wonderful evening full of beautiful tunes
BBC SSO
City Halls, Glasgow
Keith Bruce
IN a weekend pleasingly stocked with musical discoveries, Saturday’s BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra concert with principal guest conductor Ilan Volkov was the one marked out for the curious audience, and his young ollowers had duly put this date for Radio 3’s Hear And Now strand in their diaries.The people who faithfully turn out for his spring Tectonics weekend are plainly happy to listen to new music at other times of the year.
The bulk the programme was devoted to the music of American James Tenney, with two big pieces, Diapason and Clang separated by a solo for double bass, Beast, performed by Dominic Lash. That miniature of drone and harmonics with next to no variation of volume and pace was a mesmerising encapsulation of the composer’s practice. Clang, the earlier work, employed a fairly conventional orchestra layout for his individual kind of minimalism, while Diapason seeded winds and brass among the strings for its long, slow crescendo in common time and faster diminuendo to a few strings. Whether the on stage geography is detectable when the works are broadcast on March 10 will be interesting to listen for.
My guess is the specifics of the instrumental layout required by
Jose Montserrat Maceda for his Distemperament, performed in the first half, will be more obvious. Here all the instruments were represented in trios with the basses, bassoons, and trombones leading the way on a succession of overlapping phrases that were played like triggered samples in different voices. With trumpets and flutes in unaccustomed stage front positions, the work is a huge textural exercise, sometimes rather militaristic and culminating in waves of cascading notes passed around the sections from strings to winds and brass. Fascinating stuff, and to my ears, the more impressive work of the evening.
Scottish Chamber Orchestra
City Halls, Glasgow
Keith Bruce
ILLNESS having kept him from the podium for much of his final year as the SCO’s principal conductor, this bold programme was almost like a second season-opener for Robin Ticciati and it was a cracker that deserved a fuller house.
The unfamiliar name of JF Rebel might sound as if it comes from
New York in the 1980s rather than the court of Louis XV, and his astonishing 10-movement Les Elemens begins with a chord that would gladden any avant-garde experimentalist. The rhythm section boosted by guitar and theorbo, and much of the orchestra standing, bird call was added to the mix from the balcony in what was a feast of musical colour with the piccolos of Bronte Hudnott and Alison Mitchell to the fore, some lightening-fingered bassoon work and just as nimble playing from the fiddles later on. A rare treat.
So, too, was the opportunity to see principal viola Jane Atkins at the front of the stage as soloist for Martinu’s Rhapsody-Concerto.
Also full of colour, the music was beautifully served by her sonorous playing, in perfect balance with the orchestra, particularly in the glorious cinematic slow central movement as well as in the cadenzas that followed.
More Czech folk melodies are harnessed in Dvorak’s 10 Biblical Songs, setting texts from the Psalms, including some of the best known, such as 23 and 121. The fullness of Karen Cargill’s wonderful mezzo, so strong in mid-register, is exactly what these simple, direct melodies require and again the balance was absolutely perfect, with the atmospheric scoring of the eighth, setting Psalm 25, by Vilem Zemanek, even surpassing the composer’s own work on the first five songs.
Haydn’s fizzing “Miracle” Symphony, No 96, was the perfect conclusion to this superb feast of music, Ticciati absolutely in command of its narrative with an exquisite transition into the Vivace finale.
Theatre
Women Of The Hill
CCA, Glasgow
Neil Cooper
THE low whoosh of rolling thunder that slices through the air at the start of Hanna Tuulikki’s reimagining of her dramatic song cycle originally seen on Skye in 2015 is given extra low-flying heft by the gargantuan figure creating it. Towering some 20-odd feet in height, and with the train of her pure white dress created by artist Caroline Dear billowing beneath, the instrument she spins above her head is as deadly as the wordless chorale that emanates from her mouth. As embodied by Tuulikki herself with monumental grace, this is Cailleach, the ancient goddess of winter, and she’s spoiling for a fight.
She gets one too when Lucy Duncombe enters as her opposite number, Bride, attempting to hold on to all that blossoms in the face of the coming freeze, but dwarfed somewhat by the opposing elements. As the pair spar in and out of harmony, their to-and-fro exchanges morph into a primal form of flyting. A third voice, from Nerea Bello, sees the trio keen with mournful abandon, laying the old seasons to rest before the new one blows in.
Tuulikki’s creation was first performed in the open-air beside the hidden underground of Skye’s High Pasture Cave and was originally commissioned by the island’s Atlas Arts organisation. This indoor reimagining accompanied the CCA’s Lilt, Twang, Tremor exhibition, which Tuulikki shares with Sarah Rose and Susannah Stark. Over the piece’s 45-minute duration, a matriarchal sense of unity is conjured up with a kinetic intensity that eventually gives way to playfulness. Going on this showing, it deserves to have a more substantial run, be it indoors or out. By the end, it becomes a form of purging, with Tuulikki and co shouting out loud for what they’ve lost, but more importantly for everything that lies ahead.