Tag Archives: Tarik O’Regan

SCO Chorus/Batsleer

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Great Hall, Stirling Castle

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.

Keith Bruce

Dunedin Consort/Mulroy

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Glasgow University Memorial Chapel

The naming of much-loved tenor soloist Nicholas Mulroy as Associate Director of Dunedin Consort may have looked like a cosy in-house appointment, but this programme, which has toured Scotland and ends the ensemble’s 2023/24 season with a concert at London’s Wigmore Hall on Wednesday, knocks any such notions into the proverbial cocked hat.

Entitled Scattered Rhymes – the name of the most substantial recent work, by composer Tarik O’Regan – it was a masterpiece of compilation, linking early and contemporary music in a deeply considered way, and often astonishing in execution.

For those who think they know what to expect from an a cappella concert by this group, there was plenty of that. It began with James MacMillan’s Behold, you are beautiful, my love, written for the wedding of the composer’s son Aidan and setting words from the Bible’s Song of Solomon, later included Palestrina and closed with Tomas Luis de Victoria setting texts from the same source. A parallel, and mirroring, stream of words came from 14th century Italian poet Petrach, the text for O’Regan and the 16th century Flemish composer Adrian Willaert.

Many a choir could tackle the MacMillan with some confidence, but elsewhere these musicians were required to produce singing of extraordinary complexity with virtuosic technique. In that, Scattered Rhymes itself was the most striking example.

 A quartet of singers produced, together and sometimes individually, a hugely challenging declamation of the Italian verse, with constant changes of rhythm, dynamics and time signature, while the rest of the choir had equally varied music, setting Latin from an anonymous contemporary English poet and found in the Arundel manuscripts in the British Library. The unlikely gloss Mulroy provided – that O’Regan told him the 1971 rock song Won’t Get Fooled Again by The Who was another inspiration – turned out to be remarkably helpful in listening the work’s structure.

That was just one of many unusual and rewarding pathways the conductor’s sequence of music took us down. The world premiere of the set was Caroline Shaw’s Companion Planting, a Dunedin Consort commission from one of the most in-demand composers on the planet. Her own lyric had many similarities to the early texts in the recital, using the horticultural metaphor to compare the wonders of nature with the joys of a rewarding human relationship.

The music was as attractive as everything she writes, and used some of the techniques she has explored in her other vocal pieces in the most subtle, understated, but brilliantly effective way.

Nor were these the only highlights of the programme. Some distance from the music for which he is best known, Gavin Bryars’ Petrarch-setting A la dolce ombra is from his Fourth Book of Madrigals and not only linked precisely with the O’Regan in its text, but also explored the same metaphorical territory as the Shaw.

The other recent, and unfamiliar, treat, came from the pen of Canadian composer Stephanie Martin. Rise up my love, like the MacMillan using the Biblical source, is also full of flora and fauna and the word-setting –  long, flowing lines filled with crisp ear-catching repetitions – was as fine as anything else in the programme.

Keith Bruce