First published in The Herald on 27 January, 2016
News recently in of another astute faculty appointment at the the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland: Garry Walker is to become Artistic Director of Conducting. It’s a new post created especially for the 41-year-old Scot, and it comes hot on the heels of the announcement that Walker will be chief conductor of the Staatsorchester Rheinische Philharmonie Koblenz (the Rhenish State Philharmonic Orchestra) starting in September 2017.
First published in the Guardian on 22 January, 2016
What makes a good story a potential good opera? It’s a question that writer Louise Welsh and composer Stuart MacRae — about to premiere their latest co-commission for Music Theatre Wales and Scottish Opera in Glasgow this Saturday — have been pondering a lot lately. “We’re constantly sending ideas to each other,” says MacRae. “They look a bit like spam emails: ‘Hi! Look at this!’, then a link.” Welsh says it can take “ages” to figure out whether an idea is best destined as a short story or choral piece or a poem, “or just an anecdote you tell down the pub”.
First published in The Herald on 20 January, 2016
“You know the one where hell is a bunch of banjos?” Bela Fleck is laughing about his favourite Far Side cartoon down the phone from Memphis, Tennessee. (If you haven’t seen it: the devil ushers a conductor into a room full of banjo players — ‘right in here, Maestro’.) This Saturday Fleck plays a concerto with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra as part of Celtic Connections. It’s a piece he wrote — it would be; there aren’t a lot of other banjo concertos in the repertoire — and it’s called The Impostor. Much is packed into in that title. The instrument’s lambasted reputation, centuries of Western musical hierarchy, Fleck’s own family history, even his name. “It’s kinda good I can laugh about it, right?”
First published in the Guardian on 17 January, 2016
“I am what you might call ‘surrounded’ just now. I had better get this right.” Sam Lee is one of English folk’s most resolute and colourful champions but he gave a nervous laugh as he opened his Celtic Connections show. By ‘this’ he meant a set-list of Traveller songs, material he has spent years gathering from communities around the British isles and which features on his striking second album Fade in Time. On stage with him in Glasgow was Jess Smith, luminary of Scottish Traveller singing and storytelling, and in the audience was a fairly vocal contingent of Travellers from across the UK. ‘Surrounded’ was accurate, musically and physically.
First published in the Guardian on 15 January, 2016
The Seven Stars’ Symphony hasn’t been performed in the UK since the 1960s and isn’t exactly a pops classic elsewhere, so this BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra concert was a rare outing. It was a persuasive account — clear, attentive, soft-grained, unsentimental — but Seven Stars is still a weird piece. It’s a series of fond and fairly abstract musical portraits composed in 1933 by Charles Koechlin, a Parisian who was friends with Satie and Debussy, in which each movement is dedicated to a star of silent film or the early talkies.
First published in the Guardian on 14 January, 2016
Hejira is Joni Mitchell’s brooding chronicle of the road. She wrote the album in 1976 while crossing the United States from Main to Los Angeles, often driving alone and without a licence, or so the story goes, tailing truckers who flashed their lights when police cars were ahead on the freeway. Hejira is also the Arabic term for Mohammad’s flight from persecution in the year 622. Mitchell’s songs examine what it is to wander: the fears and thrills of rootlessness, how liberty and loneliness can easily share the passenger seat. The music roams from folk to rock to jazz and blues — of all her great albums Hejira probably takes the longest to get under your skin, but after a few listens it lodges. That serpentine drawl, those itinerant vocal lines, the odd-time lilt and lush guitars… And then there are the lyrics.
First published in the Guardian on 14 January, 2016
Bavarian RSO/Nelsons/Hannigan (Winter & Winter)
“Let me tell you how it was.” A mysterious, ululating soprano line opens Hans Abrahamsen’s song cycle — a setting of Paul Griffiths’s novella that uses only words spoken by Shakespeare’s Ophelia, and one of the most spellbindingly beautiful vocal-orchestral works of recent years. It was created for soprano Barbara Hannigan and is a stunning vehicle for her: those floating, effortless (well, effortless-sounding) high notes, that unblinkingly pure and intensely expressive tone. Her Ophelia is intense and fragile, sensuous and febrile; her phrasing is elastic and tasteful. Abrahamsen’s orchestral writing is typically spare and wintry, a magical panoply of spangly microtonal sounds coming from Andris Nelsons and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, but it’s also darker, more lush and more bristling than his most austere works. The piece won this year’s $100,000 Grawemeyer Award and it’s easy to hear why.
First published in the Guardian on 14 January, 2016
Kristian Bezuidenhout (Harmonia Mundi)
The final instalments of Kristian Bezuidenhout’s Mozart cycle are as stylish as the previous seven volumes: bold, sensitive playing that defines the South African as the fortepianist of his generation. He opens Volume 8 with the ultra familiar Sonata in C major, K 545 — anyone who studied piano will remember hammering it out in exams — but these volumes also feature obscurities like the parody Kleiner Trauermarsch K 453a and the single-movement fragments K 312 and K 400 in reconstructions by 20th century fortepiano trailblazer Robert Levin. The appeal of the latter might be limited but no matter: Bezuidenhout could find the spirit in a C-major scale. Articulation sparkles and ornaments are neat; slow movements sing like arias and he has fun giving chunky weight to the Rondo themes. Virtuosity buzzes under the surface but never becomes the focal point. Playing a modern keyboard — a Czech copy of an 1805 Viennese instrument — the sound is sweet, nutty and declamatory. Above all, Bezuidenhout knows how to make a fortepiano sing.
First published in the Guardian on 14 January, 2016
Bartok: 44 Duos
Sarah & Deborah Nemtanu (Decca)
Bartok composed these 44 violin duets in the early 1930s as a teaching tool — the music gets harder and more dissonant as the collection goes along — but his inspiration was always the folk music of Hungary, Romania, Ukraine and neighbouring countries and there’s song and dance in each tiny study. French-Romanian sisters Sarah and Deborah Nemtanu grew up playing duets but waited until their careers were up and running independently before they started recording together. Now they’re leaders of the Orchestre National de France and the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris, respectively, and this is their second duo disc in as many years. They’re both fiery players and they egg each other on in sparky, intuitive exchanges, but they’re clearly used to making big and glossy solo sounds that swamp the simpler pieces. The best moments come when the Nemtanu sisters are at their most introspective: the sombre Wedding Song (Number 13) or the strange, sinewy New Year’s Greeting (Number 21).
First published in the Guardian on 14 January, 2016
Sam Lee & friends. Collector, tradition-bearer, troubadour, the most interesting young voice in English folk. Old songs learned from Traveller communities done in glitchy, ambient new arrangements. Tron Theatre, 15 January http://www.celticconnections.com/events/Pages/event.aspx?ev=d09fa25b-4d6e-414c-a94f-a5310144cb22