ANCIENT MODERNITY
LOUISE Mc MONAGLE
Errollyn Wallen (b. 1958) Postcard for Magdalena [1:11]
Ailie Robertson (b. 1983) Skydance [5:18]
Corrina Hewat (b. 1970) arr. Louise McMonagle My Love Dodging Rizla [6:32]
Josephine Stephenson (b. 1990) Anamnesis [4:23]
Lisa Robertson (b. 1993) the light through forest leaves [5:21]
Alex Groves (b. 1991) Single Form (Sarabande) [4:42]
Liza Lim (b. 1966) Cello Playing ~ as Meteorology [10:02]
Caroline Shaw (b. 1982) in manus tuas [8:41]
Lisa Streich (b. 1985) Minerva [8:47]
John Maxwell Geddes (1941–2017) Callanish IV [7:03]
Zoë Martlew (b. 1968) Salat Babilya [4:11]
Total playing time [66:17]
Tracks 3–7 and 10 are premiere recordings
Recorded on 2-4 April 2024 at The Robin Chapel, Edinburgh
Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter
24-bit digital editing: Jack Davis
digital mixing & mastering:
In the photograph, a young woman, naked, sits, legs hunched up, against a bare white wall. Her head turned slightly to one side, she stares blankly across the room. Her face is calm but pensive: perhaps this is the unhappy morning after the night before. Perhaps she has received some life-changing news. Or perhaps she is simply reminiscing before her first coffee of the day.
The photograph is ‘One Summer in London’, by the Mexico-based photographer Phoebe Theodora. As part of a collaboration project between the Royal College of Music, London and the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, the composer Josephine Stephenson selected this image as inspiration for her solo cello piece Anamnesis (composed in 2012). In it, she attempts to capture the process of recalling half-forgotten events. The piece unfurls like a memory, replaying and reinscribing itself bit by bit. At certain points, in order to ‘express this presumably confused and disorganised flow of thoughts’, the composer leaves the sequence of some fragments up to the performer, who must find ways to create continuity and meaning from their disjuncture, building those trains of thought for herself.
The title of Stephenson’s piece is a term used by Plato to describe the recollection of innate knowledge. Our souls being immortal, Plato argued (through the voice of Socrates), they
have in them knowledge gathered from all previous lives. What we call learning is in fact anamnesis – the rediscovery, through systematic processes of inquiry, of knowledge that is already within us. The idea chimes with that of Ancient Modernity, the title of this debut recording by the Scottish cellist Louise McMonagle: the notion that past and present are contained within one another.
The typical way to achieve this musically is through quotation or allusion – as in Alex Groves’s Single Form (Sarabande), composed in response to the sarabande movements of J.S. Bach’s cello suites. (Dating from 2022, the piece was originally written for McMonagle’s Riot Ensemble colleague, violist Stephen Upshaw.) Groves describes his piece as ‘a dance of light and colour, like the reflections of water on the underside of a bridge or the dappled light that falls through leaves on a late summer evening’. While the tenderly hesitant rhythms of all six of Bach’s sarabandes infuse the music, it is perhaps the famously sparse fifth – a work the French cellist Paul Tortelier called ‘an extension of silence’ –that is its closest spiritual counterpart. Four simple melodic fragments recur, moving in and out of focus. The piece is played entirely on harmonics, ensuring a sound-world that is paradoxically both penetrating and vaporous.
A similar haziness surrounds Caroline Shaw’s in manus tuas (2009). This time the point of reference is a motet by Thomas Tallis. However, there are not, the composer says, any specific quotations as such (although there are affinities), but rather ‘the sensation of a single moment of hearing the motet in the particular and remarkable space of Christ Church in New Haven, Connecticut’. The music emerges as if from a fog of memory before dwelling on forms of sustain and decay – repeated arpeggios, fades from tone to noise, the soft emergence of held vocal pitches – that suggest the reverberation of Tallis’s music within that space. Twice, in the middle and towards the end, a homophonic texture is achieved, but this is an illusory crystallisation: both times the music sinks back into the mist from which it came.
Lisa Robertson is a young West Highlands composer and violinist with a particular interest in incorporating natural and traditional elements into her music. the light through forest leaves (2020) features fragments of a Scottish folk melody, which are filtered through a sequence of different harmonic series (on F, G, A, D and C). For each step in this sequence, only the notes of the melody contained within that series are permitted to sound. To these are added other notes from the series (tuned to their correct intonation) and some ornamental grace notes. Like slow changes in the evening
light, the changes in harmonic background happen discreetly and are only noticed after they are in place. Over this soft-coloured palette, the folksong fragments stand out as sharply etched details.
Traditional Scottish music – and ancient Scottish history – are at the heart of the oldest piece on this album, John Maxwell Geddes’s Callanish IV (1978). McMonagle first encountered Geddes at the age of thirteen, when she joined the Glasgow Schools’ Symphony Orchestra. As well as a composer, Geddes was the orchestra’s conductor; playing his A Castle Suite (1996) was an important early influence on McMonagle. ‘I had never met anyone like him before,’ she says. ‘With a sparkle in his eye, he taught us the mystery and magic of what music can mean and the telepathy we had to seek in order to play together.’ Callanish IV is named after one of the groups of neolithic standing stones found near the village of Callanish, on the west coast of Lewis. Geddes visited these sites often, occasionally even sleeping alongside them, and wrote six pieces for various forces inspired by their enigmatic presence. What remains of Callanish IV comprises a modest circle of five stones around a central burial cairn. In between wide pizzicato chords, suggestive of the stones themselves, Geddes’s composition intersperses fragments of a Gaelic psalm tune in the style of an ancient form of Scottish singing, and short pizzicato flurries suggestive of Western Isles rain.
The inclusion of a work by Geddes suggests one way in which knowledge – in this case, the repertory for a recital disc – can emerge (as if by anamnesis) from within the performer’s own life story. McMonagle has a personal connection with many of the composers represented here, either through their shared Scottish background or through her work as a member of Riot Ensemble. The group has performed several of Liza Lim’s major works, for example, and Zoë Martlew, Errollyn Wallen and Ailie Robertson were all commissioned by the ensemble to write solo pieces during the 2020 Covid lockdowns. Wallen’s emotionally expansive miniature Postcard for Magdalena, also written in 2020, is a further lockdown commission, this time for the BBC. Although its title suggests another reference to Bach, the Magdalena named here is in fact Wallen’s friend, the filmmaker Margaret Williams.
McMonagle first heard the music of the Scottish harpist Corrina Hewat in a moment of London-based homesickness. So taken with it was she that she enrolled for Hewat’s classes at the Edinburgh Harp Festival – ‘a thoroughly enriching five days hiding at the back of the class immersed in her music and musicianship’. Although not tempted to trade in her cello for the more traditional folk instrument, she did arrange Hewat’s My Love Dodging Rizla for herself to play. A medley of three separate tunes (‘My Love I Miss Her So’ by Peter Ostroushko, ‘Dodging the Frogs’
by Hewat herself and ‘The Rizla’ by Charlie McKerron), it was first recorded on Hewat’s 2008 album Harp I Do. McMonagle’s arrangement does not try to emulate the hazy resonances of that recording, but instead focuses on the richer tones and greater continuity of line that her instrument can produce, without sacrificing the original’s timeless, dancing quality.
Zoë Martlew’s Salat Babilya (2008; the title means ‘Babylonian Prayer’) also imagines another instrument through the body of the cello. It is inspired by a modern lullaby from Iraq, composed to soothe children during US bombing raids. The original llulaby was written for the oud, an ancient form of lute that is at the heart of many Middle Eastern musical traditions. Martlew evokes the sound and music of this instrument through resonant open strings, harmonics, ornamental inflections and ‘Arabic’ scales, as well as the exclusive use of pizzicato (the piece is played entirely without the bow). As in much Arabic music, her piece begins with a slow, quasi-improvised prelude (although in this case one that is written out) before moving into the song itself. Fittingly, this ends with a slow fade into silence as the child drifts off to sleep.
Lisa Streich, meanwhile, imagines a more mechanical intervention. Streich is known for attaching electrical motors to instruments to make different parts of them
sound in rhythmical and independent ways. Although motors themselves do not feature in her Minerva (2018), the rhythmicised bowing of the piece, which often works in contradiction to the notated rhythms of its score, goes some way to replicating the effect of a disturbing automaton. The sounds themselves are produced from a range of sources, from col legno to ordinario bowing as well as singing (a feature of several of the pieces on this album). In its entangled and embodied polyphony, Minerva ‘imagines a goddess who, almost like an octopus, helps with or stands for many things at once – a goddess of everything’, says the composer. ‘She reminds me of the human being of the future, a human fully endowed with equal rights.’ Streich notes ironically that, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, such a person ‘should exist in 217 years’; on one level, then, her work is a kind of reverse anamnesis – a projection towards something that has yet to be realised.
McMonagle gave the premiere of Ailie Robertson’s Skydance online from her home in June 2020 as part of Riot Ensemble’s lockdown commissioning scheme. Similarly to Groves’s Single Form (Sarabande), the piece is written almost entirely in harmonics. But in this case, the intended effect is not of impressionistic haze but precise, darting movement: the title refers to the mating rituals of the hen harrier, which Robertson
witnessed while staying on Orkney. Robertson’s use of harmonics not only invests her piece with a suitably airy quality but also sets cello playing itself as analogous to those tumbling, stalling dances, the subtle crisscrossing of bow and string mimicking the bird’s skilful interactions with the air.
Particular ways of playing – or, more precisely, particular ways of thinking about playing as a musical resource – inform the work of many composers today. Liza Lim’s Cello Playing ~ as Meteorology (2021) began in a conversation with its dedicatee and first performer, James Morley. Morley’s instrument is the ‘Ex-Robert Barrett’, made in 2004 by the Australian luthier Rainer Beilharz. Morley has it on loan from the medical educationalist Prof. Mitra Guha, in memory of her late husband. Before it came to Morley, the instrument had lain unplayed for ten years, during which time it developed a particularly ‘closed’ sound. Only by playing it once more – recollecting its past life, as it were – was Morley able to ‘open’ that sound.
This two-way interaction of performer and instrument – a correspondence by which each brings the other to sing – is at the heart of the piece Lim wrote for Morley. Focusing on the principle of vibration, she dispenses with the left hand’s usual role of stopping the strings and instead places a bow in each of her cellist’s hands. Variety of sound (and a remarkable variety of pitch, from the various
overtones that are activated) derives entirely from variations in pressure, speed and contact point of the two bows: the sound is rich and cut through with panting and bright streaks of energy. Lim seems to have composed a kind of anamnesis into her work, in which through a gentle process of interrogation, the piece rediscovers that innate knowledge of itself that it had forgotten. Towards the end, cello and cellist are brought into even more intimate contact as the performer uses her cheek to mute its strings. For a brief moment, the freshly enlivened instrument is brought back to stillness, before its voice is joined by that of the player herself for a final ecstatic crescendo.
© 2025 Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Tim Rutherford-Johnson writes about contemporary music. He is author of Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (University of California Press) and The Music of Liza Lim (Wildbird), and co-author of Twentieth-Century Music in the West (Cambridge University Press).
Cellist Louise McMonagle thrives on playing repertoire that goes beyond the mainstream, playing music by living composers, and creating programmes that include many commissions and premieres. Recent solo performances include Wigmore Hall, KM28 (Berlin), Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival and Open Music (Graz, Austria), as well as broadcasts on BBC radio. In September 2024 Louise featured in the ‘Scotland Unwrapped’ series at Kings Place, London, presenting a programme of solo cello music by living composers from Scotland and premiering new works by Aaron HollowayNahum and Tonia Ko for cello and live electronics in 360° d&b Soundscape.
Collaboration is at the heart of Louise’s practice, which draws huge inspiration from the players and creators with whom she works. A number of composers have written solo pieces for Louise, among which Skydance by Ailie Robertson won the Dorico Award for Solo Work at the 2021 Scottish Awards for New Music. Louise’s video premiere of that work was featured in The Strad magazine. Hannah Kendall’s piece Tuxedo: Hot Summer No Water, commissioned for Louise by Riot Ensemble, received numerous performances across Europe, including at hcmf// in the UK. Round by the Ness, a solo work for Louise by jazz saxophonist/composer Trish Clowes, was featured at the 2022 London Jazz
Festival. Also in 2022, Louise took part in the premiere performances of Laura Bowler’s new chamber opera The Blue Woman, at the Royal Opera House and Snape Maltings.
Louise is a member of Riot Ensemble, who perform regularly around Europe. Described as ‘volcanically creative’ (The New Yorker), a ‘supergroup of top soloists playing new music’ (The Guardian) and ‘always impeccable – entrancing and highly seductive’ (The Times), the group has given over 250 world and UK premieres by composers from more than 30 countries. In 2020 they were the inaugural joint winners of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation’s Ensemble Prize, and in 2024 they were shortlisted in the Ensemble category at the prestigious Royal Philharmonic Society Awards.
Voices for solo piano: Smyth | Wallen | Alberga | Beamish | Yi
Hanni
Liang
DCD34326
A pioneer of new concert formats, using music to communicate and bring people together, Hanni Liang was long sceptical about the traditional role of recording in progressing an artist’s career. It was her discovery of Ethel Smyth – both as a composer and as a person and a woman, fighting without compromise – that sparked the inspiration for Voices. In this album she has created a programme that both champions women’s voices that, without the determination of Smyth and others like her, might otherwise have been silent, and allows her to raise her own voice, reflecting both her European birth and upbringing and her Chinese roots.
‘one of the most unhackneyed, unpredictable, well-constructed, musically diverse and interpretatively gratifying piano releases I’ve encountered’ — Gramophone, November 2024
Beyond Twilight: music for cello & piano by female composers
Alexandra Mackenzie, Ingrid Sawers
DCD34306
Furthering their longstanding interest in unfamiliar repertoire, cellist
Alexandra Mackenzie and pianist Ingrid Sawers have unearthed for this album a treasure trove of short pieces by female composers, some hiding behind bland initials such as ‘A. E. Horrocks’. Dating from the 1880s to the 1950s, these intimate, quietly powerful works include miniatures by the Scottish cellist Marie Dare and two delightful songs by Gwendolen (later Avril) Coleridge-Taylor, here newly transcribed for cello. A total of fourteen works are presented, all but five in premiere recordings.
‘From a shimmering “Shieling Song” to a shaded sea shanty, Mackenzie plays with appropriate panache’
— BBC Music Magazine, Christmas edition 2023
Songs and Lullabies: new works for solo cello
Robert Irvine
DCD34173
Inspired by the plight of disadvantaged and mistreated children around the world, Delphian artist Robert Irvine has commissioned eighteen new pieces for solo cello. As a musician who works at the heart of the English and Scottish scenes, he is able to draw on an impressive roster of friends and colleagues that includes some of the UK’s leading composers. From James MacMillan and Mark-Anthony Turnage to Sally Beamish and Australian-born Jane Stanley, each of them has contributed a short solo piece, drawing out the cello’s most lyrical aspects, while Irvine’s own startling alertness to the finest expressive nuance further enhances this unique recording project.
‘Irvine responds to each piece with the same sincerity, imagination and technical assurance; lovely playing, captured in warm, natural sound’ — Gramophone, November 2016
Beau Soir: Debussy | Satie | Ravel | Poulenc
Maciej Kułakowski cello, Jonathan Ware piano
DCD34277
Acclaimed young cellist Maciej Kułakowski is partnered by pianist Jonathan Ware in an all-French recital programme that mingles the familiar with the reimagined. Elements of ‘Spanish’ style, blues and jazz, and the ironic humour of the Parisian café, encountered in sonatas by Debussy, Poulenc and Ravel (Kułakowski’s cello rendering of the latter’s second violin sonata), are echoed in a brace of shorter works that includes several further transcriptions – of three short pieces by Debussy and of Satie’s Trois Gnossiennes.
‘Cellist and pianist convey the meaning of every crescendo or change of tempo, however minimal, proving that tiny details can have huge effects ... The “wackiness” of Debussy, Ravel and Poulenc has rarely been better demonstrated’
— BBC Music Magazine, December 2022, FIVE STARS
Héloïse Werner: close-ups
Héloïse Werner and friends
DCD34312
Héloïse Werner’s first album, Phrases, was received ecstatically. For her second, she wanted to create a programme with a cohesive narrative arc – a journey, but one that the listener can take in their own time and their own way. For it, she has assembled a group of musicians who share in her concept but also bring to the project their own varied musical personalities to complement Héloïse’s own distinctive voice. These collaborators – Colin Alexander, Julian Azkoul, Max Baillie, Kit Downes, Ruth Gibson and Marianne Schofield – stitch their individual contributions into close-ups in colours just as vibrant as Héloïse’s own.
‘jaw-dropping technical agility combined with an innate, instinctive musicality and boundless, breathless creativity’
— Gramophone, August 2024
HERE WE ARE
The Hermes Experiment DCD34244
With over sixty commissions to its credit after just six years of existence, The Hermes Experiment has already proved itself a force to be reckoned with in the creation and advocacy of new music. Now, ten of those commissions are brought together on the ensemble’s debut album release, showcasing its idiosyncratic line-up of harp, clarinet, soprano and double bass in a compelling survey of styles and individual voices.
‘A most enticing calling card, advertising the skills of individual musicians and the liveliness and variety of Britain’s composing scene ... [Track 1] immediately shows off the ensemble’s frontline asset: the vivacious soprano voice of Héloïse Werner, who pounces on individual notes and words with a tiger’s tenacity and a kitten’s glee. The other musicians are equally crucial in the album’s tapestry of sounds’ — The Times, August 2020
Knight Errant: solo music for trumpet McGuire / Maxwell Davies /Turnage / Boyle / Geddes / Sweeney
Mark O’Keeffe
DCD34049
In medieval times a knight errant would wander the land in search of adventures and noble exploits. Here, Mark O’Keeffe takes a journey around the virtuoso repertoire for modern trumpet – including works he himself has commissioned from Eddie McGuire, John Maxwell Geddes and William Sweeney – and wins his spurs in this stunning debut recital.
‘No other solo instrument has the expressive range of the trumpet as played by the golden-tongued Irish virtuoso O’Keeffe, who seizes the ear with brilliant tone and a warm exuberant jig in McGuire’s Prelude, foghorn greeting and rhythmic zip in Maxwell Davies’s Litany for a Ruined Chapel’ — The Times, May 2007
Luminate: Live Music Now Scotland celebrates 30 years
Various performers; includes John Maxwell Geddes’s A Castle Mills Suite DCD34153
Released in 2015, Delphian’s first collaboration with Live Music Now Scotland marked the organisation’s 30th birthday. In recognition of its achievements in its first three decades, Delphian has taken a snapshot of LMN’s activity, itself a miniature picture of the wider cultural endeavours taking place in Scotland. Some of Scotland’s stellar young artists have recorded recent commissions by some of the country’s brightest composing voices: William Sweeney, Eddie McGuire, Alasdair Nicolson and John Maxwell Geddes, as well as a work composed and performed by Wildings Trio.
‘The sheer quality of the work produced in the name of LMNS rings through this CD’ — Glasgow Herald, April 2015
