maxim [Emelyanychev], it is a real joy.”

“He’s an amazing playing musician as well as a conductor, and he never stops. Some conductors are quite precious (mentioning no names) but Maxim is just fun. He rehearses in such a way that we really understand what he is looking for, although he is always searching and never content. And that’s the way it should be, I think.

“And of course, as he develops – because he’s still very young – it becomes more interesting. Come the concert he may do things differently but because we’re so with him, it works. It’s exciting and good for the music.

“He’s doing stuff that challenges what a chamber orchestra can do. He appreciates flexibility and openness to change. I’ve seen quite a few principal conductors and hundreds of conductors over my 40 years and he’s definitely the best.”

Now that’s clear, it is possible to persuade King to reminisce a little, and two conductors of earlier in the SCO’s history rate a special mention.

“The Finnish conductor Jukka Pekka Saraste became Principal Conductor not long after I joined, and he was great. He is exactly the same age as me and we got on very well. We did a lot of good touring and recording with him.

“And my idol for many years was Charles Mackerras. We made recordings of the Mozart operas with him and then did concert performances at the Edinburgh Festival. At the beginning of a two-and-a-half week recording project he would spend  ten minutes enthusing about the piece and the original score he’d studied in Prague. He had a tough reputation but he trusted the musicians. I was so lucky to be part of all of that.”

King is from Hertfordshire and, along with his brother, who became a jazz trumpet player, first studied music on Saturday mornings at the Royal Academy in London as a teenager. When he left school he went to the Royal Northern College of Music and, although he was offered postgraduate studies and work with the Manchester Camerata, then elected to stretch his wings with a job in Reykjavik in the Iceland Symphony Orchestra.

Returning to the UK, he was a schoolteacher for a couple of years before applying and winning the job with the SCO. The chamber orchestra has always been a freelance band, however, and like many of his colleagues King has had other work alongside. He led the Quartz string quartet, which grew out of the SCO’s education work and also included Bernard Doherty, once co-leader of the BBC SSO, SCO violinist Lorna McLaren, who also clocked up 40 years before retiring in 2018, and the late Kevin McCrae, composer and SCO principal cello.

And for 24 and half years, King was Director of Music at Edinburgh’s Heriot Watt University – encouraging and developing music-making among students and staff at an institution that does not offer music as a course of study. He stood down from that post at the end of 2022 having overseen a response to the pandemic that kept an audience of two and half thousand people online engaged with one another through sharing their “musical moments”.

If that concluded his tenure at the university, he is as proud of the project with which it began, a contemporary music commissioning initiative that produced 60 pieces, from Scotland-based composers and through a competition for unpublished composers working in Scotland. The common inspiration for them all was the Inchcolm Antiphoner, a few pages of early Celtic plainchant from the abbey on the island in the Forth that King can see from his home in Dalgety Bay.

The compositions were workshopped at residential gatherings in Highland Scotland before being performed at Iona Abbey and St Giles Cathedral. That all seems to chime with the Englishman’s enthusiasm for his adopted home – as well as his Fife home, King has a long lease on a bolt-hole on Loch Shiel.

“The cottage is half way down the loch, on the water’s edge, only accessible by boat and completely off-grid. We go there for about 12 weeks of the year: it is a good place to chill, cook and write music. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea but I like the challenge of living there, and the wildlife is amazing.”

Now 67, his quartet and university post may be in the past, but King still conducts the Dunblane Chamber Orchestra, which convenes twice a year for concerts, and he has no plans to leave the SCO.

“I’m loving the SCO too much to think about retiring. If I felt that my playing started to drop a bit, I would drop out, but we’ve had members play well into their 70s. There are only four of us in the violas, so you can’t ride along, you have to be on the ball all the time.”

It is not just the prospect of more concerts with Emelyanychev that keeps him enthused.

“Our current Associate Composer, Jay Capperauld, is one of the best we’ve ever had in that post. He stands out as being exciting, and he communicates well, and it’s good to see him grow. And violinist Pekka Kuusisto is one of those guys who sees music from a different angle. We see him every year and it is something everyone looks forward to.

“I’ve seen a huge amount of change in the orchestra but some of the young players coming in these days are just stunning. We are currently looking for a number two viola and from the five or six we’ve had on trial it is going to be really difficult to choose.”

The SCO’s 50th birthday concerts are at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh on Thursday and Glasgow’s City Halls on Friday. Maxim Emelyanychev conducts Elena Langer’s suite from her opera Figaro Gets a Divorce and Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony and plays Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos alongside Dmitry Ablogin.

Picture by Christopher Bowen

SCO / Kuusisto

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City Halls, Glasgow

That he styles himself “Fatboy” on social media, and persists with facial hair that is more shipwreck than seafarer, speaks of a character that does not take his vocal ability too seriously, but tenor Allan Clayton’s talent is immense, even if his girth hardly measures up to his Twitter handle.

That employees of Scottish Opera turned out for his appearance with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Finnish violinist and conductor Pekka Kuusisto also spoke of the regard in which he is held in that field. Some of the audience currently packing out that company’s Puccini triple bill would have found tickets available had they ventured to Glasgow’s City Hall on Friday, and heard one of the finest tenors in the world currently.

Kuusisto had provided him with a wonderful programme too. It culminated in Britten’s Les Illuminations, the young composer’s settings of Rimbaud which may have been sung by a soprano originally but clearly reflected his own relationship with tenor Peter Pears. There was a range of colours in Clayton’s delivery of Rimbaud’s free verse that a singer of any voice would have struggled to match, and his French diction was immaculate throughout, even in the slightly startling staccato of “Marine”, which is a long way from chanson.

That is true of much of the snatched phrasing of the poetry, but elsewhere Britten gives it more melodious context. The instrumental Interlude clearly pre-figures those of the opera Peter Grimes and the following Being Beauteous had the bonus for SCO devotees of a solo from cellist Su-a Lee. The dubious optimism of the closing Départ was delivered with such poise that applause almost seemed vulgar.

With Kuusisto’s usual panache, the programme had begun with a more recent work that reflected, if not directly referenced, the Britten. Nico Muhly’s Three Songs for Tenor and Violin uses more recent French poetry in translation, with the middle one an instrumental interlude, a sort of fiddle obligato. The SCO strings had a great deal less to do here, but the drone accompaniment was just as precise as Clayton’s measured vocals.

Muhly’s violin concerto for Kuusisto, entitled Shrink (which may or may not be a US psychotherapy reference), is a very different side of the composer, even if acquaintance with his minimalist predecessors is still audible. The 17 string players in the orchestra for the work are deployed with fascinating precision, the third cello, for example, sometimes playing with the basses. With little or no repetition in either solo line or accompaniment, the musical material, based on three different harmonic intervals, is constantly evolving from the first bar to the last, Kuusisto clearly revelling in his own role.

Haydn’s Symphony 104, the “London”, the last of both the twelve he wrote there and of his vast canon, may be from over two centuries earlier but it was more than just a token piece of familiar music in the programme. When this orchestra plays music of that era, the natural horns and trumpets come with an awareness of all the music that flowed from the composer’s innovations. The wind soloists sparkled as usual, but Kuusisto seemed to find a spaciousness in the string sound that was very much his own.

Keith Bruce

SCO / Kuusisto

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Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

Vermont-born Sam Amidon, who is now settled in the UK with his singer wife Beth Orton, has impeccable taste in collaborators. His relationship with the contemporary classical world dates from early in his career when composer Nico Muhly supplied string arrangements for the American folk songs he recorded. His was the only male voice on the Kronos Quartet’s Folk Songs project, and his own albums have featured guitarist Bill Frisell and one of the last recordings by trumpeter Kenny Wheeler.

Partnership with the similarly-discerning Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra therefore makes perfect sense, even if their collective plan – mixing up four Appalachian folk songs featuring Muhly string arrangements with the four movements of Janacek’s “Kreutzer Sonata” Quartet in an arrangement for string ensemble – looked less than exciting on paper.

In fact it worked rather well, and any damage done to the Janacek was more in the expansion of the forces from the edgy abrasive sound of the quartet to the fuller strings, rather than the introduction of the songs into the mix. The dark tone of the Czech composer’s response to Tolstoy’s story was certainly matched by two murder ballads, a crucifixion hymn and slavery-era children’s game chant, even if the latter, and the concluding banjo-driven ballad were rhythmically comparatively up-beat.

Muhly’s music will be more thoroughly explored in the programme Kuusisto directs next week, but his arrangements – supplemented by some vocalising from the instrumentalists – were the bridge between Amidon’s archival trawl and the Janacek here and that set the theme for the whole evening.

Kuusisto directed the strings from the violin in the first half and had his own virtuoso solo turn immediately after the interval. Missy Mazzoli is best known in Edinburgh for her opera Breaking the Waves, seen in an acclaimed 2019 International Festival production by Scottish Opera. Her solo violin work Dissolve, O My Heart takes its title from an aria in Bach’s St John Passion and its inspiration from the famous Chaconne in his Partita in D Minor. While it swiftly departs from the music of the Partita, it never loses site of it in the rear-view mirror, even if its glissando techniques and use of muted strings are a long way from the 1720s. In much the same way that solo Bach is a staple of the violin soloist’s encore repertoire, this is a work regular concert-goers can surely expect to hear again.

Traditional music from Kuusisto’s homeland runs like a stream through the Third Symphony of Jean Sibelius, a work rarely heard outside of performances of the full cycle of symphonies. Not least because of the delicious melody in the slow movement, this is a shame. More compact in every way than other Sibelius symphonies, it suits the SCO well, even if its more expansive moments probably sounded much better in Friday’s performance at Glasgow’s City Halls. What was crucial in the context of this concert was how Kuusisto the conductor emphasised the folk elements in the opening movement and masterfully managed the finale’s incremental build-up to the final C major chord.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Sam Amidon

Su-a Lee / Dialogues

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(Sky Child Records)

Fiddler, and founder of the Elias String Quarter, Donald Grant hits the nail squarely on the head in his contribution to the booklet with cellist Su-a Lee’s debut album: “The first time I met Su-a it felt like we’d been pals for years. Perhaps everyone feels the same way?”

That straightforward observation would undoubtedly be echoed by all the musicians who have contributed to the musical partnerships that are recorded here – only the final track (the Burns song Ae Fond Kiss) features the cellist on her own. But those 14 collaborators are just the tip of the iceberg. As a long-serving member of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, as a founder of the ground-breaking spin-off group Mr McFall’s Chamber, and in innumerable other contexts, she has been a supremely approachable and generous player, always happy to find time to speak to members of the audience. From South Korea, by way of New York, Su-a Lee has become a crucial part of the Scottish musical infrastructure.

This lockdown project sees her teaming up with a few of those she has worked with in the past – singers Karine Polwart and Julie Fowlis, fiddlers Duncan Chisholm and Pekka Kuusisto, pianists Donald Shaw and James Ross among them – on very carefully chosen repertoire, all quite immaculately recorded and presented as thoughtfully in a visually handsome package.

The three tracks described as “The SetUp” (followed by sections called “The Development” and “The Resolution”) make for a very strong opening, with Shaw’s Baroque Suite followed by duos with bandoneonist Carel Kraayenhof and cellist Natalie Haas. Which excursions are highlights after that will be entirely a matter of personal taste, but Su-a’s collaboration with her husband Hamish Napier is certainly a standout, and his Strathspey and Reel two of the loveliest melodies on the album.

If there is a reservation to be made about Dialogues, it is that the diversity of those opening tracks is not sustained over the whole album, which – not excepting Kuusisto’s contribution – is mainly folk and traditional music-flavoured. Very fine though all the conversations here are, those who have followed Su-a’s eclectic practice over the past three decades know that she is as fluent a player alongside those who work in the jazz and rock fields, and in contemporary classical and so-called “world” music.

Ultimately, then, this volume of Dialogues offers the listener a rich serving of one facet of the versatile Su-a Lee. It therefore makes an eloquent case for further volumes.

Keith Bruce

SCO / Ticciati / Polwart

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City Halls, Glasgow

Recorded for broadcast by BBC Radio 3 on April 1, this collaboration between the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and folk singer/songwriter Karine Polwart has been long in gestation and had a tricky last few weeks before eventually reaching concertgoers. But not only is it well worth the attention of both classical and traditional music-lovers when they have the opportunity to listen in, it must surely be the basis for an album, or the substantial part of one.

The other crucial contributor to its composition is Pippa Murphy, Polwart’s regular collaborator, particularly on the award-winning Edinburgh Festival show Wind Resistance. That was categorised as theatre, but this four-movement work, Seek the Light, is close kin to it, not least because it begins with a song, You Know Where You Are, that also find inspiration in the migratory birds Polwart sees near her Midlothian home.

There are other themes in common, particularly in the third movement’s mix of spoken and sung narrative in a feminist revision of Greek myth A Love Too Loud, closely linked to the navigational use of constellations referenced in that opening song.

In between sits the most “trad” section, The Night Mare, musically redolent of the early Scots composition canon explored by Concerto Caledonia, and the suite ends with a beguiling lullaby, Sleep Now, its chorus melody distinctly East European in flavour and sung by the entire orchestra, as well as – encouraged by Polwart – bolder members of the audience.

Whether that audience was drawn from the fanbase of the chamber orchestra or its guest vocalist was the subject of a show of hands when cellist Su-a Lee introduced the concert. My guess is that there is a good deal of crossover, with many, like myself, having recordings by both at home. And this was, in the best sense, the acceptable face of “cross-over”.

There are many routes the SCO might have chosen to present this new commission. The imaginative one chosen, in consultation with Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto, was to intersperse the sections of Seek the Light with contemporary classical pieces from Scandinavia and the Baltic states, kicking the whole sequence off with the Adagio from Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony. It was a tactic that was an exceptional success, keeping audience ears as sharply tuned as those of the performers.

There were many notable individual ones amongst the orchestra – and Polwart winningly selected a few of her favourites in her own remarks after the interval – but chief among them was Hugo Ticciati, who had stepped into the role mapped out by the absent Kuusisto. His largest contribution was as soloist in violin concerto Distant Light by Peteris Vasks, a huge work in itself that alternates between solo and ensemble, melody and cacophony, fast and slow, soft and loud and was played second from last here.

He was also responsible for inserting into the programme further eloquent recognition by the orchestra of the plight of the people of Ukraine, first clarinet Maximiliano Martin playing the country’s anthem as a brief solo after Polwart’s first song.

The SCO strings showed their superb individual technical range and ensemble coherence in the other two works in the programme. Swede Andrea Tarrodi’s fascinating Birds of Paradise begins in minimalist mode before becoming much more playful in tempo and featuring extraordinary imitation of bird calls, which were then echoed in the opening of Estonian Erkki-Sven Tuur’s Insula Deserta, a hugely evocative score using the sparest number of musicians.

If the music in the programme created imaginative landscapes, stories and ecologies beyond the auditorium, its final choral moments also brought the absent Kuusisto into the hall: I cannot be the only audience member reminded of his memorable encore at the BBC Proms in 2016 that had the Albert Hall joining him in a Finnish folk-song.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Karine Polwart by Suzanne Heffron

SCO / Symbiosis

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To my mind, but probably not in those of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra management and musicians, their guest leader and soloist Pekka Kuusisto or, most pertinently of all, composer Greg Lawson, there is an inescapable irony in the title that has been given to the work that partnership has written, performed and filmed as its cultural contribution to the UN Climate Conference in Scotland this autumn.

In the glory days of Glasgow’s self-confidence as Culture City, the arts activity around COP26 would have been carefully curated, promoted and marketed from an expertly-staffed central office. In 2021, however, everyone has to fend for themselves. National companies and small organisations have all stepped up to make contributions to coincide with the event and mark the occasion, many of them very thoughtful indeed, and often forging new partnerships and premiering new work. You will search in vain, however, for any guide or directory to the artistic side of COP, far less any co-ordination of the programme for the benefit of delegates, activists or interested observers. As a result few of the events are finding the audience they deserve. See Glasgow? See Symbiosis? Not as such.

With the sponsorship support of Aviva Investments, the SCO has commissioned this new piece from the man behind the multi-disciplinary GRIT orchestra and former principal second fiddle with the BBC SSO, Greg Lawson, and – as the composer makes clear-ish in the introductory film segment of the package – his hope of Symbiosis is between humankind and the natural landscape.

The orchestra has built on the expertise it acquired during lockdown, when its online chamber music concerts were some of the most attractive produced in Scotland, to make this short film of the 15-minute piece, preceded by footage of Lawson in his home environment at Moniaive in Dumfries and Galloway at work on it.

The countryside looks terrific, and Lawson’s more practical observations on the reality of turning the inspiration to be found there into a score are well worth hearing, but the meat of the work is the performance, in a beautifully-lit studio, by the strings of the SCO, led from the violin by Finnish star Kuusisto.

Symbiosis is in five neatly-dovetailed movements, beginning and ending with meditations on the nature of time. Anyone expecting Lawson to mine Scottish traditional music for his material, as the GRIT orchestra often has, may be surprised. The themes here owe more to the scales and cadences of Middle Eastern music, and perhaps to Lawson the violinist’s work with the small group Moishe’s Bagel.

The gentle, slow beginning takes a darker tone in the third and fourth movements when “Foreboding and Trouble” leads into “Waltzing to Oblivion”. That triple-time section is the undoubted highlight of the composition and perhaps likely to find a life of its own outside Symbiosis, but it did present the composer with a dilemma about how to end the work, whether as a prophet of doom or on a more optimistic note.

What makes the whole package is the way Lawson side-steps this difficulty by handing the baton to Kuusisto, who supplies a wonderful improvisation – an extended cadenza in a sense – over a simple chordal figure as the last movement. Somehow it is clearly up-beat, but it also explicitly states that the future is in the hands of each of us, individually.

Keith Bruce

Symbiosis is available to watch free on the SCO’s YouTube channel.

BBC SSO/Carneiro

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City Halls, Glasgow

Popular Portuguese conductor Joana Carneiro, who directed this live broadcast season-opener by the BBC SSO – its first concert for a live audience in its home venue since March 12, 2020 – has no position with a UK orchestra. Might she take on this one, with its undeclared apparent vacancy in the top job with the continuing absence of chief conductor Thomas Dausgaard?

There is clearly a great rapport there already. Carneiro conducted a fine SSO concert of Sir James MacMillan’s music at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival and was in the pit for Scottish Opera’s production of Nixon in China, some of the players from which joined guests from the RSNO in this BBC Scottish line-up.

It was luxury casting indeed to have Carneiro joined by violinist Pekka Kuusisto for what was a clever celebration of the music of his native Finland to launch the orchestra’s return. Starting with a blast of Bach from a brass quartet, a very carefully-constructed programme featured the music of contemporary composer Magnus Lindberg and culminated in the last symphony of Sibelius. The brass was a continuing punctuating feature of the evening, whether in the choir stalls above the orchestra or offstage for Beethoven’s Leonora No.3, but it was leader Laura Samuel’s strings who were the sectional heroes of the day, from their combative then seductive dialogue with Kuusisto’s solo voice in Lingdberg’s First Violin Concerto through to the striking unison ensemble in the Symphony No. 7 of Jean Sibelius.

The Bach chorale that opened the concert began a sequence that ran through Lindberg’s arrangement of that material for full orchestra in his 2001 Chorale to his three-movement concerto, also scored for a very compact string section of 25 players. Early on they swamp the soloist just the same, until an accommodation is reached and Kuusisto was heard giving full expression to a fiery cadenza.

There are echoes of Sibelius in both the blossoming to resolution of Lindberg’s Chorale and the finale movement of the concerto, and the choice of the Beethoven to open the second half (after an actual interval, albeit with no bars open) also spoke of influences, even if the storm in the overture is perhaps more clearly heard in the Finnish composer’s final orchestral work, Tapiola.

Self-evident through all this cross-referencing cleverness was that this supremely versatile orchestra had a conductor of equal range on the podium. She may not be quite as animated as the SCO’s Maxim Emelyanychev, but Carneiro is a very physical conductor with a vast vocabulary of eloquent arm and hand gestures that leave her intentions in little doubt and her tempo and dynamic instructions absolutely clear. It would be a fine thing indeed if the SSO was to sign her up.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Joana Carneiro (BBC/Alan Peebles)