Music

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Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

four stars

“WHAT do they teach them at music college, these days?” The vexed plea of those whose ears are fixedly tuned to familiar repertoire was answered by a dip into the week’s showcase of new composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland: ten concerts of performances by guest ensembles alongside groups of student musicians assembled to perform a pieces from undergraduates to established names.

In the latter category we should include all three of the composers whose work was performed on Monday in the Stevenson Hall, showcasing the winners of the prize in the name of local Hollywood composer, whose 60th birthday had fallen a week previously, Craig Armstrong. He was in the audience to hear the most recent winner, Aidan Teplitzky’s Moving On. Teplitsky is an example of the current wave of graduates whose practice has ranged across other disciplines taught at the Conservatoire at the same time as his compositions have found a home with symphony orchestras and chamber groups.

Teamed with images of desert landscapes and the city outside the venue, this work for a Sinfonietta of 22 players would have sat well with the slow “slack” music of the Canadian composers featured at Ilan Volkov’s Tectonics over the following weekend.

Previous winner Alex Mackay is a live-band musician with Mogwai in his post-RCS life, and you could hear that in his own superb electronics on 3 pieces from Targazing. The processed sounds from the two quartets of strings in front of him, drones and repeated figures, were often the garnish on top, but the whole was compelling stuff.

There was perhaps most colour in the middle work of the programme, Between the two of us by Electra Perivolaris, already championed by Armstrong’s contemporary Sir James MacMillan at his Cumnock Tryst. Alongside some lovely oboe (Rachel Curry), the lower strings of the quartet at its heart were also crucial to its success – and the composer’s own visuals, photographs of Arran, were pretty good as well.

There were string quartets at the heart of most of the short works offered by the younger composers two days later, all but two conducted by Charles Baumstark. The most striking of these were Isaac Phillips’s Must-Run, a wry commentary on fake news with found footage of US bulletin anchors and manipulated images of TV reporting running alongside the most propulsive writing in the programme, and Darlene Zarabozo’s behind closed doors, which was a collaboration with text (Phoebe McGowan) and video (Althea Young) in which the music remained the most expansive and successful ingredient.