Tag Archives: Perth Festival

Perth Festival: VOCES8

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St John’s Kirk, Perth

The members  of VOCES8 are too young (even sole original one, Barnaby Smith) to remember, but during their early ascendancy, The Beatles’ songwriting skills were favourably compared with those of Franz Schubert by the music critic of The Times.

So it was a nice conceit to bracket the German composer’s 1822 Schiller-setting Liebe, sung by four male voices from the octet, with a sextet version of Free As A Bird, the John Lennon song which the other Fab Four unearthed to add to the first volume of the Anthology reissues in 1995.

The segue was, however, one of only two sequences that survived from this small chamber choir’s planned programme, the other being the pairing of their equally well-known version of Kate Rusby’s Underneath the Stars and Joshua Pacey’s more recent arrangement of Danny Boy.

The recital they gave was an interesting answer to the question baritone Christopher Moore told us they are often asked: what does such a small unaccompanied group of singers do if one of their number is not in tip-top health.

Here it was one of the sopranos who took as limited a part as possible in the proceedings, and the repertoire was adjusted to take account for that. The result was an evening that leaned much more on the lighter side of the VOCES8 back catalogue.

It was a little briefer, but no less coherent, although the concert’s title, Give Me Your Stars, became a nonsense as it was taken from young composer Lucy Walker’s setting of words by American poet Sarah Teasdale, which, like Stardust by the ensemble’s composer-in-residence Taylor Scott Davis, we never heard.

But if those contemporary works written for the group were missing, the complexities of Renaissance polyphony were still there in the opening Regina Caeli by Victoria and William Byrd’s Praise our Lord, all ye Gentiles and devotional music still ended the first half with Holst’s Nunc Dimittis now preceded by Bobby McFerrin’s reworking of The 23rd Psalm and Arvo Part’s The Deer’s Cry, both masterpieces of elegant simplicity.

Apart from Eric Whitacre’s All Seems Beautiful to Me, and a very brief taste of Ward Swingle’s Bach at the start of the second half, the rest of the music was more pop, but brilliantly arranged and sung. The octet’s fondness for combining two songs in one featured in Jim Clements’ version of Bond themes For Your Eyes Only and You Only Live Twice, and Alexander L’Estrange’s of Fly Me To The Moon and Come Fly With Me.

The latter sat in the middle of the ensemble’s closing “jazz” sequence, which was really nothing of the kind as every note was precisely notated and rehearsed in the fine arrangements: of improvisation, there was none.

It is the detail of those settings that always fascinates. VOCES8 contributed their singular sound to Paul Simon’s most recent album, Seven Psalms, which explained the inclusion of Australian Naomi Crellin’s arrangement of Homeward Bound. In amongst its complexities it was still possible to hear the original harmonies of the Simon and Garfunkel hit properly given their place.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Andy Staples

Perth Festival: Secret Byrd / Ayoub Sisters

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St John’s Kirk, Perth/Perth Concert Hall

COME August, the Edinburgh International Festival will see the new collaboration by Owain Park’s precision vocal group Gesualdo Six and American director Bill Barclay’s Concert Theatre Works, Death of Gesualdo, in the Queen’s Hall.

So it was helpful that Perth Festival hosted two performances of the partnership’s previous show, Secret Byrd, created for the 400th anniversary of the death of composer William Byrd in 2023. It was also a major undertaking for director Helen Band and her volunteer board, who had to source almost all the props and staging and transform the city centre St John’s Kirk for the production – as well as masterminding the front-of-house arrangements for what was a superb promenade show.

With viol consort Fretwork providing the instrumental interludes from Byrd’s catalogue, the chief musical ingredients were the four and five-part Mass settings he wrote for clandestine services, as a Recusant Catholic himself. Hearing such powerful a cappella singing in the Kirk’s intimate acoustic was an utter joy, and – although they were referring to suitably antique-looking scores – the costumed choristers clearly know this music backwards now and blend together beautifully.

Secret Byrd is much more than a concert, the whole point being to recreate the tension and the dangers Roman Catholics faced during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, even if her majesty turned a benign blind eye to the beliefs of her favourite court composer for many years.

What was flagged as “Interruption” in the online programme, around two thirds through the sequence, could have been gunshots or just hammering at the door, but candles are extinguished and the priest bundled into hiding as the music stopped. Some of the audience members recruited to make up the table of twelve at the heart of the action look as alarmed as the performers.

The danger passed and the programme continued with counter-tenor Guy James delivering Byrd’s Elegy on the death of Thomas Tallis (Ye Sacred Muses). This immersive experience included soup and bread and a thimble-full of communion wine for all, and the musicians went about the business of bringing everyone into the story with practiced ease.

This year’s EIF programme also includes what has become a regular residency at The Hub by the Aga Khan Music Programme and its mission to share the classical music of other cultures was brought to mind by the Perth Festival’s opening day music in Perth Concert Hall from The Ayoub Sisters. Laura and Sarah may have grown up in Scotland but they use their conservatoire training on violin and cello to delve into their Egyptian and Arab heritage.

Others have gone down this road before them, notably Yo-Yo Ma with his Silk Road Project (after he had made his reputation with mainstream Western classical music), the Aga Khan Master Musicians, and even the flirtation with the sound of the souk by post-Led Zeppelin Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. The Ayoub Sisters used basic modern technology to make their less well-funded journey from a suburban Glasgow bedroom.

Their Saturday evening concert found them in the context of a quartet with the guitar of Giulio Romano Malaisi and the drum kit of Giovanni Velez – a last minute dep for their usual percussionist but you would never have known that had Laura not spilled the beans.

The crowd-pleasers were dispensed with early, culminating in a breakneck “Summer” from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, before a focus on their meticulously-sourced original repertoire, much of it taken from their self-released (post-Decca) Arabesque album.

There is a maturity to what the sisters are doing now that assuredly deserves investment – both from audiences as well as producers. This date was part of their ongoing tenth anniversary tour, so a sense of summing-up what they have done so far was appropriate. What is more exciting, however, is what they might go on to do now.

Keith Bruce

Perth Festival: Suor Angelica

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Perth Cathedral, St Ninian’s

Lately there has been no shortage of productions of Puccini’s Suor Angelica, the central part of Puccini’s late trilogy, around the world, and Scottish Opera’s music director Stuart Stratford recently identified David McVicar’s Il Trittico two years ago as a highlight of his decade with the company. So the piece was a bold choice for Opera Bohemia in its continuing relationship with Perth Festival of the Arts.

It turns out to be an inspired one, possibly guaranteeing that the company fills the opera slot in the festival’s programme into the future because of its clever site-specific success.

Perth’s huge Scottish Episcopal Cathedral has not featured as a festival venue before, and it has neither the ancient history nor the acoustic properties of St John’s Kirk, as well as the distraction of traffic noise, but it offered a much better space for the presentation of opera, particularly this one.

The convent-set Suor Angelica occupied the space without much in the way of staging, the Amicus Orchestra and conductor Alistair Digges behind a raised platform to which the singers processed following the long choral overture, during which we were introduced to the pregnant Angelica (Jenny Stafford).

Seven years later she is among the nuns, having been forced by her family to abandon her child, of whom she longs for news. Before the arrival of her aunt, The Princess (Louise Collett), for the great confrontation of the opera, Douglas Nairne’s production presents a very believable portrait of the cloistered life, with simple costuming and design by Alisa Kalyanova and her team, and effective lighting by Leo Wittwer.

This is very much an ensemble show, many of the singers company stalwarts; the chorus work is excellent and the step-out roles characterful. Digges and the Amicus players provide a consistently vibrant account of Puccini’s score, the mature composer at the very top of his game in a work that held a number of personal resonances.

Collet, revealing her rich mezzo range, is very good as The Princess, her initial severity softening as the pivotal scene unfolds, and Stafford is a compelling stage performer throughout the hour and a quarter, musically absolutely on point in a demanding role.

For a long time Suor Angelica was seen as the tricky part of the Il Trittico set – melodramatic and doctrine-fixated – and often omitted to create a manageable evening of Il tabarro and Gianni Schicchi (as English Touring Opera did at the 2011 Perth Festival), but that perception has certainly changed.

The denouement is still problematic, with the apparent intercession of the Virgin Mary, in the shape of the sailor-suited ghost of Angelica’s dead son (seven-year-old Rosie Nairne-Clark here), overriding the fate of eternal damnation for suicide. This production – and Puccini’s glorious score – effortlessly sweeps those difficulties aside.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Fraser Band

Perth Festival: Ora Singers

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St John’s Kirk, Perth

The most unchanged and regularly used venue in the half century of the Perth Festival of the Arts is also roughly contemporaneous with some of the music often heard there, the a cappella singing of the great Renaissance composers.

The opening concert of this year’s festival at St John’s was by a choir making its debut at the festival, Ora Singers, but the shape of the repertoire they brought was familiar enough to fill the kirk, mixing that repertoire with some of the recent flowering of new music for the same forces. It was an evening not without glitches – and congratulations to the choir’s manager for eventually identifying the user of the rogue whistling hearing aid – but it had a reassuring format with some nice original touches.

Choir director Suzi Digby’s vigorous conducting style and crystal-clear beat speaks of her long experience. That rhythmic control of her singers was especially apparent in a bracingly fresh reading of Palestrina’s Assumpta est Maria and in the rhythmic complexities of Mark Simpson’s Ave Maria.

Many of the new works had early music partners – Victoria’s Ave Maria preceding the Simpson, and David Bednall’s Assumpta following the Palestrina – but the newest, Electra Perivolaris’s An end without end, commissioned for the choir by the Duke of Buccleuch in memory of his late wife and setting words from Scots poet William Drummond’s A Cypress Grove, stood apart in both text and structure. If afforded a unique opportunity to hear the voices in the choir combine in duet, trio and quartet.

There were step-out solos throughout, of course, with one of the tenors especially impressive, and in ensemble it was the men who particularly shone, from rich bass sonorities to the single male among the altos. At other times the choir did divide, a sextet performing Cecilia McDowell’s Alma Redemptoris Mater, and the opening performance of Allegri’s Miserere including responses from singers not among those who processed around the audience.

The soaring soprano among those invisible voices was an early warning that some of the intonation was not always quite as precise as it should have been, but the theatre of the performance often made up for that.

Thankfully the sopranos sounded much more secure on Sir James MacMillan’s Miserere, closing the recital and completing the reflective nature of the programme. Fine though many of the other newer pieces were, it is a masterwork and there was really no following it.

Keith Bruce

A Perth-wide festival

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Tickets are now on sale for the full programme of the 2025 Perth Festival of the Arts in May, which promises to be a presence in the Fair City on an even wider scale.

The festival’s opera production of Puccini’s Suor Angelica is in St Ninian’s Cathedral, the cast led by South African soprano Sarah-Jane Brandon (pictured). Opera Bohemia’s Alistair Digges (conducting) and Douglas Nairne (directing) team up with the Glasgow-based Amicus Orchestra for the performances on May 27 and 28.

The more-often-used St John’s Kirk launches the music programme on Thursday May 22 with a rare visit north of the border by the Ora Singers, directed by Suzi Digby. Their programme features the ancient and modern Misereres of Gregorio Allegri and Sir James MacMillan, Renaissance polyphony from Victoria, Lassus and Palestrina and contemporary composition, including a new commission from Isle of Arran-based Electra Perivolaris, setting William Drummond’s A Cypress Grove.

St John’s also has a concert by gypsy jazz group Rose Room on Sunday 25 and a duo of classical accordionists, Melia Simonot and Sofia Ros, on the morning of May 31, as well as a full programme of schools and amateur music-making – and there’s more of that in the mixed arts programme at St Matthew’s Church.

Perth Concert Hall has a visit from the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra on Saturday May 24, with a concert packed with Classic FM favourites, including Carmen, Swan Lake, The Lark Ascending and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The Festival week ends in the same venue with brass orchestra Mike Lovatt’s Brass Pack and a music from the movies show with vocalist Anna-Jane Casey.

Perth Theatre has a visit from Children’s Classic Concerts with Peter and the Wolf on the afternoon of May 24 and tenor Jamie MacDougall’s musical biography of Harry Lauder on the afternoon of Sunday May 25.

Traditional musicians, including Ali Hutton and Patsy Reid, are part of the package in a new initiative at Perth Art Gallery, showcasing up and coming poets working in Scotland, curated by Perthshire’s Jim Mackintosh. The free early evening show is on Thursday May 29.

Perth Festival: The Fairey Band

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Perth Concert Hall

The format of The Fairey Band’s concert – overture, concerto, big work – was traditional, and the suspicion must be that it was a making a nice point about a brass band supplanting the usual symphony orchestra as Perth Festival’s gala closing event.

Perhaps that adventurous programming did not fill as many seats as the music deserved, but that was only a loss for those who failed to attend; the audience there had a sensational time.

The big work was Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, but not as anyone in the hall had seen it before, and as precious few will have heard it. Elgar Howarth’s arrangement of the suite for brass loses nothing of the excitement and pictorial splendour of the better known versions, especially Maurice Ravel’s. A convincing case might be made that it is every bit as good as that most familiar orchestral version, especially in the hands of a virtuosic ensemble like this one.

From the cornets to the tubas, by way of all the extra instruments beyond those we see in orchestras, there were colours and shades of timbre and tone that more than made up for the absence of strings and winds. Through the different incarnations of Promenade and the contrasting narratives of the canvases depicted, sections and individual soloists stepped into the spotlight.

Conductor Mark Heron – who was also a terrific verbal guide through the music – was on top of every detail but equally knew when, throughout the evening’s programme, there was nothing meaningful for him to add to the work of musicians playing together like a machine of meticulous engineering. As the band was born of Manchester aircraft-builder Fairey Aviation, that is only maintaining their tradition.

The visual element of the concert was a piece of hi-tech animation, created for conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and the New World Symphony Orchestra in the USA, an outfit that develops young players at the start of their career. It is clever enough to adapt to a different arrangement of the work for a radically different ensemble and even adjusts to the pace of the performance.

More to the point, it was fantastic to look at, and not just in time with the music but narratively pertinent to the score, beginning with images of people in a gallery – a trope that would go on to morph through the ages – and then employ different styles of animation to create moving pictures responding to the titles of Viktor Hartmann’s paintings that had inspired Mussorgsky.

There was a vast distance between the moody darkness of The Old Castle and the children’s cartoon for Tuileries which followed, while the Ballad of the Chicks in their Shells was simply a hoot. It was a moment of levity before the menace of Catacombs and The Hut on Chicken’s Legs gave way to the glorious climax of The Great Gate of Kiev.

Amazingly this spectacle – a world premiere in the form we enjoyed it and a first screening of the film in Europe – did not completely overshadow the rest of the concert. That overture was Hector Berlioz’s La Carnival Romain, salvaged from his opera Benvenuto Cellini as an orchestral concert piece and, arguably, further developed as a showcase for brass instruments in Frank Wright’s glorious arrangement.

The concerto was Alexander Arutiunian’s Trumpet Concerto, a virtuoso showpiece for Iain Culross, feet firmly planted and fingers a blur on the valves. If the Berlioz was a French or Italian town band writ large, Arutiunian’s mid-20th century music was global in scope, quoting Shostakovich but clearly aware of dance bands and movie scores on the other side of the Atlantic.

The Fairey Band even had a work to follow Pictures in Ray Farr’s arrangement of Bach’s best-known organ work, Toccata in D Minor. Here it was difficult not to be distracted from the brass by the precision-tooled work of the trio of percussionists, on everything from xylophone and kit to timpani and gong.

Keith Bruce

Il Giardino d’Amore

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Perth Concert Hall

Next year marks the 300th anniversary of the first performance of the Red Priest’s most popular piece, The Four Seasons. Not only has Vivaldi’s suite launched the career of many a young virtuoso – notably Nigel Kennedy round these parts – but it spearheaded the growth of popular interest in early music.

Around the time Kennedy brought his electric violin “new” Four Seasons to Edinburgh’s Usher Hall in 2012, Polish violinist Stefan Plewniak was departing from Jordi Savall’s Le Concert de Nations to set up his own group for a performance at Krakow’s Bach Festival.

Il Giardino d’Amore has since travelled the globe and made acclaimed recordings, most recently of Gluck’s Orfeo e Eurydice with singers Jakub Jozef Orlinski, Fatima Said and Elsa Dreisig for Warner Classics, but this was the group’s Scottish debut and also – although Perth Festival made little of the fact – the premiere of Plewniak’s new project: The New 4 Seasons.

Following the calendar from Spring through to Winter, Plewniak and his dozen younger accomplices – some of them his own students from Norway – teamed Vivaldi’s evocation of the annual cycle with Astor Piazzola’s The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires from the 1960s and Max Richter’s 21st century “Re-composition” of the Venetian’s 1725 work.

The nuevo tango pieces – more individual in character – sensibly prefaced each season (thus re-ordering Piazzola’s preference), before the original and Richter’s response were combined together. With an interval between Summer and Autumn, the whole made for a satisfying evening, if one where the Perth audience seemed unsure when to applaud and sensibly just sat on their hands until the end of each half.

The other element of the presentation was visual, with a haze over the stage to diffuse the lighting plot, and projections of the natural world and dancing bodies on a screen above the players. Some of this was as inconsequential as a screensaver, but it was generally inoffensive and occasionally more interesting in its close-ups of people and time-lapse photography of germination and bloom.

Musically, although the opening resolved into the Piazzola, it began with a provocatively tentative fade-in of period-instrument rawness and that “authentic” element was never away – not least in some occasionally wayward tuning. It was balanced, however, by some lush and lovely ensemble playing with obligatos from the first cello Niamh Malloy as well as the leader and director. If Spring was a season of settling into the expanded suite, the sunny opening of Summer immediately spoke of an assemblage that actually enhanced the programme’s individual ingredients.

If that was true of the old war horse that is the Vivaldi, it was as applicable to the Richter. Although the music itself could appear as down-tempo padding, or respite for the musicians, interweaving it with its Baroque inspiration made the German composer’s intentions evident.

It made for a much more arrestingly inventive evening of music-making than, say, the concert of Italian music from Nicola Benedetti’s Baroque ensemble at the pandemic-era Edinburgh Festival.

When he spoke at the end, before an encore of Waltzing Matilda that was less cheesy than that sounds, Plewniak was engagingly enthusiastic about bringing his group to Scotland. He included a winning “four seasons in one day” gag about the local weather, and there was something of waltz king Andre Rieu’s swagger in his stage-centre soloist’s role. It is not impossible that Perth Festival may have been in on the ground floor of a very successful project with this low-key first night.

Keith Bruce

Hebrides Ensemble

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St John’s Kirk, Perth

The notion of the “Auld Alliance” between Scotland and France may well persist in the minds of the programmers of classical music concerts more than it does in any other sphere, so it is probably unfair to quibble that a very broad definition of “Scottish” was required to justify the Hebrides Ensemble’s use of it to entitle its debut recital at the Perth Festival.

The three composers representing the home side were Judith Weir (born in Cambridge), Sally Beamish (London) and Lyell Cresswell (Wellington, New Zealand). France, on the other hand, fielded representatives of Le Mans, Paris, Avignon and Biarritz: Jean Francaix, Claude Debussy, Olivier Messiaen and Maurice Ravel.

It was Ravel’s septet for string quartet, flute, clarinet and harp, Introduction and Allegro, that brought together all the players of this edition of cellist William Conway’s chamber group at the end of the programme. Effectively directed from the violin by Irish Chamber Orchestra leader Katherine Hunka, it was as notable for its dynamism and pace as for its melodic riches, and the rich ensemble sound these players produced in St John’s.

The concert began with Weir’s The Bagpiper’s String Trio, also rhythmically engrossing and democratic in its use of the instruments, although it began life as a showpiece for the range of a clarinet. The playful use of Scottish country dance rhythms and evocation of the sea made it an accessible way in to a varied evening where the pieces shared interesting inspirations.

Yann Ghiro’s clarinet featured immediately afterwards, in the opening movement of Francaix’s quintet, its deliciously French way with melody prefiguring the Ravel later. In the second half, Ghiro returned to the stage alone for the Abime des oiseaux movement of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, its use of birdsong nicely following Between Earth and Sea by Sally Beamish, where that is heard from Katherine Bryan’s flute, teamed with the rich-toned viola of Jessica Beeston and Sharron Griffiths’ harp.

Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane was commissioned as a showpiece for harp, but it has equally rich ensemble writing for the string quartet, in what was the second of the French sequence leading to that Ravel finish.

Those two quintets bracketed a real rarity, Cresswell’s Variations on a Theme by Charles Ives with Conway and Bryan. The dozen treatments of Ives’ setting of Songs My Mother Taught Me, ranging from thirty seconds to less than two minutes, are fascinating explorations of the textural possibilities of the combination of flute and cello. With the RSNO’s first flute on stage, its was easy to hear why the founder of the ensemble was eager to bring the piece back in front of an audience.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Lyell Cresswell

The Magic Flute

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Perth Theatre

Superficially, Die Zauberflote looked an odd choice for the Scots Opera Project. Although purists will always want to hear operas in their original language, the convoluted masonic nonsense of Mozart’s The Magic Flute makes singing it in English a sensible step to some clarity. For all that many people in Scotland know – and even speak – more Scots than they realise, Michael Dempster’s new version of the libretto potentially added a different hurdle for the audience.

Beyond that, on paper a Da Ponte opera like Cosi fan tutte or even Don Giovanni would appear to offer more opportunity for the sort of Scots characterisation that has made adaptations of Moliere successes in the theatre. In reality, however, this opening attraction of the 2024 Perth Festival of the Arts was ideal for the job, and that had little or nothing to do with the libretto.

When it was audible, Dr Dempster’s translation sounded just the dab, but with no surtitles (always an asset, even for operas sung in English) a great deal did not make it over the footlights and the six musicians in the pit under the musical direction of pianist Gordon Cree.

Nonetheless, the fact that this cast and chorus had learned an entirely new book spoke volumes for their commitment, and that was evident in every other facet of the production, musically and theatrically a huge success.

Multi-tasking tenor David Douglas was not only our hero Tamino but also the director and producer of the show. Setting the scene during the overture with the retro-tech assistance of an overhead projector, his prince was a patient in an asylum, tended, none too caringly, by the three nursing assistants (Rachael Brimley, Cheryl Forbes and Ulrike Wutscher) to Colleen Nicoll’s imposing matron of a Queen of the Night. The scrubs, metal trolleys and drapes, doubling as projection screens, recalled Milos Forman’s film of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and into this secure ward Douglas Nairne’s Papageno arrived as a Pest Control warden to find Catriona Clark’s Pamina held in a straitjacket and wheeled around in a skip, like a character in a Beckett play. Michael Cameron-Longden’s gentle Sarastro subsequently appeared as the trusted consultant physician in this febrile clinic.

Within such a restricted environment, the company zipped through an abbreviated version of the score, accompanied by a string quartet and Andrea Kuyper’s flute. There was quality singing from everyone onstage, including the community chorus of other inmates that arrived later, each of them demonstrating their own disturbing affliction.

With Wutscher doubling as Monostatos, and Brimley donning a few feathers to become Papagena later – in a splendidly vulgar and inventive behind-the-curtain love tryst with Papageno – a generously-cast staging demonstrated high production values (even the instrumentalists were costumed) and made effective use of the auditorium as well as the stage. There is, sadly, just one further opportunity to see it, at Sunday’s matinee performance.

Keith Bruce

Picture of David Douglas as Tamino by Fraser Band

Perth Festival 2024

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The range of this year’s Perth Festival of the Arts may embrace Rory Bremner’s comedy and the funk and soul platter-spinning of Craig Charles but classical music and opera is still at its heart, with performances running right through its 11-day programme at the end of May.

The performance programme opens at Perth Theatre on the evening of Wednesday May 22 with a return visit from the Scots Opera Project, festival debutantes last year with Granville Bantock’s The Seal Woman (Perth Festival / The Seal-Woman | VoxCarnyx). This year the Project revives its Scots language version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, with a further matinee of the production the following Sunday.

Making their first appearance at the festival this year, somewhat surprisingly, are cellist Will Conway’s long established Scottish chamber group Hebrides Ensemble. Their programme visits an idea that has proved strangely popular in the post-Brexit era, celebrating the “Auld Alliance” between Scotland and France and mixing 20th century French music with the work of composers from, or at one time based in, Scotland.

The following week’s chamber music highlight is a visit from the pan-European Il Giardino d’Amore, founded and directed by Polish violinist Stefan Plewiak. Celebrating the tercentenary of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, the group will play, from memory, that Baroque favourite alongside the more recent responses to it from Astor Piazzola and Max Richter.

The Czech National Symphony Orchestra is at Perth Concert Hall on Saturday May 25 for the festival’s flagship concert. Regular touring orchestra with tenor Andrea Bocelli under the baton of its American conductor Steven Mercurio, the soloist for this concert is violinist Chloe Hanslip, playing the perennially popular Bruch Violin Concert No 1.  The rest of the programme is equally box office: Smetana’s Overture to the Bartered Bride, Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.

There is a thread of brass music running through the 2024 Perth programme that may well have its roots in the enthusiasm of chairman Craig Dennis. Children’s Classic Concerts, presented as usual by the ebullient Owen Gunnell, give two performances of Big Top Brass, featuring the Thistle Brass Quintet, and the following Saturday afternoon (June 1) The Fairey Band add a live soundtrack to the Aardman animated film starring Wallace & Gromit, The Wrong Trousers.

The Fairey Band also closes the classical programme with a performance of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition in Elgar Howarth’s superb arrangement, and that comes with its own visuals in the from of animated interpretations of the music created by Ion Concert Media with USC School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles.

Nigel Short’s first-class vocal group Tenebrae is in the splendid acoustic of St John’s Kirk on Friday May 24 with a programme that teams Herbert Howell’s Requiem with a new work by Joel Thompson, A Prayer for deliverance. In the same venue the following Monday duo New Focus, pianist Euan Stevenson and saxophonist Konrad Wiszniewski, bring their clever show exploring the relationship between classical music and jazz, The Classical Connection.

Scottish Opera’s Pop-Up Opera is at St Matthew’s Church for its regular visit to the festival, with two of Derek Clark’s half hour condensed versions of classics of the repertoire, The Merry Widow and Don Giovanni, narrated by Alan Dunn.

For full details and booking information visit perthfestival.co.uk

Perth Festival / Red Priest

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St John’s Kirk, Perth

Red Priest were new to me, if not to Perth and St John’s, and this well-attended midweek hoolie had a feeling of joyful reunion, with the CD stall doing brisk business at the interval.

Recorder virtuoso Piers Adams founded the group, using the nickname of composer Vivaldi, over 25 years ago, but with the return of baroque violinist Julia Bishop – whose other gigs have included the Gabrielli Consort, the Academy of Ancient Music and the Hanover Band – the line-up is three-quarters intact, harpsichord player David Wright replacing the late Julian Rhodes.

Bishop, one might speculate, relishes the opportunity to let her hair down. Wright apart, the musicians perform entirely from memory, and both she and Adams left the stage to promenade up close and personal with the audience. Cellist Angela East would likely have joined them if her instrument didn’t necessitate a chair.

That freedom of movement is paired with freedom of expression. There’s improvisation, tonal expansion and all sorts of tempo variation in the Red Priest approach to baroque music – about as far from any po-faced notion of period authenticity as it is possible to get.

For all the choreography, costuming and larking about, however, the final result is less showbiz than it is educational, in the least condescending way. Every piece, however unfamiliar or well known, some of them arranged together in the most singular of sequences, comes with a few words of introduction and a joke or two. No-one left St John’s on Wednesday evening without knowing a little more about Gian Paolo Cima, Anna Magdalena Bach or the music of the court of the Sun King.

Ideas about the possibilities of the recorder were surely revised as well, as Adams applied an extended range of embouchure techniques, some of them highly percussive, to the full pitch range of instruments. His digital dexterity was matched by all of his colleagues, with East’s cello also adding percussion as well as bass to the mix.

Her solo feature was a fresh take on a well-known Bach Prelude, and the repertoire successfully mixed the very familiar with the downright obscure, often in startling juxtaposition. Only Wright’s Couperin Chaconne perhaps overstayed its welcome in what was a slick, pacy performance, and that work’s uncanny prediction of 20th century minimalism still merited its inclusion.

At other points we were more in the realm of the traditional music session’s sets of jigs and reels, and the volume the acoustic quartet managed to produce without any sacrifice of detail or articulation was often remarkable. It was perhaps too easy to miss that level of technical excellence in a gig that was mostly about pure fun.

Keith Bruce

Perth Festival / The Ayoub Sisters

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Perth Concert Hall

The corpses of young conservatoire-trained musicians that have been chewed up and spat out by the “classical crossover” genre litter the by-ways of the music marketplace. The Ayoub Sisters, you’d wager, are made of sterner stuff.

Of Egyptian heritage and Glasgow born and raised, they launched their second album, Arabesque, in Cairo and this Perth Festival date was part of its international promotional tour. The festival had tweaked the package, however, with the addition of support act The Lark Piano Trio, whose 20th century chamber music provided an impressively ear-exercising opening to the evening.

Post-graduate students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, pianist Anna Michels, violinist Emma Baird and cellist Helena La Grand championed composer Rebecca Clarke with their performance of her 1921 Piano Trio, which first appeared under her post-World War One nom-de-guerre “Anthony Trent”.

In a beautifully blended and balanced performance, and particularly in the meditative central movement, it was not hard to hear pre-echoes of better-known American male composers as yet unborn when the work was written.

The Ayoub Sisters opened their hour’s music with Misirlou, the Middle-Eastern folk tune made famous by surf-rock guitarist Dick Dale and the movie Pulp Fiction, which they played five years ago at Glasgow’s Proms in the Park.

Here, however, it introduced a programme that delved much more deeply into the siblings’ musical heritage, appropriating religious chants from different cultures as well as other folk music in their clever arrangements for violin and cello, amplified and looped through the sort of portable sampling technology familiar to fans of K T Tunstall and Ed Sheeran.

The pair have the possibilities of this kit at their fingertips and elegantly-shod toes, and the live layering of sound was very impressive, although never at the expense of overshadowing their genuine playing abilities. A backing track provided the Indian percussion for an excursion into the world of Bollywood soundtrack, but most of the execution was live and very slick indeed.

Their programme was also cleverly constructed to mix the less familiar music with more recognisable fare, including a terrific take on McCartney’s Blackbird and a more knockabout tilt at Boney M’s Rasputin as well as Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turca. Taking turns to introduce the music, Laura (violin) and Sarah (cello) also have good stories and a congenial style to their presentation.

Scotland had its share of the spotlight too, from a vaguely Phil’n’Ally folk fiddle feature early in the set to an encore that saw Sarah move to the piano for the freshest take on some of the nation’s most threadbare favourites (including Flower of Scotland, Auld Lang Syne and Loch Lomond) that any in the audience will have heard in a while.

Keith Bruce

Perth Festival / The Seal-Woman

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Perth Theatre

While Granville Bantock’s name may have fallen into relative obscurity today, the English-born Birmingham-based composer of Scots heredity was notable enough in British musical circles during his lifetime (1868-1946) to have found himself the dedicatee of Sibelius’ Third Symphony, such was the great Finnish composer’s gratitude for Bantock’s muscular UK championship.

His own music is interesting, at times inspired, a style emerging out of Wagner but with a curiosity for the modal adventures favoured by Vaughan Williams, Delius, even Debussy. Exotic whole tone harmonies vie with folksy pentatonic melodies, the latter no doubt emanating from his direct Scottish bloodline (his Highlands-born father was an eminent surgeon) and evident in such major works as his Celtic and Hebridean Symphonies.

But what of his 1924 opera The Seal-Woman, written in partnership with the Gaelic singer, collector and song writer Marjory Kennedy-Fraser, and currently enjoying a timely revival by The Scots Opera Project? It received two performances at this year’s Perth Festival, featuring a cast of upcoming professional opera singers, a pop-up community chorus, with musical direction and solo piano accompaniment by Scots pianist Hebba Benyaghla. Stage direction was by Ayrshire tenor David Douglas, who also sang the key male protagonist, The Islesman.

As for plot, think of variations on a theme of Disney’s The Little Mermaid or Darryl Hannah’s film Splash transported to a tiny Hebridean community, where a Seal-Woman and her sister enjoy the option of being human on land or mammal at sea so long as the magical robes they discard on dry land are there to reverse the process. In this case, the Islesman snaffles them, forcing the Seal-Woman to stay. They fall in love, have a child, but the call of the sea is too strong and the mother sacrifices family life to return to the deep.

In a production that played safe and fairly simple, strong performances were required to make up for limited action. The strongest of these came from Sioned Gwen Davies in the title role, a ripe vocal performance, particularly in the second half duet with her sister, sung sweetly if a little less assuredly, by Colleen Nicol. As the island’s matriarchal Cailleach, Ulrike Wutscher cut a suitably morose sage, her biggest challenge being to make something special out of Bantock’s overly monotone writing (Britten does that much better), but that was perhaps asking a lot. Michael Longden, as the Fisherman and Water Kelpie, gave what was necessary in his functional roles.

Hebba Benyaghla’s marathon 2-hour piano performance gave comforting impetus to the production, tastefully-spun in a way that appreciated Bantock’s clustered, often misty-eyed textures and folksy melodic inflexions. Could a single instrument ever replicate the colours envisaged by Bantock, a man noted for his skill as an orchestrator, in his original scoring? Who knows? We’d need to hear a full reconstruction of the opera to give a definitive answer to that pressing question.

Ken Walton

Madama Butterfly

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Perth Theatre

Opera Bohemia’s compact, punchy Madama Butterfly may never have looked and sounded as good as it does on the stage of Perth Theatre for the company’s debut at the 50th Perth Festival of the Arts.

Working with the earliest version of Puccini’s score and with a small chamber orchestra in the pit for the first time, John Wilkie’s production may be nearly a decade old, but the clean symmetry of Magnus Popplewell’s set, the simple use of shadow-work on its screens, and the clarity of the story-telling, recognising the prescience of the work’s political message, are unimprovable.

Under the baton of Bohemia’s music director Alistair Digges, this revival’s great asset is that 11-piece ensemble, led by Feargus Hetherington, whose own solo contributions are a particular highlight.

On stage, the men in the cast supply some especially careful characterisation. Whitaker Mills is a troubled Sharpless, who sees disaster looming from early on but is not bold or interested enough to avert it. Seumas Begg gives much more subtle shape to Goro, the estate agent/pimp who makes the fatal introduction, than is often seen. There is a moral equivalence in the way both back off rather than become involved which casts the US Consul in an especially bad light here.

This is a modern dress production, with the nice touch of having Butterfly adopt contemporary American teen clothes in the “American home” she is keeping for her absent naval officer husband at the start of Act Two. Such detail does a lot of work in showing how little colonial geo-politics have altered since Puccini’s librettists were writing at the start of the last century.

Thomas Kinch gives a bluff, macho Pinkerton of slow emotional intelligence, so his tendency to over-sing the role early on could be said to match that interpretation, although his big tenor voice really comes into its own later. Like Louise Collett’s Suzuki, Catriona Clark’s Cio-Cio San is a link with earlier stagings, assured and at home in the coloratura of the role.

There is strong vocal casting in the smaller roles too, with Stephanie Stanway as Kate Pinkerton and Fiona Mackenzie taking the role of The Registrar, while special mention must be made of the (very) young Robert Nairne-Clark, who absolutely nails his extended presence on stage as Sorrow, the fought-over issue of the relationship. There is a further performance this evening.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Catriona Clark

Perth Festival / Tenebrae

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St John’s Kirk, Perth

Goodness knows how many times we heard the word “Maria” sung in this Perth Festival performance by the superlative vocal ensemble Tenebrae under its founding director Nigel Short. At one point Górecki, in his motet Totus tuus, treats the word with such plaintive repetition it almost turns into the famous hit number from West Side Story. But this was an altogether more religious affair: a programme called Queen of Heaven dedicated to music inspired by the sanctity of the Virgin Mary.

If the setting seemed perfect, the ancient cathedral-like architecture of St John’s Kirk with its golden acoustics, an idle thought that the anti-Marian John Knox launched Scottish protestantism on this very spot did warrant a moment of ironic reflection.

But that was instantly washed aside by the integrity of performances that certainly didn’t hold back on the theatre and passion. It began with a rearguard assault, a piercing cry of “Maria” from the back of the St John’s nave, Tenebrae issuing the shrill declamatory opening of the Górecki with the same electrifying fullness that was to inform the entire evening. 

Whether in the seamless polyphony of Robert Parson’s 16th century Ave Maria, or the infectiously chaotic and exotic modernism of Giles Swayne’s 1982 Magnificat, this was a brand of choral singing that combined impeccable homogeneity with penetrating expressive range. Intonation was unshakeable, but the tonal options were never restrained. The bass voices reverberated in the rich acoustics, the high soprano notes ecstatic in flight, between which the inner parts wove with tastefulness and purpose. 

It was enlightening, too, to experience such rarely-heard Ave Marias as Bruckner’s seraphic setting, compared to the cool austerity of Stravinsky’s Russian Orthodox version. Or the more effusive and worldly Ave maris stella by Greig and Mater ora ilium by Bax, with Britten’s simple, strophic Hymn to the Virgin allowing a breakaway ensemble to enjoy a moment of blissful antiphony.

The second half opened with the haunting primitivism of Owain Park’s Ave maris stella and the unaffected lucidity of Tavener’s Mother of God, before interweaving a series of palate-cleansing chants with the lushness of Verdi (his Laudi all Vergine Maria for upper voices), the bittersweet piquancy of Poulenc’s Salve Regina and the euphoric climax provided by nonagenarian Margaret Rizza’s plainsong-inspired Ave generosa. 

Perth is currently celebrating its 50th annual Festival of the Arts. If Monday’s demonstration of choral perfection by Tenebrae is anything to go by, it’s doing so in style. 

Ken Walton 

Festival Gala / Scottish Opera

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Perth Concert Hall

The Perth Festival has changed markedly over its 50 years, but as it celebrates that Golden Jubilee, a determination to present opera as part of the annual event remains a commitment. This year’s staged performance arrives at Perth Theatre next week in the shape of Opera Bohemia’s Madama Butterfly, and for many years it provided the only Scottish opportunity to see English Touring Opera and some very fine singers at the start of their careers. Before that John Currie masterminded the festival’s own bespoke productions, but in 1972 it was Alexander Gibson’s Scottish Opera company who brought two productions to the first festival, so it was fitting the national company provided this year’s opening gala concert.

Fitting, but perhaps also a little surprising, in that Scottish Opera has its hands full at the moment, with the revival of Don Giovanni newly opened in Glasgow and its own 60th anniversary season just announced. That meant the orchestra, conductor Stuart Stratford, and one of the quintet of young vocal talent on stage had been performing the previous evening in the Theatre Royal with only the smallest overlap in the repertoire they played in the Fair City.

That Don Giovanni duet, La ci darem la mano, teamed young mezzo Lea Shaw, who sings Zerlina in the touring production, with Jonathan McGovern, who takes over the title role from June 9. It opened a Mozart sequence that also featured Eleanor Dennis as the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro and McGovern duetting with Catriona Hewitson as the Magic Flute’s Papageno and Papagena.

After the interval, that section was mirrored by the music of Puccini where the Intermezzo from Manon Lescaut was bracketed by Hewitson singing O mio babbini caro from Gianni Schicchi and McGovern the very much less often heard Questo amor, vergogna mia from the composer’s early Edgar.

Neither of those parts of the substantial programme included the undoubted star of the evening, for all the quality of the singing throughout. Scotland’s Cardiff Singer of the World winner, Catriona Morison, was a compelling presence whenever she was on stage as well as being, with Stratford, an architect of the shape of the evening.

Her music was all in French and German, beginning with a sequence from Bizet’s Carmen that also involved Hewitson and Shaw as Frasquita and Mercedes, and then McGovern singing the Toreador’s song. Hewitson also partnered her in music from Massenet’s Werther and provided the Sandman to her Evening Hymn with Dennis as Hansel and Gretel. Those three also brought the programme to a close with music from Strauss’s Rosenkavalier which was, apparently, as much a treat for some members of the orchestra as the audience.

In fact the instrumentalists had the meatiest music of the night, in the instrumental interludes, in the appropriate opening fanfare of Shostakovich’s Festive Overture and then the Overture to Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, which began the second half. After all its trials and tribulations, the opera orchestra is currently at the top of its game.

For them, and for Perth Festival, this opening gala ticked a lot of boxes, and admirably included some more unusual music alongside the famous hits, even if that meant some tricky leaps in style, pace and tone, for the listener as much as the performers. Those structural flaws perhaps make it more difficult to berate the citizenry of Perth for failing to fill more of the seats.

Keith Bruce

Sponsored by Brewin Dolphin

Picture: Catriona Morison by Fraser Band

PERTH FESTIVAL: Benedetti & SCO

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Perth Concert Hall

One of the constant enjoyments in life is to listen to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra playing Mozart. It’s tradition for them that goes back to the James Conlon recordings of the early 1980s and continues today under the likes of current chief conductor Maxim Emelyanychev. There have been times, too, when this finely-tuned orchestra has simply self-driven itself through Mozart, as it did with the in-house guidance of leader Benjamin Marquise Gilmore in this closing online concert of the Perth Festival.

And this Mozart delicacy – the short, light-fingered, Italianate No 33 – was much more than a warm-up to the starry appearance of Nicola Benedetti in Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto that was to follow. In its own right, it had poise, the graceful triple-time opening Allegro, the soothing Andante, the downward swooping Menuetto and the pert Finale, all enlivened by shapely poeticism and a neatly-textured ensemble. It wasn’t the most flawless performance in terms of absolute togetherness, but in spirit it was a confectionary delight.

Benedetti may only be in her early 30s, but she carries her own lengthy and busy tradition of playing the Mendelssohn concerto, which – she recounted in her introductory remarks – featured in the last set of SCO performances she undertook before last year’s lockdown. 

So there was an obvious pertinence in returning to it here as the music world begins to reopen. A palpable optimism seemed to inform Benedetti’s performance, which bristled with intent from the word go. If this is a work that engenders impetuosity – there’s a fair argument for that – it was dealt here in spades, but with all the affectionate sincerity and heartfelt lyricism it deserves.

Was Benedetti’s response a little roughshod at times? To an extent, perhaps, in the heat of the opening movement, but there was consistency, wholehearted conviction in her playing, which in turn fed into the robust orchestral support. The melting tenderness of the Andante, opulent without labour or indulgence, was charming; the finale, joyous and liberated. 

That should have been the upbeat conclusion to the 2021 Perth Festival, were it not for an unexpected encore: Sally Beamish’s natty arrangement for violin, viola and orchestra of Peter Maxwell Davies’ Farewell to Stromness. Benedetti was joined front stage by principal viola Nicholas Bootiman, in a version stage-managed like Haydn’s Farewell Symphony, the musicians disappearing one by one, leaving only the duo under the lone spotlight, Max’s wistful melody drifting softly into the distance. 
Ken Walton

Available on the Perth Festival website till 7 June. 

PERTH FESTIVAL: Russian Soul

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Russian Soul: The Story of Rachmaninov in Song

Perth Theatre

As well as Perth’s wonderful concert hall, the redevelopment of Perth Theatre has given the Fair City another adaptable small music stage in the Joan Knight Studio. It was the ideal compact venue for this old-school three-hander by soprano Ilana Domnich, pianist Sholto Kynoch and narrator, journalist and broadcaster Michael White.

As White conceded early on, the life of Rachmaninov is not an especially happy tale, and he was, famously, a far from cheery chappy. Even when he found material success in exile in the West, that distance from home – and a picture of Mother Russia that no longer existed – has made the scowling six-footer with the massive keyboard-spanning hands a bit of a caricature.

White does his best to humanise him, and is careful to inject a bit of reality into the cliches of Rachmaninov’s life in his script, but it would be generous to say that we get a fresh picture of the man from the show. There is a glimpse of the fake-Russian idyll he created in his homes that intrigues, and it would have been good to learn more of his non-musical enthusiasms for speed-boats and fast cars, but, understandably perhaps, the focus is on the works.

Those, sadly, create the main structural problem with the show, and one which, to be fair, White acknowledges. Rachmaninov wrote no songs in the years of his Western success, so the material Domnich has to sing – which she does beautifully – all comes from the years before the 1917 Revolution, when the troubles of Rachmaninov’s life still lie ahead of him.

The instrumental music that made him famous, from the C sharp minor Prelude to the Paganini Variations, are illustrated by a few bars from each in the hands of Sholto Kynoch, which, inevitably, only leave the listener wanting to hear more.

Rachmaninov, I suspect, would have found that observation depressing, and the efforts of White and his colleagues to tie themes of the songs to elements of the life, albeit after the fact, are undeniably inventive, but it is debatable whether the structure of the presentation succeeds.

That said, the opportunity to hear Domnich sing Spring Waters and A Dream is worth the price of admission, even if she seems less comfortable away from her native tongue in the wordless Vocalise.

Keith Bruce

PERTH FESTIVAL: The Gesualdo Six

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Perth Museum and Art Gallery 

“It’s not all about nymphs and shepherds.” With these teasing words from Owain Park, director of The Gesualdo Six, his slick tight-knit ‘a cappella’ vocal ensemble embarked on a 12-composer Renaissance journey entitled The Flower of the Italian Madrigal. En route were predictable themes of love, death, even a brief recourse to those nymphs and shepherds, but also via more unexpected diversions that ventured into such realistic realms as the world of Italian politics. 

The venue for this online Festival concert, released Tuesday, was well chosen, the city’s Museum and Art Gallery. Its classicism and booming acoustics were both an apposite visual and aural wraparound to the stylised grace of the music. The singers stood in a circle within, as if in conference, opening with Viva amore by the 15th/16th century madrigalist Bartolomeo Tromboncino, its rippling crisscross of parts fusing into a luminous counterpoint, enlivened by the reverb and the laddish conviviality of the group.

Progressing through the years brought a succession of choral delights. The pairing of Verdalot and Arcadelt – teacher and pupil – threw together the former’s optimistic hopes of a united Italy (Italia Mia) with the languid thoughts of approaching death in Arcadelt’s Beautiful White Swan. Then to the stately perfection of Palestrina’s Io son ferito before the darker tones of Morir non puo by  Maddelena Casulana (the first ever female composer in Western Europe to have a complete volume of her music published) and low-pitched wretchedness of Alessandro Striggio’s Misero Ohime.

The journey’s end was inevitably Monteverdi, two voluptuous examples that closed with the resigned calm of Rimanti in Pace from his Third Book of Madrigals, but not before further illustrating the riches of the genre in works by Giovanni de’ Bardi, Luca Marenzio, Vittoria Aliotti, Marco da Gagliano, and of course the anarchic harmonic inventiveness of Carlo Gesualdo, whose name the ensemble honours.

Had this programme not been so thoughtfully interspersed with explanatory comments from each of the singers, its stream of thought may not have been as captivating and intriguing as it was. As it happened, the presentation was balanced in every sense, the story well told, the journey well worth taking.
Ken Walton

Available to view until 3 June on the Perth Festival website

PERTH FESTIVAL: The Sixteen

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St John’s the Evangelist Church, Upper Norwood, London

Although the repertoire was entirely different, there was something reminiscent of the programmes put together by Scottish Opera’s Derek Clark for the company’s Opera Highlights tours about this quite uncharacteristic concert by Harry Christophers and his top rank professional choir, The Sixteen.

The comparison stands in the eclectic mix of material, the inclusion of a Scottish premiere performance alongside songs everyone knows, and in an interest in the sort of once-unfashionable Victoriana that may now be finding an audience again.

The programme – and the group’s latest album – takes its title from a setting of Longfellow by London-domiciled Italian composer Ciro Pinsuti, whose Good Night, Beloved was once a staple of choral societies. Better known than that piece nowadays were the Londonderry Air (Danny Boy), sung here in Bob Chilcott’s arrangement, and the Eriskay Love Lilt, presented in a new arrangement by baritone and composer Roderick Williams.

The Chilcott, with a very spare piano accompaniment played by Christopher Glynn, alternated unison singing and very accessible harmonies to great effect, while Williams’ arrangement had some technical similarities to the recital’s first Scottish performance of James MacMillan’s Children are a heritage of the Lord. This setting of Psalm 127 is MacMillan at his melodic mellowest, with a lovely descant line over acapella chords.

In what was mostly a secular selection, it sat alongside the works that opened and closed the concert, Edward Naylor’s Vox dicentis and Gustav Holst’s Nunc dimittis. Soprano Julie Cooper was on glorious pure-voiced form on the former, and she and tenor Mark Dobell made notable solo contributions throughout.

Contemporary choral writing was also present in the inclusion of Eric Whitacre’s popular Sleep, while Charles Villers Stanford’s The Blue Bird, setting Victorian poet Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, was another once-ubiquitous song to bracket with the Pinsuti.

This would have been contrast enough, perhaps, but the variety did not end there. Smaller groups of six or just three of the men in the choir added earlier songs that would have sounded more appropriate in a tavern than a church, and explained why the chaps deserved or needed a drink. From the pens of William Cornysh, William Hayes and the ubiquitous Anon, these might have seemed out of place in a Sixteen concert at a previous year’s Perth Festival yet somehow they worked splendidly well here.

Perhaps it is because we have so missed singing in these confined times, but this advert for the range of material to which Christophers’ choristers can apply themselves was exactly what was needed in 2021. Just as pitch-perfect was the conductor’s introduction, lamenting that he and his colleagues were missing the attractions of the Fair City and singing not in St John’s Kirk but in St John the Evangelist Church, Upper Norwood, London.

They also surely lost out on CD sales, as this listener would not have been alone in joining the queue to buy a souvenir of a memorable evening to take home.

Available to view via www.perthfestival.co.uk

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