Tag Archives: Steve Martland

Hebrides Ensemble

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Perth Theatre

Following fairly swiftly on the recent tour of Arthur Keegan’s new companion piece to Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, together with its inspiration (review: Hebrides: Music for Time | VoxCarnyx), here was another bold programme from cellist Will Conway’s Hebrides Ensemble, built around a world premiere.

The environmental concern of that piece, Shifting Baselines, by Dave Maric, was the ostensible linking agent, but the work’s form, using a selection of recorded voices in its three movements, and the background of the composer, who played piano in the Steve Martland band, were certainly other factors.

Martland’s early solo piano piece, Kgakala (Sunrise), opened the programme, James Willshire’s performance of the picturesque score, full of technical flourishes with hints of stride left hand, suggesting some of the theatricality that would follow. The composer’s much later Reveille, for string quartet, bass, piano and tuned percussion, was just as effective at the close, as a call to arms in response to all the evidence of calamity we’d heard.

The central section of Maric’s piece uses a vox pop of people in Alyth and Perth expressing ecological concerns, while the recordings on either side were a litany of animals exterminated on a Scottish estate and a more recent official report on species threatened with extinction. The composer’s musical response – mostly written for the quartet with piano chords and snare drum rim-shots – was compelling, with very democratic sharing of the lead voice amongst the string instruments.

Three women composers added works to the programme for smaller ensembles, two of them originally heard at Aberdeenshire’s Sound festival. Georgina MacDonell Finlayson’s Silent Spring, presumably referencing Rachel Carson’s famous book, is for solo flute with tape of birdsong and spoken word, and the sound design was brilliantly mixed in this space, while flautist Cormac Henry demonstrated his extended embouchure techniques.

Aileen Sweeney’s The Wooden Web, inspired by more recent writing about the communication networks of trees, was a delight. The most traditional music-influenced work of the evening, its instruments are viola, cello and flute, with the spotlight again very equally shared, but it ended with voices when Henry’s singing was joined by the vocals of Catherine Marwood and Conway in the piece’s gentle conclusion.

Eleanor Alberga’s violin and piano sonata, The Wild Blue Yonder, dates from 1995. Alberga was born in Kingston, Jamaica but violinist David Alberman revelled in music that seemed spun from the East European gypsy dance vocabulary that colours so much classical music, becoming increasingly propulsive and vigorous before also ending in a gentler closing movement.

The outlier in the programme was George Crumb’s 1971 Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale), the theatrical piece that ended the first half and included Henry’s first vocalising. He, Willshire and Conway all donned masks (over their spectacles) as the score requires, and the lights were dimmed. The pianist spent as much time inside the instrument as on the keyboard, damping strings and introducing objects, Henry again needed his extended techniques as well as whistling, and he and Conway added some delicate percussion. It was a highly eventful eight movements, the whale song delineating periods of geological time, often expressed in very literal tick-tock fashion.

This thoughtful programme could perhaps have done with a little more detailed explanation than Conway’s brief spoken introduction and the composer’s note from Maric for his work alone, and it is not unkind to say that the stage management was fastidious rather than slick, but it was musically packed with interest. It is repeated at Kings Place in London tomorrow evening.

Keith Bruce

EIF: Colin Currie / King’s Singers

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Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

In his early days, James MacMillan looked up to Steve Martland, a slightly older composer whose hard-edged style (and thorny politics) appealed to the young MacMillan seeking to hone his own identifiable voice in the 1980s. Fast forward forty years and the presence of a saucy new MacMillan commission within a programme designed around Martland’s belligerent Street Songs was – for those of us old enough to remember – a pertinent reminder of that influential link.

Of course, Martland is no longer with us – he died 12 years ago at the too-early age of 58 – so these performances by percussionist Colin Currie (on marimba) and The King’s Singers, signalling the start of the Edinburgh International Festival’s Queen’s Hall series, were strikingly nostalgic. 

The four songs – Poor Roger, Green Gravel, Jenny Jones and Oranges and Lemons – may not be Martland’s most consistently riveting pieces, but there’s no mistaking the combative, mischievous minimalism underpinning them that was once the feisty hallmark of the “bad boy” composer and his eponymous hi-energy band, of which Currie himself was a member.

Add to that The King’s Singers’ championing of the Street Songs (originally performed and recorded late last century with Evelyn Glennie) and Currie’s own five-year association with the legendary vocal group, and the connective potential of Saturday’s line-up was plain to see.

Poor Roger, with its multi-layered “Hippety Hops”, wasted no time in charging the atmosphere, the marimba’s muted insistence a kinetic dynamo to the Singers’ nimble acrobatics. Before the hypnotic freneticism of Green Gravel, Stanley Glasser’s Zulu-inspired Lala Mntwana offered a moment of sweetness and repose. The ensuing step back in time – to the haunting 17th century motet, Death Hath Deprived Me, of Thomas Weelkes – served its purpose in setting the mood and context for Roderick Williams’ contemporary response to that very composer, his own Death, Be Not Proud, rearranged for this programme for singers and marimba. 

This performance captured well the tempered anguish, neatly calibrated dissonance and expressive gestures of Williams’ poignant homage. Its final moments, like a ghostly reference to the original Weelkes, were strikingly reminiscent – and just as effective – as the plaintive homecoming ending achieved by Britten in his magical Lacrymae. 

The soft pop ballad Alive, by Brighton-born composer Francesca Amewudah-Rivers, offered a momentary glimpse of the old Saturday Night TV King’s Singers’ sound, itself a perfect way in to MacMillan’s A Bunch o’ Craws, a hilarious and virtuosic skit on the children’s ditty “Three Craws Sat Upon a Wa’”. With seven “craws” now in on the action (including a spoof vocal contribution from Currie) the focus was on quick fire entertainment, and a Glaswegian patois –  including the well-worn Taggart cliché “There’s been a murder!” – from the singers that would easily have passed muster in Sauchiehall Street on a Saturday night. When MacMillan lets his hair down like this he proves himself an absolute master of his craft.

The second half completed the Martland sequence – an a cappella Jenny Jones that occasional sagged intonation-wise, and the versatile play-acting of Oranges and Lemons. It also brought us the sultry, atmospheric South African story-telling of Peter Louis van Dijk’s Horizons, sung, clapped and finger-clicked to haunting effect.

Missy Mazzoli’s Year of Our Burning, written in 2021 in response to the pandemic offered another “world premiere arrangement”, which lived more for its precious moments than as a convincing whole. So, too, Bryce Dessner’s Tromp Miniature for solo marimba had more an air of background music than anything more compelling. 

Compelling is exactly what’s needed in any encore, which Joe Duddell’s arrangement of Everything Everything’s I Want A Love Like This delivered to an audience hot for more. Martland, one sensed, would no doubt have approved.

Ken Walton

(Photo: Jess Shurte Photography)