Live Music Now Scotland
celebrates 30 years
Spencer-Strachan Duo a
Rachel Spencer violin
Duncan Strachan cello
Emma Versteeg b soprano
Maryam Sherhan b piano
Astrid String Quartet
Elanor Gunn, Katrina Lee violins
Sarah Leonard viola
Julia Wagner cello
Sarah Hayes flutes, keyboards
Fiona MacAskill fiddle
Jennifer Austin piano, keyboards
Laura Margaret Smith e mezzo-soprano
Geoffrey Tanti e piano
Comforting, healing and bringing delight: 30 years of Live Music Now in Scotland
When I caught up with Carol Main in early January, she brushed off with typical humility the news that she had received an MBE for services to music in the 2015 New Year’s Honours List. A whirlwind winter, and it wasn’t over yet: as we spoke she was preparing to fly abroad for Live Music Now projects in Abu Dhabi and then Mumbai. Director of Live Music Now Scotland for thirty years, she is also Live Music Now’s Director of International Development (UK) –establishing new branches in Bulgaria, Chile, Denmark and the Netherlands and developing links with existing ones in Germany and Austria. This means a world platform for LMN’s emerging performers, with exchanges of specially written new music scores as well as musicians. Carol points to the unique nature of LMN Scotland’s commissioning of new music – her insistence on top-of-the-range work, no compromise in the composer’s style, presented by young and emerging professional musicians of excellence to a very diverse range of listeners who otherwise rarely, if ever, have opportunities to experience live music. This wide audience encompasses children, those with special needs and disabilities, people in hospitals and hospices, older people and those with mental health difficulties. Carol avoids the description ‘music therapy’ – a speciality well catered for by others.
has pursued this ideal of transcending barriers to communication. An ever growing audience in care homes, schools, prisons and far-flung locations has been thrilled by the performances of visiting musicians. They, in turn, have had their fledgling careers boosted – coupled with valuable experience of presenting and communicating their music over a four- or five-year period.
Collaborations are key in Carol’s work. For example, those with Kimie Trust and Royal Conservatoire of Scotland have resulted in the Kimie Composition Prize – launched in 2013, with Matt Zurowski as the first recipient. On the present recording, Alasdair Nicolson’s piece and my own were funded by Kimie Trust in terms of commissioning and several performances. Collaborating with festivals has proved fruitful, too. Alasdair’s string quartet was premiered at the St Magnus International Festival in the Orkney Isles and given a second performance at the Paxton Festival in the Scottish borders – typical of the wide geographical spread of LMN events.
Carol’s whirlwind of activity does not rest there. As we part, she looks forward to new collaborations: with LMN Wales on a commission from leading Scottish composer John McLeod, and with Jennifer Martin on a new piece for clarinet and piano.
when I was 13 – and culminated in my largestscale work to date, the three-act ballet Peter Pan for Scottish Ballet and Hong Kong Ballet, which has received over 120 performances since the 1990s. My Creative Scotland Award of 2004 resulted in a one-act ballet combining Chinese and Scots traditional instruments and in Kaleidoscope Fanfare (which went on to win a British Composer Award in the wind ensemble/ brass ensemble category), where dance rhythms feature as the centrepiece. Dance Suite for Two pursues this interest, in a piece designed to trigger the imaginations of listeners to fly off, however momentarily, to places the music might take them. The suite was written specially for the Spencer-Strachan Duo, and they have now performed it internationally, including in Abu Dhabi as part of an extended residency project working with children and young people with special educational needs – part of Live Music Now’s partnership with the Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation.
at the New Lanark mill. The song had been printed in Rhymes for the Nursery in 1806, at the height of New Lanark’s activities.
The next movement is the Irish-influenced ‘Air & Slip Jig’, inspired by the traditional music pioneer Garech Browne. Through his label Claddagh Records, he encouraged the group I play with, The Whistlebinkies, to make its first recording in 1976. The ‘Air’ suggests warm hospitality, such as we experienced at his Luggelaw home in County Wicklow, while the ‘Slip Jig’ paints a more energetic celebration. Both are based on his Irish initials GDB, which are heard in the opening notes of each dance, and the piece was presented to him on his 75th birthday.
When LMN was founded nearly four decades ago, Yehudi Menuhin had the vision of providing music that ‘might comfort, heal and bring delight’. Since the Scottish branch was created in 1984, Carol
My interest in dance goes back to my first piece to be played publicly – a jig for a school play
Each of the four dances arose from personal experiences or memories, often places, that inspired a musical response. I had long admired the idealistic venture that was Robert Owen’s New Lanark. The rushing currents of the upper reaches of the River Clyde that powered its mills are mirrored in the short opening dance, ‘Courante’. About halfway there is a very brief reference to ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’. Why? It is to celebrate one of the first efforts to establish education for infants, which occurred
The third dance, ‘Hebridean Dolphins’, takes the listener out to sea around the western isles of Scotland. This arises from my experience of playing on several cruises there for the National Trust for Scotland. Their wildlife experts are frequently on deck pointing out dolphins leaping alongside, whales spouting further out and a great variety of seabirds. A regular pulse of seven beats impels the music forward.
I spent a lot of time in Saltcoats on Scotland’s west coast when my parents moved there in the 1970s. By chance I discovered in the town’s small museum a traditional tune that another Glasgow composer, Janetta Gould, had donated,
called ‘The Lads o’ Saltcoats’. This suite gave me the opportunity to write a companion piece named after the adjoining town. Hence the finale – ‘Jig: The Lassies o’ Stevenston’.
William Sweeney’s Luminate: From the Islands was the first work to result from a new compositional model for LMNS – Composing with Care – through which the commission was funded by Luminate: Scotland’s Creative Ageing Festival. The work is inspired by older people sharing the stories, poems and music that they remembered from their earlier years. Their reflections had been triggered by hearing and talking to Scottish traditional musicians Jennifer Port (clàrsach and voice) and Gary Innes (accordion), who had performed to them earlier that year as they toured the islands of the Inner Hebrides. The song-cycle with which Sweeney responded was composed for Luminate’s 2013 festival, and performed around care homes and centres throughout Scotland.
The cycle displays two unique qualities of Sweeney’s music. First is his pioneering work in setting texts in the Gaelic language: his opera An Turus (1997) has a libretto in Gaelic by Aonghas MacNeacail, and his Salm an Fhearainn (1987), written for the vocal ensemble Cappella Nova, was the first extended classical composition to set the language. Then there is his mastery of the portrayal of heartfelt emotion – for example in The Tree o’ Licht for two cellos, which features
on his highly praised portrait CD of the same name (Delphian DCD34113).
In total the cycle contains five songs, though Sweeney suggests various options for choosing from among those five. For the present recording three songs have been selected, each inspired by a particular island.
‘Tiree’ brings into play childhood memories of long walks to school and the rhythmic, rural tasks of the day. Games, tricks and songs would have lightened the load, and the composer develops the clapping-song ‘An ràcan a bh’ againne’ to convey the fun.
‘Islay’ consists of two linked songs. The first was collected from its writer, Peter MacArthur, who had worked as a postman on the island. The setting has the added hint of mirk and storm clouds gathering. And indeed, it is a storm at sea claiming the life of a beloved that informs the companion song ‘Ailein Duinn’.
The composer consulted Anne Lorne Gillies’s Songs of Gaelic Scotland for the rhythmic delivery of this traditional material. It was sung to the composer by an elderly woman who, emerging from a withdrawn state, gathered more and more strength to her voice in a perfect rendition.
In ‘Iona’, the intimate celebration of new life in the traditional Gaelic lullaby ‘Tàladh ar Slànair’ (‘Lullaby for the Saviour’) is given the composer’s special harmonic treatment,
vividly suggesting Iona’s illuminated landscape in all its mysteries. The gentle pulse of the sea – or perhaps a rocking cradle – completes the imagery. Sweeney’s source for the traditional material both here and in ‘Tiree’ was Margaret Fay Shaw’s Folksongs and Folklore of South Uist.
To celebrate its 30th anniversary, Live Music Now Scotland – funded by Kimie Trust –commissioned Inverness-born Alasdair Nicolson, who responded with String Quartet No 2 (The Keeper of Sheep). Nicolson is now the Artistic Director of the St Magnus International Festival in the Orkney Isles. Time spent there, and memories of his outdoor childhood on Skye, gave an extra dimension to his reading of The Keeper of Sheep by Alberto Caeiro (a pseudonym of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa). The landscape observed through a shepherd’s eyes, both realistic and mystical, and its relationship to humanity, struck a chord with Nicolson. He derived the evocative titles of the individual movements from Caeiro’s poems. The quartet was premiered at the 2014 St Magnus Festival by the Astrid String Quartet.
One of the most influential post-war British artists was John Bellany, famed for his allegorical works encompassing the complexities of human existence. Born in Port Seton on the east coast of Scotland in 1942, he was one of the main voices to re-establish
figurative art in the face of abstract modernism. He died in August 2013, just a few months after the Prestongrange Museum, near his home town, mounted a major retrospective, ‘John Bellany: The Sea, The Sky and Me’ (January 2013). In the same month as that exhibition opened, Wildings – one of the LMNS traditional music ensembles, with influences from the Orkney Isles to Northumberland and beyond –premiered The Bellany Suite in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. The result of another LMNS commissioning partnership, this time with the National Galleries of Scotland, it is an in-depth musical reflection, through dance forms and meditative music, on Bellany’s art, created jointly by the three composer/performers.
An ingredient present throughout the suite is the sense of flowing water, and this is the feeling of the introduction to the first section, ‘The Boat Builders’ – a strathspey with the mood of a work-song. The titles of the Suite’s six sections match those of the Bellany paintings on which they are based. The subject matter of the first is concerned with Bellany’s memories of his hometown fishing trade, with its hustle and bustle. The more sombre symbolism of ‘Allegory’, with its build-up of mysterious music, is followed by the pulsating introduction to ‘The Box Meeting’ – a lively hornpipe in 3/2 time, a tempo popular in Northumberland and the Scottish Borders. The title is the name of a festival originally set up
to aid the local fishing community. The music of the fourth section, ‘The Burden’, develops an insistent fiddle reel dance describing hard working lives. The dangers of working at sea are at the heart of ‘The Eyemouth Disaster’, a slow air in which fiddle and flute are woven together, before ‘Dieppe’ brings in poignant and colourful contributions from the whole group, creating a broad seascape and a feeling of a safe haven.
Another Composing with Care collaboration took the form of joint funding from the Imperial War Museum and Arts Council England nurturing the composition of A Castle Mills Suite by John Maxwell Geddes. He composed both the music and the texts of this song cycle, which has proved to be an exemplary exercise in art arising from social history. The remarkable process of creation included Live Music Now performers interviewing one of the last surviving workers from the North British Rubber Company’s Castle Mills factory in Edinburgh. She was 103 years of age when they met her. The inspiration from hours of such interviews and conversations with her and others in homes and centres stayed vividly with John during the writing of both words and music.
John’s embrace of this fascinating project is in keeping with his wide range of interests. These encompass history, archaeology, astronomy and science fiction. The five songs here cover love, fond memories, industry,
loss, and the little-known Zeppelin airship bombing raid on Edinburgh in 1916, one of the first such events in history. Commissioned jointly by Live Music Now Scotland and 14-18 NOW, the work formed part of the World War One Centenary Art Commissions and was premiered in the care homes which were part of its composition, followed by Edinburgh Festival Fringe performances in the National Museum of Scotland and in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
© 2015 Eddie McGuire
Eddie McGuire’s compositions have featured on several Delphian recordings – works for the Fell Clarinet Quartet, for trumpeter Mark O’Keeffe, soprano Irene Drummond and organist Nicholas Wearne, as well as the portrait disc, Eddie McGuire: Music for Flute, Guitar and Piano (DCD34029), which was selected as a Gramophone ‘Editor’s Choice’ in 2006. A second disc devoted to his music, Entangled Fortunes (DCD34157) – performed by Red Note Ensemble – is scheduled for release in summer 2015.
‘It has been my dream to bring live music back into the everyday lives of people of all ages … in those places where most of us spend our time, where we work, study, suffer or celebrate, be it in office or factory, school or prison, parish hall or church.’
and the resulting interactive performances prove time after time that connecting with people through music can stimulate responses that have a profound and lasting transformative effect.
The words with which the legendary violinist, Yehudi Menuhin, founded Live Music Now in 1977 remain at the heart of the organisation and its work today. It is a unique organisation, which has kept Menuhin’s vision alive in ensuring that all members of society, whatever their circumstances, have access to the enriching experience of live music. At the same time, Live Music Now offers invaluable performing opportunities, training and support to emerging artists at the outset of their professional careers. The musicians who are part of the scheme operate in small ensembles of up to five members and are specially recruited and auditioned before being accepted to it. As well as outstanding musical and technical abilities, musicians who work with Live Music Now have excellent communication skills in engaging with a wide range of audiences from a diversity of backgrounds.
Typical audiences include children with additional support needs, older people in residential and day care, often with dementia-related illness, young offenders, hospice patients, and those living in remote, rural and island areas with little or no access to high-quality music. Programmes are tailored to suit each venue on a bespoke basis,
Throughout the UK, Live Music Now gives around 2,500 performances each year. 600 of these are presented by Live Music Now Scotland, which covers the whole country, from Orkney and Shetland to the Scottish Borders and Dumfries and Galloway. The pool of musicians delivering the work is across the genres of classical, traditional, rock/pop and jazz, and numbers around 120 individual musicians as members of between forty and fifty ensembles. Alumni can be seen in orchestras, ensembles, opera houses, concert venues, recording studios and educational establishments where musicians are pursuing their careers, inspired by the ideals of Live Music Now.
Live Music Now Scotland was founded in 1984, and became a devolved branch in April 2013, with its own charitable and company status. It has offices in Edinburgh and Glasgow and leads on the International Development programme of Live Music Now, including exchanges, residencies and setting up new branches, on behalf of the scheme throughout the UK.
Carol Main Director
Live Music Now Scotland (LMN Scotland) is registered in Scotland, company no. SC442910 and charity no. SC043868.
Live Music Now Scotland is grateful for ongoing support from Creative Scotland.
Luminate: From the Islands
5 Tiree (An ràcan a bh’ againne)
An ràcan a bh’ againne
Na mearlaich a thachair ris
An ràcan a bh’ againne
’Si challain thug am bàs dha
Chaidh e null air a lòn
Chaidh e shuirgh’ air na h’eòin
Thug mi sgriob air a thòir
’S gòrach a bha mi
’Siomadh rud a rinn e riamh
Creididh mi gu robh e fior
Tunnagan a chaidh an fiadh
’S iadsan a shàbhail e
Chaidh e null air a loch
Chaidh e phunndadh ’sa spot
Lùbadh e a’s a’ phoit
Phlodadh gu bàs e
Gheibh sinn dinneir a nochd
Nach do rinneadh leithid am poit
’N crotal thug mi far na cloich’
’S clòimh na caora Spàintich
6 Islay (Portnahaven / Ailein Duinn)
Portnahaven, by the sea,
That’s the place I want to be, There beside the rocky shore I would stay for evermore, Portnahaven, by the sea.
The drake we used to have Thieves found him
The drake we used to have Hogmanay was the occasion of his death
He went across the pond
He went courting the birds I took my turn looking for him
Foolish I was!
He did many a thing
I believe it was true
It’s true the ducks went wild It was them who saved him
He went across the loch
He was pounded on the spot
Doubled up inside the pot
Finished off by boiling
We’ll get a dinner tonight
The like of which was never made in a pot I got crotal off the rocks
And wool from the Spanish sheep
Headland that breaks on Caolas nan Gall, Yon the hills of Ireland, Red sun setting in the West, Nature’s beauty at its best, Portnahaven, by the sea.
Children playing on the shore, Mothers watching from their door, Hear the foghorns lonesome call As mist flows from Loch Indaal.
See the ships at dark of night
Sailing by the Orsay light, Passing down by Curree Sands
Heading off for foreign lands, Portnahaven, by the sea.
Ailein Duinn, ò hì, shiùbhlainn leat
hì rì a bho hì o ho hao rionn o ho o hì o ho,
Ailein Duinn, ò hì, shiùbhlainn leat!
Brown-haired Alan, alas, I want to go with you!
Chan eil sùgradh nochd air m’aire Tonight my mind is without joy ’s gur e mise th’air mo sgaradh and I am torn apart
Ailein Duinn, ò hì, shiùbhlainn leat …
le meud na stoirm’ is sian na gaillin with the enormity of the storm and the violence of ch’fhuadaicheas na fir bhon chala that drives the men from the harbour [the weather
Ailein Duinn, ò hì, shiùbhlainn leat …
Ma’s fhior an sgeul, cha bhi mi fallain If the news is true, I’ll never recover, gu la bràth cha dèan mi banais till the day of doom I’ll never marry
Ailein Duinn, ò hì, shiùbhlainn leat …
’s cùl chinn air bac mo làimhe with the back of your head resting in the hollow of do chùl dualach, cuachan, fàinnich. your curling, wavy, ringleted hair. [my hand,
Ailein Duinn, ò hì, shiùbhlainn leat …
Texts and translations
Aleluiah.
Mo ghaol, mo ghradh, is m’ fheudail thu, M’ ionntas ùr is m’ èibhneas thu, Mo mhacan aluinn ceutach thu, Chan fhiù mi fèin bhi ’d dhàil.
Ged ’s leanamh diblidh thu,
Cinnteach ’s Righ nan Righrean thu, ’S tu ’n t-oighre dligheach, firinneach
Air Rioghachd Dhè nan gràs.
Bu mhòr solas agus ioghnadh
Buachaillean bochda nan caorach, ’Nuair chual iad na h-ainglean a’ glaodhaich, “Thainig Slànaighear chun an t-saoghail.”
’S tusa grian gheal an dòchais, Chuireas dorchadas air fògairt; Bheir thu clann-daoin’ bho staid bhrònaich
Gu naomhachd, soillearachd, is eòlas.
Hosanah do Mhac Dhàibhidh, Mo Righ, mo Thighearna, ’s mo Shlànair; ’S mòr mo shòlas bhith ’gad thàladh, ’S beannaichte am measg nam mnài mi.
My love, my dear one, you are my treasure, My new wealth and my joy.
You are my beautiful and attractive little son. I myself am not worthy of being your contact.
Although you are a lowly child,
It is certain that you are the King of Kings.
You are the lawful and truthful heir
To the kingdom of God of Graces.
There was great joy and wonder
For the poor sheep herdsmen
When they heard angels calling out, “A Saviour has come to the world.”
You are the bright sun of hope Who will put darkness into exile. You will take mankind away from any sorry condition
To holiness, brightness and knowledge.
Hosannah to David’s Son,
My king, my Lord, my Saviour; I hope greatly that I soothe you
And that I will be blessed among women.
A Castle Mills Suite
14 Idyll 1914
I remember beautiful weather before the War
I was sixteen, Johnny was eighteen before the War
After church, one Sunday morning we left unseen
Hand in hand we wandered together in fields of green
Spring time by the Water of Leith and its rippling stream
And the echoing Raven, calling there in the sky
I remember daffodils blowing their golden bugles
Bugles distantly calling in spring
15 Castle Mills
As I went down by Castle Mills, I thought I heard my mother sing a song from long ago
She sang of bygone days of daily toil and forgotten ways
Then to her my mem’ry strays at Castle Mills in the morning.
My mother worked beside her team by wheels of brass and copper gleam
She joined the workers’ chorus. She made boots for her son, who on the Somme stood by his gun; “This war by Christmas will be won, when he comes home a hero.”
The melody has slipped away, forgotten as a summer haze, or dew upon the meadows.
But Oh! the thought remains, of daily toil and forgotten ways; The melody now faint as shadow on a May Day morning.
But some time in the fam’ly’s past this joyful song was proudly cast at Castle Mills, and Fountainbridge, that melody comes unbidden.
Often, when I dream, I hear her sing that workers’ theme of happy hours and busy days, at Fountainbridge at Castle Mills!
16 Factory Song
We all work at Castle Mills and ev’ry girl her quota fills making rubber boots, water bags, gun bags and covers and mats!
Our brave lads are at the War in trenches filled with mud and glaur; we’ll send them Wellington Wellington Wellington Wellington boots!
We are working thru’ the night. Castle Mills a blaze of light: helping our lads the War to win Bouncing the Kaiser back to Berlin!
Bags for water, bags for guns
With thanks to Mary Ann Kennedy and Kenna Campbell for their help with pronunciation of the Gaelic texts
We make rubber goods tons and tons! we’ll send them high pressure hoses and waterproof clothing and boots!
7 Iona (Tàladh ar Slànair – Lullaby for the Saviour)
We are working thru’ the night. Castle Mills a blaze of light: helping our lads the War to win Bouncing the Kaiser back to Berlin!
We all work at Castle Mills and ev’ry girl her quota fills making valves, joints and rings and those telephone things and washers and gaskets and aeroplane fabric and Wellington, Wellington Wellington, Wellington BOOTS!
17 Lullaby
Oh sleep, oh sleep, my bonnie wee bairnie? oh sleep, oh sleep my bonnie wee lad Ye lie sae still an naethin’ll wake ye, Ti morning licht come ower the hill.
Oh whaur, oh whaur is my bonnie wee bairnie? oh whaur, oh whaur is my bonnie wee lad? He marched awa’ wi’ bugles an’ banners, he marched awa’ tae the beat o’ the drum
My bairnie lay in the warmth o’ my briestie, Sae bright his een, the lassies he’d win! but noo he lies in clay-cauld Flanders, sae dull his een an’ black his skin.
18 Zeppelin 1916
On the night of 2nd April 1916 an enemy airship passed over the City of Edinburgh: its principal targets were military, munitions, docks, the Castle and the North British Rubber Company.
Air Raid Action!
Zeppelin attack!
High explosive!
Fire from the sky burning in the night
All over the city, bombs were falling At George Watson’s College and Castle Rock In Marchmont Terrace, a bomb struck the roof and travelling downwards through three ceilings and floors and unexploded lay in the basement.
In Marshall Street six people were killed, and seven injured Ah!
Castle Terrace Zeppelin attack!
High explosive!
Fire from the sky burning in the night!
Six people were injured at Causewayside At St Leonard’s Hill two more were hurt but Ah! the child was dead, Broken glass lies in the Meadows; hospital windows on ancient graves; Why? Why? Why?
what is the meaning of so much pain? This is the war to end all wars.
Biographies
Also available on Delphian
Eddie McGuire: Music for flute, guitar and piano
Nancy Ruffer, Abigail James, Dominic Saunders
DCD34029
Over the past 40 years Eddie McGuire, British Composer Award winner and Creative Scotland Award winner, has developed a compositional style that is as eclectic as it is concentrated. This disc surveys a selection of his solo and chamber works, written for his home instruments – flute, guitar and piano. The writing, whilst embracing tonality, focuses on texture and aspects of colour, drawing on a myriad folk influences. The listener cannot help being drawn in to McGuire’s evocative sound-world, at once bold and playful.
‘This is quite simply beautiful music … Performances are excellent, the overall playing as expressive as the music itself requires; Delphian’s sound is spot-on … the perfect entrée to his sound-world’ – Gramophone, Awards issue 2006, EDITOR’S CHOICE
William Sweeney: Tree o’ Licht
Robert Irvine & Erkki Lahesmaa cellos, Fali Pavri piano
DCD34113
Both musically impassioned and socially engaged, William Sweeney’s music is at its most eloquent when voiced by that most human of instruments, the cello. The player navigates a stormy electronic landscape in the Borges-inspired The Poet Tells of his Fame, while Schumann lies behind the powerfully argued Sonata for Cello and Piano, recipient of a 2011 BASCA British Composer Award. The Sonata bears a joint dedication to Delphian artist Robert Irvine and to Erkki Lahesmaa – ‘keepers’, as Sweeney calls them, ‘of the cello’s inner voice’ – and Irvine is joined by his Finnish colleague here in the 2008 duo The Tree o’ Licht, in which Gaelic psalmody is transmuted into deepest instrumental expressivity.
‘luminous … an intriguing combination of exploration and introspection’
– The Independent, August 2013
The Cold Dancer: contemporary string quartets from Scotland Clapperton / Dempster / Sweeney / Weir
Edinburgh Quartet
DCD34038
Rich and personal contributions to the quartet tradition from four contemporary Scottish composing voices, ranging from the lyrical profundity of Kenneth Dempster’s meditation on a George Mackay Brown poem to a characteristically idiosyncratic and yet songful work by Judith Weir. Under leader Charles Mutter, the Edinburgh Quartet delivers blazing, committed performances celebrating the immense variety and vitality of work on offer.
‘On this outstanding CD, driven by scorchingly focused performances from the Edinburgh Quartet, the impact of the four pieces is colossal … Each of the composers is at his and her peak, and the Edinburgh Quartet has never played better. It’s nothing less than a landmark’ – The Herald, February 2007
Knight Errant: solo music for trumpet
McGuire / Maxwell Davies / Turnage / Boyle / Geddes / Sweeney
Mark O’Keeffe
DCD34049
In medieval times a knight errant would wander the land in search of adventures and noble exploits. Here, Mark O’Keeffe takes a journey around the virtuoso repertory for modern trumpet – including works he himself has commissioned from Eddie McGuire, John Maxwell Geddes and William Sweeney – and wins his spurs in this stunning debut recital.
‘No other solo instrument has the expressive range of the trumpet as played by the golden-tongued Irish virtuoso O’Keeffe, who seizes the ear with brilliant tone and a warm exuberant jig in McGuire’s Prelude, foghorn greeting and rhythmic zip in Maxwell Davies’s Litany for a Ruined Chapel ’ – The Times, May 2007
Also available on Delphian
The Shadow Side: contemporary song from Scotland
MacMillan / McGuire / Geddes / McLeod / Bingham / Forbes / Mealor
Irene Drummond soprano, Iain Burnside piano
DCD34099
For many years Irene Drummond has been the leading exponent of contemporary song in Scotland. With her partner Iain Burnside – peerless in this music – she offers here a fascinating snapshot of her repertoire.
From the rarefied sparseness of James MacMillan to the sustained luminosity of Paul Mealor and the emotionally charged dramatic outbursts of John McLeod, The Shadow Side explores a world of half-lights and brittle intensity.
‘… soprano Irene Drummond at her most breathtakingly stellar and seductive’
– The Herald, June 2011
‘Burnside shares the credit for performances of total focus’ – BBC Music Magazine, October 2011
Ronald Stevenson: A’e Gowden Lyric
Susan Hamilton soprano, John Cameron piano
DCD34006
Since first performing Ronald Stevenson’s music as a treble in 1985, when she gave the broadcast premiere of A Child’s Garden of Verses, Susan Hamilton has brought Stevenson’s songs to audiences throughout Britain and abroad. The present recording features her unique, clarion voice in the soprano version of that work, alongside settings of Scots poems by Hugh MacDiarmid and William Soutar and a short translated verse by the Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean.
‘an astonishingly pure voice ... the ringing accuracy of Hamilton’s intonation is a continual marvel ... The recording is beautifully balanced and clear as a bell’
– International Record Review, June 2003
Rory Boyle: Solo piano music; Phaethon’s Dancing Lesson James Willshire piano, Bartholdy Trio
DCD34098
In Rory Boyle’s sixtieth year, virtuoso pianist James Willshire’s debut recording pays birthday tribute, exploring the full gamut of Boyle’s compositional personality – from the cragginess of his finely wrought Sonata to the intensely human lyricism of Tatty’s Dance, itself a sixtieth-birthday present for Boyle’s wife. Dancing is also the subject of Boyle’s second piano trio, in which Willshire is joined by his fellow members of the Bartholdy Trio.
‘Judging by this CD he deserves to be better known ... a distinctive voice and fluent imagination’
– Financial Times, April 2011
‘brilliantly sustained by [pianist] James Willshire … compelling listening’
– The Arts Desk, May 2011
Robert Crawford: Music for solo piano, Piano Quintet
Nicholas Ashton piano, Edinburgh Quartet
DCD34055
Elder statesman of the Scottish music scene by the release date of this disc shortly after his eightieth birthday, Robert Crawford (1925–2012) lavished intense care upon every one of his comparatively few compositions. The Edinburgh Quartet and pianist Nicholas Ashton, intimately acquainted with Crawford’s work, mirror the composer’s attention to detail in a long overdue survey of this lovingly crafted music, spanning sixty years of compositional activity.
‘an impressive collection … committed and excellent performances’
– Musical Opinion, March/April 2008
‘splendid, incisive playing’
– The Wire, April 2008