Tectonics 2025 review — I've never heard a symphony like this
This is more like it. My last visit to Tectonics, Glasgow's annual festival of new and experimental music, left me pretty deflated at the quality of what was on offer, but the 2025 festival marked an encouraging return to form, with some music that was both genre-busting and often genuinely exciting.
The highlight of the weekend was Saturday's performance of the symphony by Oyvind Torvund, which was effectively a multi-site piece of music, simultaneously using several different spaces inside Glasgow's City Halls around which the audience was invited to promenade as though they were visiting pictures in a gallery. Strings moved slowly through warm harmonies while the winds chirped like angry birds next door, the brass brayed balefully in the main hall and psychedelic
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Times
05-05-2025
- Times
Tectonics 2025 review — I've never heard a symphony like this
This is more like it. My last visit to Tectonics, Glasgow's annual festival of new and experimental music, left me pretty deflated at the quality of what was on offer, but the 2025 festival marked an encouraging return to form, with some music that was both genre-busting and often genuinely exciting. The highlight of the weekend was Saturday's performance of the symphony by Oyvind Torvund, which was effectively a multi-site piece of music, simultaneously using several different spaces inside Glasgow's City Halls around which the audience was invited to promenade as though they were visiting pictures in a gallery. Strings moved slowly through warm harmonies while the winds chirped like angry birds next door, the brass brayed balefully in the main hall and psychedelic
Scotsman
05-05-2025
- Scotsman
Tectonics: BBC SSO 1, Glasgow review: 'food for thought'
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Tectonics: BBC SSO, City Halls, Glasgow ★★★★ This year's Tectonics Festival, running over Saturday and Sunday, took as its key theme 'the profound act of listening'. You could argue that goes without saying for any music festival, but when it comes to Tectonics, and the explorative cutting-edge repertoire favoured by curator Ilan Volkov, the challenge can be as provocative as it is revealing. Ilan Volkov PIC: Alan Peebles Saturday's evening performances by the BBC SSO certainly gave us food for thought, not least in Norwegian composer Øyvind Torvund's Symphony. Ignore the connotations of the title, as in music you passively sit and digest from a performance on stage. In this 40-minute work the 'stage' was everywhere: woodwind in the main foyer, strings in the adjoining bar, brass inside the auditorium, soloists (saxophone, synth/guitar and percussion) located in sundry other spots, all interacting via television screens to Volkov's baton. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad We, as receptors, mapped our own way through the piece, free to promenade and thus individually determine the relative hierarchy of the textures. Hanging around the strings was to pleasurably ingest their permeating radiance, a cohesive Vaughan Williams-like density. Amble towards the wind and their cackling, dissonant belligerence grew increasingly antagonistic. Within the relative vastness of the auditorium, the brass generated waves of climactic clichés mostly in the combined spirit of Bruckner and Mahler. The magic lay in being able to create our own relationship with the score.
The Herald Scotland
04-05-2025
- The Herald Scotland
A composer whose remarkable works are very much his own
City Halls, Glasgow Keith Bruce four stars AYRSHIRE composer Jay Capperauld may be at the start of his career, but he is already as old as Mozart was when he died and rather older than Schubert, which put an interesting perspective on a concert which featured a world premiere alongside two youthful works from earlier times. Capperauld is currently producing a remarkable sequence of works for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra as its Associate Composer, and Carmina Gadelica, a five-movement suite commissioned by the SCO with the support of the Vaughan Williams Foundation, was another demonstration of his range. Written for a wind dectet – pairs of clarinets, bassoons, horns, oboes and flutes (one crucially doubling on piccolo) – it achieves a wide palette of sonic colour over its 20 minutes, the players adding some foot-stomping to the mix at the start and sounding uncannily like the pipes playing a reel at the end. Read More Things to do in Scotland this month, from gigs to book festivals The new guide to Glasgow's musical heroes and trailblazers Drama and excitement as guest conductor takes up the baton at BBC SSO There are some obvious influences to Capperauld's approach – mentor Sir James MacMillan, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and Sally Beamish among them – but the result is very much his own. The vernacular of unaccompanied Gaelic Psalm singing and the work rhythms of the Waulking Songs of the Western Isles have inspired others, but Capperauld finds a kinship with New York minimalism in the former and builds a fascinating complexity on the framework of the latter. In the lament of the fourth movement and dance of the finale he has also written some of his most approachable music and this piece is surely likely to find other eager champions. Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante, a double concerto for violin and viola, must have challenged his Salzburg audience in 1779 because much of it – and especially the moving central slow movement – sounds of a century later. SCO leader Stephanie Gonley and principal viola Max Mandel were the soloists and co-directors for this performance, which brought out the operatic flavour of the work. If Mozart did not actually repurpose the music of the closing Presto in The Marriage of Figaro we are unmistakably listening to a rehearsal for that score. Schubert's Symphony No. 4 (not lumbered with its unfortunate 'Tragic' nickname in this programme) is often seen as a step back from its predecessor, too reliant on earlier models, but the SCO made it unfold with increasing fascination, the intensity of the low strings and bassoon in the Andante followed by sparky syncopated Scherzo and a finale that had a clarity in its impact larger orchestras struggle to match. Gonley's direction here was very light-touch, prompting an interesting question about what any conductor could have brought to the performance.
