Tag Archives: Tenebrae

Perth Festival 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cumnock Tryst

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Various venues, Cumnock

It’s hard to believe The Cumnock Tryst is approaching the significant landmark of its first decade. Nine years ago, local boy, now globally-celebrated composer, Sir James MacMillan founded the event, modelled on the likes of Orkney’s St Magnus Festival, in the hope it would play its part in accelerating the cultural and economic revival of the former mining-dependent Ayrshire town. 

It has certainly proved sustainable. MacMillan’s contacts book may have been essential in enticing celebrity names from the classical world and beyond, but just as imperative has been the Festival’s catalysing effect on generating projects involving local people that impact so positively on their social and cultural well-being. 

The 4-day 2023 Festival was no exception, witnessing on the one hand the magnetic persona of Australian-American opera star Danielle de Niese, the electrifying a cappella vocal ensemble Tenebrae and leading Scots folk singer Findlay Napier; while on the other, such big-hearted community events as BIG Saturday!, back-to-back concerts in the new Barony Hall of Robert Burns Academy, a central hub in the sprawling multi-school Barony Campus newly built on the edge of the town.

Both hour-long concerts – “In the Stars” and “Darkness into Darkness” – were the culmination of a three-year project celebrating the legacy of the local coalfields, in which schools and older community groups (including the now well-established Festival Chorus) engaged with composers and songwriters to create their own musical responses. These were performed by the participating groups with professional support from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under MacMillan’s direction.

I witnessed Saturday’s earlier event, “In the Stars”, notable for its slickness of presentation and stylistic variety the challenge produced: from Doon Academy, an attitudinal percussion number with narration by singer-songwriter Karine Polwart; from Netherthird Primary Choir the catchy Elder of the Woods; from Logan Primary the whimsical Crow from Crow Wood; and finally Robert Burns Academy’s vocal pop number, The Colour Room, its title borrowed from an actual Cumnock hairdressing salon.

Dalmellington Brass Academy had set the mood with brass band composer Andrew Duncan’s Knockshinnoch 1950, a robust tribute to an historic local mining accident. Further short orchestral links written by Duncan, Electra Perivolaris, Michael Murray, Gillan Walker and Jay Capperauld, and ranging in temperament from Murray’s brooding and mysterious Visions of the A-Frame to the minimalist lustre of Capperauld’s Zenith, secured a vital continuity, and a vehicle to offset the successive performers’ comings and goings. With MacMillan’s riotous football tribute, Eleven, a pugnacious BBC SSO blew the final whistle. 

Friday evening offered a stimulating juxtaposition between the sacred and the secular. The former was delivered by Nigel Short’s excellent a cappella vocal ensemble Tenebrae in a programme entitled I Saw Eternity, referring to the Scottish premiere of MacMillan’s eponymous anthem, a work written specifically to partner Bach’s motets.

Which is precisely what Tenebrae did, coupling that and more by MacMillan’s choral settings with two of Bach’s loveliest cantatas, Komm, Jesu Komm and Jesu Meine Freude. The Bach interpretations were supreme, drawing an uplifting combination of homogenous perfection and nuanced elasticity from the singers. The choral partita format of Jesu Meine Freude, while immense, even symphonic in scope, maintained its intimacy throughout. Intonation was electrifyingly spot-on.

MacMillan’s music provided freer scope for Tenebrae’s expressive war chest. The three Tenebrae Responsories, reminiscent in many ways of Bruckner’s motets and driven by the same spiritual potency and molten ecstasy, gave rise to some of the programme’s most heightened thrills, some reaching a level of intensity so penetrating that this modest venue – St John’s Church – almost strained to contain it.

After the liquid density and visionary warmth of I Saw Eternity, the programme ended with his Miserere, a pertinent endpoint, and a hugely transformative one as MacMillan’s famous “Tryst” melody – a recurrent feature in many of his works – appeared in its original completeness like an awakening sunburst. Something of a Götterdämmerung moment.

Along the road at the Dumfries Arms Hotel, Friday’s late-night slot was given over to folk musician Findlay Napier, his affable repartee and earthy lyricism like beer and crisps to the earlier sacred sustenance at St John’s. From Hamish Imlach’s Cod Liver Oil and Orange Juice to his own The Blue Lagoon (a sardonic response to the famous Glasgow chippy’s claim of having served Justin Bieber a haggis supper), Napier, through smiling charm and gentle ribbing, gradually reeled in an slow-burning audience. A more liberating cabaret-style setting might have loosened inhibitions quicker.

Danielle de Niese struck gold immediately with her audience in Thursday’s Festival opening recital in Old Cumnock Church, which featured two brand new songs written for her by MacMillan, their emotionally introspective core perfect as a preface to Poulenc’s highly-charged operatic one-acter, La Voix Humaine.

If the Poulenc – in which a fraught woman’s telephone call to her unseen lover confirms his wish to end their relationship – was the natural outlet for de Niese’s red-hot theatricals, so too MacMillan’s songs, setting words by Michael Symmons Roberts, played directly to this versatile soprano’s hot-blooded instincts. 

The unfettered spirit defining both MacMillan songs – the questioningly enigmatic Soul Song and the sparkling abandon of The Vows – was charismatically captured by de Niese and pianist Matthew Fletcher, whose mutual response to the music’s crystalline sparkle never missed a trick. MacMillan and Symmons Roberts intend to add further songs to the collection.

The most intriguing aspect of the Poulenc was to witness it in this version for piano-only accompaniment. Again, Fletcher’s own dramatic instinct multiplied its effectiveness, attuned perfectly to the breathtaking, at times breathless, spontaneity of de Niese’s solo portrayal. It was a mesmerising performance, de Niese piercing the character’s rawest emotions, minimal props throwing the spotlight wholly on the feverish restlessness of a truly intoxicating score.

Ken Walton

Photos: Stuart Armitt

Perth Festival / Tenebrae

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St John’s Kirk, Perth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ken Walton 

Cumnock Tryst: Tenebrae / Forshaw

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Cumnock Old Church

Before a simple, effective – and almost unbearably moving – arrangement of the hymn Abide With Me was performed as an encore by the six singers of Tenebrae and saxophonist Christian Forshaw, the choir’s director Nigel Short acknowledged the inspiration of the Hilliard Ensemble and Jan Garbarek in this combination of talents.

Much though I love the ECM recordings Garbarek and the Hilliards made – and Officium is now closing in on 30 years old – there was more warmth, and a quite distinctive sound, to the world premiere of this sequence by Tenebrae and Forshaw, under the title of the Orlando Gibbons hymn Drop, drop slow tears.

This was the choir’s debut at Cumnock Tryst – 2021’s alternative to the absence of Harry Christophers and The Sixteen perhaps – and part of Forshaw’s residency at the festival. James MacMillan has helped foster a collaboration that sounds very much as if it has legs, not least because the arrangements the saxophonist and Short brought to the project seemed very much cut from the same cloth.

Not all the music was presented in an altered state. The hour or so began with the Gibbons sung “straight” and ended with a Short arrangement that sounded close kin to Forshaw’s earlier treatment of Thomas Tallis’s O nata lux. Short also brought some creative use of the acoustic of the space, a high soprano delivering Hildegard von Bingen from “off-stage” and he himself instigating a semi-processional Incipit Lamentatio Gregorian chant.

Forshaw, who mostly performed from the pulpit but joined the singers to replace the contralto with alto sax on later Tallis, added compositions of his own to the mix. The modern language of Renouncement was nicely answered with Victoria’s Reproaches and In paradisum gave a rare showcase to the bass-baritone of the group.

In Garbarek fashion, Forshaw often favoured the soprano instrument, sometimes in dialogue with the choir’s soprano, but as well as alto he also added some subtle bass clarinet to the mix. Yes, Tenebrae and Forshaw owe a debt of recognition to the musicians who sold so many albums of sax and early vocal music, but Drop, Drop Slow Tears takes the recipe in a direction that is all their own.

The sound on the streamed version of this concert, which is available until Friday October 8, is superb, and the camerawork limited and unshowy, so not distracting. It is possible, however, that the Tryst may wish it had been able to devote more budget to the filming when the programme becomes more widely appreciated.

Keith Bruce