A composer whose remarkable works are very much his own

The Herald Scotland

04-05-2025

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.
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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.