Building Castles
New Music for New Audiences
Contents and performers listed after review
rec. 2024, St. Mary’s Parish Church, Haddington, Scotland
Live Music Now Scotland celebrates 40 Years
Delphian DCD34327 [59]
Reading the Live Music Now Scotland website, we learn that it is an organisation that exists ‘to bring high-quality live music to people throughout Scotland, particularly those who would otherwise not have access to its transforming benefits and ability to effect societal change.’ This aim is achieved by organising public performances, providing opportunities for Scottish performers at the outset of their musical career, and by commissioning new works. A CD, Luminate, was issued by Delphian in 2015 to mark the organisation’s 30th anniversary. This one, Building Castles now celebrates its 40th. Carol Main, the Director of LMNS, contributes a booklet note that provides useful information about the performers and the programme, though I would have liked a little more on the composers themselves. Otherwise, I encourage readers to visit the website in order to learn more about an interesting organisation that has some unusual and fascinating features. I also encourage them, very warmly, to acquire this lovely disc.
The programme is made up of seven works by five composers. First out is Karine Polwart. One of LMNS’s core concerns is working with people in care homes, a group particularly hard hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. A project was launched, City Sounds of Nature, funded by OneCity Trust, Edinburgh. Such were the restrictions in play during that extraordinary time that the project was based online, but contact between care home residents and musicians was enabled nonetheless. Karine Polwart’s two songs were the direct fruit of this project. Keep Building Castles recalls memories of beach holidays where the children’s sandcastles were repeatedly demolished by the North Sea waves. Meet Me at Loganlea is a love poem in a rural setting. Both songs are equally lovely, and the performances are beyond praise. Hannah Rarity’s singing is gloriously generous and open-throated, and the voice itself is one of great beauty. She communicates the essence of these songs, and Luc McNally’s guitar playing and vocal contributions complete a musical offering of pure pleasure.
Erin Thomson’s The Graceful Art of Walking on Stilts, placed second in the programme, brings total contrast. The work was composed for and is performed by the Campus Trio, an ensemble of two saxophones and piano whose usual repertoire, unsurprisingly, is mainly made up of arrangements and transcriptions. The work is in eight movements, the last of which, at 1:47, is the longest. Its target audience was children with additional support needs, and a condition of the commission was that the music would ‘readily engage’ with that audience. It was inspired by a cartoon character learning to walk on stilts, and the movements carry titles describing the process. Thus we have ‘With uncontained excitement’, ‘Lopsided, with one hand’ and, the touching final movement, ‘Sunken; tender’. I think it will speak directly to the ready, open minds of children, and, as real music that reveals more at each hearing, it will also appeal to ageing listeners such as myself. It is performed with great skill and total conviction.
Savourna Stevenson’s Mill Memories was written to support the town of Paisley’s bid to become UK City of Culture. It is dedicated to those who worked in cotton mills. The forces are flute and guitar, with the two instruments more or less equal partners. The booklet notes invite us to imagine that the rapid music of the opening represents the sounds the mill workers would have heard throughout the day, ‘machinery, spinning, shuttles flying and raised voices’. I’m happy enough to go along with that, and note that the musical language employed, whilst still accessible, is more advanced than anything heard so far in this programme. A more traditional vocabulary emerges in the lyrical second section, where subtle Spanish elements are introduced and highlighted by the guitar writing. I hear wistfulness rather than tragedy in the movement that is meant to evoke a cinema tragedy of 1929 in which 71 children lost their lives, but the work as a whole is attractive and satisfying. Any performers who decide to take it up will be hard-pressed to do a better job than Leila Marshall and Sasha Savaloni do here.
I think that Jennifer Martin’s two pieces, in spite of the technical challenges they present, will be particularly satisfying to get to know and to play. Clarinettist, Calum Robertson, and pianist, Juliette Philogene, do them full justice. Both pieces explore the theme of motherhood. Bi-Cycle begins with a very affecting, rocking lullaby, and the titles of the movements that follow, ‘Haywire’, for instance, give a fair indication of what to expect. ‘Hammer and Tongs’, though, sounds like good-natured banter to this listener. ‘Push-By’ – I don’t know what is meant here – is the most dissonant of the five movements, and, like the work as a whole, demonstrates considerable inventiveness in its use of the two instruments. We read in the notes that the tender closing movement, ‘To live with thee’, ‘brings the relationship [between mother and child] full circle.’ The five minutes of What’s for you… are ‘inspired by the hopes, joys and fears that come with having a child.’ You don’t need to know this. Indeed, given that much of the piece is made up of a singing line for the clarinet over a nervy, highly rhythmic and irregular piano part, I don’t find it particularly helpful. Listening to it as pure music is just as satisfying, perhaps more so.
The final work in the programme, Songs from Above and Below, grew out of a project supported by the Baring Foundation, an independent organisation that provides financial support in the form of grants and whose values turn around human rights, inclusion, discrimination and disadvantage. John McLeod’s composition was part of a programme entitled ‘Late Style’ which supported artists over 70. McLeod produced a song-cycle to his own texts on the subject of the mining industry. The first songs have the poet recalling how he was taken from school at the age of ten to work in the mines, alongside descriptions and reflections on the back-breaking and exhausting nature of the work. Another poem describes the miners’ Gala Day, and another recounts the Aberfan disaster of 1966, when a slag heap descended on to the village school, killing 116 children and 28 adults. The final song is actually a setting of Wilfred Owen’s early poem, Miners, cut to about half its length, leaving a meditation on the dangers of mining, on those who died underground, and how they are largely forgotten. The music of this work is freely atonal and highly dissonant, with the exception of ‘Gala Day’, where tonality is used to create an attractively gay and carefree atmosphere. The vocal writing throughout is varied, with considerable use of the upper register. The piano writing is much more than simple accompaniment, with, in particular, eloquent postludes to some of the songs. ‘Last Friday Before Half-Term’ is the song that deals with Aberfan, and begins with a striking special effect. Some listeners might wonder, though, if it is even possible successfully to render in music such an unthinkable event. Others might also wish the composer had not chosen to end the work with spoken words. Songs from Above and Below is, to be sure, a serious and sombre work, challenging for the listener, as well as, no doubt, for the artists. It receives a magnificent performance here from Emily Mitchell and Geoffrey Tanti.
William Hedley
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Contents
Karine Polwart (b. 1970)
Keep Building Castles (2020)
Erin Thomson (b. 2000)
The Graceful Art of Walking on Stilts (2022)
Savourna Stevenson (b. 1961)
Mill Memories (2021)
Karine Polwart
Meet Me at Loganlea (2020)
Jennifer Martin (b. 1967)
Bi-Cycle (2015)
What’s for you… (2020)
John McLeod (1934-2022)
Songs from Above and Below (2015)
Performers
Hannah Rarity (voice); Luc McNally (guitar and voice) (Polwart)
Campus Trio: Richard Scholfield, John Anthony Craig (saxophones), Maria Urian (piano) (Thomson)
Leila Marshall (flute); Sasha Savaloni (guitar) (Stevenson)
Calum Robertson (clarinet); Juliette Philogene (piano) (Martin)
Emily Mitchell (soprano); Geoffrey Tanti (piano) (McLeod)
