Les Illuminations – Season 22/23 – Programme note

LES ILLUMINATIONS

15-17 Mar 2023

Season 2022/23

LES ILLUMINATIONS

This performance will be recorded for the BBC ‘Radio 3 in Concert’ series, due for broadcast on 21 March 2023.

Wednesday 15 March, 7.30pm Younger Hall, St Andrews

Thursday 16 March, 7.30pm The Queen's Hall, Edinburgh

Friday 17 March, 7.30pm City Halls, Glasgow

Muhly Three Songs for Tenor and Violin

Haydn Symphony No 104 in D ‘London’

Interval of 20 minutes

Muhly Violin Concerto ‘Shrink’ (Scottish Premiere)

Co-commissioned by Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, Australian Chamber Orchestra, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, St Paul Chamber Orchestra and Scottish Chamber Orchestra

Britten Les Illuminations

Pekka Kuusisto Violin / Director

Allan Clayton Tenor

Pekka Kuusisto

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Allan Clayton

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WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR

Muhly (b. 1981)

Three Songs for Tenor and Violin (2012)

Part I – Always for the First Time

Part II

Part III – I love

Haydn (1732-1809)

Symphony No 104 in D ‘London’ (1795)

Adagio – Allegro

Andante

Menuetto and Trio: Allegro

Finale: Spiritoso

Muhly (b. 1981)

Violin Concerto ‘Shrink’ (2019 ) Scottish Premiere

Co-commissioned by Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, Australian Chamber Orchestra, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, St Paul Chamber Orchestra and Scottish Chamber Orchestra

Ninths

Sixths

Turns

Britten (1913–1976)

Les Illuminations, Op 18 (1940)

Fanfare

Villes

Phrase – Antique

Royauté

Marine

Interlude

Being Beauteous

Parade

Départ

There’s a subtle thread of surrealism running quietly through tonight’s wideranging programme, which brings together Haydn in celebratory mood, Britten’s vocal expertise, and two pieces by one of America’s brightest younger composers.

We begin intimately, with the Three Songs for Tenor and Violin written by 2012 by New York-based Nico Muhly. He worked as Philip Glass’s editor and assistant for several years, and has clearly learnt much from minimalism. But his genre-straddling music takes in pop (he’s worked with Björk and Sufjan Stevens, among many others) alongside opera (with premieres at ENO and the Met) and everything in between – as we’ll hear in a larger piece later in tonight’s concert. Muhly writes about his Three Songs:

"Three Songs for Tenor and Violin should technically be called Three Songs for Tenor, Violin, and Drones, as there is a two-note drone that sounds throughout the piece’s 15-minute duration. In the first part of the songs, the tenor and the violin exchange lyrical and declamatory statements. The second part is a song without words: a sort of dance for solo violin. The third part has the violin intoning a pair of notes while the tenor sings, in essence, a list. The work was commissioned by violinist Tatiana Berman on French surrealist poems of her choosing, and was premiered at the Constella Festival in Cincinnati in 2012."

The slightly warped perspectives on reality, not to mention the overt sensuality, of the poems by André Breton and Jacques-Bernard Brunius that Muhly sets

look ahead to the far more otherworldly texts that Britten employs later in tonight’s programme. But we’ll come to that. For now, we leap back in time more than two centuries, to the 63-year-old Joseph Haydn about to embark on his second visit to England.

By the time he wrote his ‘London’ Symphony, No 104, in 1794-5, Haydn had spent almost 30 years in the employment of the fabulously wealthy Esterházy family, much of that time in the lavish but rather isolated Eszterháza Palace, in what’s now north-west Hungary, in Haydn’s time firmly at the heart of the Habsburg Empire. During those decades, he’d used the court’s resident musicians to the fullest, virtually inventing the modern symphony and string quartet as musical forms, and developing his clean, clear, elegant and mischievously

witty musical style across operas, chamber music and plenty more.

But equally, he felt he needed to stretch his wings. In 1790, at the age of 58, he found his chance. The incoming Prince Anton looked to trim back his artistic outgoings, still guaranteeing an ongoing salary for Haydn, but no longer requiring the musician’s permanent presence at court. The composer’s music was already wildly popular among London audiences, and German-born, Londonbased impresario Johann Peter Salomon snapped him up for two visits to England, the first in 1791-2, and the second in 1794-5. Both went down a storm, so much so that Haydn reportedly even considered settling permanently in the English capital (and was explicitly invited to do so by King George III, no less).

He worked as Philip Glass’s editor and assistant for several years, and has clearly learnt much from minimalism.

Nico Muhly

He hobnobbed with royalty and the aristocracy, was fêted at high-society occasions, and even received an honorary doctorate in Oxford (which provided his ‘Oxford’ Symphony, No. 92, with its nickname). More importantly, with the six symphonies he composed for his first visit, he got to know just what his London listeners liked. When he returned two years later, he could give it to them all over again with six more ‘London’ symphonies – and plenty more besides. In that respect, Haydn’s second batch of ‘London’ symphonies – Nos 99 to 104 – represents a rare meeting of composer’s and audience’s minds: each knows the other intimately, and each is out to enjoy that relationship to the fullest.

No 104, however, is the only one of Haydn’s twelve ‘London’ symphonies to have

retained its ‘London’ nickname. It’s also the very final Symphony that Haydn would ever write. Was he aware of that fact when creating it? It’s unlikely – more probably, he simply didn’t compose any more after completing it (he lived for another 14 years). Nonetheless, there’s a definite feeling of celebration and festivity to the Symphony’s music – it seems unavoidably like a grand bowing-out statement, one that’s almost certainly intended to please his London audiences, and would also provide a fitting farewell to the orchestral form that Haydn had done so much to establish.

No 104 received its official premiere on 13 April 1795, and then went on to form the centrepiece of Haydn’s farewell concert to London three weeks later. Of that later event, Haydn – ever the canny

Itseemsunavoidably likeagrandbowing-out statement, one that’s almostcertainlyintended topleasehisLondon audiences, and would also provideafittingfarewell to the orchestral form thatHaydnhaddoneso much to establish.

Franz Joseph Haydn

businessman – wrote in his diary: ‘The hall was filled with a picked audience. The whole company was delighted and so was I. I took in this evening 4000 gulden. One can make as much as this only in England.’

The first movement’s bold, slow introduction sets the Symphony’s monumental tone right from its opening seconds, and Haydn’s quieter passages here seem to gaze across wide open spaces, or even far out into space, away from the splendour and pageantry of its louder moments. It’s clearly music designed to impress, invigorate and intrigue – as is the brighter, faster music that it leads into, which begins unassumingly before bursting into brilliant life.

Haydn charts an intriguing journey, too, in his slow movement, whose bright, lilting opening slowly progresses into something far darker and angrier. His third movement is an assertive, outspoken minuet, with some unexpected empty spaces that might have had dancers tripping over themselves. He closes, however, with charm and joy, in a finale that brings together a collection of Slavonic folk tunes that he would no doubt have heard during his years working on the Esterházy estates, filled with irrepressible energy.

We return to Nico Muhly after the interval, and to his 2019 violin concerto Shrink. Muhly writes about the work:

"Shrink (Concerto for Violin and Strings) is in three movements. Each movement obsesses over certain intervals: the first, ninths; the second, sevenths; and the final, a tiny set of anxious intervals between unisons and fourths. The overall

structure suggests an intensifying focus on these small building-blocks, a process which is reflected in the speed of each movement. The first proceeds quickly, becomes aggressive, and dissolves into small fragments. The second movement is slow and taut, with a looped sequence of chords whose character becomes increasingly thick and heavy. The last movement is fast, nervous, and scattered, with occasional giant unisons coming in and out of focus. Shrink is dedicated to Pekka Kuusisto."

Tonight’s concert takes its title from the evening’s concluding piece, and the texts that the 25-year-old Benjamin Britten selected for Les Illuminations undoubtedly reflect the surreal strangeness of Breton and Brunius heard in tonight’s opening piece. They’re by the wild child of French poetry, Arthur Rimbaud, who was only about 19 when he wrote them – at least according to fellow Gallic poet Paul Verlaine. Verlaine would probably know better than most: he and Rimbaud had been lovers in a torrid, sometimes violent affair that led the older man to virtually abandon his wife and unborn child, heading across the Channel with Rimbaud to live virtually as beggars on the streets of London. Things ended badly when Verlaine shot the younger man twice in a drunken rage, in Brussels in 1873, merely wounding Rimbaud on the wrist, but nonetheless receiving two years in gaol as a result. It was shortly after this crime of passion that Rimbaud embarked on his fulsome collection of free-form poems and poetic prose Les Illuminations (according to Verlaine, at least), which was published without his knowledge in 1886. He’d die five years later, at the age of just 37.

Britten himself summed up Rimbaud’s brief but bright-shining life in his own programme note for the 1940 premiere of Les Illuminations:

"Rimbaud’s short life as a poet was an erratic and turbulent one, generally near starvation and often homeless, sometimes with his friend Verlaine, sometimes alone, and much of it was set in the most sordid surroundings, in Paris, Brussels, and London; but throughout it, the boy’s inspiration remained radiant and intense. The word ‘Illuminations’ suggests both the vision of a mystic and a brightly coloured picture …. The composer has taken seven of these poems, six in prose and one in verse, and has made them into a cycle."

Britten had already begun to display his uncanny gift for vocal writing by 1940, in works including Our Hunting Fathers and On This Island (both, incidentally, premiered by Swiss soprano Sophie Wyss, who also gave the first performance of Les Illuminations). It was Britten’s friend WH Auden who suggested that the composer might like to consider applying his musical skills to some of the wilder, freer verse of Rimbaud, and Britten set to work at his home in Suffolk in March 1939, completing Les Illuminations in Amityville, New York, on 25 October 1939, where he’d relocated with Peter Pears in response to the looming threat of war in Europe. The piece went down well at its London premiere upon their return, though critics carped somewhat at Britten’s supposedly ‘unpatriotic’ setting of French rather than English verse.

a similarly vivid, passionate musical response from Britten, one that deploys its string orchestra with immense imagination, calling for a number of unusual playing effects, and even mimicking other instruments (listen out for trumpets in the opening ‘Fanfare’). Britten originally conceived Les Illuminations for a soprano voice, but clearly viewed a tenor singer as an entirely legitimate alternative: he himself conducted his partner Peter Pears in the piece less than two years after its premiere.

And, just maybe, it’s a male tenor voice that more authentically captures the transgressive sensuality of much of Les Illuminations’ music and poetry. Those competing, trumpet-style fanfares from violas and violins – in two entirely unrelated keys – kick off the opening ‘Fanfare’, in which the singer first declaims the enigmatic Rimbaud utterance that will return twice more in the work. ‘J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage’ (‘Only I have the key to this savage parade’) seems to convey the notion that nobody other than an artist can truly comprehend and convey the ‘savage parade’ of human existence, and its sentiments capture the succession of vivid, sometimes unsettling images to come throughout the work’s remaining eight brief movements.

Nonetheless, Rimbaud’s unconventional, highly charged writing summoned

‘Villes’ bustles along in what Britten called ‘a very good impression of chaotic modern city life’ in a letter to Sophie Wyss, with a chattering vocal line set against urgent string accompaniments. The somewhat icy interlude ‘Phrase’ leads directly into the sensual dance of ‘Antique’, with violas and cellos strummed as if they were guitars. It’s an unapologetic description

of male beauty, and Britten dedicated this particular movement to ‘K.H.W.S.’, or Wolfgang (‘Wullf’) Scherchen, son of conductor Hermann Scherchen, with whom he’d been rather smitten. ‘Antique’ establishes a mood of joy and contentment for the two songs that follow: the striding, confident ‘Royauté’, and the bracing, sparkling seascape of ‘Marine’.

Britten returns to his recurring Rimbaud line ‘J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage’ in the ‘Interlude’, but here it’s a bit less sure of itself, and set against keening descending figures in the strings. It leads into what’s arguably the work’s climactic song, the passionate ‘Being Beauteous’. ‘Being’ is here a noun rather than a verb, and Britten responds to Rimbaud’s overtly erotic, sometimes violent description with music that barely conceals its passion

Nonetheless, Rimbaud’s unconventional, highly charged writing summoned a similarly vivid, passionate musical response from Britten

under a veil of propriety: the song’s final gestures are surely as much a cry of pain as an expression of joy. Britten dedicated this deeply felt setting to ‘P.N.L.P.’, or his soon-to-be life partner Peter Neville Luard Pears.

The urgent, dark penultimate movement, ‘Parade’, reuses material from an adolescent string quartet, Alla quarteto serioso: Go play, boy, play, in which Britten illustrated several teenage loves, building to a decadent dance-cum-march that provides an ideally unrestrained setting for the final declamation of ‘J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage’. It only needs the ravishing ‘Départ’ to lead Les Illuminations to its hushed, valedictory conclusion.

© David Kettle

Benjamin Britten

Muhly (b. 1981)

Three Songs for Tenor and Violin 2012)

Pat I – Always for the First Time

Always for the first time

Hardly do I know you by sight

You return at some hour of the night to a house at an angle to my window

A wholly imaginary house

It is there that from one second to the next In the inviolate darkness

I anticipate once more the fascinating rift occurring The one and only rift

In the façade and in my heart

The closer I come to you

In reality

The more the key sings at the door of the unknown room

Where you appear alone before me

At first you coalesce entirely with the brightness

The elusive angle of a curtain

It's a field of jasmine I gazed upon at dawn on a road in the vicinity of Grasse

With the diagonal slant of its girls picking

Behind them the dark falling wing of the plants stripped bare

Before them a T-square of dazzling light

The curtain invisibly raised

In a frenzy all the flowers swarm back in It is you at grips with that too long hour never dim enough until sleep

You as though you could be

The same except that I shall perhaps never meet you

You pretend not to know I am watching you

Marvelously I am no longer sure you know You idleness brings tears to my eyes

A swarm of interpretations surrounds each of your gestures

It's a honeydew hunt

There are rocking chairs on a deck there are branches that may well scratch you in the forest

There are in a shop window in the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette

Two lovely crossed legs caught in long stockings

Flaring out in the center of a great white clover

There is a silken ladder rolled out over the ivy There is

By my leaning over the precipice Of your presence and your absence in hopeless fusion

My finding the secret Of loving you

Always for the first time

Breton

Ann Caws

Part III – I love

I love sliding I love upsetting everything

I love coming in I love sighing

I love taming the furtive manes of hair

I love hot I love tenuous

I love supple I love infernal

I love sugared but elastic the curtain of springs turning to glass

I love pearl I love skin

I love tempest I love pupil

I love benevolent seal long-distance swimmer

I love oval I love struggling

I love shining I love breaking

I love the smoking spark silk vanilla mouth to mouth

I love blue I love known—knowing

I love lazy I love spherical

I love liquid beating drum sun if it wavers

I love to the left I love in the fire

I love because I love at the edges

I love forever many times Just one

I love freely I love especially

I love separately I love scandalously

I love similarly obscurely uniquely

HOPINGLY

I love I shall love

Jacques-Bernard Brunius (1944) tr. Mary Ann Caws

André

(1934) tr. Mary

Britten (1913-1976)

Les Illuminations, Op 18 (1940)

Fanfare

J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage.

Fanfare

I alone have the key to this savage parade.

Villes

Ce sont des villes ! C’est un peuple pour qui se sont montés ces Alleghanys et ces Libans de rêve! Des chalets de cristal et de bois se meuvent sur des rails et des poulies invisibles. Les vieux cratères ceints de colosses et de palmiers de cuivre rugissent mélodieusement dans les feux… Des cortèges de Mabs en robes rousses, opalines, montent des ravines. Là-haut, les pieds dans la cascade et les ronces, les cerfs tettent Diane. Les Bacchantes des banlieues sanglotent et la lune brûle et hurle. Vénus entre dans les cavernes des forgerons et des ermites. Des groupes de beffrois chantent les idées des peuples. Des châteaux bâtis en os sort la musique inconnue… Le paradis des orages s’effondre… Les sauvages dansent sans cesse la fête de la nuit…

Quels bons bras, quelle belle heure me rendront cette région d’où viennent mes sommeils et mes moindres mouvements ?

Phrase

J’ai tendu des cordes de clocher à clocher; des guirlandes de fenêtre à fenêtre; des chaînes d’or d’étoile à étoile, et je danse.

Towns

These are towns! This is a people for whom these dreamlike Alleghanies and Lebanons arose. Chalets of crystal and wood move on invisible rails and pulleys. The old craters, girdled with colossi and copper palm trees, roar melodiously in the fires…

Processions of Mabs in russet and opaline dresses climb from the ravines. Up there, their feet in the waterfall and the brambles, the stags suckle Diana. Suburban Bacchantes sob and the moon burns and howls. Venus enters the caves of the blacksmiths and the hermits. From groups of bell-towers the ideas of peoples sing out. From castles of bone the unknown music sounds… The paradise of storm collapses… The savages dance ceaselessly the festival of the night… What kind arms, what fine hour will give me back this country from which come my slumbers and my smallest movements?

Sentence

I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance.

Antique

Gracieux fils de Pan ! Autour de ton front couronné de fleurettes et de baies, tes yeux, des boules précieuses, remuent. Tachées de lies brunes, tes joues se creusent. Tes crocs luisent. Ta poitrine ressemble à une cithare, des tintements circulent dans tes bras blonds. Ton coeur bat dans ce ventre où dort le double sexe. Promène-toi, la nuit, en mouvant doucement cette cuisse, cette seconde cuisse et cette jambe de gauche.

Royauté

Un beau matin, chez un peuple fort doux, un homme et une femme superbes criaient sur la place publique : “Mes amis, je veux qu’elle soit reine !” “Je veux être reine !” Elle riait et tremblait. Il parlait aux amis de révélation, d’épreuve terminée. Ils se pâmaient l’un contre l’autre. En effet ils furent rois toute une matinée où les tentures carminées se relevèrent sur les maisons, et toute l’après-midi, où ils s’avancèrent du côté des jardins de palmes.

Marine

Les chars d’argent et de cuivre —

Les proues d’acier et d’argent — Battent l’écume, — Soulèvent les souches des ronces.

Les courants de la lande, Et les ornières immenses du reflux, Filent circulairement vers l’est, Vers les piliers de la forêt, Vers les fûts de la jetée, Dont l’angle est heurté par des tourbillons de lumière.

Antique

Graceful son of Pan! About your brow crowned with small flowers and berries move your eyes, precious spheres. Stained with brown dregs, your cheeks grow gaunt. Your fangs glisten. Your breast is like a cithara, tinglings circulate in your blond arms. Your heart beats in this belly where sleeps the dual sex. Walk, at night, gently moving this thigh, this second thigh, and this left leg.

Royalty

One fine morning, amongst a most gentle people, a magnificent couple were shouting in the square: “My friends, I want her to be queen!” “I want to be queen!” She was laughing and trembling. He spoke to friends of revelation, of trial ended. They were swooning one against the other. As a matter of fact they were royal one whole morning, when the crimson hangings were draped over the houses, and all afternoon, when they progressed towards the palm gardens.

Seascape

The chariots of silver and copper — The prows of steel and silver — Beat the foam — Raise the bramble stumps. The streams of the moorland

And the huge ruts of the ebb-tide

Flow eastward in circles

Towards the shafts of the forest, Towards the columns of the pier

Whose corner is struck by eddies of light. Please

Interlude

J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage.

Interlude

I alone have the key to this savage parade.

Being Beauteous

Devant une neige un Être de Beauté de haute taille. Des sifflements de morts et des cercles de musique sourde font monter, s’élargir et trembler comme un spectre ce corps adoré : des blessures écarlates et noires éclatent dans les chairs superbes. Les couleurs propres de la vie se foncent, dansent, et se dégagent autour de la Vision, sur le chantier. Et les frissons s’élèvent et grondent, et la saveur forcenée de ces effets se chargeant avec les sifflements mortels et les rauques musiques que le monde, loin derrière nous, lance sur notre mère de beauté, — elle recule, elle se dresse. Oh ! nos os sont revêtus d’un nouveau corps amoureux.

Ô la face cendrée, l’écusson de crin, les bras de cristal ! Le canon sur lequel je dois m’abattre à travers la mêlée des arbres et de l’air léger !

Being Beauteous Against a snowfall a Being Beauteous, tall of stature. Whistlings of death and circles of muffled music make this adored body rise, swell and tremble like a spectre; wounds, scarlet and black, break out in the magnificent flesh. The true colors of life deepen, dance and break off around the Vision, on the site. And shivers rise and groan, and the frenzied flavor of these effects, being heightened by the deathly whistlings and the raucous music which the world, far behind us, casts on our mother of beauty, — she retreats, she rears up. Oh! our bones are reclothed by a new, loving body. O the ashen face, the shield of hair, the crystal arms! The cannon on which I must hurl myself through the jumble of trees and buoyant air!

Parade

Des drôles très solides. Plusieurs ont exploité vos mondes. Sans besoins, et peu pressés de mettre en oeuvre leurs brillantes facultés et leur expérience de vos consciences. Quels hommes mûrs ! Des yeux hébétés à la façon de la nuit d’été, rouges et noirs, tricolorés, d’acier piqué d’étoiles d’or; des facies déformés, plombés, blêmis, incendiés; des enrouements folâtres ! La démarche cruelle des oripeaux ! Il y a quelques jeunes…

Ô le plus violent Paradis de la grimace enragée !… Chinois, Hottentots, bohémiens, niais, hyènes, Molochs, vieilles démences, démons sinistres, ils mêlent les tours populaires, maternels, avec les poses et les tendresses bestiales. Ils interpréteraient des pièces nouvelles et des chansons “bonnes filles”. Maîtres jongleurs, ils transforment le lieu et les personnes et usent de la comédie magnétique…

J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage.

Départ

Assez vu. La vision s’est rencontrée à tous les airs.

Assez eu. Rumeurs de villes, le soir, et au soleil, et toujours.

Assez connu. Les arrêts de la vie. Ô

Rumeurs et Visions !

Départ dans l’affections et le bruit neufs !

words by Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891)

Parade

Very secure rogues. Several have exploited your worlds. Without needs, and in no hurry to set their brilliant faculties and their experience of your consciences to work. What mature men! Eyes dulled like a summer night, red and black, tricolored, like steel spangled with gold stars; distorted features, leaden, pallid, burned; their playful croakings! The cruel bearing of tawdry finery! There are some young ones…

Oh the most violent Paradise of the furious grimace!…Chinese, Hottentots, gypsies, simpletons, hyenas, Molochs, old madnesses, sinister demons, they mingle popular, motherly tricks with brutish poses and caresses. They would interpret new plays and “respectable” songs. Master jugglers, they transform the place and the people and make use of magnetic comedy…

I alone have the key to this savage parade.

Leaving

Seen enough. The vision was met with everywhere.

Had enough. Sounds of towns, in the evening, and in sunlight, and always. Known enough. The setbacks of life. O

Sounds and Visions!

Leaving amid new affection and new noise!

English translation by George Hall, Copyright 1983

Violin / Director PEKKA KUUSISTO

Violinist, conductor, and composer Pekka Kuusisto is renowned for his artistic freedom and fresh approach to repertoire. Kuusisto is Artistic Director of the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra and Principal Guest Conductor & Artistic Co-Director: Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra from the 2023/24 season. He is also Artistic Partner with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, a Collaborative Partner of the San Francisco Symphony, and Artistic Best Friend of Die Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen.

In the 2022/23 season Kuusisto debuted with Berliner Philharmoniker and will perform with the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra. He will return to orchestras such as The Cleveland Orchestra, San Francisco, and Cincinnati symphony orchestras, Gürzenich-Orchester Köln, and Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Kuusisto makes his debuts as a conductor with the Philharmonia, Gothenburg, and City of Birmingham symphony orchestras. He is also Sinfonieorchester Basel’s Artist-in-Residence with whom he appears as conductor, soloist, and recitalist.

As a conductor, recent highlights include appearances with Helsinki Philharmonic, Saint Paul Chamber, and European Union Youth orchestras, the Concertgebouworkest, and Die Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, hr-Sinfonieorchester Frankfurt, Orchestre de chambre de Paris and Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

Kuusisto is an enthusiastic advocate of contemporary music and a gifted improviser and regularly engages with people across the artistic spectrum. Uninhibited by conventional genre boundaries and noted for his innovative programming, recent projects have included collaborations with Hauschka and Kosminen, Dutch neurologist Erik Scherder, pioneer of electronic music Brian Crabtree, eminent jazz-trumpeter Arve Henriksen, juggler Jay Gilligan, accordionist Dermot Dunne and folk artist Sam Amidon.

Pekka Kuusisto plays the Antonio Stradivari Golden Period c.1709 ‘Scotta’ violin, generously loaned by a patron through Tarisio.

For full biography please visit sco.org.uk

ALLAN CLAYTON

Allan Clayton is established as one of the most exciting and sought after singers of his generation. He studied at St John’s College, Cambridge and at the Royal Academy of Music in London. An Associate of the Royal Academy of Music and former BBC New Generation Artist from 2007-09, his awards include The Queen’s Commendation for Excellence and a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship. He was awarded the MBE in the Queen's 2021 Birthday honours list.

Recent performances include H.K. Gruber’s Frankenstein at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, In the Market for Love, an updated version of Offenbach’s Mesdames de La Halle, for Glyndebourne’s Garden Opera series, and the title role of Peter Grimes in a new production by Deborah Warner at Teatro Real Madrid and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. His 2022 debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in the title role in the US premiere of Brett Dean’s Hamlet was met with widespread critical acclaim, which he then followed with Peter Grimes, about which the New York Times declared: "A tenor claims his place among the Met Opera's stars".

For full biography please visit sco.org.uk

Biography

SCOTTISH CHAMBER ORCHESTRA

The internationally celebrated Scottish Chamber Orchestra is one of Scotland’s National Performing Companies.

Formed in 1974 and core funded by the Scottish Government, the SCO aims to provide as many opportunities as possible for people to hear great music by touring the length and breadth of Scotland, appearing regularly at major national and international festivals and by touring internationally as proud ambassadors for Scottish cultural excellence.

Making a significant contribution to Scottish life beyond the concert platform, the Orchestra works in schools, universities, colleges, hospitals, care homes, places of work and community centres through its extensive Creative Learning programme. The SCO is also proud to engage with online audiences across the globe via its innovative Digital Season.

An exciting new chapter for the SCO began in September 2019 with the arrival of dynamic young conductor Maxim Emelyanychev as the Orchestra’s Principal Conductor.

The SCO and Emelyanychev released their first album together (Linn Records) in November 2019 to widespread critical acclaim. The repertoire - Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 in C major ‘The Great’ –is the first symphony Emelyanychev performed with the Orchestra in March 2018.

The SCO also has long-standing associations with many eminent guest conductors and directors including Conductor Emeritus Joseph Swensen, François Leleux, Pekka Kuusisto, Nicola Benedetti, Richard Egarr, Andrew Manze and John Storgårds.

The Orchestra enjoys close relationships with many leading composers and has commissioned almost 200 new works, including pieces by the late Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Sir James MacMillan, Sally Beamish, Martin Suckling, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Karin Rehnqvist, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Nico Muhly, Anna Clyne and Associate Composer Jay Capperauld.

For full biography please visit sco.org.uk

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