THERE is something not quite right about the Scottish Ensemble's new autumn/winter season, which opens this week.
It's tricky to buttonhole the issue, though the outcome is unmistakable.
It is a complex and diverse season, compounded of new things, one-offs, special projects and a regular core provision of Scottish Ensemble classics. It opens this week with a special on Friday and Saturday, entitled City Spaces And Strings, in which SE artistic director Jonathan Morton and his group move into the disused and abandoned Anderston Centre in Glasgow to play 20th-century music in an environment designed by visual artist Toby Paterson.
There's another special in the city at the far end of the season when the group takes the SE Songbook, with music by Gershwin, Berlin and others, into the Old Fruitmarket, along with a vocalist. And there's yet another special, untried yet in Glasgow, called SE Sessions, where the ensemble will fragment into small groups and individuals, staging free and informal musical evenings with a cabaret-style presentation in its Glasgow home at the CCA in Sauchiehall Street.
And then, increasingly important to the group, there are the City Residencies, where the Scottish Ensemble literally moves into a city and its community for more intimate and personal work. There are three such residencies this season, in Dundee, Inverness and Aberdeen. That's a lot.
On top of that, there is the core programme of big-time, more formal Scottish Ensemble concerts touring Scotland's cities. There are five of these throughout the season, and here's where the issue surfaces. And it's like an open wound.
Three of these five frontline concerts are not coming to Glasgow, where the Ensemble's home base (CCA) and main performance venue (the City Halls) are situated. That is almost incredible. These are mainframe events, stuffed with quintessential, defining repertoire. But not coming to Glasgow?
Look at the facts: this month the SE's Essential Ensemble concert (their name) with a raft of concertos by Vivaldi and Dvorak's big Serenade, will not come to Glasgow. Next month, the SE's major collaboration with brilliant pianist Alasdair Beatson, playing concertos by Mozart and Haydn and much else, will not come to Glasgow. And finally (I didn't quite believe this could happen) next May, another fundamental, defining Scottish Ensemble programme, From Russia With Love, whose masterpieces, Shostakovich's Chamber Symphony and Tchaikovsky's Serenade For Strings, are SE party pieces, is not coming to Glasgow.
What's going on? I don't know. Could it be just bad planning? I don't believe that. Are they trying to do too much? Possibly. Could three separate city residencies in a single season be a residency too far? Interesting question. I'm just rather perplexed that it has happened at all. These are sharp, clever people. Did nobody on the board, spotting Glasgow missing out on three out of five major concert projects, not raise an eyebrow and gently suggest that such a scenario, in the group's home city, was unthinkable?
Of course, there is the odd occasion where one might say: "Okay, that programme is going to Perth, so I can go and hear it there."
Not everyone wants to do that, though. And it does rather run counter to the philosophy behind those city residencies: " We'll come to you; we will bring the music to where you are." Not, it would appear, if where you are happens to be Glasgow.
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