Red Note Ensemble
MOMENTS IN TIME John McLeod
MOMENTS IN TIME
1
John McLeod (b. 1934) Red Note Ensemble Jacqueline Shave violin Robert Irvine cello Simon Smith piano Yann Ghiro clarinet Tom Hunter percussion
The Song of Icarus
[9:22]
for violin and piano 2
The Song of Dionysius [11:58]
for percussion and piano
A Moment in Time for violin, clarinet, cello and piano 4
1 – Metamorphosis 2 – Threnody
5
The Song of Phryne
3
with
[8:57] [3:51] [11:16]
for clarinet and piano with pre-recorded tape
Mairi Pirie voice on tape
6
The Song of Leda
[13:46]
for cello and piano
Total playing time
Recorded on 10-12 December 2014 in St Mary’s Parish Church, Whitekirk, East Lothian Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter 24-bit digital editing: Paul Baxter & Simon Smith 24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter
Cover image: Carolyn Hubbard-Ford, Ascending (2004, oil on canvas) / Private collection / Bridgeman Images Session photography © Delphian Records Design: John Christ Booklet editor: Henry Howard Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.co.uk
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[59:14]
Griffin Music, Hill House, 9 Redford Crescent, Edinburgh EH13 0BS
Notes on the music John McLeod celebrated his eightieth birthday in 2014 with a bundle of new works and a performance at the BBC Proms in London, of The Sun Dances, a study of dawn on Benmore, one of the most admired of his mature orchestral scores. Like The Gokstad Ship, commissioned by the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland for a Nordic tour, and the striking Shostakovich Connection, written earlier in tribute to the Russian composer’s Symphony No. 5, it displays McLeod’s qualities as an important Scottish orchestral colourist. But it is not only McLeod’s orchestral music which possesses this flair. It is present, too, in his substantial output of chamber music, which has been increasing steadily, and with ever-new inventiveness, in his old age. In this respect he is proving himself something of a modern Janáček, whose finest works came at the end of his long career, though that is not to say that McLeod’s earlier music lacks distinctive ideas. On this disc we have a selection of his output, dating from 1974 to the present. Four of the pieces form an arresting integer, linked by their theme of classical mythology, one of the composer’s enthusiasms. But though each is called a ‘song’, they are not written for human voice. The earliest, entitled The Song of Phryne, was composed for Keith Pearson, a former principal clarinettist of the Scottish National
Orchestra. The next to be written, The Song of Icarus, dating from two years later, was first played by Sam Bor, leader of the SNO, with Roderick Brydon, a former music director of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, as pianist. Then, after a gap of thirteen years, came The Song of Dionysius, inspired by and written for the percussionist Evelyn Glennie and performed by her at the BBC Proms. Lastly there was The Song of Leda, telling how Zeus, king of the gods, transformed himself into a seductive swan. Written for cello and piano in 2010, it may or may not be a tribute to Saint-Saëns, whose swan portrait in Carnival of the Animals is played by a solo cello. Since, in his written introduction to this piece, McLeod speaks of the song series as ‘ongoing’, it would be good to think that there are more to come. Meanwhile, in their absence, a further – and quite appropriate – piece of chamber music has been included in this recording. Entitled A Moment in Time, it was composed in 2002 as a tribute to Messiaen’s great Quartet for the End of Time and employs the same four instruments as Messiaen. Since all of them are also used in McLeod’s Songs, A Moment in Time fits happily (in all but name) into this series of pieces, and thus makes a suitable supplement to the cycle. Though schooled in the north of Scotland, John McLeod received his musical training
at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he studied the clarinet under three distinguished players, the great Reginald Kell, Jack Brymer, and Gervase de Peyer, with Lennox Berkeley as his teacher of composition. Subsequently he came under the influence of the Polish composer Witold Lutosławski, whom he knew and admired. McLeod himself himself taught music at two famous Scottish boarding schools, Glenalmond and Merchiston Castle, and conducted the Perth Symphony Orchestra in the Scottish premiere of Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky before becoming a full-time composer in Edinburgh. Though it was apt that the first of his instrumental Songs would have his own instrument, the clarinet, as its voice, with the addition of piano and pre-recorded tape, the set of pieces as a whole remains remarkable for the versatility of its instrumental colouring. Phryne, the subject of the first of what McLeod has described as his four ‘dramatic scenes’, was a beautiful Greek courtesan, celebrated in painting and sculpture, who was eventually brought to trial and threatened with death. In front of the judges, she exposed the beauty of her breasts and was immediately forgiven. She has been portrayed more than once in music, not least by Gounod in his Faust ballet music. In McLeod’s piece, the clarinet initially mounts from its depths to its heights, joined by the piano and then the pre-recorded tape.
The study that emerges, in which McLeod quotes the siren’s call from Bartók’s lascivious ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, is eloquent and grows increasingly agitated, with the players at one point directed to play their parts ‘as if performing alone’, an instruction which, after wistful passages for clarinet and tape, is employed a second time. Thereafter the music grows faster and more explosive before dying gradually and expressively away. In The Song of Icarus, written two years later, a violin replaces the clarinet for the depiction of Daedalus and his son flying with hand-made wings above the Aegean Sea. Icarus, soaring too close to the sun, is doomed when the wax melts on his wings and he drowns in the water below. The music, beginning with decisive piano chords, grows increasingly brilliant and airborne, with a striking passage of violin glissandi, until Icarus’s wings begin to waver and, in a final ‘adagio lamentoso’ – evoking a classical lament – the mood turns tragic. In his written introduction to the piece, McLeod quotes a translation of Philippe Desportes’s sixteenth-century poem, beginning Here sank proud Icarus, boldest youth of all, Who, scorning death, essayed to cleave the sky, Here fell his plumeless body from on high, Leaving the bravest envious of his fall.
Notes on the music The Song of Dionysius brings on the percussion: ten types of instrument in all, including the piano. In this song the story takes a somewhat surrealist twist in its tracking of the behaviour of the obsessively suspicious Dionysius, who built an abode with a huge acoustical ear – known as the Ear of Dionysius – measuring 80 by 250 feet in its cavernous cellar, through which he could eavesdrop on what was being said by the people he had imprisoned above. The ingenuity with which McLeod – and, it should be added, a percussionist of Evelyn Glennie’s skills – depicts the tale, and the eventual murder, of the ear’s builder, explores all the possible sonorities of which the chosen instruments are capable. Suffice it to say that a second player is needed for the piano part, and that the work begins with the two players swapping roles, with the percussionist seated at the piano and the pianist in command of the percussion. Gradually they cross paths, but repeat the process at the end of the score. This is a piece, perhaps, some of whose intricacies have to be seen to be believed. The Song of Leda was commissioned by the vanguard (and now defunct) Edinburgh Contemporary Arts Trust in 2010 for the cellist Robin Michael. In order to seduce Leda, future mother of Helen of Troy, Zeus, the randy king of the gods, transformed himself into a swan.
Using W.B. Yeats’ famous poem as inspiration, McLeod’s rhapsody for cello and piano tells the story in its own passionate vein, opening with a vivid cello solo before working through passages marked ‘volante’ (flying) and ‘affrettando’ (hurrying) before reaching one of the aleatory, or random, sections McLeod increasingly employs in his music, whereby the players have to perform their parts as if each is playing alone. Having arrived at this climax, the music subsides hauntingly into its soft ‘adagio mistico’ (slow and mystical) ending. Leda and the Swan A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies? A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? W.B. Yeats
Finally there is A Moment in Time, another sort of instrumental song, inspired on the one hand by the first of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets – beginning with the words ‘Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future’ – and on the other by Messiaen’s luminous Quartet for the End of Time, completed in 1941 while the French composer was a prisoner of war in East Germany.
voices and the music grows unsynchronised. Ultimately, however, things calm down in preparation for the succeeding ‘Threnody’. This concludes with the opening bars of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, thus enabling his work, as McLeod has pointed out, to serve as a prelude to a performance of Messiaen’s haunting masterpiece. © 2015 Conrad Wilson
Written for members of the Hebrides Ensemble, McLeod’s work uses the same four instruments – violin, clarinet, cello, piano – as Messiaen to convey his message about time and war. In McLeod’s case, given that the music dates from 2001–2, it is the effect of the destruction of New York’s twin towers by terrorists on 9/11/2001 with which the work concerns itself. Referring to Eliot’s poem, published in 1943, the composer has said that his score is an exploration of time – real, imagined, fractured, unsynchronised, changing – as he experienced it in the aftermath of 9/11. The work, in two sections entitled ‘Metamorphosis’ and ‘Threnody’, contains moments of considerable violence, particularly in the first section. The music, which is launched increasingly piercingly on the clarinet, grows more and more agitated as the other instruments join in, until it fragments into a series of virtuosic cadenzas begun by the violin before the rest of the ensemble add their
Conrad Wilson was staff music critic of The Scotsman from 1963 until 1991 and today writes for The Herald. Born in Edinburgh, he was the Edinburgh Festival’s programme editor for sixteen years, lectured on opera at Glasgow University, and has written nineteen books, including a major biography of Puccini, the authorised biography of Sir Alexander Gibson, and histories of Scottish Opera and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.
John McLeod
© Wojtek Kutyla
Born and educated in Aberdeen, John McLeod studied composition with Sir Lennox Berkeley and subsequently through close association with Witold Lutosławski, who became his mentor. McLeod also studied conducting with Sir Adrian Boult. He has won important awards for his compositional work, including the prestigious Guinness Prize for British composers. In 1989 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music, and in both 2005 and 2010 was nominated for a BASCA British Composer Award. In 2014 he was presented with the Gold Badge of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (BASCA) for services to British music. McLeod’s brilliantly coloured orchestral and vocal music has been commissioned, performed and recorded in many countries by leading soloists and ensembles. Orchestras such as the Philharmonia, the Hallé, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (who made McLeod their Associate Composer from 1980–82), The National Youth Orchestras of Scotland (NYOS), the Orchestra of the Staatstheater, Saarbrücken, the Nashville Symphony and the Polish Radio and TV Symphony Orchestra of Krakow have all featured his works. McLeod’s music has also
been heard at international festivals including the BBC Proms, the Aldeburgh, Edinburgh, Canterbury and Perth festivals, the Sound Festival in Aberdeen and the St Magnus Festival, Orkney, as well as on BBC Radio 3, Classic FM, BBC TV and Channel 4. His formidable catalogue of compositions covers many musical genres – orchestral (including concertos for piano, percussion, clarinet and guitar, and three symphonic song cycles), choral works, church music, songs, instrumental and chamber music as well as scores for film and TV. Highlights include The Gokstad Ship (commissioned by NYOS and played by them all over Scandinavia), seven performances of his Percussion Concerto played by Evelyn Glennie in the UK and in the USA, and a revival of the latter work by international soloist Colin Currie in a stunning performance by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Yasuo Ishikawa. Peter Donohoe premiered McLeod’s Piano Concerto at the Perth Festival, Benjamin Luxon was the soloist in The Seasons of Dr Zhivago (an RSNO commission), and Jane Manning sang The Whispered Name with the Polish Radio and TV Symphony Orchestra under the composer’s direction. More recently, his ‘little Chinese opera’ Thrashing the Sea God was performed at London’s Tête à Tête Opera Festival.
Secure in his sustained productivity, McLeod at the age of eighty goes from strength to strength, his output in recent years a torrent of activity ranging from the Guitar Concerto (2010) to the mock expressionism of the song cycle Fearful Tales (2012); from his Fantasy on themes from Britten’s ‘Gloriana’ (2012) for guitar to the verve and virtuosity of Piano Sonata No 5 (2013), with which Murray McLachlan is at present touring the world. Major performances have also increased dramatically and in 2014 his music was heard at the St Magnus and Aldeburgh festivals as well as at the BBC Proms, where he scored a great personal success with the London premiere of The Sun Dances, played by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Donald Runnicles. Amongst his latest commissions is a solo percussion work for Dame Evelyn Glennie in her 50th-birthday year.
Red Note Ensemble Red Note Ensemble is Scotland’s contemporary music ensemble, commissioning and performing new music from Scotland and around the world. The Ensemble was founded in 2008, and draws its members from the deep talent pool of Scottish new music expertise. Red Note’s Spring and Autumn seasons comprise tours, site-specific work and collaborations with other companies within Scotland, around the UK and abroad.
© Wattie Cheung
In 2013 the ensemble made its Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival debut with an acclaimed three-concert series including the UK premiere of James Dillon’s New York Triptych. Red Note also toured venues in Europe with François Sarhan’s multimedia work Lachez Tout, performing in collaboration with the Flemish contemporary music theatre group LOD at the Rotterdam Opera Festival, in Dresden, Bruges, Ghent, Clermont-Ferrand, Orléans and elsewhere. Autumn 2014 saw Red Note collaborating with the Orchestre d’Auvergne for performances in France and Scotland of new works by William Sweeney, Brian Irvine and Laurent Cuniot.
Other recent collaborations include the ensemble’s Reels to Ragas project with tabla player Kuljit Bhamra and piper Fraser Fifield, while highlights for 2015 are set to include a new song cycle by Rory Boyle (with mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill), performances at the Bath and City of London Festivals, and autumn visits to Ireland, Barcelona and Moscow. In 2016 Red Note will collaborate with the Antwerp-based ensemble I Solisti on a European tour of Louis Andriessen’s De Staat. Red Note is Associate Contemporary Ensemble at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow, an Associate Company of the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh and Associate Ensemble of the Sound Festival Aberdeen. Appearances on BBC Radio 3 include the premiere of Stephen Montague’s Three Fables from the Purcell Room in London. The ensemble makes its Delphian debut in 2015 with two portrait discs, of the highly respected Scottish composers John McLeod (DCD34155) and Eddie McGuire (DCD34157). www.rednoteensemble.com
Also available on Delphian Eddie McGuire: Music for flute, guitar and piano Nancy Ruffer, Abigail James, Dominic Saunders
William Sweeney: Tree o’ Licht Robert Irvine & Erkki Lahesmaa cellos, Fali Pavri piano
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Over the past 40 years Eddie McGuire, British Composer Award winner and Creative Scotland Award winner, has developed a compositional style that is as eclectic as it is concentrated. This disc surveys a selection of his solo and chamber works, written for his home instruments – flute, guitar and piano. The writing, whilst embracing tonality, focuses on texture and aspects of colour, drawing on a myriad folk influences.
Both musically impassioned and socially engaged, William Sweeney’s music is at its most eloquent when voiced by that most human of instruments, the cello. The player navigates a stormy electronic landscape in the Borges-inspired The Poet Tells of his Fame, while Schumann lies behind the powerfully argued Sonata for Cello and Piano. The Sonata bears a joint dedication to Delphian artist Robert Irvine and to Erkki Lahesmaa – ‘keepers’, as Sweeney calls them, ‘of the cello’s inner voice’ – and Irvine is joined by his Finnish colleague here in the 2008 duo The Tree o’ Licht, in which Gaelic psalmody is transmuted into deepest instrumental expressivity.
‘This is quite simply beautiful music … Performances are excellent, the overall playing as expressive as the music itself requires; Delphian’s sound is spot-on … the perfect entrée to his sound-world’ — Gramophone, Awards issue 2006, EDITOR’S CHOICE
The Shadow Side: contemporary song from Scotland MacMillan / McGuire / Geddes / McLeod / Bingham / Forbes / Mealor Irene Drummond soprano, Iain Burnside piano DCD34099
For many years Irene Drummond has been the leading exponent of contemporary song in Scotland. With her partner Iain Burnside – peerless in this music – she offers here a fascinating snapshot of her repertoire. From the rarefied sparseness of James MacMillan to the sustained luminosity of Paul Mealor and the emotionally charged dramatic outbursts of John McLeod, The Shadow Side explores a world of half-lights and brittle intensity. ‘… soprano Irene Drummond at her most breathtakingly stellar and seductive’ — The Herald, June 2011
‘luminous … an intriguing combination of exploration and introspection’ — The Independent, August 2013 Luminate: Live Music Now Scotland celebrates 30 years McGuire / Sweeney / Nicolson / Geddes Spencer-Strachan Duo, Emma Versteeg soprano, Maryam Sherhan piano, Astrid String Quartet, Wildings, Laura Margaret Smith mezzo-soprano, Geoffrey Tanti piano DCD34153
This year, Live Music Now Scotland – an organisation that promotes the work of stellar young artists – celebrates its 30th birthday. A blazing trail of commissions has followed in the charity’s wake. In recognition of these three decades’ achievements, 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 shining young artists have recorded recent commissions by some of the country’s brightest composing voices. A broad canvas of activity, flecked with intriguing and beautiful details. New in April 2015
Also available on Delphian
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James MacMillan: Visions of a November Spring Edinburgh Quartet
Thomas Wilson: A Chamber Portrait Edinburgh Quartet, Simon Smith piano, Allan Neave guitar
DCD34088
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Spanning James MacMillan’s career from 1982 to 2011, these marvellously idiomatic, intensely virtuosic performances by the Edinburgh Quartet – in a new line-up under the dynamic leadership of Tristan Gurney – provide three snapshots of the composer’s evolving style: an intriguing tissue of Wagnerian referentiality; a burst of youthful energy with touches of the visionary; and, in String Quartet No 3, the sovereign integration of folk and discursive elements. A moving short tribute, For Sonny, shows another side to this ceaselessly inventive composer’s output.
An influential figure both personally and musically, Thomas Wilson (1927–2001) was the leading light in a group of composers whose vision and technical assurance brought an international modernism into twentieth-century Scottish music. In the chamber works collected here, moments of extraordinary stillness continually release into fast, propulsive writing whose compelling energies are matched by the individual and collective virtuosity of Simon Smith, Allan Neave and the Edinburgh Quartet.
‘I am astonished by these players, by their complete immersion in MacMillan’s sound-world, their nerve and by their communicative power … The sound, I should add, is fabulously real and present’ — International Record Review, November 2014
‘Delphian are to be warmly congratulated for bringing these tough but elegant, closely argued and well-crafted works to a wider public … Superbly committed performances in vivid recordings’ — Tempo, October 2009
Hafliði Hallgrímsson: Music for solo piano Simon Smith
Robert Crawford: Music for piano and strings Nicholas Ashton piano, Edinburgh Quartet
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This – the second of two Delphian discs showcasing music by Hafliði Hallgrímsson, one of the leading figures in the recent flowering of Icelandic music – shows his mastery of the epigrammatic miniature. The piano music gathered here spans Hallgrímsson’s career from 1963 to 2008, and the brilliant young pianist Simon Smith is a vital advocate of its varied colours, textures and resonances.
Elder statesman of the Scottish music scene by the release date of this disc shortly after his eightieth birthday, Robert Crawford (1925–2012) lavished intense care upon every one of his comparatively few compositions. The Edinburgh Quartet and pianist Nicholas Ashton are intimately acquainted with Crawford’s work, and mirror the composer’s attention to detail in a long overdue survey of this lovingly crafted music, spanning sixty years of compositional activity.
‘Smith proves an admirable guide to this often engrossing music, his playing enhanced by the close but never airless sound’ — Gramophone, November 2008
‘an impressive collection … committed and excellent performances’ — Musical Opinion, March/April 2008
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