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.
Over a few hours on the Saturday at the start of Easter week, it was possible to bask in the calibre of choral singing of which Scotland can boast.
In the afternoon, at St Michael’s Church by Linlithgow Palace, the NYCOS National Boys Choir revealed the fruits of their residential course at Gartmore. The hiatus of the pandemic has produced an odd imbalance where the older Changing Voices cohort currently outnumbers the trebles and altos of the NBC itself, but the varied programme still boasted a confident, if unseasonal, This Little Babe from Britten’s Ceremony of Carols alongside some Schubert and fine arrangements of sea shanties and spirituals.
In time, some of these older lads may find themselves on the Young Singers programme that refreshes the superbly-balanced Scottish Chamber Orchestra chorus where two of those currently keep the tenor section at a strength most amateur choirs can only dream of.
It does seem unfair on both sides to pitch the SCO Chorus into such a competition, however, as their concert that evening demonstrated. Director Gregory Batsleer’s ensemble are simply in a different league, as their opening motets by Renaissance composer William Byrd immediately proved. This is repertoire we usually hear in concert from small professional chamber choirs, and to hear the overlapping text in the closing “Jerusalem desolata est” sung by nearly 50 voices in the glorious acoustic of Greyfriars was a joy.
A cannily-chosen Scottish premiere of Daniel Kidane’s Be Still – inspired by the experience of the Covid pandemic – provided a string interlude to set the stage for the combination of SCO strings and singers in James MacMillan’s Seven Last Words from the Cross.
If the work is quintessential MacMillan, it now seems astonishing that he composed it so early in his career, and disappointing that such a masterwork is not heard more often.
Sharing some material with his equally bold clarinet work, Tuireadh, that is partly because it requires great skill in the voices, and indeed in the technical precision of the string playing. One of the things that distinguished this immaculate performance was the interplay between the two. That is to the fore in the dialogue between stratospheric sopranos and the low strings in the third part, Verily, I say unto thee, today thou shalt be with me in Paradise, with its parallel solo from the orchestra leader, but it is a continuous process in the work.
The writing for the choir inevitably remains foremost in the memory – beautifully resonant bottom notes as well as those high frequencies, immaculate ensemble singing from the altos and those remarkable tenors. But the instrumental playing is only a hairs-breadth behind, and after the representation of the nails being driven into the cross, it is the violins who have the moving last bars of Christ’s dying breath.
English court composer John Sheppard died during a flu epidemic in the winter of 1558, some 430 years before the birth of Edinburgh-based composer Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade, who is still in her mid-30s. Both, however, sat very comfortably in the Dunedin Consort’s startlingly diverse programme of choral works for Lent.
Associate Director of the Dunedin, tenor Nicholas Mulroy – who was conducting and not singing for this concert – may have devised a programme that should win accolades for its diversity alone. Although it was built around the four motets Francis Poulenc wrote as he rediscovered his Catholic faith on the eve of the Second World War, featured two movements from the Mass Benjamin Britten’s right-hand woman Imogen Holst wrote as a student, and was liberally sprinkled with Renaissance polyphony, it also contrived to include five living composers, four of them women, and a Marian hymn by a Portuguese musician reckoned to be the first black composer to have his work published.
The “rediscovery” of Vicente Lusitano may not have been big news in Lisbon, where that happened 50 years ago, but the rest of Europe is now catching up and his Sancta Maria proved a fascinatingly dense and complex work, sung by a sextet drawn from the ranks of the 16-strong choir. A similar approach of one voice to a part was employed with quintets for Orlando Lassus and William Byrd, and – at a stretch – for Anna Meredith’s affecting and highly original Heal You, performed by a female trio and at times reminiscent of the wonderful Roche sisters.
It followed Canadian Sarah MacDonald’s Crux Fidelis, a work whose intricacy was both textual and musical with the men and women swapping roles as singers of the Latin text and the English poetry of Emily Dickinson and Elizabethan “Dark Lady” Emilia Lanier. The Byrd was followed by Cruttwell-Reade’s The Dead, a setting of Don Paterson’s version of a Rilke sonnet on which the ink is barely dry, and whose harmonies other choirs will surely lap up eagerly.
The distinctive musical dialect of the Poulenc and James MacMillan’s Miserere gave this ensemble plenty of chewy stuff to display their chops, and the Holst, Sheppard, William Gibbons setting of Fletcher’s Drop, Drop Slow Tears and William Henry Harris’s of John Donne’s prayer Bring Us, O Lord God showed their command of more ‘mainstream’ repertoire.
The other new gem in the concert was also a John Donne setting, his masterly sonnet At The Round Earth’s Imagin’d Corners given superbly complementary musical life by Cheryl Frances-Hoad. Giving the sopranos a bit of r’n’r, her ATB voicing, in unison and deceptively simple harmonies, proved a masterclass in sensitivity to rhyme scheme and rhythm.
As well as being the architect of this clever sequence of works, Mulroy was in eloquent command of its musical performance. At the Glasgow one, however, he chose to present it in artificial groups of three pieces, solely to control the applause, and regardless of stage management realities. It was an unfortunate decision, and letting the audience do its own thing, or – even better – asking it to hold back until the end of each half, was really what his thoughtfully-compiled recital deserved.
Repeated at Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh on Friday March 28, Dundee St Mary’s Parish Church on Saturday 29 and Aberdeen’s Cowdray Hall on Sunday 30.
As it was revealed in the programme, it seems most unlikely that Sir James MacMillan was the only soul in the City Hall unaware that the Scottish premiere of his new Concerto for Orchestra, “Ghosts”, would be preceded by the award of a prestigious Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Philharmonic Society, as was suggested, but the conceit at least spared the conductor the additional task of preparing an acceptance speech.
More importantly, it gave RPS chief executive James Murphy and the charity’s chair Angela Dixon the opportunity to explain the significance of the honour – MacMillan joining a pantheon that includes many of the most familiar names of classical music – and to remind the audience of the composer’s vast back catalogue, beginning with the acclaim for The Confession of Isobel Gowdie and Veni Veni Emmanuel. (BBC Radio 3 should further expand on that when this concert is broadcast.)
As it stood, however, this was already a mighty evening of music, painting a comprehensive picture of where MacMillan is now, because that new piece was preceded by no fewer than eight orchestral works from composers nurtured at the festival he has established in his home town, The Cumnock Tryst – an event that has already been garlanded by the Royal Philharmonic Society.
They ranged in length from a few minutes to a quarter of an hour and demonstrated a diversity of stylistic approaches, but remarkably all but the first of them, by Copenhagen-based Yorkshireman Matthew Grouse, were by composers from Ayrshire. MacMillan is fond of saying that there must be something in the water to grow such a concentration of talent in the area, but Dixon was correct to point out that the secret ingredient is plainly his dedicated mentorship.
Grouse’s Solods and Tuttis was an intriguing beginning, a collage-work commissioned by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Cumnock Tryst, it attempts to convey the musical experience of the Covid-19 pandemic with the sudden switch to online and filmed performances. Musical quotations and technical glitches were mashed-up in a wry sonic soup that changed gear and tempo relentlessly, a bracing test for both the players and the conductor.
Michael Murray’s brief Visions of the A-Frame, inspired by the relic of the coal-mining industry that stands as a memorial to lives lost near Auchinleck, provided a contrast – and some theatrical direction of the orchestra by MacMillan. The self-taught Murray, has been part of the Tryst story since it began and this atmospheric piece was perhaps the most emblematic ingredient of the evening.
Electra Perivolaris has also been part of the new music at the festival for some years. Her two short environment-inspired works, A Wave Breaking and A Forest Reawakens, owe a debt to Peter Maxwell-Davies as well as her acknowledged influence, Judith Weir. The first featured some particularly lovely writing for the winds, while the second grew to a warm choral climax.
Jay Capperauld is undoubtedly now the best-known of the products of the Tryst and currently enjoying a purple patch as Associate Composer with the SCO, which explained his personal absence from this concert as his newest work, Bruckner’s Skull, was being premiered by the orchestra in Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall.
His equally intriguingly-titled Inertia of a Bona Fide Pyschopath dates from 2014 but this was its Scottish premiere. Melodious flutes and clarinets alternated with splashy discordant harpsichord in a compelling evocation of mental stress, and Capperauld’s skill with colourful orchestration was always evident as cacophony and statement battled it out.
There was some of that technique in Scott Lygate’s Engines and Men as well. The composer himself was soloist on this single-movement concerto for contrabass clarinet and orchestra, his majestic instrument receiving its own share of the applause when he brought it onstage. He demonstrated a virtuosic range of extended techniques on it too, while the orchestral writing began with a string underscore before ranging into the jazzy involvement of the other winds, and became distinctly cinematic as the work opened out.
After the interval, MacMillan’s own music was prefaced by two short pieces from Gillian Walker, both inspired by poetry, the first in Shetland dialect, the second Lowland Scots and both very redolent of the speech rhythms of their source. The specific melodic echoes in Jean Redpath’s Skippin’ Barfit Thro’ the Heather made it an appropriate partner for MacMillan’s Concerto for Orchestra “Ghosts” which quotes Beethoven’s “Ghost” Trio and alludes to Debussy’s trio for flute, viola and harp.
Larger combinations of instruments within the sections of the orchestra are employed at various points in what is a multi-faceted but very clearly-structured work. Rich in melody, “Ghosts” is MacMillan at his most approachable and it is a piece surely destined for regular performance. Written for the fullest orchestral forces, it also makes virtuosic demands of individual players with some terrific passages for brass and clarinets, and switches from familiar combinations of instruments to more esoteric ones. The SSO played it quite brilliantly for him.
Chamber choir The Marian Consort were at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland to mentor vocal studies and composition students before their Friday lunchtime concert, and there can also have been few among the audience in the well-filled Stevenson Hall who left without learning something.
Not only did Rory McCleery’s group give a masterclass in performing 16th century scores, with some appropriate contemporary works in the mix, but their founder and director kept us up to speed with the latest thinking on the music of the era in genial style. This was a very thoughtfully compiled programme that included works written half a millennium apart which spoke eloquently to one another.
If Scotland’s much-vaunted Auld Alliance with France means anything at all, here was the sonic evidence, unaccompanied singing, sourced from manuscripts found in Scotland, that mixed native composers with those who worked in France: Josquin de Prez, Johannes Lupi and Notre Dame choirboy Pierre Certon.
All three of those, and much of the anonymous music alongside, were in praise of, or from the mouth of, the Virgin Mary, by way of justifying the consort’s name, but of even greater interest was the way in which they musically drew on one another, or demonstrated a shared inspiration. That there was a vibrant trade in musical ideas between the two countries seemed unarguable, even if it was the interweaving complexity of the individual parts in the French music that was the more sophisticated.
The octet found space to make the case for simplicity as well, however. The inclusion of the post-Reformation setting of Psalm 150 by David Peebles, with its instantly-recognisable four-part metric harmony, showed that the era also shaped the sound of Scottish worship for the next four hundred years.
That prolific composer’s present day successors are free to range across languages as well as tenets of faith and Phillip Cooke’s Canticum Mariae Virginis alternates choral singing in Latin with a solo soprano singing words from the Magnificat in Scots, to mesmerizing effect. Just as compelling was the contribution of current RCS doctorate student Kenneth Tay, whose Duo Seraphim for double choir makes inspired use of bell-like whistling as counterpoint to the Latin text, initially by the men in the choir and finally by conductor McCleery himself.
All of which ostensibly left no room for the best known of Scotland’s living composers of sacred music, James McMillan, although advance publicity had promised its inclusion. But if devotees of Sir James were feeling short-changed, the encore answered their prayers.
Emerging from among the audience – as had an off-stage tenor singing plainchant earlier in the recital – 20 RCS voice students expanded McCleery’s choir for the hit tune from MacMillan’s Strathclyde Motets, O Radiant Dawn. There was no following that.
A programme of new music is not what Scottish Chamber Orchestra patrons have come to expect from the visits from Andrew Manze, but perhaps this contribution by the orchestra to the Nordic Music Days weekend suggests a broader remit since his appointment as Principal Guest Conductor.
The obvious reason for his presence on the podium was the Scottish premiere of Swede Anders Hillborg’s Viola Concerto, as he also conducted its first performance three years ago by its dedicatee, Lawrence Power, with the Royal Liverpool Phil.
The virtuoso violist is in a class of his own, and the work demands all his skill as it knocks any preconceptions about the capabilities and tonal colour of his instrument out of the park. As Manze mentioned, the work’s Covid-era composition can be heard in much of the writing, particularly the furious “Rage” of the opening movement, which has a reprise at the end.
It is redolent of Appalachia as much as Scandinavia, and there is an appeal to the work that suggests a global audience in mind, not least the closing string crescendo’s resemblance to The Beatles’ A Day in the Life, accompanied by a vocal cry from the players. That Hillborg took his bow wearing an Abbey Road album cover t-shirt was presumably no coincidence.
Behind the frantic bowing of the solo part, there is some very specific scoring throughout the concerto from slapped string basses to sustained chords on piano and SCO principal viola Max Mandel’s drone note beneath Power’s later cadenza.
The composer’s Swedish contemporary Madeleine Isaksson provided the short work that began the second half. Flows (Tornio) is the central part of a geographical triptych and much more recognisably “Nordic” with a compelling narrative arc in which its rich scoring dissolved to something much simpler.
There is nothing simple about James MacMillan’s Symphony No.2, which closed the concert. It is 25 years since the SCO gave its premiere and the piece is not ready to give up all its secrets yet. It’s a peculiar sort of symphony, the main course of the second movement framed by two much briefer – although hardly slighter – sections. Much of it would not readily be identified as bearing the composer’s signature at all and the audible influences range dizzyingly wide.
To the Wagner, Boulez and Berio he acknowledges, one could add Shostakovich and Messiaen, and – much less predictably – hints of Ravel and even a few bars akin to John Williams’ score for Star Wars. Manze brought an expansive intelligence to this performance which kept revealing its more fascinating depths. It is well worth tuning into the BBC Radio 3 broadcast of the concert for this work as much as anything else in the programme.
The composition that is likely to keep most listeners by their wireless sets, however, is the work that opened the evening. Jay Capperauld’s Death in a Nutshell was first performed by the SCO three years ago (shortly after the premieres of both the Swedish composers’ pieces, curiously), with MacMillan conducting. Capperauld was then made SCO Associate Composer (as MacMillan has once been), and has made an exemplary contribution in that role thus far. If this work was a factor in his appointment that would be no surprise.
Perfect Hallowe’en fare, its inspiration in the dioramas of crime scenes made by Frances Glessner Lee is remarkable and the programme notes which accompany it are a compelling read. They are far from compulsory, however, as the six-movement work is simply terrific music, and its Cluedo/Hitchcock vibe, complete with hints of Herrmann, comes with bits of theatre (percussionist Louise Goodwin’s claw hammer) and some glorious melodic material, often to match the grisliest stories.
Keith Bruce
This concert was recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Wednesday November 6, available thereafter on BBC Sounds.
ROBERT Schumann’s Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood) are open to interpretation, and it was emblematic of the fascinating programme Steven Osborne debuted to open the 10th birthday edition of The Cumnock Tryst that the pianist chose to offer a brief guide to the 13 short pieces verbally before he played a note.
Whether they are simply a wistful adult view of childhood or contain a deeper psychological picture of the composer, it was an invitation to sit up and tune in to the recital this most thoughtful of players had structured.
Crucially, the set contains at least two melodies well known beyond their original context, and that set the tone: some top tunes, masterly keyboard technique and a sequence of choices that engaged the brain as well as the heart.
The earliest piece followed, Bach’s Jesu, joy of man’s desiring. It too has a rich back-story, becoming especially popular in the mid-20th century performances of Myra Hess. Here it was immediately followed by Lumen Christi, composed in 1997 by our festival host, Sir James MacMillan. His use of a liturgical Easter chant in the brief piece sounds a little like a musical box, and after we had heard a sparkling Prokofiev Prelude we returned to that idea with the Musical Snuff Box composed by Anatoly Liadov, a composer every bit as troubled as Schumann.
That lovely miniature ends like a musical box in need of winding, and Osborne followed it with a third Russian, Rachmaninov and his unmistakable flamboyant signature arrangement of Fritz Kreisler’s Liebesleid.
There ended that distinct section, before a time-shift to the sequence that followed, perhaps more eclectic superficially, but no less carefully thought-through, and clearly all close to the performer’s heart.
Beginning with keyboard studies on Scottish Folk Tunes by Osborne’s contemporary at St Mary’s Music School, James Clapperton, it visited the catalogue of Judith Weir with her 2017 piece, Chorale for Steve (remembering American composer Steve Stucky), before seamlessly moving into jazz mode.
Playing three of his own transcriptions of recordings of improvising, with a fourth as an encore, Osborne was in territory he has made his own, but here given welcome sustained exposure. Keith Jarrett, unsurprisingly, featured large, his My Song – one of his loveliest melodies – opening the sequence, and, in the encore from his Vienna Concert album, closing it.
In between Osborne “became” two more very different and distinctive jazz pianists: Bill Evans playing Gershwin’s I Loves You Porgy and Oscar Peterson doing his Art-Tatum-on-speed thing with the very early James Hanley jazz standard, Indiana.
45 years ago, when he was 53, British jazz pianist composer and band leader Stan Tracey recorded a fine album of solo piano music which he wryly entitled “Hello Old Adversary!” At the same age, Steven Osborne’s relationship with the Steinway grand is more like that between Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer – and what fabulous fun they are able to have together!
As chorus director and conductor Gregory Batsleer pointed out, the performers on stage in the restored, if slightly jaded, splendour of the Great Hall of Stirling Castle have an excellent view to the National Wallace Monument and the Ochil Hills which matched the heaven and skywards theme of most of the works he had programmed.
He conceded, however, that the audience is not in the same privileged position, so it was down to the choir to communicate that. Thankfully the SCO Chorus is capable of reaching heights other ensembles can only aspire to.
The two newest works in the programme were, perhaps, furthest from that theme as well as closest to home. Andrew Carvel is a tenor in the choir as well as a composer and wrote his setting of Psalm 150, which lists a suggested instrumentation for the Lord’s Praise, for a BBC broadcast from St Andrew’s and St George’s Church in Edinburgh. With its fluxing music, it is recognisably hymn-like, but a long way from congregational.
The SCO’s current Associate Composer, Jay Capperauld, contributed a setting of a contemporary poem by Fife-based Niall Campbell. The Night Watch is about the joyous sleeplessness of caring for a newborn, a sort of inverse lullaby which Capperauld has set to use the individual and sectional talents of the choir, especially the pure-toned sopranos.
Less than a month after the Dunedin Consort singers gave a memorable performance of Tarik O’Regan’s Scattered Rhymes, it was a joy to hear another of his choral pieces, The Ecstasies Above. Setting Edgar Allan Poe’s Israfel, which recognises the beauty of the archangel but also his otherworldliness, the piece is full of rhythmic challenges as well as shifts in dynamics. With instrumental support from a quartet of SCO players – violinists Gordon Bragg and Amira Bedrush-McDonald, violist Brian Schiele and cellist Philip Higham – those sopranos were once again on star form.
They did not have the whole show to themselves, however, and the full-voiced basses sounded remarkably Russian for John Tavener’s Syvati, the choir’s drones and Eastern intervals complemented by Higham’s cello from the minstrel’s gallery, from where he also played Tavener’s contemporaneous cello solo, Chant.
The other liturgical works in the programme were Roxanna Panufnik’s Kyrie after Byrd, inspired by the 16th century composer and less than a decade old, and the opener from James MacMillan’s Strathclyde Motets, from 2007 and ideally voiced to introduce the sound of the choir in this historic venue.
If there was an enticement for the uninitiated to buy tickets, it was in Ralph Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, regularly voted the public’s favourite classical piece. Few, however, would have heard it in this arrangement by Paul Drayton, in which Bragg’s violin had a choral accompaniment and the instrumental soloist only had our full attention in the closing bars.
Using a brutally condensed version of the George Meredith poem that inspired the composer (fewer that a tenth of the lines of verse), the score is mostly wordless and demands a broad range of techniques from both the full choir and a number of individual voices within it. Like much else in the recital, it proved a demonstration of the technical mastery of the SCO Chorus.
Alongside world class musicianship and a breadth of programming that leaves few ears unengaged, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s 50th anniversary season has been distinguished by very thoughtful and original programming. This concert, built around the world premiere of a new choral work by Sir James MacMillan, was a stunning example of that.
MacMillan’s Composed in August – not a diary note but the real title of the Robert Burns lyric known mostly by its first line Now Westlin Winds – is an SCO commission with partner organisations in Estonia and Sweden. Once they have had their premieres, it is likely to become a very popular piece with choirs, challenging in parts but tune-filled, and unusual in being a secular work from MacMillan for these forces.
The singers have to employ a range of techniques and the excellent SCO Chorus members were as assured in their diction of the rhythmically overlapping phrases as in the wordless music at the gentle finish. The instrumental music is for the SCO’s standard set-up, with the odd extra string player, and echoes the pastoral music of the Baroque era in the strings, horns and woodwind birdsong while still bearing the clear signature of the composer. With a wealth of different music over the five stanzas, it is an exquisite piece.
The work of two Ayrshire lads was followed by a Mancunian’s impression of Orcadian celebration, with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s perennially popular An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise. There are few conductors who so obviously enjoy their work as Maxim Emelyanychev, but the young Russian was in ecstatic form here, enjoying all the theatre of the piece with foot-stomping enthusiasm. That included a tray of drams being brought on for himself and leader Stephanie Gonley as the work slides into inebriation, greeted with a hilarious massed “slanj” of hipflasks from the chorus, still seated in the choir stalls.
If the larks set up the arrival of piper Robert Jordan, in full regalia, from the back of hall to perfection, there was also a characteristic precision in every detail of their performance – especially the “tuning up” moment, which Emelyanychev surely recognised as being a gag partly at his own expense.
The programme began with a French composer’s way with Scots romanticism, Berlioz’s Rob Roy overture, which takes Burns’s tune Scots Wha Hae and finds a lot of different things to do with it. With some period instrumentation, it is a curious and fascinating response to Sir Walter Scott’s novel, full of colour and a reminder, perhaps, that the melody makes a strong claim to National Anthem status.
The overture teed-up a superb performance of the same composer’s La mort de Cleopatre with mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill on her best form. Rather than a soloist at the front of the stage she was embedded in the music, but at the same time gave an expressive reading that was straight off the opera stage. The low string pulse that sets up her welcoming of death sounded startlingly contemporary, and emblematic of how this orchestra and its associates span the centuries.
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
Some end-of-term concerts are grander than others, and this one, in terms of its participants and musical content, was certainly top of the class. Featuring an orchestra that teamed the current cohort of students with alumni whose schooldays ended as long ago as the early 1980s, under the baton of cellist, teacher and leader of the Hebrides Ensemble Will Conway, and a choir that involved the entire school singing a new work by Sir James MacMillan, the star soloists included a trio for Beethoven’s Triple Concerto of violinist Colin Scobie, cellist Philip Higham and pianist Steven Osborne, all former pupils.
Yet there was a sense that the event needed to be grander than it turned out. It felt constrained by the dimensions of the venue, both physically and aurally, and the occasion – the Golden Jubilee of the establishment of St Mary’s as a proper academic establishment for the training of young musicians – seemed worthy of a bigger bash. The long saga of the school’s ambition to move from its present cramped accommodation in Edinburgh’s West End to a redeveloped Old Royal High School on Calton Hill, has perhaps taken its toll. Although that development is now on track, it is probably unlikely that even the youngest of the present pupils will still be around to see the move.
Nonetheless, St Mary’s cannot be accused of losing sight of the music in the course of embracing its bold building scheme. That campaign has been soundtracked by The Seven Hills Project, which commissioned seven composers to write a diversity of pieces, the common thread being new verses, themed on Edinburgh’s seven hills, written by Alexander McCall Smith. The 50th birthday commission was the new MacMillan piece, setting George Mackay Brown’s calendar poem The Flute in the Garden.
It is a challenging sing for a youth chorus, in which the orchestra is very much an equal partner, and the flute of the title a crucial voice. The loveliest moments occur, appropriately, in the summer months, with instantly recognisable evocations of the sounds of nature. It is not a long work, but surely one that other ensembles, vocal and instrumental, will be keen to get their teeth into.
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise was a well-chosen work to follow the new piece, although also a tall order for young players, who rose splendidly to its challenges and enthusiastically added the required vocal punctuation. The concluding bagpipes appeared from the back of the hall in the hands of Brighde Chaimbeul, more usually a virtuoso on the bellows-powered smallpipes, and rarely seen playing standing up, never mind making a pacing entrance.
The concert ended with another world premiere in Judith Weir’s 50 Happy Bars, a measured fanfare/coda that revealed itself as an orchestration of the world’s best known birthday melody.
The first half of the programme had begun with the only piece that really suited the scale of the Queen’s Hall – Aaron Copland’s Quiet City. Conway’s small string ensemble was flanked by the two guest soloists – trumpeter Aaron Akugbo and the cor anglais of Katherine Bryer. As a piece it may have outgrown its theatrical origins, but it was the precision of this performance by all involved that made it such a good place to start.
The Triple Concerto, on the other hand, did seem a squeezed into the space, an impression amplified by an orchestral sound that was initially more (late) ‘Beethoveney’ than the work really wants. What was fascinating, so soon after hearing Benedetti, Kanneh-Mason and Grosvenor play it with the RSNO, was the very different approach of Scobie, Higham and Osborne. They were no less communicative as a trio, but there was no question that Higham had the leading role.
BBC Radio Scotland’s rumoured plan to axe a huge swathe of its specialist music programming has now been confirmed. A news exclusive this week by the Scotsman’s arts correspondent Brian Ferguson extracted a response from the press office at Pacific Quay that neither denied BBC Scotland’s intentions nor offered a convincing argument for the controversial decision.
Widely discussed over the festive season, Ferguson’s story confirmed that both Classics Unwrapped, presented by tenor Jamie MacDougall and Jazz Nights, fronted by singer and violinist Seonaid Aitken (pictured), had been “decommissioned” in response to the freezing of the licence fee and a shift from broadcast to digital output.
Added to the news that pipe music programme, Pipeline, was to lose its broadcast slot – revealed to writer and piper Rab Wallace before Christmas – the changes amount to the cancellation of the BBC Scotland’s commitment to much of its weekend broadcasting of traditional and classical music, opera and jazz.
Although BBC insiders believe that the cost-cutting measure is unlikely to be reversed, political condemnation of the organisation has been swift and widespread. Two of Scotland’s best known musicians, tenor saxophonist and educator Tommy Smith and composer and conductor Sir James MacMillan, have started online petitions opposing the decisions to cut Jazz Nights and Classics Unwrapped.
The new director of the Edinburgh International Festival, violinist Nicola Benedetti, quickly added her voice, and the campaign has also been supported by Creative Scotland’s Head of Music, Alan Morrison.
The justification for the axing of the programmes has looked desperately thin, with Smith and others pointing out that the programmes’ budgets will represent a small saving and Ferguson speculating that sports coverage has been ring-fenced at the expense of the arts.
It certainly looks like an abdication of responsibility on the part of BBC Scotland to curtail its support, reporting and discussion of areas of music that are a distinct national success story and whose funding is built into the political settlement of devolved government in Edinburgh.
Although its main paymaster is BBC Radio 3, it is also true that the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra is a local asset paid scant attention by BBC Scotland itself, and whose long-term future is hardly helped by the decision.
Few will also be persuaded by the BBC Scotland spokesperson’s glib statement about a shift towards digital, when more thoughtful strategies of parallel development are being pursued elsewhere in the BBC. As the range of formats and platforms employed for recorded music has long demonstrated, consumers do not follow such a linear path but prefer to be able to choose and use the full range of what is on offer.
That it has been left to an un-named press officer to justify the cuts also speaks volumes of a decision that has been made to achieve savings without affecting BBC Scotland’s narrow definition of its core activity and staffing. A senior management representative should be called to account in the face of the vociferous opposition to the changes.
TO the ears of those who have heard John Butt whisk the Dunedin Consort through Part One of Handel’s Messiah in well under an hour, Sir James MacMillan’s conducting debut of the work will not have sounded very pacey at all.
Truth to tell, the older members of Edinburgh Royal Choral Union – a choir that now boasts a healthy number of younger faces – have probably been asked to sing their annual New Year staple faster in some pre-pandemic performances. But if the unhurried approach MacMillan took denied his stated intention when he spoke to VoxCarnyx before the concert, that was probably for the best. What we heard was a very expressive, but never bombastic, Messiah where the story-telling took precedence over any darker liturgical message.
The choir can take a great deal of the credit for that, dispatching the trickier choruses with panache, only coming apart slightly in Part Two’s penultimate one, Let us break their bonds, but recovering quickly. Edinburgh’s Pro-Musica Orchestra were also a crucial factor in the light touch, fielding RSNO and Scottish Opera players alongside the freelances under the leadership of the Grit Orchestra’s Greg Lawson, and with ERCU director Michael Bawtree at the harpsichord and John Kitchen in a telling supporting role on the Usher Hall organ.
But the key ingredient for many in the completely filled hall on Monday afternoon was the quartet of young soloists, three of them – soprano Catriona Hewitson, mezzo Catherine Backhouse, and baritone Paul Grant – born in Edinburgh, and, alongside Royal Scottish Conservatoire-trained tenor Kieran White, all representatives of a new generation of highly-accomplished young voices.
For them, the old distinctions between big choral society Messiahs with hundreds of singers and historically-informed chamber choir recitals of the work are ancient history. What they have learned to do is give their own best performance of the oratorio, individually and collectively, in the most communicative way possible.
That is exactly what happened for the rapt audience in the capital from White’s gently-crooned “Comfort ye my people” onwards, Grant upping the ante with his sharply-enunciated shaking of all the nations, before Backhouse’s run of arias foretelling the birth of Christ, rich in her lower register with a delicious flourish at the end of Malachi’s “refiner’s fire”.
The narrative stepped up another notch with the shift to the Gospel texts and soprano Hewitson, who delivered the story as if she was announcing the good news for the very first time to an intimate circle of friends.
The flow of nice interpretative detail continued after the interval in Backhouse’s He Was Despised and the sequence of choruses from the same chapter of Isaiah. This choir demonstrates a dynamic range that is a rare skill among large amateur choruses, and MacMillan made full use of that.
Hewitson’s How beautiful are the feet was a little jewel amongst those choruses, and both she and Grant – on Why do the nations? and The trumpet shall sound – gave excellent accounts of the best known arias in Parts Two and Three.
With all the usual cuts to the full score, this was not an epic Messiah, and nor was it an especially “authentic” one, but it was a performance that everyone in the capacity house savoured from start to finish.
The conductors of Handel’s Messiah in Glasgow and Edinburgh on January 2 talk to Keith Bruce
As young musicians they came to Handel’s masterwork as a trumpet player and a flautist, but this year James MacMillan and Nicholas McGegan are on the podium for the New Year concerts of Messiah in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall and Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. For one it is a conducting debut, while the other has been part of the revolution in historically-informed performances of the work for more than four decades.
“I went to performances of it as a boy in Cumnock,” remembers MacMillan. “The local choral union was the Kyle Choral Union and they used to put on performances of Messiah and other oratorios. In fact one of my earliest trumpet memories is of playing third trumpet in a performance of Handel’s Judas Maccabeus in New Cumnock when I was 12 or 13 with the Kyle Choral Union. So they performed Messiah as well, with amateur players from around Ayrshire.”
McGegan recalls playing flute in the Prout orchestration of the work when he was at high school in Nottingham, and then being disappointed to find out that Handel had not written flute parts at all.
He was at the harpsichord when he played it in a seminal performance at Westminster Abbey in 1979, under the baton of Christopher Hogwood with his Academy of Ancient Music.
“It was about zero degrees and I was wearing fingerless Bob Cratchit gloves, and soprano Emma Kirkby had thermal underwear underneath her Laura Ashley dress.”
Understandably, however, McGegan recalls that era as a thrilling time when baroque repertoire was being re-thought.
“I ran intro Chris Hogwood at Cambridge in 1970. He was living at the top of a house owned by Sir Nicholas Shackleton, whose collection of wind instruments is now at Edinburgh University. I was loaned an 18th century flute and I went to the library and got hold of a treatise to learn how to play it, so I ended up playing second flute on the first recording of the Academy of Ancient Music.
“It was an exciting time; Trevor Pinnock was also around and a lot of this music was being done for the first time in many years. I was a slightly junior member of the team: Chris and Trevor and John Eliot Gardiner were all about ten years older than me. I played the harpsichord for them and, when necessary, the flute, and I was part of the project.”
It was in the USA that McGegan graduated to conducting the work, in the middle of the following decade.
“I remember directing my first Messiah absolutely to the day. It was December 1986 with the St Louis Symphony and the soprano, as she was then, was the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and it was her first Messiah too. She was a remarkable artist and in 91 I was able to record it with her.”
This year McGegan is once again at the helm of the RSNO and RSNO Chorus, with soloists soprano Mhairi Lawson, counter-tenor William Towers, tenor Jamie MacDougall and bass-baritone Stephen Loges. On the same afternoon, composer James MacMillan conducts the work for the first time for Edinburgh Royal Choral Union, where Catriona Hewitson, Catherine Backhouse, Kieran White and Paul Grant are the soloists.
“I sang bits of it later in my student years,” says MacMillan, “but a lot of the music I sang at school and university was earlier and I never sang the big choral union sort of pieces. So preparing for this performance there has been a lot that felt like seeing and hearing it for the first time.
“Some of the arias I really didn’t know and the breadth that Messiah travels over its three parts is incredible, not just from Christmas to the Crucifixion but as a piece of music drama. It really takes you on a journey with a whole range of emotions and moods. I can see now why it established itself as a deeply loved masterpiece.
“The hinterland now is the difference of approach from the big choral union tradition to what the early music world has brought to it, with smaller choirs and a tighter, more authentic instrumental approach.
“All that has to be taken on board and that might be the reason why I’ve never conducted it before, because there is a specialism and scholarship to Baroque and Pre-Baroque music that puts barriers up for the rest of us. My choral music was earlier, unaccompanied music, but most of the orchestral music I’ve conducted in the last 20-odd years or so is later, so coming to Messiah for the first time is a new thing for me.”
At the same time, MacMillan’s own composing life has moved from smaller, unaccompanied motets toward exactly the shape of work that Handel undertook after his operas.
“In recent times I’ve written a lot of big oratorios – the Christmas Oratorio, the St John Passion and the St Luke Passion – and I suppose they acknowledge the historical hinterland of Handel’s oratorios and Bach’s cantatas and passions – it’s all there in the mix. You grow up with this music and it leaves an indelible mark, sometimes subliminally, on a composer’s mind.”
The Covid pandemic had yet to silence choirs around the world when McGegan last conducted in Glasgow, where he thinks he counts as a local boy because of his years as Principal Guest Conductor at Scottish Opera, and the flat he still has in the city’s west end.
“New Year 2020 was the last time I was with the RSNO, just before the pandemic, so a lot of the same people will be playing in the orchestra and I hope some of the audience will be the same too.
“What I do is bring my own orchestra parts, with my bowings, the dynamics and articulation written in. I’ve worked with nearly all the soloists before, either in Messiah or other projects – people like Jamie MacDougall and I go way back, Will Towers and I have done opera together as well as Messiah – so it is like organising a dinner party for friends.
“I first came to Glasgow in 1991 and did The Magic Flute with Scottish Opera two years running. My father was an Edinburgh boy and I had a clutch of rather terrifying great aunts in Morningside, who were horrified that I wanted to work there!
“I had the best time at Scottish Opera, I always enjoyed it. I’ll be 73 next month, but I hope I’ve still got a few Figaros left in me. I did Figaro, Giovanni and Cosi at Scottish Opera and loved every second of it.”
MacMillan may be making his Messiah debut in Edinburgh next week, but he has other concerts of the work upcoming.
“This time is very experimental for me, but I get to do it again a couple of times in December next year in Australia. I have been asked to conduct it with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in the week before my Christmas Oratorio. I think they thought if they were having me for one week they might as well have me for two!
“So it is something that will grow as I get to do it a few times. Keeping the pace lively is important and that is something we have all learned from the early music revolution. I’ve taken a couple of rehearsals now and I’ve been delighted how chorusmaster Michael Bawtree has trained the choir. It is very lithe and very light on its feet.
“I’ll bring a composer’s inside view to the process, and whether that’s valuable is for others to decide! I haven’t had a conducting lesson in my life, but I did have a consultation with Sir Colin Davis, who said that I should keep doing what I do, because there is something about a composer’s perspective that is unique. He thought that a contemporary composer’s view of the music of the past is valuable, and I was always encouraged by that.
“And the more I have lived with Messiah, I think there has to be a sense of through-composed travelling and of drama in the performance. I am wondering about whether some of the stopping and starting is really necessary and I might want to push on, so there’s not much hanging about between arias and choruses, and a non-stop feel to where the music is going.”
It is the non-stop sequence of performances of Messiah that McGegan identifies as one of its unique characteristics.
“It is one of the very few pieces I know that has been in more or less continuous performance since it was written. I know some musicologists would disagree, but I just see the basic story of the prophecies surrounding the birth of Christ, Christ’s life and passion and the resurrection, with the basic tenets of the religion without delving too deeply into the tricky stuff.
“It’s unusual for Handel because nearly all his oratorios have people singing roles. Jesus does not appear as a singing role and in some ways I think that makes it easier for everybody. It is not a portrait of Jesus, it is a portrait of the idea of the religion.
“Handel’s librettist, Charles Jennens, chose the texts very carefully to find the words that were easiest to sing and Handel sets those words very carefully. Handel is a master of writing for choirs, but the choruses are actually much more difficult than people who don’t sing realise. It is a masterpiece of very varied choral writing. That’s why people love it so.”
MacMillan also notes the way the work appeals as much to those of no faith as to the devout.
“When Messiah was first performed in the 1700s, I wonder what kind of mood there would have been in the hall. Would people want to applaud?
“How secular was it? How sacred was it? It seems to be a hybrid form that brought together the sacred and the secular in the world of music.”
The Edinburgh Royal Choral Union Messiah begins at noon in the Usher Hall, Edinburgh on January 2. The RSNO and RSNO Chorus perform the work from 3pmon the same day at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.
The day after a scratch orchestra had played film music to a reportedly packed house in a concert organised by a commercial promoter, it was disappointing that the RSNO was greeted by a half-filled hall for a programme of equally attractive concert music with the bonus of a Scottish premiere from the country’s best-known living composer performed by an international star.
That soloist was mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill and the Three Scottish Songs were new orchestrations by Sir James MacMillan only previously heard in March this year, when the singer was Ian Bostridge and the orchestra the Britten Sinfonia.
Superficially, they make an odd trio, the first two in Scots and intimate words of love and loss composed by MacMillan to sound akin to folk songs of an earlier era. The third, The Children, also sets words by William Soutar, but written in English and a harrowing evocation of the war-time loss of innocent lives, written during the Spanish Civil War. Its sound-world is entirely different, distinctly in the composer’s style, and as explicit as the text.
There is, however, a consistently spare style to all three, Cargill beginning the first two unaccompanied and singing solo for most of the first stanza of The Children after an initial chord. The composer uses only strings and percussion, and the instrumental silences are often as eloquent as the music in his arrangements, with the focus always on the singer, at least until the cataclysmic percussive conclusion.
Who knows how Bostridge, whose Englishness makes him a great interpreter of Noel Coward’s songs, coped with the linguistic transition inherent in the set, but it presented no difficulty to Cargill and there was in her interpretation a clear line from the personal to the universal. What links all three of William Soutar’s poems is the veracity of their emotional truth and MacMillan and the mezzo masterfully communicated that.
The concert was to have been conducted by Maestro “Sasha” Lazarev, the orchestra’s Russian Conductor Emeritus, whose presence was impossible because of the global situation. Perhaps his absence was linked to the number of empty seats, but if so, those who stayed away missed a debut on the podium that was worth witnessing.
Austrian conductor Patrick Hahn is still in his 20s, and already has a list of senior posts in Germany on his CV, and apparently sings cabaret songs and plays a mean jazz piano as well. Taking over the existing RSNO programme this week, the spare essence of the MacMillan was bracketed by huge orchestral stuff – three movements from Khachaturian’s ballet Spartacus, and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 4.
A diminishing number of folk must now hear the former and see a tall ship in full sail battling the waves, thanks to its use in the BBC TV drama The Onedin Line, and that will certainly not be the case for the young conductor. That theme was presented here at the centre of a suite that started quietly but swiftly unleashed the full power of the symphony orchestra and concluded with a triple-time section to rival the Armenian composer’s other great waltz, which the touring RSNO played as an encore under conductor Peter Oundjian, and a great brass climax.
Tchaikovsky 4 also featured in an Oundjian touring programme. Hahn took the work at his own very measured pace, a quietly deliberate way with the dramatic opening that paid dividends later. I don’t think I have heard the orchestra play quite so quietly before the first clarinet’s entry. There was a very precise ebb and flow in the pizzicato Scherzo too, and a full range of contrasts and dynamics in the Finale – and another huge finish. I’d wager that the whizz-kid from Ganz will be back.
From its first announcement, back in October 2013, Sir James MacMillan’s intention for The Cumnock Tryst has been that it serves and reflects the community where he was raised. Inevitably there have been times, however, when the programme of music performed by professional visitors and the inclusion of contributions from local amateurs have seemed some distance apart.
On the last day of this year’s programme, in the august surroundings of the restored splendour of Dumfries House, that was emphatically not the case.
On Sunday afternoon, in the lovely recital room in the house itself, Latvian pianist Arta Arnicane fulfilled a promise to herself and to an amateur composer from nearby Troon when she played a recital that featured the music of Douglas Munn alongside that of Debussy and Martinu. Munn, who died in 2008, and his wife Clare, who was present, had supported Arnicane as a student and now she is returning the favour in championing his compositions, which also feature on a recently-released recording.
She opened with Martinu’s Butterflies and Birds of Paradise, a trio of pieces that would also be unfamiliar to many listeners, but a glorious discovery. Akin to French Impressionism at the start, the final work also had hints of Mussorgsky’s Pictures and segued beautifully into a Nocturne by Munn from 1944, written when he was just 15 years old.
Unlike some of the other pieces on the Toccata Classics album, it was not revised by Munn after his retiral from a stellar career as a mathematician, so any minor corrections to the score were the pianist’s own. The teenage composer was clearly modelling his work on Chopin, but his own talents were considerable.
Following three of Debussy’s Estampes – La soiree dans Grenade played with special finesse and the Ayrshire rain returning to the grounds of Dumfries House for Jardins sous la pluie – Arnicane played three of Munn’s Preludes. The most substantial of these, in D major, could, as the pianist said, equally have been entitled “Ballade” and dates from the end of his years composing, before the maths took over, when he was still just 18. It and its predecessors are the work of a young man with a remarkable gift for melody who must have been a pianist of considerable technical prowess himself.
Sir James MacMillan and Ayrshire Symphony Orchestra
The “Pavilion” at Dumfries House is a semi-permanent structure so far from being a marquee that gilt-framed mirrors and pictures hang on two of its walls. Alongside the function suite at Cumnock’s Dumfries Arms Hotel, where the Tryst’s closing ceilidh would happen, it gives the festival a fine new space, large enough to accommodate the amateur Ayrshire Symphony Orchestra and the Cumnock Tryst Festival Chorus.
They were joined by a second choir of members of the Cumnock Area Musical Production Society – a music-theatre group with the best acronym ever – for the Scott Riddex Memorial Concert, celebrating one of their members. Sir James shared conducting duties with the orchestra’s conductor John Wilson in a programme that was as diverse and entertaining as it was deeply moving, beginning with a movement from Greig’s Holberg Suite and concluding with a 28-minute version of Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet that included all the singers and players.
With principal oboe Joanna Senior the soloist in Ennio Morricone’s music from The Mission soundtrack, the orchestra’s first violin was a crucial instrumental voice in the two new songs by MacMillan that the chorus premiered. Part of the Tryst’s evolving celebration of the area’s mining heritage, Blackcraig Hill and A Fire of Ages set poetry by a soprano, Maggie Broadley, and a bass, Allan McMillan, from within their ranks. Those, and the Bryars that followed, were the sound of the Tryst making its own precise, individual and remarkable mark – and a nonsense of any distinctions between music-makers of all ages and commitment.
Featuring a full complement of the Scottish orchestras, the presence of Scottish Opera, quality string quartets and more top drawer pianists than is quite decent, one of the few things the 2022 Lammermuir Festival is not about is debuts. Or perhaps it is.
With The Marian Consort, Sansara, The Orlando Consort and Dunedin Consort still to come in the chamber choir line-up, that strand began with the first public concert by the newest ensemble under the capacious umbrella of the National Youth Choir of Scotland.
Long in the planning, or at least in the aspirations of NYCoS founder and artistic director Christopher Bell, the NYCoS Chamber Choir takes his example of the pursuit of excellence with the young musicians of Scotland to another level. If the full forces of the senior choir have already impressed some of the world’s top conductors in performances in Edinburgh, London, Europe and the United States, this elite unit of between 20 and 30 young voices is a refinement of that success.
What Bell has done with the formation of the Chamber Choir is select the finest voices within the current cohort – and possibly recent graduates who are beyond the stipulated age-range in future incarnations – and created a group that can tackle specific repertoire. Who knows what that might be in the future, but this first concert set bold, contemporary parameters – putting, perhaps quite deliberately, clear distance between the NYCoS Chamber Choir and the other vocal groups at this year’s Lammermuir.
With Michael Bawtree at the organ for Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb, which opened the recital, and the piano for Jonathan Dove’s The Passing of the Year, which concluded it, the other two works were a cappella – James MacMillan’s Culham Motets and Caroline Shaw’s And the swallow.
Only the Dove, which dates from 2000, could be described as a secular work, although some of the poetry he sets – Blake, Dickinson and Tennyson among the texts – is faith-inspired. It was an especially appropriate work, not just for an unintended allusion to the death of the Queen, but also because the setting of Dickinson’s Answer July seemed to be a mature version of the sort of songs NYCoS has commissioned as part of its invaluable training of young musicians over its 25 years.
That coming to maturity of the organisation is perfectly celebrated in the birth of this choir. If Britten’s fascinating 1943 work – commissioned by the same clergyman responsible for Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and setting texts by troubled 18th century poet Christopher Smart – is not heard very often, it is because it is far from easy. Here too, though, step-outs from soprano Emily Kemp and alto Olivia Mackenzie Smith take the listener into a child-like world of cat and mouse, while tenor Alexander Roland and bass Christopher Brighty each made powerful solo contributions.
Kemp then supported fellow soprano Lorna Murray in the exquisite close harmony passages of the MacMillan, while all the female voices provided an ethereal underscore to solo tenor Lewis Gilchrist. With alto Morven McIntyre and tenor Jack Mowbray the solo voices in the Dove, this was a chance for individuals to shine, but mainly about the meticulous performance of the ensemble of young men and women whose musical abilities far transcend any “youth choir” or “non-professional” categorisation.
The group also gives Bell access to a whole realm of repertoire, including the newest piece in this programme, the setting of verses from Psalm 84 by America’s composer-of-the-moment, Caroline Shaw. And the swallow is a gorgeous piece which seems to take the sound-world of Whitacre or Lauridsen into a more sophisticated sphere, not least in the imaginative and specific vocal techniques it demands.
Two premieres from the pen of Sir James MacMillan and a focus on the work of Brahms by Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev are the headline attractions in the new season unveiled by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.
The first of the MacMillans will be his Second Violin Concerto, with soloist Nicola Benedetti, for whom it has been written. The world premiere will take place at the end of September, shortly after the violinist has taken up her new post as director of the Edinburgh International Festival. It will be conducted by Emelyanychev in a concert that also includes John Adams’ The Chairman Dances and Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony.
The other new Macmillan work is a short piece on a football theme that had its world premiere in Antwerp last week as part of the repertoire the SCO took on its European tour. The first UK performances of “Eleven” will be next March in concerts Emelyanychev is directing with himself as soloist on Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 22, K482.
The conductor is at the harpsichord for a programme of “Baroque Inspirations” in November that teams Vivaldi with Grieg, Hindemith and Gorecki. At the end of February he conducts an all-Brahms concert with the Symphony No. 1, preceded by the Violin Concerto with Aylen Pritchin as soloist, and at the start of March an all-Mendelssohn one with the Italian Symphony and the Incidental Music from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The season concludes next May with Brahms’ German Requiem, Sophie Bevan and Hanno Muller-Brachman the soloists and Gregory Batsleer’s SCO Chorus concluding a busy year. The same two singers are joined by tenor Andrew Staples for The Creation by Haydn in October, with Emelyanychev again conducting, and Richard Egarr directs Handel’s Israel in Egypt in December, with Rowan Pierce, Mary Bevan, Helen Charlston, James Gilchrist and Andrew Foster-Williams the soloists.
Other familiar faces conducting and directing concerts include Clemens Schuldt, with a November concert that includes Alban Gerhardt giving the Scottish premiere of the cello concerto written for him by Julian Anderson, Peter Whelan with music of the Scottish Enlightenment, Andrew Manze, Joseph Swensen, Joana Carniero, Francois Leleux and violinist Anthony Marwood.
Next Spring, Bernard Labadie directs an evening of music Handel wrote for Royal occasions, joined by singers Lydia Teuscher, Iestyn Davies and Neal Davies, following a fortnight residency by Finnish violin maestro Pekka Kuusisto who has singer-songwriter Sam Amidon and tenor Allan Clayton, singing Britten’s Les Illuminations, as soloists and composer Nico Muhly featuring in both programmes.
The star names keep coming at the season’s end, with mezzo Karen Cargill singing Berlioz and cellist Laura van der Heijden playing Shostakovich in April and Lawrence Power giving the Scottish Premiere of Cassandra Miller’s Viola Concerto, under the baton of John Storgards, in May.
Those familiar with the work of young Ayrshire composer Jay Capperauld will recognise that he finds inspiration in his eclectic taste in other, non-music related, art, often with a scientific dimension.
That tendency may explain his new work for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the culmination of a concert programme conducted by his mentor, Sir James MacMillan, but it doesn’t make the journey to his composition, Death in a Nutshell, any less bonkers.
The well-to-do American Frances Glessner Lee was a pioneer of forensics as a route to solving crime, and as a teaching aid she created little models of real crime scenes, like rooms in a doll’s house of death. The clues to the mystery are all in the little dioramas, of which the focal point is the corpse.
Exhibited at the Smithsonian a few years ago, Capperauld has taken six of them and created a 20-minute suite of soundtracks to the macabre pictures, which were helpfully reproduced in the SCO’s online programme, with a fat caption beneath outlining each case.
Which is all very curious and fascinating of course, but what about the music? I’ll go out on a limb and say that Capperauld’s colourful composition could happily be enjoyed without any knowledge of the background to Death in a Nutshell, although any listener would guess that there is something cinematic going on, especially if they are also watching the players.
Opening movement Malleus Dei (in the Parsonage Parlour) had percussionist Louise Goodwin wield a steel claw-hammer down upon a sheet of metal, and she and her section associate Ally Kelly were kept on the move throughout the work, on every form of tuned instrument, bass drum, blocks and tom-toms, a full kit and a selection of empty bottles. For the final movement Hanging upon your every word (in the Attic) they were joined by their neighbours in the trumpets on paper-shuffling duties.
There was also a full range of sinister effects required of the strings, as well as delineating every step in the fourth movement’s Interlude pour l’esprit de l’escalier (on the Stairs). The kit and the bottles featured in the preceding A Drowned Sorrow (in the Dark Bathroom), which was dominated by the bluesy alto sax of Capperauld’s Royal Conservatoire of Scotland associate Lewis Banks, whose instrument was integral elsewhere in the score, alongside William Stafford’s bass clarinet and Alison Green’s contrabassoon.
Sir James was all over every detail of this, ensuring a performance that understandably had the composer beaming when he took his bow. For the sort of musician who enjoys the challenge of new music, it also looked enormous fun and that infectious enthusiasm transferred easily to the audience.
The skill of Capperauld’s orchestration was particularly appreciable because of the company it was keeping in following a reverse chronological journey through Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question, the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, and Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll.
Think of any of these works and it is big string chords that come first to mind, but the other elements are just as crucial: the horns, wind ensemble and solo oboe in the Idyll, En Hudson’s harp in the Mahler and Peter Franks’ trumpet, high in the choir stalls and the vibrant wind quartet in the Ives.
In an earlier era – one without, perhaps, the baleful influence of Richard Wagner – it is intriguing to wonder if Robert Schumann might have composed more than one opera. Certainly, in her performance of his song cycle Frauenliebe und Leben, international opera star Karen Cargill suggested a sensibility to create something less epic than the big German Romantic projects he contemplated.
For Cargill, Clara Schumann’s Sechs Lieder, Opus 13 and Robert’s Opus 42 set of eight are both the work of the couple together. This was something of a change to the pre-announced programme to open Sir James MacMillan’s returned long weekend of performances in East Ayrshire. The published brochure lists a showcase for female composers, with Clara followed by Fanny Mendelssohn, Pauline Viardot and Amy Beach.
Only Beach’s Three Browning Songs survived of the others, following the Schumanns with big Broadway renditions that rounded off the recital in grand style. The major loss was of five of Viardot’s Russian songs, in their German translations, which might have been something of a bridge to Cargill’s new Linn disc of French repertoire, Fleur de mon ame, none of which she sang here.
Her partner on the recording, Simon Lepper, was also her foil in Cumnock, the familiar foundation for her first performance in front of an audience in 18 months, something she clearly found an emotional experience.
In that time, as well as releasing that acclaimed recording of Debussy, Duparc and Chausson, the mezzo has been appointed interim head of vocal studies at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the Schumann songs are, as she pointed out, bedrock repertoire for young students. Cargill gave a masterclass in their performance here, alternating power with tenderness, communicating both sequences as narrative arcs of the rewards and pain of love, and persuasively presenting the settings of Chamisso’s popular verse cycle as the answer to the questioning note on which Clara Schumann’s Die stille Lotosblume ends.
This was, beyond argument, a superb way for the Cumnock Tryst to open its return, with Scotland’s major opera star making her debut at the event in an intimate recital a million miles from her high-profile life at the New York Met and elsewhere. If those Beach songs are as new to her as she said, she gave a definitive performance of them just the same, and then encored with a nod to her host in a William Soutar setting by MacMillan. Live-streamed from its first performances, the concert is available via the Tryst website for seven days.
