Hinterland

How a Scottish composer went beserk – and wrote Britain’s greatest piano concerto for half a century

The 1930s represented a golden age for the British piano concerto. John Ireland led the way in 1930, followed by John Foulds with his revelatory Dynamic Triptych, which was first performed the following year.

Next came Vaughan Williams’s absurdly neglected concerto of 1933 and, in 1938, both Arthur Bliss’s overtly romantic work and Benjamin Britten’s underrated masterpiece. Then, nothing of note for half a century.

That silence was broken in

1990 by James MacMillan’s The Berserking, a piano concerto by the then 31-year-old Scottish composer for which the phrase “tour de force” feels inadequate. MacMillan told me some years ago that the piece was inspired by a football match he had seen in 1989 between Celtic and Partizan Belgrade, in which the Scottish team were “characteristically passionate, frenzied but ultimately futile”. In his programme note for the premiere, MacMillan also talked about the Berserkers, Norse warriors who went into a trancelike frenzy when they confronted their enemies. However, he observed that the Berserkers’ “process” was “paradoxically a suicidal one”, as the exhaustion into which the frenzy drove them made them more vulnerable to subsequent attack.

As a Scot, the composer found the Berserkers’ behaviour “very familiar”. It reminded him of a people that had become adept at “shooting themselves in the foot in political and, for that matter, in sporting endeavours”. In what seems the sporadically revolutionary world of contemporary Scotland, MacMillan created a piano concerto that came, as it were, straight from the soil, and from his own intense experiences.

The Berserking lasts just over half an hour and is split into three movements, played without a break. MacMillan described it as being about “misplaced energy”: the very opening consists of string players, in a passage that quickly gathers momentum, tapping the backs of their bows on their instruments, before some strident brass joins in with what he calls “swaggering futility”, the energy “misdirected into climaxes without resolutions” and “maintained in a continual state of hyperactivity and excess”.

If that sounds grim, it isn’t. MacMillan comes up with a swaggering tune that is compelling, almost mesmerising, but also laced with humour, as some of the brass goes rogue to emphasise the wildness. The composer wrote that, in the first movement, the soloist (in the original performance, Peter Donohoe) was in conflict and argument with the orchestra (the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, conducted by Matthias Bamert), and one doesn’t have to be a regular attender of football matches, or indeed Scottish political hustings, to sense the competitive ranting represented by the aggressive, sardonic music.

The second section begins with a proclamation by the percussion section that has always reminded me of a bag of spanners being dropped from a considerable height on to a concrete floor; it draws a line under the madness of the first movement and, after a brief silence, ushers in a period of blissful contemplation. In this movement, the soloist is at the forefront, and remains prominent into the finale, as the tempo picks up, and a sense of aggression returns, sporadically, with the orchestra; and the orchestra is driven on by the piano. A final coda links to what MacMillan calls the “Celtic folk influence”, ending this most turbulent of works with a moment of serenity.

The year in which The Berserking had its premiere was an annus mirabilis for MacMillan: exactly a month earlier, his orchestral piece The Confession of Isobel Gowdie had had its first performance at the Proms, to an ecstatic ovation, and it has come to be recognised as one of the great British works of recent years. It deserves that acclaim: but its genius, to my mind, is exceeded by The Berserking, whose musicality and originality make a greater impact every time one hears it.

There is only one recording, on the Chandos label, with Martin Roscoe as soloist and the composer conducting the BBC Philharmonic. It is a magnificent account; but it is time this very grown-up work had more interpretations, and more performances.

One section sounds like a bag of spanners being dropped from a considerable height