The Bass Clef Trio
Stockbridge Church, 1/11/24
The Bass Clef Trio, Clea Friend, Cello, Su-a Lee, cello and Jamie Kenny, double bass
Two 0f my favourite musicians in Scotland are cellists, Clea Friend and Su-a Lee, so imagine my delight when I got an invitation to hear them play together in Stockbridge. Along with bass player, Jamie Kenny, they made up the Bass Clef Trio. What a great title! Of course it’s not just that they are cellists that makes them special but because they are extraordinary enthusiasts for music in Scotland. I first met Clea Friend many years ago on a train to Glasgow with her cello. We got chatting about music and I discovered she was the daughter of conductor Lionel Friend, whom I knew as the music director of English National Opera. Clea was then studying Nigel Osborne’s Music in the Community Course at Edinburgh University. Many years later she has put her course to great effect in creating the Stockbridge Music Hub, which does a great job in making music the centre of its community and uses the beautiful setting of the Stockbridge Church as its base. Clea is also a very fine cellist. Su-a Lee is one of the best-known faces of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. She has been with them for over 20 years and with her colourful hair and her enthusiastic smiles she emanates a love for music which communicates directly to her audiences. She is also a very fine cellist, who alongside her SCO work also plays with a number of other ensembles and is engaged in making links between classical and traditional music; indeed she is taking it so seriously she has married a traditional musician!
When we got to the lovely setting of Stockbridge Church with its gorgeous seascape panels, very decent acoustic and comfortable chairs (not something you can say of many churches!) we were in for a surprise. Those comfortable chairs were arranged in a circle around the performers. I joked with Clea that this was clearly a Halloween concert since an old saying is “witches do it in a circle!” It was an inspired choice to surround the musicians with the audience, bringing us much closer to the musicians; indeed as I got there early I chose a seat right next to and between Su-a and Clea where I not only saw them working close-up but could feel the vibrato from the cellos in my bones.
In addition to Su-a and Clea we had a fine young bass player, Jamie Kenny, who plays double bass with the SCO. He provided a lovely resonant bass which anchored our two cellists and gave them the heft of a string quartet. Clea delighted in using her new technology tools to present the music - both she and Su-a used iPad musical scores and it was interesting to see Jamie Kenny rearranging his sheet music slowly in comparison. Her other new toy was an electronic communicator which commanded a series of screens, which gave us the programme details so no need for paper programmes. The programme they chose for us was a one-hour delight, with no encore as Su-a and Jamie had to rush off to Glasgow for an SCO concert that evening. They began with a lovely Handel Trio Sonata in G minor which allowed all three instrumentalists to display their skills. This was followed by a programme eighteenth century works for cello by Pergolesi and Cervetto, all interspersed with traditional tunes, such as ‘Drink To Me Only with Thine Eyes’ and the Londonderry Air, better known as Danny Boy.
Overall the concert was a delight Su-a and Clea displayed their skills to us and laughed their way through the programme, young Jamie provided a good solid bass-line to ground the trio and let’s hope the Bass Clef Trio has a future! Clea’s Stockbridge Music Hub certainly has a future, indeed the immediate event the next day was a lecture by her still very active professor, Nigel Osborne, on Music and War. Nigel was closely involved in War Child, which used music therapy to ease the ravages of the Bosnian War - and indeed I played a part in arranging a grant from the European Parliament to War Child when I was an MEP, along with a grant to Yehudi Menuhin’s work with war-damaged children in schools using music and drama as therapy. Music can heal but also, as Clea and the Bass Clef Trio showed us, can delight. This was a free concert, although people were queuing up at the end to make donations to keep this great community music hub going. If you wonder how Clea is going to follow this initiative, next year she plans to take on Wagner’s great Ring Cycle, drawing on the talents of her father Lionel Friend, who is a fine Wagnerian conductor. Clearly Nigel’s course in Music in the Community is paying off for Clea, and for Stockbridge!
