Our Gilded Veins
Jay Capperauld (b. 1989)
Our Gilded Veins (2020)
Anna Clyne (b. 1980)
Within Her Arms (2009)
Sir James MacMillan (b. 1959)
For Zoe (2022)
The Death of Oscar (2012)
Martin Suckling (b. 1981)
Meditation (after Donne) (2018)
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (1934-2016)
Farewell to Stromness (1980)
Katherine Bryan (flute, Our Gilded Veins)
Henry Clay (cor anglais, For Zoe)
Royal Scottish National Orchestra/Rory Macdonald
rec. 2022/24, Scotland’s Studio, Glasgow, UK
Linn CKD713 [72]
Jay Capperauld composed the flute concerto Our Gilded Veins for Katherine Bryan, who premiered it. The work is in a single span but falls clearly into different sections roughly reflecting the process which the title implies. Paul Conway’s ever well-informed notes explain that the piece was inspired by the ancient Japanese art of kintsugi [joining with gold]. One repairs broken pottery by mending areas of breakage with a gilded lacquer. That not only repairs the object, but highlights the previous damage. Capperauld’s work more or less alludes to – rather than merely describe – this kind of process.
The piece begins with an arresting gesture which suggests pottery smashed to pieces and reduced to fragments. The music then attempts to put the various scattered bits and pieces together, which is after all a fairly traditional musical concept. The piece moves throughout varied and contrasting episodes, and aims at reconstructing a more coherent whole. Along the way, there is a powerful climax on a resounding tam-tam stroke. There follows a short suspended moment succeeded by what Paul Conway describes as a lyrical, folk-like melody. The work ends appeased “with a keen sense of anticipation for what lies ahead”. This attractive, beautifully written piece brings out Katherine Bryan’s immaculate technique and musicality: she is playing almost continuously. The work could become popular among flautists.
Anna Clyne’s Within Her Arms for fifteen strings is a deeply felt and strongly moving elegy dedicated to the composer’s mother. The basic material grows out of a repeated four-note motif introduced at the outset by a solo violin. The music unfolds contrapuntally until it freezes in the middle of the piece in a static section that does not last long: it gathers momentum again and morphs into Tippettian counterpoint. (One may be forgiven to hear a faint echo of Tippett’s Corelli Fantasia, and the work is none the worse for that, I hasten to say.) This marvellous, moving work deserves wider exposure.
James MacMillan wrote For Zoe in memory of Zoe Kitson, principal cor anglais of the RSNO from 2006 to 2014. This short tribute is appropriately scored for cor anglais, harp and strings. A tightly argued piece, it packs a maximum of emotion within its concision.
MacMillan’s The Death of Oscar is inspired by the ancient Celtic warrior-bard Ossian and the story of his son Oscar’s death. The legend says that Oscar challenges his father’s betrayer and enemy, with whom he engages in combat. He wins but is fatally wounded. MacMillan’s tone poem opens with an imposing gesture – timpani, bass drum and tam-tam strokes. There follows a grieving lament, more intensive as the music moves on. Further episodes, reminding happier times, are soon swept away by the central war-like section; here, we get wonderfully agile, trenchant RSNO trumpets to the fore. The slow tempo resumes in the elegiac section proper, until the opening material is briefly restated and brings the piece to its emphatic close. This splendidly vivid and colourful tone poem happily mixes heroic gestures and elegiac moments.
Martin Suckling wrote Meditation (after Donne) as part of the 2018 centenary commemorations of World War One. Paul Conway says that it “marks the event with a musical response to the legacy of war and the feelings of commemoration, loss, anger and peace it evokes”. The piece is scored for chamber orchestra and sampled bell sounds. The composer describes the work as “a simple song for orchestra, with performers and audience surrounded by a constantly evolving tapestry of tolling bells created by live electronics”. Although one inevitably misses the multi-directional effect of a live performance, the work has an extraordinary power to move. The music echoes the plea for a shared humanity in John Donne’s Meditation XVII: “no man is an island, entire of itself […] any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it toll for thee”.
To my mind, Suckling’s work and Clyne’s elegy are the most substantial pieces in this very fine programme. It closes with Peter Maxwell Davies’s simple Farewell to Stromness. Rosemary Furniss arranged it for strings for the blessing of the marriage of the then Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall at St. George’s Chapel in April 2005. (Farewell to Stromness is one of the piano interludes from The Yellow Cake Revue composed in 1980.) Some may find this small, unimposing piece anti-climactic but I firmly believe that such simple, almost humble music is a fitting conclusion to this release devoted to “reflections on memory, loss and healing”.
All in all, this is a very fine disc, well played and recorded. It deserves serious recommendation.
Hubert Culot
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