How Scottish tunes might sound on Mars

JUDITH WEIR: AIRS FROM ANOTHER PLANET

Hebrides Ensemble Delphian

David Mellor, one-time culture secretary and

Classic FM broadcaster, once declared that he would rather be “thrown into a pit of scorpions” than listen to one of Judith Weir’s operas.

He opined that she only got the job of Master of the Queen’s Music (a position she still holds) because she was a woman.

It’s hard, listening to this delightful new CD of Weir’s chamber music, to understand what drove him into such a fury. True, the emotional tone of her pieces can sometimes be hard to pin down, but Weir’s sounds themselves are often guilelessly bright and simple, though with a dark undertow that seems to issue from some ancient folk taproot. Weir has Scottish ancestry, and one often hears echoes of Highland reels in her music.

That’s one thing that contradicts the winsome brightness of the music’s surface. Another is a vein of surprise, veering occasionally towards slapstick, but more often in an intrusion of something mysterious and unexpected.

The familiar is made to seem strange, an effect shown with startling vividness in the title piece on the CD, Airs from Another Planet. Weir imagined a group of would-be colonisers of Mars who prepare for their isolation by living on a remote Scottish island. Years later, their halfremembered folk melodies have morphed into strange alien shapes, an idea realised with entertaining wit.

The more recent pieces show that Weir’s instinct towards a simple ecstatic radiance has become ever more powerful in her music. Her settings of African women’s poetry, for instance, are touching in a completely innocent way, and the meditation on a melody by the now-famous medieval abbess and composer Hildegard of Bingen is even more beautiful. The performances by Irish soprano Ailish Tynan and the Hebrides Ensemble have exactly the right razor-sharp purity and knowing innocence. Thanks to them, the music’s subtle power to move, hidden at first under a dancing surface, gradually reveals itself.