Welcome showcase of dual nation contemporary music
RSNO’S Nordic Music Journeys Glasgow Royal Concert Hall JJJJ
Three short concerts, or one concert in three parts? It was possible to view Saturday’s Nordic Music Journeys either way. The focus was new music from Sweden and Scotland, two hour-long programmes by Swedish ensemble Gageego! spotlighting Swedish composers, responded to with a central one by the Scots-based Hebrides Ensemble showcasing the Scottish equivalent.
To put it in further context, this event - a collaboration backed by the Swedish Composers’ Society (FST), the Swedish performing rights society (STIM) and the RSNO - was the first of several related performances happening throughout Scotland.
Saturday was therefore something of a taster, and one that raised an intriguing question: is there a capacity for genuinely original thinking in the field of contemporary composition these days?
That was no more salient than in the electro-acoustic music dotted within these programmes. There’s something intrinsic in the vocabulary of the electronic music studio that still seems embedded in a midto-late 20th century sound world.
Maybe that’s unfair, because inspirational ideas frequently emerged in some of Saturday’s electronic offerings. Glasgow-based Finn O’hare’s ääni was particularly invigorating, transforming close-up sounds of ice melting into a compelling symphonic soundscape. In the same Hebrides programme Fraser Macbeath’s Mar gum biodh an teine air do chraiceann (part of larger Gaelic-inspired piece) played charmingly with sampled folk song.
Lars Bröndum’s Time’s Arrow, deliberately retro in its use of analogue technology, was intense but ultimately overstayed its welcome. Mirjam Telly’s Apparitions, mostly an excitable acousticallyspatial adventure, spent its duller moments resembling a full-on Scalextric race.
Yet it was in the live acoustic performances that the greatest consistency and originality emerged. Gageego!’s opening programme, under conductor Fredrik Burstedt, included Henrik Denerin’s Collide, a touching amalgam of grainy subtleties. Mika Pelo’s Abandoned, a tribute to “abandoned music philosophies” by the likes of Stockhausen and Crumb, paradoxically proved fresh and exhilarating.
If Gageeko!'s presentational style was a tad improvised, Hebrides responded with slicker continuity, from the gestural, glacial cello luminosity of Aileen Sweeney’s Siku to the kinetic fascination of Oliver Searle’s Harbour Dreams. Based on a letter by Lord Kelvin, Jane Stanley’s Lalla Rookh for speaker and natural horn recaptured the spirit of Britten. Gemma Macgregor’s string trio Betrayal served up refreshingly conservative modernism, before the sensitive nuclear string writing of Fergus Hall’s Laig Beach and Rylan Gleave’s Heartstrings.
Gageeko! launched its final session with the intoxicating originality of Alfred Jimenez’s With Voice, Cage-like in its dynamic containment. Ylva Fred’s Motor Music owed more ultimately to Bartok and minimalism. Marie Samuelsson’s The Lion was unexpectedly playful. Madeleine Isaksson’s Capsuled Time closed the event. Collaborative new music events like this used to be commonplace in Glasgow. Good to see them back.