Turn
The Govan Graving Docks, Glasgow
Mary Brennan
***
TIMES and tides - waiting for no man but maybe, as here, allowing a shared pause for thought.
On site, at Govan’s three Graving Docks – fallen into disrepair since 1988, and with grass now stretching over cobble-stones worn down by thousands of now absent feet - you witness Clydeside’s industrial downturn. On three evenings across September, however, the largest of the docks has briefly taken on new life, as a location for Nic Green’s elegiac site-specific sound-scape, Turn. Green’s starting point had been a conjunction of cycles in nature. From lunar phases to the ebb and flow of tides, she’d added the shifting perspectives and life changes of women whose birthdays fell on the dates she’d fixed on: September 1 and 16 - the 30th is still to come. Their personal stories would unfurl, interwoven by new music (by Naomi Pinnock) and the chiming of locally hand-crafted bells - the latter delivered by a group Green affectionately referred to as the ‘ringer-singers’.
On the 16th, when the moon would be waxing full, and the tide was at its lowest, a crowd of us gathered on both sides of Graving Dock 3. Looked into the rippling water - a stiff breeze chivvying the surface - and heard an opening peal of chimes inviting us to listen as Colette celebrated her 41st birthday by laying out details of turning points in her life. Revealing, to strangers, her highs of being in love and her lows - divorce and depression - while an increasing swell of Pinnock’s harmonies floated out across the slowly sinking water level. Complex harmonies, Colette’s lone voice - not every woman wants to strip her soul bare on her birthday... even if there’s cake, and the sense of being part of a time that will never come again, for any of us.
Budapest Cafe Orchestra
Birnam Arts Centre
Rob Adams
****
YOU’RE never quite sure with the Budapest Café Orchestra if their glorious Mahler Adagietto is going to break into a cod Cossack version of Guns N’Roses or if Summertime might segue into I Heard it Through the Grapevine.
Being kept on tenterhooks is one of the pleasures of encountering the musical masters of Harringay in their charity shop chic, down the river hats and standard lamp-lit stage set. In the event, the Adagietto stayed true to Mahler’s intentions, portraying a sad prolonged delicacy that was gorgeously poignant, and Marvin Gaye did indeed elbow George Gershwin out of the way, briefly, in a Summertime that pulled as many legs as it tugged heartstrings.
Not so much a band name as a whole genre of its own, Budapest Café Orchestra embraces an encyclopaedia of music and mischief. From Macedonia to Mull and from Hank Marvin to Edvard Grieg they kidnap melodies and make them their own, lending them variously heavy Slavic soulfulness, an unlikely but somehow apt rhythm and blues bassline, some gypsy swing pep or the slapstick pathos that comes from frontman Chris Garrick dragging a horse hair across a violin string to make a creaky door-like melody.
Garrick once managed to have himself introduced on BBC Radio Scotland as “Crease Garrique” – he lived in Perpignan at the time – so pinches of salt are required with him and Adrian Zolotuhin, whose droll introduction to his various stringed instruments was both education and hoot. Add superb interplay between Garrick and accordionist Eddie Hession, now virtuosic, now triple piano plaintive, and a wonderfully self-contained quartet sound and the audience leaves grinning as well as musically impressed and satisfied.
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
St Mary’s Church, Haddington
Rowena Smith
****
EARLY music and core German repertoire are two strands of this year’s Lammermuir Festival with this appearance from the BBC SSO and principal guest conductor Ilan Volkov in a programme of Brahms and Beethoven falling in the latter category. However there was a sly reference to the early music theme slipped in: Rolf Riehm’s He, tres doulz roussignol joly a spiky twentieth century deconstruction of a medieval song.
Riehm’s work provided the novelty value but the pillars of the concert were two central works from the German repertoire: Beethoven’s Violin Concerto and Brahms’ Third Symphony. Liza Ferschtman was the soloist in the Beethoven, producing a sweet, silvery tone that soared over the orchestral writing in the clear acoustic of St Mary’s. Volkov set an elegantly unhurried tempo leaving plenty of space for Ferschtman’s lyricism without allowing the music to become weighted down and over indulgent. Only Beethoven’s own cadenza in the first movement (transcribed from his arrangement of the concerto for piano) felt a bit gratuitous its flamboyance at odds with the symphonic weight of the work.
As in the Beethoven, pared-back simplicity underscored Volkov’s approach to Brahms’ Third Symphony. The declamatory insistence of the opening chords, which sets up the major-minor dichotomy present throughout the piece, was smoothed over in favour of a brisk pace which kept the momentum flowing. Volkov brought to the central movements a similar lean clarity, a refreshing approach particular in the third movement which can easily become overly sentimental. The approach was arguably less successful in the finale, which felt a little hurried in places with the result that the closing bars in favour of the major key seemed something of a surprise rather than a tentative resolution.
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