No shame in sentiment as Deneve makes a return
Music RSNO Glasgow Royal Concert Hall Michael Tumelty ****
THERE was probably a dollop of sentiment mixed in with other emotions as Stephane Deneve returned to Scotland and the RSNO on Saturday. But there’s no harm in sentiment, is there? Not for this old geezer, who was charmed to renew acquaintance with the charismatic Frenchman, with whom I spent many hours tearing apart music. And what a delight to meet again his beautiful daughter, who told me with great pride that she is now “eight and a half”. Aww.
Musically, Deneve presided over a well-played programme where the Auld Alliance connections ran deep. It made sense to preface Debussy’s little Marche Ecossaise in an unbroken sequence with the pipe tune that inspired it, even if the Marche itself gives no indication of the revolution soon to erupt gently from Debussy’s imagination.
The Scottish connection loomed large in James MacMillan’s The Death Of Oscar, a characteristic portrayal of Oscar, son of Ossian and a renowned warrior, represented by brilliant and evocative music as bellicose as it was reflective, sympathetic and ultimately poignant: pure MacMillan beyond the surface and into the DNA of his music.
The emphasis shifted to the French connection in Ravel’s blistering Left Hand Piano Concerto, with the Scottish element provided in the sheer steel, made from girders, of Steven Osborne’s pulverising left hand. Wow.
The opulently Germanic textures and thrust of Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration suggested no relevant connection; unless, of course, you know that Richard Strauss himself conducted this piece with this orchestra in this city in 1902. Then Deneve turned the whole concert inside out with his electrifying detonation of Ravel’s La Valse, which duly imploded.
Music National Youth Orchestra of Scotland Perth Concert Hall Michael Tumelty ****
THE annual Spring concert by the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland, given in Perth on Friday night, and repeated, I imagine to spectacular sonic effect, in Glasgow’s City Hall on Saturday, rather threw me back on myself. This was Scotland’s flagship youth orchestra in glorious full sail: 105 of the best young musicians in the country in a remarkable display of virtuosity, musicality and the sheer professionalism of near-flawless collaboration under the sure-footed guidance of the staggeringly-competent young conductor Alpesh Chauhan.
It was an inspiring display, but where was the audience? And that’s what threw me back as I recalled asking the same question, year in year out, until it became a mantra and I abandoned it, realising that there appeared to be no answer to the question: what’s to be done? If people don’t come out to hear the best of the best, with its promise of a rich musical future for the country, then they don’t come out.
The turnout in Perth was, in the words of the NYOS chief executive, “shocking”. Fortunately it did not blemish the musical glories that streamed from Chauhan and this beautiful orchestra which provided, with some mind-blowing playing, one of the most glorious Daybreak openings to Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe that I have heard, though the final Bacchanale was dangerously fast and, at the other end of the night, a performance of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet whose mix of battering physicality and heart-wrenching tenderness generated a sense of wonder.
In the middle, SCO principal Alec Frank-Gemmill gently underlined the languid loveliness of Koechlin’s Poeme for horn and orchestra: music born for the horn.
Music BBC SSO City Hall, Glasgow Michael Tumelty ****
IN a largely-electrifying concert on Thursday night by the BBC SSO, with the inimitable, totally-dependable Ilan Volkov at the helm, and the orchestra at white heat, several features stood out. It would be remiss of us not to throw a spotlight on Scottish composer Tom Harrold. He’s in his mid-twenties, and he’s been around for a while. But I would suggest that in his new piece, Nightfires, commissioned by the BBC and premiered on Thursday in a blazing performance with the SSO using its heavy artillery to maximum advantage, this young man has made a huge mark on the music scene.
The flaring, punchy impact of Nightfires, which gives way to a breathtaking, stomping momentum and a thwackingly-rhythmic sense of drive, was gob-smacking in its ferocity and the composer’s certainty in what was saying, and how confidently he was saying it. Even when the pressure lifted as the violence and action melted into music for a solo cello, the intensity was enormous . I’d dare to suggest that Nightfires, with its incredible seismic heaving, is among the most exciting pieces I’ve heard from a Scottish composer in the last 25 years; since Isobel Gowdie, in fact. And this week, when the Royal Albert Hall Proms are announced, you might watch out for the name of Tom Harrold.
Viviane Hagner’s performance of Unsuk Chin’s over-long Violin Concerto was meticulously and brilliantly detailed, but I could detect neither warmth nor spirit in the music. Tchaikovsky’s Manfred, on the other hand, was brimming with passion in a powerhouse SSO performance where Volkov seemed to have the pulse and intensity of the music in his soul.
Music Tae Sup Wi’ A Fifer Adam Smith Theatre, Kirkcaldy Teddy Jamieson ****
LINTON Kwesi Johnson has never been a “dub poet”, as some have called him. No, he told a rapt audience at the Adam Smith Theatre, he saw himself more as a reggae poet. “A subtle distinction,” he suggested.
Listening to him recite his poetry – that familiar Jamaican patois rat-a-tatted out in Jamaican rhythms – it was clear he doesn’t need musical accompaniment to earn the description.
But as he stood behind a lectern, immaculately dapper in his suit, tie and hat, coolly reciting words full of blood and fire, the temptation to stretch the description of the man to encompass preacher and historian was hard to resist.
Johnson was the main event in the latest of James Yorkston’s monthly musical pick ’n’ mixes in Kirkcaldy, giving the audience, sitting in reverent silence, a mixture of poetry reading and history lesson which took us from the Windrush generation to the Brixton riots and beyond.
Johnson may look like a retired teacher yet the anger and the injustices his community faced down the years still sing in him. That, though, is not his only register. The elegies he recited for his father and a fellow poet here ached with feeling.
The evening had begun with a short appearance by the host (a song and a reading from his new novel) and a set of comic valentines from Adam Ross of Randolph’s Leap (accompanied by his band mate Pete MacDonald on keyboards and punch lines).
But clearly most were here to see Johnson. Which meant that Kathryn Joseph had the hardest job of the evening as drifting stage times meant she played to a dwindling audience. That didn’t stop her playing with an intensity that was riveting. Sometimes awed silence is the only response.
Performance BuzzCut Pearce Institute, Govan Mary Brennan ****
AT times, over the five days of BuzzCut’s full-on festival of live performance, it felt as if Govan’s Pearce Institute was like a pressure cooker: so much creative energy but also so much personal angst and questioning – especially in terms of gender and sexuality – building up a head of steam... Which is where BuzzCut, now in its fifth year, is also an oasis: a safe house where risk can take to the stage in public explorations of what it means to be in the wrong body, the wrong time, the wrong society, with the making of art the most intense and immediate way to assert your humanity.
In Mammies and Jezzebels, Nigerian-born Vivian Ezugha used her body to challenge the Western stereotypes of black women that are rooted in slavery and in images of ‘service’ both domestic and sexual. Duster in hand, she polishes our shoes. Still on all fours, she humps her hips as if an unseen master was riding her. Inbetween-times, she feels the heat. The heat of her own libido, the heat of a political climate that objectifies and discounts her, the heat of the historical baggage she inherited with the colour of her skin. And as she oils that skin, fondles it – holding our gaze in the process – we know, and she knows, that if she was white we would read this work differently.
Katy Dye accepts she looks young for her age, but in Baby Face she lams into the increasingly suspect premium our culture puts on women looking young – and not just young, but girlie-girlie cute and pre-pubescent. By the time Dye is squirming into a teensy baby-gro, while a perfume commercial voices how innocent and sexy a scent for infants is, she’s confronted issues of body image and the dark, sexualised appeal of vulnerability that sees even grown women behave like helpless children. A complex, clever solo that doesn’t dodge uncomfortable questions.
In Domestic Labor, Alejandra Herrera Silva – originally from Chile – confronted a room full of crockery and glasses that her efforts at tidying actually smashed into shards.In the course of two unrelenting hours, she pushed brooms and crunched over broken glass, occasional glugs of red wine spilling down her white vest and pants like blood. Dignity, defiance, spirituality – Herrera Silva found them in the midst of clearing up after faceless others.
There is so much wily humour and visual wit in Painkillers that when Mamoru Iriguchi is finally disgorged from the entrails of his vast, squishy knitted female fat-suit, you’re ready to laugh – only Iriguchi’s journey through the shifting masculine/feminine traits in all of us isn’t like any of the magic tricks or deceptions his character, Anastasia, has assisted in. Finally clad in a unitard that resembles flayed flesh, Iriguchi is an incarnation of what is raw, visceral and unprotected about the selves we harbour behind clothes, relationships, even the names we assume – and behind the actions we take to dull the pain when society sends us bullets we can’t magically catch, let alone dodge.