A pin sharp soprano with elegant strings: Review of Scottish Ensemble
Keith Bruce
After a rural start in Perthshire and Strathpeffer, the Scottish Ensemble's 'Concerts for a Summer's Night' is touring visual arts venues of Scotland's cities with a sonically-colourful soiree that spans the centuries.
Ditching their concert blacks for mostly white clothing, the instrumentalists have as their guest soloist soprano Heloise Werner, a performer who focuses attention with her animated reading of Barbara Strozzi as much as in her own experimental compositions. Hers is not a huge voice, but its pure tone and pin-sharp accuracy sit well with the elegant playing of Jonathan Morton's string group.
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Lithuanian Antanas Rekasius provides the arresting opener, a movement from the composer's tongue-in-cheek Music for Strings setting the exploratory tone of the evening. It finds more familiar form in the music of Stravinsky and Ravel, as well as new experiences like Lisa Illean's clever instrumental settings of Gilles Binchois's Chansons and Tom Coult's response to the Baroque ground bass.
The reverberant acoustic of Kelvingrove added an additional challenge to the music-making, and where it worked – as in the chorale of Julie Pinel's Cantatille, as arranged for Werner by Marianne Schofield – it was an ally to the performance. In some other respects, and prosaically in the audibility of Morton's stage announcements, it was less helpful.
The soprano's own compositions and recordings, which are released on Scotland's Delphian label, provide the programme's most original content, most obviously the improvisation of the wittily-titled Unspecified Intentions. Her Lullaby for a Sister is echoed by Morton's equally lovely arrangement of Pauline Viardot's Lullaby and Errollyn Wallen's melodious Tree provides the climax of the recital.
For the Glasgow concert that was achieved with some last minute re-ordering of the programme, which sacrificed some potentially-interesting juxtapositions to create different ones, and the true purpose of which did not become apparent until the arrival of the unlisted encore.
That is of the Danish String Quartet's version of the English folk tune As I Walked Out, which ends with the players doing exactly that, whistling the refrain as they stride off stage through the audience.
The final performance of the tour is at V&A Dundee on Monday at 8pm.
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