Plug
Red Note/Music Lab
RCS, Glasgow
Michael Tumelty
four stars
WHO would have thought it a decade ago, when head of composition at the RCS, Gordon McPherson, introduced the institution’s new music festival with the ungainly title of Plug that it would be celebrating its 10th anniversary with an opening night that drew a packed hall and the luminaries and leading composers of the Scottish music scene?
A stunning night was the RCS’s reward for a decade of support. All four pieces premiered on Tuesday reflected the musical, dramatic, theatrical and intellectual probity with which these young composers set about and achieved their aims. I was blown away by the fierce emotional impact of Henry McPherson’s multi-media opera, Uhte, which was as pure in theatrical articulation as anything in Britten, and as raw as the most naked emotions in Maxwell Davies’ music theatre pieces; wonderfully-performed on film by the BBC SSO and Martyn Brabbins with an outstanding squad of RCS singers.
I was equally impressed, in superb performances by Garry Walker, with Red Note and Music Lab, by the economy of resources employed by Gregor Forbes in his Infinite Avenues, which started like minimalism and became something else; by Shona MacKay’s wickedly-mischievous, video-linked How to Undress in Front of Your Husband, which was embarrassing to cocksure male plonkers and to daft women who bought the line for generations. And I was intrigued by Martin Keary’s New, the Craig Armstrong Prize winner, for its beguiling combinations of music and computer animation. I do worry about all the apps ‘n’ craps invading the thesaurus of musical resources these days. But I’m a non-Smart codger; and they probably thought that about the metronome.
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