Tag Archives: The Ayoub Sisters

Perth Festival: Secret Byrd / Ayoub Sisters

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St John’s Kirk, Perth/Perth Concert Hall

COME August, the Edinburgh International Festival will see the new collaboration by Owain Park’s precision vocal group Gesualdo Six and American director Bill Barclay’s Concert Theatre Works, Death of Gesualdo, in the Queen’s Hall.

So it was helpful that Perth Festival hosted two performances of the partnership’s previous show, Secret Byrd, created for the 400th anniversary of the death of composer William Byrd in 2023. It was also a major undertaking for director Helen Band and her volunteer board, who had to source almost all the props and staging and transform the city centre St John’s Kirk for the production – as well as masterminding the front-of-house arrangements for what was a superb promenade show.

With viol consort Fretwork providing the instrumental interludes from Byrd’s catalogue, the chief musical ingredients were the four and five-part Mass settings he wrote for clandestine services, as a Recusant Catholic himself. Hearing such powerful a cappella singing in the Kirk’s intimate acoustic was an utter joy, and – although they were referring to suitably antique-looking scores – the costumed choristers clearly know this music backwards now and blend together beautifully.

Secret Byrd is much more than a concert, the whole point being to recreate the tension and the dangers Roman Catholics faced during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, even if her majesty turned a benign blind eye to the beliefs of her favourite court composer for many years.

What was flagged as “Interruption” in the online programme, around two thirds through the sequence, could have been gunshots or just hammering at the door, but candles are extinguished and the priest bundled into hiding as the music stopped. Some of the audience members recruited to make up the table of twelve at the heart of the action look as alarmed as the performers.

The danger passed and the programme continued with counter-tenor Guy James delivering Byrd’s Elegy on the death of Thomas Tallis (Ye Sacred Muses). This immersive experience included soup and bread and a thimble-full of communion wine for all, and the musicians went about the business of bringing everyone into the story with practiced ease.

This year’s EIF programme also includes what has become a regular residency at The Hub by the Aga Khan Music Programme and its mission to share the classical music of other cultures was brought to mind by the Perth Festival’s opening day music in Perth Concert Hall from The Ayoub Sisters. Laura and Sarah may have grown up in Scotland but they use their conservatoire training on violin and cello to delve into their Egyptian and Arab heritage.

Others have gone down this road before them, notably Yo-Yo Ma with his Silk Road Project (after he had made his reputation with mainstream Western classical music), the Aga Khan Master Musicians, and even the flirtation with the sound of the souk by post-Led Zeppelin Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. The Ayoub Sisters used basic modern technology to make their less well-funded journey from a suburban Glasgow bedroom.

Their Saturday evening concert found them in the context of a quartet with the guitar of Giulio Romano Malaisi and the drum kit of Giovanni Velez – a last minute dep for their usual percussionist but you would never have known that had Laura not spilled the beans.

The crowd-pleasers were dispensed with early, culminating in a breakneck “Summer” from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, before a focus on their meticulously-sourced original repertoire, much of it taken from their self-released (post-Decca) Arabesque album.

There is a maturity to what the sisters are doing now that assuredly deserves investment – both from audiences as well as producers. This date was part of their ongoing tenth anniversary tour, so a sense of summing-up what they have done so far was appropriate. What is more exciting, however, is what they might go on to do now.

Keith Bruce

Perth Festival / The Ayoub Sisters

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Perth Concert Hall

The corpses of young conservatoire-trained musicians that have been chewed up and spat out by the “classical crossover” genre litter the by-ways of the music marketplace. The Ayoub Sisters, you’d wager, are made of sterner stuff.

Of Egyptian heritage and Glasgow born and raised, they launched their second album, Arabesque, in Cairo and this Perth Festival date was part of its international promotional tour. The festival had tweaked the package, however, with the addition of support act The Lark Piano Trio, whose 20th century chamber music provided an impressively ear-exercising opening to the evening.

Post-graduate students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, pianist Anna Michels, violinist Emma Baird and cellist Helena La Grand championed composer Rebecca Clarke with their performance of her 1921 Piano Trio, which first appeared under her post-World War One nom-de-guerre “Anthony Trent”.

In a beautifully blended and balanced performance, and particularly in the meditative central movement, it was not hard to hear pre-echoes of better-known American male composers as yet unborn when the work was written.

The Ayoub Sisters opened their hour’s music with Misirlou, the Middle-Eastern folk tune made famous by surf-rock guitarist Dick Dale and the movie Pulp Fiction, which they played five years ago at Glasgow’s Proms in the Park.

Here, however, it introduced a programme that delved much more deeply into the siblings’ musical heritage, appropriating religious chants from different cultures as well as other folk music in their clever arrangements for violin and cello, amplified and looped through the sort of portable sampling technology familiar to fans of K T Tunstall and Ed Sheeran.

The pair have the possibilities of this kit at their fingertips and elegantly-shod toes, and the live layering of sound was very impressive, although never at the expense of overshadowing their genuine playing abilities. A backing track provided the Indian percussion for an excursion into the world of Bollywood soundtrack, but most of the execution was live and very slick indeed.

Their programme was also cleverly constructed to mix the less familiar music with more recognisable fare, including a terrific take on McCartney’s Blackbird and a more knockabout tilt at Boney M’s Rasputin as well as Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turca. Taking turns to introduce the music, Laura (violin) and Sarah (cello) also have good stories and a congenial style to their presentation.

Scotland had its share of the spotlight too, from a vaguely Phil’n’Ally folk fiddle feature early in the set to an encore that saw Sarah move to the piano for the freshest take on some of the nation’s most threadbare favourites (including Flower of Scotland, Auld Lang Syne and Loch Lomond) that any in the audience will have heard in a while.

Keith Bruce