Scotland
Miranda Heggie
Featuring two Russian composers, the two halves of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s programme could hardly have been more different. In the first, pianist Xiayin Wang (pictured below) joined the RSNO for Scriabin’s florid, rarely-heard Piano Concerto. The orchestral sound under Peter Oundjian – in what is his final season as Music Director – was lean yet strong, as the vast number of violins played as a single, powerful muscle.While this made for a captivating orchestral presence, Wang’s solo playing was for most of the first movement either overshadowed or downright drowned out. Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
It’s as intricate as it is concise. The depth to the architecture of James MacMillan’s Saxophone Concerto – which was given its world premiere this week by saxophonist Amy Dickson and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra – is quite astounding, and all the more so for being packed into three five-minute movements. As with much of MacMillan’s music, the work is inspired by Scottish folk tunes, which certainly takes the saxophone into unusual territory in this concerto for solo instrument and string orchestra.The first movement, based on a march, strathspey and reel, is tight and spry, with the solo Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The National Jazz Trio of Scotland are not really that at all. With a name designed to sound like a stiffly formal unit they are, in fact, an entity based around Bill Wells, a Scottish institution, albeit an alternative one. He’s been around the block many times since the Eighties when he first started making waves with his very personally curated and individual perspective on jazz. Since those days, he’s worked with all sorts, ranging from Isobel Campbell to Aidan Moffat to Future Pilot AKA. His fourth National Jazz Trio of Scotland outing is a likeable, laid back odd-pop curiosity.Vol. IV Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s final season concert conducted by Robin Ticciati, who leaves his post as chief conductor of the SCO for the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, was bound to be an emotional occasion. Spanning a decade, the relationship between orchestra and conductor has been a very special one indeed, and has seen an abundance of success over the past 10 years. The fervour and intensity shown in the playing at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall on Thursday was almost palpable, a fitting finale to such a fruitful partnership.Opening with a small band of players, JS Bach’s Orchestral Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Malcolm Middleton (b.1973) is a Scottish singer-songwriter whose music has a devoted fanbase. Instead of the faux-vulnerable, non-specific, sub-Jeff Buckley flannel touted by many of his contemporaries and younger peers, Middleton’s work is grounded in the physical grit of the everyday, boasting a social realism underpinned by mordant humour and, often, heartbreaking emotion.Middleton first came to the attention of music fans as a member of pithy indie observational duo Arab Strap with Aidan Moffat. By the time they wound down in 2006, he had already launched a solo career defined by literate Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Launched into an already crowded choral scene in 2016, the professional choir Sonoro has marked its second birthday with the release of a debut CD. Last night was the launch concert, featuring items selected from the disc. On the evidence of both CD and concert Sonoro is a very welcome new addition to the roster of excellent London choirs, with its own distinct sound and ethos.This was the second time I have heard Sonoro, but their relaxed and good-natured Christmas concert was in a different world from the serious-minded religiosity of last night. In the excellent acoustic of St Botolph- Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
There’s more than a touch of vaunting ambition in the idea of turning the Scottish Play into dance theatre. Without spoken text, named scenes or even a printed synopsis, it falls to choreography and direction to speak for them all. Thus the most striking achievement of Mark Bruce’s small-scale touring production of Macbeth is that it delivers the story with a clarity and vibrancy that communicates, whatever one's level of acquaintance with Shakespeare. What’s more, its best moments – which come thick and fast in the second half – are as thrilling as it gets on any size of stage.The grand Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Colours had meanings for Emil Nolde. “Yellow can depict happiness and also pain. Red can mean fire, blood or roses; blue can mean silver, the sky or a storm.” As the son of a German-Frisian father and a Schleswig-Dane mother, Nolde was raised in a pious household on the windswept flat land on the border on Germany and Denmark that his family farmed. The Bible was practically the only book in the household and had been in the family for nine generations, and his understanding of colour was drawn as if from a chromatic psalter. “Every colour harbours its own soul,” he wrote, "delighting or Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Art fairs are vaguely promiscuous. So much art, so many galleries, so very many curators. They’re a glut for the eye yet curiously anodyne — the ranks of white cubicles could belong to a jobs fair, except there’s a Miró round the corner. And it’s impossible not to price-perv, that sly flick of the eye down to the label just happens.Not so at Art UK. They’re the London Art Fair’s museum partner this year, and this is their first ever exhibition. Nothing’s on sale because they hold none of the works themselves. Instead, all the pieces on display are publicly owned, if seldom seen. They’re on Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Word wizard. Grammar bully. Sentence shark. AA Gill didn’t play fair by syntax: he pounced on it, surprising it into splendid shapes. And who cared when he wooed readers with anarchy and aplomb? Hardly uncontroversial, let alone inoffensive (he suggested Mary Beard should be kept away from TV cameras on account of her looks, and shot a baboon), he was consistently brilliant. Wherever he went, he brought his readers with him. His journalist’s eye and performer’s hunger made him a natural raconteur, one who could induce synaesthesia so you could taste words.People dear to me loved his writing Read more ...
David Kettle
Collaboration and collegiality are becoming ever more important across the Scottish arts scene, it seems. Glasgow theatre company Vanishing Point teamed up with Scottish Opera earlier this year for a double-bill based around Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle. String group the Scottish Ensemble has focused heavily on collaborative projects in recent years, joining visual artist Toby Paterson, composer Anna Meredith and (okay, admittedly not Caledonian) Swedish ensemble Andersson Dance in a string of projects.It was probably inevitable that Vanishing Point and the Scottish Ensemble would end up Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
In 1725 a collection of some 50 songs was published by one William Thomson. You might not know his name, or even the names of the songs, but given the first bar of most I’m betting you could hum them from beginning to end. The work? Orpheus Caledonius – the first published collection of Scottish folk melodies and lyrics.This year’s Brighton Early Music Festival takes “Roots” as its theme, and this opening night concert looked back beyond baroque to the traditional tunes that lurk, just out of sight, behind so many of its great works, from Corelli to Purcell. This performance by period band L’ Read more ...