The Bubblyjock Collective
Stockbridge Church 2/8/2024
Stockbridge Music Hub: The Bubblyjock Collective
The Bubblyjock Collective, launched earlier this year, is a trio of young musicians who champion music by Scottish composers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and promote the work of emerging contemporary composers. Soprano, Rosie Lavery, pianist, Anna Michels and accordionist, Neil Sutcliffe are all recent Conservatoire graduates now embarking on their musical careers. I’ve admired Rosie and Anna in concert under the auspices of Live Music Now Scotland, while Neil Sutcliffe has recently been playing with violinist Roo Geddes, also for LMNS in Orkney and at Paxton. Their dramatic opening number, Ronald Stevenson’s setting of Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘Bubblyjock’, sums up their superb attention to detail in the turkey-like shrieks from the accordion, and authenticity in Rosie’s command of Scots, with a commitment to entertain their audiences.
All three are enthusiastic about these composers, some scarcely known, like Newport-born, Marie Dare, the first female professor at the Athenaeum – the earlier name of the Conservatoire. Her songs ‘Ettrick Water’ and ‘Night’ and her duet for piano and cello, ‘Nocturne’ have been sympathetically arranged by the trio to incorporate some atmospheric accordion. Anna Michels has studied the works of Ronald Center, a self-taught pianist who learned about the music of his contemporaries, like Shostakovich and Poulenc, by hearing it on the radio. She introduces his monumental 1951 ‘Sonata’ in four movements as “chaos in the best possible way,” and gives us a tour de force performance from memory which leaves the audience breathless. ‘For Winter Rains,’ his song to a text by Swinburne, is a more straightforward lyrical piece for voice with a flowing piano accompaniment which ends with the notes of the cuckoo.
Ronald Stevenson’s songs are better-known: my EMR colleague, Brian Bannatyne Scott, has sung them well in concert and in recordings. The cheerful ‘Buckie Braes’ with a syncopated jig accompaniment by Neil, gives Anna a chance to show off her comic talents in Soutar’s Scots poem. Stevenson’s gentler setting of part of Sorley Maclean’s ‘Traighan/Shore’ is sung in English. It is followed by a setting of the whole poem in Gaelic by Padruig Moireasdan, a young composer from Uist. This superb piece of writing for voice, piano and accordion was premiered at the Collective’s launch, and hopefully will receive many more performances. Padruig, like Neil, a classically trained accordionist, begins the piece with the sound of the wind, waves and bird cries on the accordion. The voice and piano parts are initially quite simple – the setting for voice is very lovely – and become more ornate as Maclean’s words in praise of his beloved and the coast at Talisker, Calgary, Moidart and Staffin grow more emotional. Stormy passages on the accordion accompany the setting of Maclean’s defiant vow to build a “rampart wall” against the “unhappy surging sea.”
The sizeable audience in Stockbridge Church applauds enthusiastically. Look out for The Bubblyjock Collective!
