RSNO: Patrick Doyle’s Music from the Movies

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall - 18/11/23

Dirk Brossé, conductor | Lorne MacDougall, highland pipes & whistles | Fraser Fifield, whistles | Màiri MacInnes, Gaelic singer | Abigail & Nuala Doyle, vocals | Patrick Doyle, Peter Capaldi & Richard E Grant, hosts

One of the hottest tickets of the 2023 pre-Christmas season has been the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s ‘Music from the Movies’ extravaganza, celebrating Scottish composer Patrick Doyle’s 70th birthday and phenomenally creative oeuvre of film scores and more, spanning 5 decades. The two performances, one each in Edinburgh and Glasgow, were arranged for the benefit of ‘Play Your Part’, the current name of RSNO’s community outreach programme, which promotes music opportunities for youth all over Scotland.  This reviewer attended the second of these, on the night of 18th November, in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.  The orchestra, at full strength, with 14 first violins, triple winds and 6 horns, for example, was further augmented with a piano, euphonium, bagpipes and tin whistles, and conducted by Belgian composer and conductor Dirk Brossé.  Solo vocalists included virtuosa Gaelic singer Màiri MacInnes and the composer’s daughters, Abigail and Nuala Doyle.  The role of genial, witty and informatively anecdotal hosts and presenters was ably discharged by actors Peter Capaldi and Richard E Grant, with further contributions from the conductor, the composer himself and his daughters.

The concert opened with a cue from Patrick’s first film score, also Kenneth Branagh’s audacious directorial debut, ‘Henry V’, igniting a fruitful artistic partnership and friendship (and also prompting an anecdote of my own, uniting RSNO outreach and my favourite cue from the same movie, which I’ll keep to the end of this review).  This was ‘St Crispin’s Day’, setting the dawn scene of the day of the Battle of Agincourt, music that speaks eloquently of the growth of hope.  Emma Thomson’s award-winning 1995 screenplay for ‘Sense and Sensibility’ prompted a neo-classical, almost Mozartian score and ‘My Father’s Favourite’ featured a sunny piano solo from Lynda Cochrane, as charming as any of the master’s piano concerti.  Two pieces from the 2015 live-action Disney ‘Cinderella’ followed, ‘La Valse de l’Amour’ and ‘Pumpkin Pursuit’, each honouring its description perfectly, a sumptuous valse in the French style, followed by a frantic panicky chase following midnight chimes on the tubular bells.  A sense of melancholy numb anxiety pervaded the atmospheric ‘Train Away’; from Richard E Grant’s semi-autobiographical 2005 directorial debut, ‘Wah-Wah’.  Back to Branagh’s Shakespeare for the playful yet epic Overture to his 1993 ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, with some fabulous writing for horns.  Patrick’s daughter Nuala then introduced big sister Abigail singing in Gaelic from Mike Newell’s 1993 film ‘Into the West’, a touchingly beautiful song, ‘The Blue Sea and the White Horse, with hauntingly idiomatic use of uilleann pipes played by Adam Richardson and tin whistle played by Fraser Fifield.  A short orchestral suite of themes from Sharon Maguire’s 2001 adaptation, ‘Bridget Jones’ Diary’ featured fabulous orchestration and melodies with affection, tenderness, pathos and passion by turns.  The writing for glockenspiel, piano and trombones was very fine, but it was the delicious string polyphony in the next number, ‘Remember Me’, the end credits from Brian De Palma’s 1993 ‘Carlito’s Way’ that had me in tears. The first half of the concert concluded outside the movies with the briskly optimistic Coronation March which Patrick was commissioned to write for Charles III.  Whilst there may be far too many ideological barriers to me sharing the sentiment, the music is undoubtedly grand, if you like that kind of thing, with more than a passing nod to Celtic culture.

Still outside the movies, two concert pieces opened the second half.  Dirk Brossé introduced the first of these, the Scottish Overture which Patrick wrote for the 2019 Celtic Connections festival.  The highland pipes played by Lorne MacDougall featured prominently, an idiomatic melody harmonised beautifully with the brass, followed by some equally delicious string writing with harp (Pippa Tunnell) and violin solo from guest leader Hannah Perowne.  However, the wild jig that drove the piece to its big finish, featuring an awesome duel between the pipes and the 6 horns, was unforgettable.  Richard E Grant introduced the second piece, Corarsik, a rhapsody for solo violin and orchestra, in the style of a neo-classical romance with a jig central section.  The piece is named for the Argyll family home of its dedicatee, long-time close friend of the composer, the celebrated actress and filmmaker, Emma Thomson, and evokes her personality against the backdrop of the Scottish climate.  Hannah stood to play the concertante part.  It’s a super piece and it received a sympathetic and virtuosic outing.  ‘Gairm na h-Oidhche’ (The Calling of the Night) is a Gaelic song from Patrick’s score for Gillies MacKinnon’s 2016 ‘Whisky Galore’ and it was exquisitely sung by Màiri MacInnes with some lovely whistle-playing from Fraser Fifield.  ‘Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’, another Branagh collaboration, was represented next by the thrillingly scary ‘The Creation’, a syncopated pursuit with great writing for brass and timpani, charting the mounting tension as the monster is assembled.  The closing credits of Branagh’s 2017 ‘Murder on the Orient Express’, the song ‘Never Forget’, received an atmospheric, haunting delivery from Nuala Doyle and featured a very lovely solo from associate principal cellist Betsy Taylor. Two cues from ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’ (2005) showed Patrick to be a worthy successor of John Williams, ‘Potter’s Waltz’ and ‘Harry in Winter’, the former gliding sweepingly with lovely writing for harp, glockenspiel, vibraphone and flutes; the latter richly romantic with dreamy writing for celeste and strings. Both magical. The programme closed with two numbers from Pixar’s 2012 animation, ‘Brave’, a commission which Patrick himself introduced as ‘a dream come true’, and indeed it is hard to imagine a composer better equipped to score that movie.  ‘Merida’s Home’, the hauntingly beautiful closing credits of the movie, is enough to make me, an Irishman, homesick for Scotland.  But the raucous hilarity of ‘The Games’, an unashamed Caledonian romp which accompanied the chaotic Highland Games earlier in the movie, and closed the concert, was brilliant, not least because it afforded another opportunity to savour a duel between the pipes and the horns. Who won? Everybody. The composer and performers won the praise and affection of the audience. The audience won an evening of pure enjoyment. And Scotland’s learning communities will win much-needed funding.

Anecdote alert.

Back in 2002 and 2003, a creative approach to funding Community Learning and Development in Clackmannanshire coincided with an appetite for community learning outreach at the RSNO and the vision of saxophonist/composer/presenter/educator Paul Rissmann, resulting in musicians from the RSNO, including the charismatic and well-loved former principal trumpeter Marcus Pope, visiting the Wee County’s nursery schools, getting the wee ones making and enjoying music and putting on an end-of-year show based on the animal-based poetry picture books of children’s author Giles Andreae, including ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ and ‘Commotion in the Ocean’.  My own two children were at Sauchie Nursery School and benefited hugely from the experience.  I joined in with my violin.  A year later the funding had dried up and an unguarded remark by my wife resulted in me being approached to write music for another Andreae anthology, ‘Farmyard Hullabaloo’.  Unlike Paul, I wrote music for the whole book: every single poem.  Including the last one, where it is time for the farm animals to sleep and we bid them goodnight.  My setting for this was inspired by the mood and depth of feeling of my favourite Patrick Doyle piece: his setting of the ‘Non nobis, Domine’ in his music for Branagh’s Henry V. Over the next couple of years, I wrote similar Andreae-based shows for Clacks nurseries, including new complete versions of ‘Rumble’ and ‘Commotion’ and a completely new show, ‘Dinosaurs Galore’. These shows were the first time in my life that I was paid for music composition, so I can kid myself even now that I am a semi-professional composer.  Both Doyle’s ‘Non nobis’ and my ‘Sundown’ still bring a tear to my eye, for not entirely different reasons.  Incidentally, Paul’s attachment to the work of Andreae continues: his ‘Chimpanzees of Happy Town’ premiered earlier this year. So that, dear reader, is why RSNO outreach and Patrick Doyle’s music occupy a special place in my heart.