Tag Archives: Westbourne Music

Westbourne Music: Meraki Duo

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Glasgow Art Club

The art deco gallery interior of Glasgow Art Club provided an apposite setting for the intimate flute-guitar coupling of the Meraki Duo. This Westbourne Music recital by the young British duo – Meera Maharaj on flute, James Girling on guitar – also happened to be their first ever Scottish appearance, marking the start of a wider Scotland/UK tour that culminates with the launch of their debut Delphian album in September. It was a programme perfectly suited to the lunchtime slot: light, varied, charming, even revelatory in the rare choice of repertoire.

Much of that required adaptation for this specific combo, clearly a role enjoyed by Girling, whose arrangements of works by William Grant Still, Dominique Le Gendre and Olivier Messiaen projected a personal imprint on the performances. 

Still’s Three Songs (he was an American composer who played in Blues legend W C Handy’s band, but studied composition with Varèse) echoed the composer’s eclectic tendencies, combining soft “soirée” appeal – emphasised by the oaken sensuousness of Maharaj’s alto flute – with a deftness of simple construction. Le Gendre’s Songs and Dances of the Island’s Suite, inspired by his Trinidad and Tobago heritage, upped the vibe, not least in the animated and exotically-coloured Biguine. Especially fascinating were the three miniatures selected from Messiaen’s 5 Leçons de solfège, essentially pedagogical works, yet masterfully conceived in a manner more akin to the fluid brushstrokes of Debussy than the composer’s more ecstatic modernist signature.

Takemitsu’s Toward the Sea for alto flute and guitar, written for Greenpeace in the 1980s with inspiration from Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, was equally illustrative of that composer’s more tonal proclivities. Its three sections – Moby Dick, The Night and Cape Cod – were warmly embraced by a performance honouring the music’s mellifluous sweep and undulating dynamic. Again, the voluptuousness of the alto flute was spell-binding, entwined with the expressive dexterity of Girling’s versatile guitar.

To close, the Duo turned to Bosnian guitarist/composer Miroslav Tadić’s Four Macedonian Pieces for alto flute and guitar. Besides evoking the folk essence of these songs and dances, Maharaj and Girling struck a convincing balance between the sardonic and the ebullient. In response to the reflectiveness of the song-based Zajdi, Zajdi, the quintuple-time Pajdushka bristled with energy. The melancholic undertones of Jovka Kumanovka were swiftly swept aside by the wild Bagpiper’s dance Gajdarsko Oro, a fitting finale to Meraki’s enjoyable Scottish debut.

Ken Walton 

Other Scottish performances by the Meraki Duo are at West Kilbride (20 Feb), Hawick Music Club (21 Feb) and Moffat Music Society (22 Feb). Further details at https://meeramaharaj.co.uk/meraki-duo

Matthew McKinney & Marianna Abrahamyan

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Glasgow Art Club

Scots tenor Matthew McKinney already has an impressive CV, roles at English Touring Opera followed by first prize in the Kathleen Ferrier Awards at Wigmore Hall last year and a stint at Carnegie Hall Song Studio in New York. An alumnus of the National Youth Choir of Scotland and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, he will be one of Glyndebourne’s Jerwood Young Artists this summer, and will make his role debut there as Peter in the premiere of Mark Anthony Turnage’s upcoming opera The Railway Children.

Opportunities to see him in the intimacy of a Wednesday lunchtime Westbourne Music concert may become rare, and a packed house spoke of an awareness of that. With front-rank young pianist Marianna Abrahamyan, now teaching at the RCS, he had devised a memorable recital, the first half of which alternated the songs of Clara and Robert Schumann in a thematic lovers’ exchange that an enterprising record label should have the pair commit to disc at the earliest opportunity.

The Robert Schumann songs suffered not a jot from being lifted from the context of cycles like Leiderkreis and Myrthen, while the strength of his wife’s compositions was amply revealed by their being preceded and followed by his and in no way outshone.

McKinney was at his best at the emotional heart of the sequence, Robert’s Zweilicht and Mondnacht bracketing the rollercoaster of Clara’s Loreley. His voice has a very particular timbre and vibrato uncommon in contemporary tenors – once heard it will surely always be recognisable – and it may not be to all tastes, but he is unafraid to bring his own interpretive style to a score.

That adventurous spirit was even more in evidence in the second half of the recital, which also gave Abrahamyan more opportunity to show her abilities. It began with Frank Bridge’s Love Went A-Riding, a souvenir of McKinney’s Ferrier Award-winning programme, and continued with Bridge’s pupil Benjamin Britten, a gentle Italian Sonnet of Michelangelo followed by the more rumbustious John Donne setting Batter My Heart.

Another intriguing sequence followed, moving from Rebecca Clarke’s appropriation of a Scots folk melody for her own instrument, the viola, in I’ll Bid My Heart Be Still, through a  heart-stopping unaccompanied Ae Fond Kiss, to a folk melody sourced from the pianist’s Armenian heritage. McKinney added wordless melody lines to all three, more evocative of a string instrument than simple humming, and singularly effective.

It was only in the first of a pair of Richard Strauss songs that ended the programme that McKinney came briefly unstuck, losing his grasp of a top note, but he recovered quickly to deliver the closing Zueignung (Dedication) which cleverly echoed Schumann’s earlier Widmung.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Matthew McKinney by Ben Durrant

Baichuan Hui & Huixin Hu

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Glasgow Art Club

Baichuan Hui (piano) and Huixin Hu (violin) are long-serving Chinese students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. The significance of their duo programme on Wednesday, as part of Westbourne Music’s regular lunchtime concert series in Bath Street’s amenable Glasgow Art Club venue, was to celebrate in music the Chinese New Year – their “gift” on that very day to an appreciative audience.

As such, they included two works by representative composers – Shanghai-born Chen Gang and Sun Yiqiang – that illustrated, as you’d expect from that globalised port city, a fusion of Chinese musical sentiment and western influence. 

Beyond the ethereal scene setting of Gang’s Sun Shines on Tashkurgan a world of references erupted: gypsy-like dances flavoured with Ravel flourishes; folk allusions eventually engulfed by a torrent of dizzying occidental intensity. Yiqiang’s Spring Dance – neatly transformed by British composer Ben Lunn’s arrangement from its original piano solo status to one featuring violin and piano – maintained the Turkic inflexions of its Uyghur musical influences, yet also gravitated noticeably towards East European rustication.

There was no escaping the enthusiasm these two formative artists brought to their performances, creditable in the virtuosic flashpoints they felt most comfortable and musically confident with.  Where Gang’s music built up heads of rhythmic steam, Hu and Hui responded with convincing togetherness, a quality that, in the larger scheme of things, wasn’t always so obvious. Yiqiang’s Spring Dance, a piece laced with intoxicating textures, offered richer potential for subtlety despite some nervousness on the violinist’s part that materialised as periodic harshness of tone or uncentered intonation.

In a similar vein, the two mainstream works framing this recital – Beethoven’s Spring Sonata and Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata No 2 – blew hot and cold. Where there was admirable optimism expressed in this bold view of the Beethoven, not least in the sprightliness of the Scherzo and frequent eloquent exchanges in the Adagio, the duo opened the work with somewhat overheated determination and a tendency throughout to misjudge the interchanges between lead and secondary roles. 

There was a sense, though, that they understood, therefore conveyed, the Beethoven more thoroughly and persuasively than the Prokofiev. Where was the sardonic allure that underpins the latter’s haunting opening theme, or more generally the opportunities to explore the shifting, often contrary, colours that embody the sonata’s mercurial drama? It was a performance that didn’t seem to ask the right questions, nor as a consequence find interesting answers. 

That said, flashes of witty conviction in the Presto and a gentle benevolence in the Andante served to stoke the fireside warmth (literally) in this pleasant city centre lunchtime oasis.

Ken Walton

Westbourne Music: Edinburgh Quartet

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Glasgow Art Club

It’s astonishing to think that all three pieces in the Edinburgh Quartet’s lunchtime programme for Westbourne Music were conceived within a thirty year period – three glorious decades between 1890 and 1920, in which the waning of Romanticism and dawning of modernity jointly fuelled the seismic European fin de siècle spirit. 

In Puccini’s mournful 1890 elegy for string quartet, I Cristantemi, written in a single night apparently in response to the death of his friend, the Duke of Aosta, is a language dripping with languid nostalgia, a lyricism caked in chromatic angst and reflective passion. If it took a moment or two for the Quartet to trigger its natural warmth – to be fair, the heating in a chilly but delightful Glasgow Art Club was on the bung – the end product was one of cloying eloquence, growing intensity and comforting resolve.

It was also a sweet aperitif to the more acerbic tang of Kodaly’s 1918 String Quartet Op 10 No 2, which straddles the nervy cellular obsessiveness of Janacek and the austere folksiness of fellow Hungarian Bela Bartok. This was a performance notable for its heartfelt expressiveness, which was no mean achievement given the sometimes unsettled fragility of its structure and the slightly impersonal harmonic world it occupies. But from the outset, in the interwoven complexities of the opening Allegro, there was a real sense of emotional understanding and dramatic intent. 

All of which prepared the way for the mercurial restlessness of the second movement, a turbulent journey from its rhapsodic opening recitativo and discursive meandering to an Allegro giocoso vitalised by intrepid dance rhythms and folkish charm.

The programme by Westbourne Music’s current resident ensemble ended with the F major String Quartet by Ravel, a supreme fusion of taut classical structure and the liquid lyrical modality of the early 20th century French idiom. It was here that the Edinburgh Quartet found their firmest, most expansive footing. After the fragrant melodic expansiveness of the opening movement, the playful pizzicato of the lively Assez vif hinted of Mediterranean sun and fun. Then the easing of tension, the contemplation, of the slow third movement, before the race to the finish of the Vif et agité, delivered with plenty vim and verve.

The Edinburgh Quartet has been through turbulent times recently with multiple changes of personnel. The signs here, performing in such diverse repertoire, and with illness prompting a brief return to the line-up by former violinist member Tom Hankey, are that they are returning to good musical health.

Ken Walton

Westbourne Music’s Glasgow Concert Series continues on 22 November with singer/songwriter and 2018 BBC Young Traditional Musician of the Year, Hannah Rarity. Full details at www.westbournemusic.org