Building Castles
November 2024, CD Review
Live Music Now Scotland: Building Castles
Part of Live Music Now Scotland’s 40th Birthday celebrations, their new CD ‘Building Castles’ promises ‘New Music for New Audiences’. LMNS has commissioned five Scottish composers, four of them women, to write for five current and former Emerging Artist ensembles. The resulting works are striking and eclectic pieces of contemporary instrumental music, a song cycle and two exceptional folk-inspired songs. Designed for the organisation’s activities in care settings for the elderly, with children and in concert halls, they reflect the playfulness of childhood and the interplay of family relationships as well as Scotland’s industrial and natural heritage.
LMNS’ small musical ensembles are often unusual in their makeup. The Campus Trio consists of pianist, Maria Urian and saxophonists, Richard Scholfield on soprano saxophone and John Anthony Craig alternating alto and baritone saxophones. The young composer, Erin Thomson (b. 2000) wrote ‘The Graceful Art of Walking on Stilts’ for them, and the eight tiny named movements (each lasting not much more than a minute) are based on a series of cartoons about stilt-walking, and are designed to be played for children in a care-settings. The titles suggest the stilt walker’s movements – “reaching”, “swinging”, “ lopsided with one hand” and also the emotions -“with uncontained excitement”, “ hopeful” “rushed”. The whole piece captures the thrills and spills of an exhilarating activity in a way which also draws a young audience into the possibilities of music making through the soaring, tinkling and percussive sounds of the instruments. The composer was a worthy winner of the Kimie Composition Prize, in association with LMNS and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
Jennifer Martin’s two works for clarinet and piano were written about children, rather than for them, and in the first, ‘Bi-Cycle,’ she explores a mother and daughter relationship over their life cycles in five short movements. Beginning with the gentle ‘Lullaby’, Juliette Philogene, piano, and Calum Robertson, clarinet, chart the ebb and flow of love and conflict through the boisterousness and tantrums of early childhood in ‘Haywire’ and ‘Hammer and Tongs’ to the more bitter recriminations of the teenage years in the impassioned rush of ‘Push By’ until ‘To Live with Thee’ sees serene acceptance of the family relationship in gentler piano and high clarinet melody. In her second seven minute piece, the composer’s title “What’s for you…” (which will be completed by most Scots with “will no go by you”) indicates another wry look at motherhood, as the frantic first section gradually makes way for more reflective passages on the lower notes of the clarinet, which strive upwards with the piano to reach a gentler conclusion.
Two works on the CD preserve memories of Scotland’s industrial past. Harpist Savourna Stevenson was commissioned to write ‘Mill Memories’ a seven minute work for flute and guitar as part of Paisley’s 2021 bid to be European City of Culture and commemorates the work of mill workers there and in Lancashire where all four of the composer’s grandparents worked in the mills. A bustling start mimicking the continual movement of the machinery is followed by an exotic melodic section, perhaps a nod to the famous Paisley pattern, originally copied from Indian patterns. In 1929, Paisley was the site of the largest ever cinema fire in Europe when 71 children were killed, and an elegiac passage recalls this tragedy. Leila Marshall, flute and Sasha Savaloni, guitar are sensitive to all the changes of mood in the music.
John McLeod, who died in 2022, was over 80 when he wrote the song cycle for soprano and piano ‘Songs From Above and Below,’ at 20 minutes the longest work on the CD. Part of the Baring Foundation’s ‘Late Style’ series of commissions to 11 artists over the age of 70, the work involved co-operation between LMNS and its sister organisation in Wales. Musicians in both countries worked with care home residents in participatory music and story-telling sessions, and John McLeod’s libretto reflects experiences from Scottish and Welsh mining communities. A boy miner narrates the first sections: his grim start at work is alleviated by his pleasure in hearing the canary, ‘The Song of the Golden Bird’ and there’s escape and humour for young and old on ‘Gala Day’. ‘Last Friday before half-term’ is a dramatic re-telling of the Aberfan disaster (McLeod uses the name Pan Glas – the affected area of the village) starting from the point of view of a boy survivor remembering the “wave of blackness” and “Dafydd cold and silent”, and ending with a piano quotation from the hymn tune ‘Cwm Rhondda’ as the village mourns. Soprano Emily Mitchell and pianist Geoffrey Tanti give this work a sensitive performance especially in the descriptions of the disaster and in the final section, a reworking of Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Miners,’ which begins ‘There was a whispering in my hearth.’
Carol Main, founding Director of LMNS, in her sleeve-notes, comments that few newly commissioned works get even a second performance, but the structure of Live Music Now Scotland means that commissions may be performed countless times, firstly by the artists for whom they were written, and later through “exchange of scores with Live Music Now branches in mainland Europe (which) leads to even wider opportunities for contemporary music to be heard at the heart of our communities.”
I’ll finish with a special commendation for two works on the CD which I think have the power to become much better known. Composer and singer Karine Polwart, commissioned by LMNS as part of City Sounds of Nature, funded by One City Trust Edinburgh, wrote ‘Keep Building Castles’ and ‘Meet Me at Loganlea’. Their catchy tunes and compelling mix of memories and local references are very much in the folk tradition: “The reek’s rising oot the Cockenzie lums” and “The haar’s lifting oot on the Isle o’ May” have a poetry which will surely appeal not just to those who live near the Forth. In the voice and guitar arrangement sung by Hannah Rarity and Luc McNally, they sound like well-known songs where we can’t wait to join in the chorus. They may already have taken off as popular songs – if not, I’m sure they will soon. You can listen here:
Hannah Rarity sings Karine Polwart: Keep Building Castles - YouTube
The CD is available from Delphian Records, Presto and Amazon, and also as an mp3 download.
