Red Note Ensemble
MOMENTS IN TIME John McLeod
MOMENTS IN TIME
1
John McLeod (b. 1934) Red Note Ensemble Jacqueline Shave violin Robert Irvine cello Simon Smith piano Yann Ghiro clarinet Tom Hunter percussion
The Song of Icarus
[9:22]
for violin and piano 2
The Song of Dionysius [11:58]
for percussion and piano
A Moment in Time for violin, clarinet, cello and piano 4
1 – Metamorphosis 2 – Threnody
5
The Song of Phryne
3
with
[8:57] [3:51] [11:16]
for clarinet and piano with pre-recorded tape
Mairi Pirie voice on tape
6
The Song of Leda
[13:46]
for cello and piano
Total playing time
Recorded on 10-12 December 2014 in St Mary’s Parish Church, Whitekirk, East Lothian Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter 24-bit digital editing: Paul Baxter & Simon Smith 24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter
Cover image: Carolyn Hubbard-Ford, Ascending (2004, oil on canvas) / Private collection / Bridgeman Images Session photography © Delphian Records Design: John Christ Booklet editor: Henry Howard Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.co.uk
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[59:14]
Griffin Music, Hill House, 9 Redford Crescent, Edinburgh EH13 0BS
Notes on the music John McLeod celebrated his eightieth birthday in 2014 with a bundle of new works and a performance at the BBC Proms in London, of The Sun Dances, a study of dawn on Benmore, one of the most admired of his mature orchestral scores. Like The Gokstad Ship, commissioned by the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland for a Nordic tour, and the striking Shostakovich Connection, written earlier in tribute to the Russian composer’s Symphony No. 5, it displays McLeod’s qualities as an important Scottish orchestral colourist. But it is not only McLeod’s orchestral music which possesses this flair. It is present, too, in his substantial output of chamber music, which has been increasing steadily, and with ever-new inventiveness, in his old age. In this respect he is proving himself something of a modern Janáček, whose finest works came at the end of his long career, though that is not to say that McLeod’s earlier music lacks distinctive ideas. On this disc we have a selection of his output, dating from 1974 to the present. Four of the pieces form an arresting integer, linked by their theme of classical mythology, one of the composer’s enthusiasms. But though each is called a ‘song’, they are not written for human voice. The earliest, entitled The Song of Phryne, was composed for Keith Pearson, a former principal clarinettist of the Scottish National
Orchestra. The next to be written, The Song of Icarus, dating from two years later, was first played by Sam Bor, leader of the SNO, with Roderick Brydon, a former music director of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, as pianist. Then, after a gap of thirteen years, came The Song of Dionysius, inspired by and written for the percussionist Evelyn Glennie and performed by her at the BBC Proms. Lastly there was The Song of Leda, telling how Zeus, king of the gods, transformed himself into a seductive swan. Written for cello and piano in 2010, it may or may not be a tribute to Saint-Saëns, whose swan portrait in Carnival of the Animals is played by a solo cello. Since, in his written introduction to this piece, McLeod speaks of the song series as ‘ongoing’, it would be good to think that there are more to come. Meanwhile, in their absence, a further – and quite appropriate – piece of chamber music has been included in this recording. Entitled A Moment in Time, it was composed in 2002 as a tribute to Messiaen’s great Quartet for the End of Time and employs the same four instruments as Messiaen. Since all of them are also used in McLeod’s Songs, A Moment in Time fits happily (in all but name) into this series of pieces, and thus makes a suitable supplement to the cycle. Though schooled in the north of Scotland, John McLeod received his musical training
at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he studied the clarinet under three distinguished players, the great Reginald Kell, Jack Brymer, and Gervase de Peyer, with Lennox Berkeley as his teacher of composition. Subsequently he came under the influence of the Polish composer Witold Lutosławski, whom he knew and admired. McLeod himself himself taught music at two famous Scottish boarding schools, Glenalmond and Merchiston Castle, and conducted the Perth Symphony Orchestra in the Scottish premiere of Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky before becoming a full-time composer in Edinburgh. Though it was apt that the first of his instrumental Songs would have his own instrument, the clarinet, as its voice, with the addition of piano and pre-recorded tape, the set of pieces as a whole remains remarkable for the versatility of its instrumental colouring. Phryne, the subject of the first of what McLeod has described as his four ‘dramatic scenes’, was a beautiful Greek courtesan, celebrated in painting and sculpture, who was eventually brought to trial and threatened with death. In front of the judges, she exposed the beauty of her breasts and was immediately forgiven. She has been portrayed more than once in music, not least by Gounod in his Faust ballet music. In McLeod’s piece, the clarinet initially mounts from its depths to its heights, joined by the piano and then the pre-recorded tape.
The study that emerges, in which McLeod quotes the siren’s call from Bartók’s lascivious ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, is eloquent and grows increasingly agitated, with the players at one point directed to play their parts ‘as if performing alone’, an instruction which, after wistful passages for clarinet and tape, is employed a second time. Thereafter the music grows faster and more explosive before dying gradually and expressively away. In The Song of Icarus, written two years later, a violin replaces the clarinet for the depiction of Daedalus and his son flying with hand-made wings above the Aegean Sea. Icarus, soaring too close to the sun, is doomed when the wax melts on his wings and he drowns in the water below. The music, beginning with decisive piano chords, grows increasingly brilliant and airborne, with a striking passage of violin glissandi, until Icarus’s wings begin to waver and, in a final ‘adagio lamentoso’ – evoking a classical lament – the mood turns tragic. In his written introduction to the piece, McLeod quotes a translation of Philippe Desportes’s sixteenth-century poem, beginning Here sank proud Icarus, boldest youth of all, Who, scorning death, essayed to cleave the sky, Here fell his plumeless body from on high, Leaving the bravest envious of his fall.