Music
The Cumnock Tryst
Cumnock and Auchinleck, East Ayrshire
Keith Bruce
five stars
THERE are many models for Sir James MacMillan’s autumn music festival – the choral and chamber music church concerts of the Lammermuir and East Neuk Festivals, and especially the combination of community involvement and top professional performers established by a composer of an earlier generation at Orkney’s St Magnus Festival – but the Cumnock Tryst has very quickly established an identity all of its own.
That unique style was palpable in the atmosphere of Friday evening’s Trinity Church concert by the trio led by violinist Nicola Benedetti with Leonard Elschenbroich and Alexei Grynyuk. It is superfluous to talk of the communication and empathy at the heart of this established group, so revel instead in the rich tone of Elschenbroich’s cello of the third movement of Ravel’s Trio in A Minor and the way Grynyuk’s piano drove the finale of Brahms’ Trio No1 in B, and how Benedetti and her partner so eloquently enjoy the wit of the Duetti d’Amore written for them by Mark Anthony Turnage.
On Saturday afternoon, the forces gathered in Auchinleck’s lovely Parish Church numbered close on 150 for the Scottish premiere of Cecilia McDowall’s Stabat Mater, a beautifully constructed work that had the young women of the RSNO Junior Chorus at its pivotal point, bracketed by solo arias from baritone Leigh Melrose, with the young professionals of Genesis Sixteen (edition five) bolstering the community voices of the Festival Chorus at its opening and profoundly moving close.
Conductor Eamonn Dougan then showed the full range of capabilities of those voices at the start of their careers, when Genesis Sixteen presented their own programme in St John’s Church in Cumnock. The relationship between the Tryst and the training academy for The Sixteen now seems an established annual ingredient of the Festival, supported by the Genesis Foundation, but here was the junior ensemble’s first full concert. A very cleverly selected quartet of “Scottish” works (by Kenneth Leighton, Robert Ramsey, MacMillan and Maxwell Davies) sat at its core, but there was space for excursions into very Sixteen territory of early music rarities as well as contemporary works by Roderick Williams and Arvo Part.
The more intimate atmosphere of Cumnock Old Parish Church was the venue for a showcase of even newer works with five pieces penned for the Tryst by composition students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland premiered by their highly accomplished colleagues of the RCS Music Lab. There was not a weak effort among them, but Charles Baumstark’s saxophone duo and Max Welton’s mischievous jazz appropriations in Victrola will remain in my own mind longest.
The late evening Festival Club in the Dumfries Arms Hotel has its own unique Tryst atmosphere too, more mellow than its Kirkwall equivalent. The musicianship of the Causeway Trio (Friday) and the Jackie Oates Band (Saturday) was an un-showy delight in both cases.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here