Pressure on space, thanks to the coincidence of the Edinburgh International Film Festival and Glasgow Jazz Festival, meant it proved impossible to run the second instalment of Rowena Smith's coverage of the St Magnus Festival in the print edition. This is her report:
Tuesday was something of a folk-music day at St Magnus. Trio Mediaeval, a Norwegian, female vocal ensemble followed up its evening concert of fragments of a medieval mass with a concert of Norwegian folk music in Birsay Church. Actually, early music of the vocal variety seems such an obvious choice for the amazing acoustic and surroundings of St Magnus Cathedral it’s surprising the Festival doesn’t programme it more often (though, I suppose a resident vocal ensemble is perhaps of less use for the composers and conductors courses that run alongside the music programming).
Prior to the excursion to Birsay, there was more folk-influenced programming in Psappha’s lunchtime concert in the cathedral. Peter Maxwell Davies’s Kettletoft Inn – named after an establishment on his home island of Sanday – was written for Northumbrian piper Kathryn Tickell. Scored for pipes, cor anglais and an ensemble of strings, it is a short, rather unshowy piece, with a particularly attractive slow lament section in which the pipes are harmonised by the cor anglais – a striking and rather beautiful combination of sonorities. Kettletoft Inn’s gentle lyricism is miles away from the rigorous complexity of Max’s Image Reflection Shadow that Psappha had performed earlier in the festival – it never ceases to surprise that a composer known for writing such dense, difficult music in his firebrand days, should reveal such an affinity with melody later in his career.
The rest of Psappha’s programme was a curiously mixed bag. Mozart’s Oboe Quartet in F seemed little more than filler designed to give the cor anglais player something other to play besides Kettletoft Inn and seemed out of joint with the rest of the programme. The idea of pairing Max’s folk-inflected music and Tickell’s pipe solos with chamber music by contemporary Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag was an interesting one, especially including Kurtag’s pieces solo cimbalom, Hungary’s national instrument. However, the parallels would have been stronger if Kurtag’s music was more apparently folk-inflected. Instead, he ploughs his own furrow with his inimitable, jewel-like miniatures. The intricacies of Signs, Games and Messages seemed to perplex a few members of the audience, if the comments as the audience left the cathedral are anything to go by. The work, scored for string trio, has a dynamic range of quiet to extremely quiet punctuated by a few explosions – it can be quite difficult to get into depending on the context, though the ear gradually adjusts. Here it took the performance the first couple of short movements to settle, though since there are 11, there was still plenty to appreciate in the writing.
On a completely different scale altogether, the RSNO rounded up its festival residency with a concert conducted by music director Stéphane Denève. The all-French programme had Denève’s stamp all over it, and though it is perhaps looking too much into the performance to hear a marked difference in sound with a different conductor at the helm, the orchestral sound seemed to be lusher and more expansive than at the previous two concerts. (Though this perhaps said as much about the difference in programme as it did about conductor). Having opened with Fauré’s Pelléas et Mélisande suite, the concert continued with pianist Eric Le Sage performing Ravel’s G major Concerto back-to-back with Conneson’s single movement concerto-in-miniature The Shining One. This piece was written for the RSNO and Jean Yves Thibaudet earlier this year and is intended as a companion piece for short French concertos, such as the Ravel. At its premiere it was performed separately to the Ravel, but here side-by-side the similarities in colour, gesture and even individual phrase are extremely apparent. Surprisingly perhaps, this isn’t to the work’s detriment, it works well as a kind of sparkling encore with orchestra to the main work. Le Sage is a very different pianist to Thibaudet, more solid and deliberate where the other is mercurial. Le Sage’s account of the first movement of the Ravel felt too heavy, almost laboured, but his finale, taken at less than Thibaudet’s usual helter-skelter pace was a welcome change, allowing the finer orchestral detail to come through.
While much of the RSNO’s St Magnus programme consisted of recently performed works (the Conneson, Vaughan Williams’s Sea Symphony) or standard repertoire (Dvorak’s New World Symphony) the orchestra brought its residency to a close with a taster of a new work it will be performing next season. Henri Dutilleux is the latest French composer to be championed by Denève. Here the orchestra performed his First Symphony, completed in 1951, an immense work, accessible in its musical language yet also involving. The RSNO made a strong case for why Denève has chosen to programme this work. There were moments where a little uncertainty crept in, particularly in the finale where the arrival of the ethereal melody seemed more of a relief than a musical culmination, but there was much to admire in the performance – it will be good to see what the orchestra makes of the symphony when it is performed again next season.
Rowena Smith
The National Theatre of Scotland's touring caravan is in Strathy in Sutherland tonight (and reaches Wick on Thursday) with Liz Lochhead's Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off and Dennis Kelly's new children's show Our Teacher's A Troll.
In the latter the hilarity reaches a pitch when our young heroes take their troll problem to the Prime Minister and he delivers a politician's response.
The script runs:
"Hmmmm. Yes. Well," said the prime minister, a very thoughtful expression in his eyes as he gazed down at the young faces below, a hundred reporters hanging on his every word.
"Mistakes have been made."
"But the point is," said the prime minister, beginning to pull out one of his favourite smiles for the cameras, "that we will learn from our mistakes. We shall learn that there have been mistakes, that the mistakes were definitely mistakes, and we were mistaken to make those mistakes.
"But what I’m hearing from the British people is that every one is very much mistaken if you make the mistake of thinking that no-one can make a mistake or two.
"Therefore, make no mistake about it… We will learn… We will do better… We will win!"
Mr Kelly's text was, of course, written long before Gordon Brown had to deal with the issue of Westminster expenses.
Yesterday he said: "And we must show that, where mistakes have been made and errors have been discovered, where wrongs have to be righted, that that is done immediately.
"We have also to try hard to show people and think hard about how a profession that ... depends on trust – the most precious asset it has is trust – how that profession too can show that it is genuinely there to serve the public in all its future needs." Keith Bruce
The 10th anniversary of Scotland's festival of street arts in Callendar Park coincided with the continuing celebrations of the 250th birthday of that Burns bloke, so Neil Butler of UZ Events was able to recycle, remake and remodel the Iconic Burns work created for the launch of Homecoming at Alloway as Burns is Back to bring the Falkirk event to a climax. Back? Oh yes. Burns began his Highland tour of licensed premises in 1787 with an overnight stay at the town's Crosskeys Inn.
Before that an arbitrary critical pick of the Sunday's events would undoubtedly include Motionhouse Dance Theatre's energetic Underground in which a quartet of multi-disciplinary dancers built, inhabited, sprayed-painted, strap-hanged in, threatened and robbed from a compartment of a tube train. Less athletic, but subtlely thought-provoking, was Angie Dight's Snowglobe, flamenco in the era of Franco. As far as educational fun stuff for kids went, the ecological lesson of Gorillas was a bit earnest, but Dangerous Men's Darwin and the Dodo was an anarchic, informative delight, spiced with daft songs. Keith Bruce
When David Byrne played Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on the last day of March, his ensemble included three contemporary dancers and the gig was almost as impressive for its choreography as the music. As the band also took part in some of the moves, it was a rather nice joke that everyone, blokes included, appeared for their curtain call wearing tutus. How wackily witty and terribly David Byrne, we all thought.
It turns out, however, that Byrne's gag was not entirely original and seems to have been deliberately referencing the Broadway success of the stage version of Billy Elliot. The musical, which is running at the Imperial in Manhattan and has grossed some $30m to date, has a "rousing curtain call with the entire cast - from petite girls to burly men - donning tutus to take their bows", according to US showbiz journal Variety. The magazine prints a picture of composer Elton John and lyricist Lee Hall in suits and net skirts to prove the point. Keith Bruce
It was a couple of wide boys from Oregon or someplace who decreed that September 19 should be designated International Talk Like A Pirate Day, an amusingly satiral notion so appealing it became the title of a song on the last Lambchop album.
In much the same spirit, the Chicago Shakespeare Theater enlisted the assistance of the Mayor of Chicago Richard M Daley to declare tomorrow, April 23, Shakespeare's birth (and death) day, Talk Like Shakespeare Day. A week ago the Mayor issued a proclamation encouraging the citizenry to "incorporate phrases such as 'prithee', 'thou', 'fie! and 'knave' into their parlance as a way to celebrate the legacy of his language."
Students of English might have a few difficulties with that clause of the proclamation, but let's leave that to one side. More to the point, if it catches on, Talk Like Shakespeare Day can be guaranteed to irritate letter writers to the Telegraph and leader writers at the Mail, despite the fact that English people routinely ignore the national day of St George on which, suspiciously, their national bard contrived to be born and to die. Keith Bruce
Space restrictions in our print edition meant that my review of Dennis Kelly's Our Teacher's A Troll (directed by Joe Douglas) and Liz Lochhead's Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (directed by Alison Peebles)was curtailed. For reasons of personal vanity, rather than simply to ingratiate myself with actress Angela Darcy, the paragraph below was one of those lost.
Where Kelly’s play is full of repeating motifs like a story book – as well as the sort of incidental gore and vulgarity that children love – and culminates in a nicely understated message about the virtues of tolerance, Lochhead’s still feels like the more organic creation it was in the beginning (as she makes clear in the introduction to a new edition of the script). Parts of it are blatantly out of order (Mary muses about her "flyting fae Knox" before the scene, for example), and there is no other work of Lochhead’s that is so clearly the work of a poet as well as a dramatist. La Corbie’s opening speech is rightly celebrated for its witty characterisation of Auld Scotia, but there are other passages (notably that speech of Mary’s in her odd French-accented Scots) that grab the ear immediately too. That these two characters have no automatic right to our sympathy and attention is down to a sparkling turn by Darcy as Elizabeth – although the production is an ensemble triumph, her particular contribution is superb.
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