60 SECOND INTERVIEW

SCO VIBE team. William Stafford and pianist Hiroaki Takenouchi gave a fabulous Lunchtime Chamber Concert featuring the music of James MacMillan, and as part of our Early Evening Concert series SCO players, students and staff performed an innovative programme of music by Jeremy Thurlow. This year’s StAFCO Spring Concert showcased Maximiliano Martín’s spellbouding performance of Weber’s Concertino for Clarinet with the orchestra.

In other news, Scrapers and Tooters visited Dundee on 6 & 7 May, and we celebrate our two year residency at Rattray Primary School, Perthshire with a final performance at Horsecross Youth Arts Festival on 14 June. We are also delighted to be working in partnership with Live Borders to produce Sounding Out the Past, a new music commission for the Borders Heritage Festival 2017. Composer Suzanne Parry, a Borders writer and musicians from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra will work with four classes of local primary school children to explore the history and stories connected to three historic Borders houses – Abbotsford, Bowhill, and Aikwood Tower. The resulting pieces for a small SCO ensemble will be performed at a series of school concerts and at an evening performance during the Borders Heritage Festival in September 2017

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SECOND INTERVIEW RICHARD EGARR

Tell us about Schumann’s Requiem? We all know Schumann for his great piano music and great song cycles and lieder in general. Even the symphonies are loved by musicians, but audiences grow a bit foxed by them. I think musicians tend to love Schumann and audiences go “eh what”?! So hearing the Schumann Requiem will hopefully create a wonderful eureka moment for audiences. He wrote it very late in life, in 1852, and Schumann himself said, “One only writes a Requiem for one’s self”. This is kind of interesting as he was already ill, so I think he saw the writing on the wall and the result was this extraordinary, very thoughtful, quite introverted Requiem.

What does it sound like? If you are used to Requiems such as Verdi’s or Mozart’s, there is lots of bluster and noise around their Dies Ires. Schumann’s Requiem is not like these. It is very Schumann-esque, a very introverted piece, a bit like his Violin Concerto. So I’m hoping that our audiences will discover a whole new side of Schumann through this piece.

What will be different about this concert, having previously worked with the SCO Chorus? I’m a choir man. I was brought up as a choir boy so I love working with choirs. I think Greg has done fantastic things with the SCO Chorus over the last three or four years since I’ve known him. I am looking forward to working on this piece with him because it is a piece they have never sung before and the orchestra have probably never played it before, so actually it’s rather exciting to play a piece by a major composer for the first time. I think this will also bring a sense of expectation and excitement to the whole project ––––––Schumann’s Requiem is on the 26 & 27 October in Edinburgh and Glasgow

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