Tag Archives: Roderick Williams

SCO/Emelyanychev

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City Halls, Glasgow

Some members of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra Chorus doubtless sang Hector Berlioz’s L’Enfance du Christ under the baton of Emmanuel Krivine when the SCO last performed the oratorio in Glasgow City Halls almost a decade ago – but equally many of the current cohort of singers will have been tackling the work for the first time. It is surely that constant process of renewal, under chorus director Gregory Batsleer (who has just extended his contract with the choir), that makes the SCO Chorus so special.

It was on its finest form for this concert, making The Shepherds’ Farewell, the best known music of the score, sound newly-minted, its luscious harmony delivered with ideal balance and precision, and then exceeding that achievement with the closing a cappella hymn, surely some of the finest and most perfectly calibrated singing ever heard in this venerable venue.

It included two sopranos singing from outside the choir stalls door and tenor soloist Andrew Staples moving from the front of the stage below to behind the choir to deliver his contribution. If the quieter elements of all this were daringly demanding of the silent attentiveness of the audience, the chorus of offstage Angels at the end of Part One  delivering their ethereal Hosannas had already prepared the ears.

Batsleer and conductor Maxim Emelyanychev had evidently planned the delivery of Berlioz’s theatrical music very carefully, and that extended to the instrumentalists as well, not just Michael Bawtree’s harmonium, located somewhere invisible alongside the women of the chorus.

The composer’s own libretto adds  a lot to the bare bones of Mary and Joseph’s flight to Egypt as it is recounted in the Bible, with the encounter between Herod (Callum Thorpe) and the Soothsayers (the men of the choir) owing much to the one between Macbeth and the Witches. Much of the narrative of the work is in the music, with that section, for example, using a superb combination of low strings, natural horn and bassoon.

All of these details could not have been clearer under the conductor’s meticulous direction, and nor could the architecture of the piece, with the odd-time-signatured ritual music of those mystics in Part One mirrored by the instrumental interlude of home-making in Part Three. Typical of Emelyanychev, the maestro took a chair amongst his string players to enjoy the pastoral trio that followed from flautists Claire Wickes and Carolina Patricio and Eleanor Hudson’s harp.

The vocal soloists, then, had to be content to share much of the spotlight that usually falls on them, but their contributions were of equally high standard. Roderick Williams set the standard for French diction with his animated Polydorus before becoming a more sedate Joseph, while Paula Murrihy’s Mary was radiant, with just the right measure of anxiety.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Paula Murrihy by Barbara Aumuller

Cumnock Tryst: Roderick Williams/Carducci Quartet

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Trinity Church, Cumnock

In Crail Church during the East Neuk Festival earlier this year, young baritone James Newby gave a remarkable performance of Schubert’s first major song cycle Die schone Mullerin which emphasised the disturbed existential angst of the protagonist.

Introducing his own radical revision of the work, Roderick Williams confessed to wishing he had tackled it as a younger man, and his very different reading gave us not the live trauma of a jilted lover falling apart but the regretful tone of an older man looking back on troubled times.

The boldness in Williams’ recital was in his own arrangement of the instrumental accompaniment for string quartet. The piano part is so integral to Schubert’s vision – and its playing (by Joseph Middleton in the case of Newby’s concert) key to its success – that the absence of it in the familiar opener, Das Wandern, could not help but jar.

The softer edge to the music, even if cellist Emma Denton in particular often added percussive pizzicato, undoubtedly altered the experience, but equally it suited Williams’ more wistful tone – or perhaps his approach deliberately matched his arrangement.

Whatever, it was a new way to listen to a familiar piece and as the ear attuned, one that revealed much about it. With the piano part mostly covered by the other players, quartet leader Matthew Denton sometimes added an extra obligato line – the usually unheard voice of the Fair Maid of the Mill herself. There was more of a sense of the landscape in which the songs are set, rather than simply the viewpoint of the smitten singer.

By the time we arrived at Morning Greeting, the next song that really enjoys a stand-alone life, the lush string arrangement was assuredly a positive advantage and the sequence that song starts was a highlight of the whole performance.

From then on, Williams added more drama and spice to his delivery, which was all to the good. The self-deception of Mein!, envy of Der Jager, and cynical side-eye of Die liebe Farbe brought changes of timbre in his vocal delivery, although the relaxed delivery of the German verse and technical precision across his entire range never faltered.

The final song, Des Baches Wiegenlied, was beautifully recast by the quartet, its rocking rhythm especially good in the hands of the strings. It also restored the sense that we had been given a glimpse into past grief that had proved eminently survivable.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Stuart Armitt

SCO / Manze

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Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Faure’s Requiem is a popular choice for amateur choirs: not too long and requiring limited contributions from just two soloists, it is very often heard with organ or piano accompaniment. Predictably, the honed precision of the SCO Chorus, as prepared by director Gregory Batsleer, was in another league altogether, but it was the partnership with the orchestra itself that made this a revelatory performance.

Faure’s spare orchestration, completed a decade after the work’s composition, is substantially in the hands of the low strings, so SCO Principal Guest Conductor Andrew Manze had the orchestra re-positioned with principal viola Jessica Beeston in the orchestra leader’s seat opposite first cello Su-a Lee, and the violins centre stage but further back.

The effect was crucial aurally as well as visually, the front stage musicians’ combination with horns and organ in the Introit emphasising the movement’s affinity with early music, and the entry of the harp and violins in the Sanctus answered by the lovely counterpoint line given to the violas. For the Pie Jesu that followed, soprano Julia Doyle sang from high in the organ gallery, and the pizzicato cellos and basses in the Libera Me seemed absolutely essential to the anguish of the baritone’s plea for deliverance.

That soloist was Roderick Williams, and the conductor had also put his participation in an excellent broader context. If Gabriel Faure brought something of an outsider’s eye to the rituals of the Catholic church, that perspective could also be detected in everything else in the concert.

Berlioz’s devotion to Shakespeare – albeit in the person of one actress in particular – still seems odd for a man with limited command of the English language, but his Overture, Beatrice and Benedict, is unmistakably a work of the theatre. The combinations of wind instruments were a sparkling part of his dramatic narrative.

Then it was the turn of the SCO strings to shine in music from a century later, and an Essex woman’s impressions of the Lake District. The SCO is in the vanguard of championing the neglected Ruth Gipps and her Cringlemire Garden both harks back to the architectural era of the country house of its title and shows the influence of her teacher, Vaughan Williams, whose own composition of exactly that time – the beginning of the 20th century – followed.

His Five Mystical Songs set the Christian lyrics of early 17th century metaphysical poet and priest George Herbert, and Williams and the SCO Chorus found the sort of respectful distance to the words that the composer surely intended. The best-known of the five is the choral closer, entitled Antiphon, but familiar from its couplet “Let the world in every corner sing, My God and King!” That hymn and the opener, Easter, bracket more personal statements of faith, the central “Love bade me welcome” perhaps the loveliest.

The way Vaughan Williams combines soloist and choir is full of interest and invention, with wordless underscores as well as the fuller choral writing, and Williams is a superb interpreter of this music.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Roderick Williams by Theo Williams

RSNO / MacMillan

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Handel’s Messiah was one of my gateways into music as a child and I still find something in every performance, but it would be no bad thing if Sir James MacMillan’s Christmas Oratorio muscled in on its territory. In this work, which received its Scottish premiere from the RSNO and RSNO Chorus, conducted by the composer himself, MacMillan has made a work of comparable majesty, with the additional virtues for affordable performance of requiring 50 per cent fewer soloists and being half as long.

Without question one of the Scots composer’s most significant works, in a catalogue not short of those, its arrival was complicated by the vicissitudes of the pandemic, which closed down venues and occasioned a ban on choral singing. It is to be hoped that its more gradual and less trumpeted arrival leads to growing status with performers and public, because it is a quite remarkable piece.

The architecture of the oratorio is in itself a thing of beauty, a palindromic structure to each of the two parts (designed to incorporate an interval) which mirror one another in their individual sections.

Four instrumental “Sinfonias” frame the piece and immediately adjacent to them are liturgical choruses, with words (and one melody) from a number of Catholic sources. The soprano and baritone soloists have arias in both halves, setting the poetry of Robert Southwell, John Donne and John Milton, and in the centre of each part are two “Tableau” which use both chorus and soloists, the first using Matthew Chapter 2 to tell the story of the Nativity, the second setting the opening of John’s Gospel.

The composer has chosen his texts with great skill, placing due weight on the darker side of the Christmas story in Herod’s slaughter of the innocents and the flight to Egypt, echoed in the dark tone of the Donne and Southwell sonnets. But there are also moments of lightness, in the opening and closing Sinfonias, for example, which clearly allude to the tinsel and Tinseltown sides of the “Holiday season.”

It is hard not to smile too at the repetitions MacMillan gives the choir to sing, ramming the continued currency of the story of Christ’s birth home in the Latin “Hodie” at the start of the Vespers setting at the end of Part 1, mirrored by “In the beginning” at the start of the Gospel chorus in Part 2.

These reflections and parallel musical allusions make for a work that is full of interest every step of the way, sometimes operatic, but with moments of intensely personal devotion. Some of the most obvious antecedents are in works by Britten, and the Milton setting – superbly sung by Roderick Williams – is the most Britten-esque MacMillan has ever sounded, but mainly it all sounds like MacMillan himself. Moments recall the drama of The Confession of Isobel Gowdie or Ines de Castro, others the quietude of the Seven Last Words or Strathclyde Motets.

Williams was paired with Rhian Lois, well-known to Glasgow audiences for her Musetta and Gretel with Scottish Opera, who was equally versatile in her full-voiced contribution. The work put in by the chorus, under their director Stephen Doughty was immense; this is far from an easy score and the choir gave MacMillan a magnificently expressive performance, as careful with unison singing on a single note (as in the last of the verses from St John) to some bold leaps in pitch.

The instrumental score is no less colourful, although MacMillan often uses the resources at his disposal with notable restraint before demanding full commitment and virtuosity. And while there were fine solo contributions from players across the platform, this was a season highlight for the whole orchestra as well as its excellent chorus.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Sir James MacMillan from rehearsal, courtesy RSNO

Dunedin Consort / Maxwell Quartet

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Crichton Collegiate Church, by Pathhead/Dirleton Kirk

The multifaceted 2023 edition of the Lammermuir Festival – very possibly the most artistically successful in its history, making Creative Scotland’s absence as a supporter all the more absurd – revealed yet another face on its final Sunday. In two of its most architecturally beautiful and acoustically admired venues we heard very different sung music, composed centuries apart, that fitted their original purpose as places of worship.

Roddy Willliams closed his short but highly effective recital at Dirleton Kirk in the afternoon with the Five Mystical Songs of Ralph Vaughan Williams, setting lyrics by metaphysical poet George Herbert, in the composer’s own arrangement for piano (Christopher Glynn) and single strings (the Maxwell Quartet).

Herbert’s guidance to living the Christian life is still part of the liturgy of the church, and the unmistakable voice of the popular baritone sounded wonderful in the closing Antiphon: Let all the world in every corner sing, My God and King!

Less familiar were the settings of English Folk Songs by Vaughan Williams in the singer’s own arrangements for string quartet, which were as crisp as his own immaculate diction. Originally a lockdown project with soprano Mary Bevan and tenor Nicky Spence, Williams took on all the characters in these tales himself with changes of tone and timbre. In a varied selection from the composer’s vast archaeological project, Captain Grant was a geographically appropriate tale of an Edinburgh jail-break, while others dealt with lovers bereft, spurned and slightly soiled.

Preceding the songs and hymns, in the first half the Maxwells and Glynn combined forces for Elgar’s Piano Quintet, perhaps not obvious territory for this quartet but to which they brought their own folk-tinged style, to the music’s great profit. The work is full of changes of mood and tone, the haunted opening giving way to a dance tune that sounds almost Mediterranean, and a spooky carnival ride alternating with a stride across the South Downs in the finale. With a blended sound in the strings that only long acquaintance can bring, and assertive contributions from the pianist, this performance told its tale in what seemed a very swift 40 minutes.

Earlier in the day, at the well-off-the-beaten-track Crichton Collegiate Church (actually in Midlothian), the sequence of secular and sacred was reversed in soprano Nardus Williams’s recital with a Dunedin Consort quintet, led by John Butt from chamber organ and harpsichord.

Following on neatly from the Dunedin’s Out of Her Mouth production in June, featuring three of French composer Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre’s Biblical cantatas, this programme included her instrumental music alongside songs and solo cantatas by her female contemporaries and predecessors in Italy.

The convent composers featured in the first half may have had the Saviour and religious life as their subject, but they were clearly not cloistered from worldly desires and Williams brought real passion to her delivery, whether seated or standing. Singing from memory, she brought an expressiveness to these appeals for the bliss of Heaven or an encounter with the Christ-child that contrasted with the wry, more cynical tone of Barbara Strozzi in La vendetta, the song that gave the recital its title.

The lesson-telling of that and Costuma de grandi, the brilliant word-setting of Havete torto and the 12 minute mono-drama Hor che Apollo made the sequence after the interval a superb introduction to Strozzi, but the genius of the programme was the way it presented her work in context, with the Dunedin instrumentalists on top form.

The soprano – now happily a Dunedin stalwart – was the star however, in what was a beautifully nuanced, delightfully ornamented and utterly compelling performance.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Nardus Williams by Bertie Watson

Raymond Yiu

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THE WORLD WAS ONCE ALL MIRACLE
Delphian

Occasionally, a new composer will spring from nowhere with a musical style that seems completely chaotic, unapologetically eclectic and to all appearances untutored. Yet through the apparent mire emerges a personality so stirring, so imaginative, so wonderfully refreshing that what might be mistaken for stylistic naivety turns out to be an instinctive statement of wild self-belief.

If you haven’t heard of Raymond Yiu, he was born in Hong Kong in 1973, came to the UK in 1990 to study for A levels, before reading engineering at Imperial College London. Mainly self-taught as a composer, and with a freedom of language emanating from his early exposure to 1980s Western pop sung in Cantonese, his music was soon being played by the BBC’s orchestras, the success of the London premiere of The London Citizen Exceedingly Injured leading to commissioning of Symphony for the 2015 BBC Proms. Both feature on this curiously exciting disc.

Just how important it is to know that The London Citizen Exceedingly Injured takes its title from a pamphlet issued by the 18th century Scots-born bookseller Alexander Cruden – something of a latter-day Mary Whitehouse who styled himself a moral “Corrector” – is debatable. More interesting is Yiu’s analogy of modern-day international citizenship, a kind of cultural morass that finds form in the madness of extremes.

While the motivic germ is a borrowing from Elgar’s Cockaigne – a portrait of a very different London – this “game for orchestra” soon explodes into a restless, shifting menagerie of colour, gesture and references. There is violence and calm, industrial grit and spiritual calm, pealing church bells, wanton dance pastiche. It’s a crazy cacophony, skittish in parts, but hugely addictive. The BBC Symphony Orchestra, under David Robertson, reveals Yiu’s underlying craftsmanship in a performance bursting with vital exuberance and energy. 

In Symphony, Yiu displays the same freedom of expression. The protagonist is a countertenor (Andrew Watts), present from the word go – or rather, the gradually emerging word “strong” – in a time-travelling selection of texts from Walt Whitman, Constantine P Cavafy, Thom Gunn and John Donne. The five-movement format offers greater scope for Yiu to frame his thoughts, self-regulating the seeming free-for-all of the earlier piece. 

In no way, though, does it curb his eclectic toolbox, from which the likes of esoteric modernism and seventies’ disco are plucked with shameless confidence. Watts’ flamboyant and versatile performance is matched by conductor Edward Gardner’s cool mastery over the BBC Symphony Orchestra, which is a remastering of the original Royal Albert Hall premiere.

The World Was Once All Miracle features the indomitable baritone Roderick Williams with the BBC SO, this time under the baton of Sir Andrew Davis. Written in the years immediately following Symphony, it’s an extended setting of words by Anthony Burgess, commemorating the 2017 centenary of the A Clockwork Orange author’s birth, in which Yiu explores ever wider musical influences, such as the Malayan instrumentation that haunts the third song. 

Burgess’ words, of course, are just another perfect excuse for Yiu to engage in further wicked satire. With musical quotes from Thomas Arne (one very obvious snippet of Rule Britannia) and a blatant parody on mid-20th century popular song to end with (somewhat abruptly), mixed with anything else that takes his fancy, the charm of Yiu’s music is its compulsive listenability. Scots label Delphian, in remastering these performances, has done well to bring it to wider attention.
Ken Walton