Savourna Stevenson
Reid Hall
The University of Edinburgh Music School provide a wonderful service to Edinburgh's musical life with their regular free lunchtime concerts on Tuesdays and Fridays in the Autumn and Spring terms.These are often of national and indeed international quality and are consistently well attended. Occasionally they provide an outstanding performance; today was one of those occasions.
Savourna Stevenson comes from a very musical family. Her father was Ronald Stevenson, the well known Scottish composer, and her sister is Gerda Stevenson, a very fine Scottish actress and poet. Savourna took up the clarsach (Scottish harp) at an early age. She recalled her first concert, performing aged 15 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, along with Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span, a concert I suspect I may have been present at! Savourna has also trained on the classical harp (pedal harp), and has composed for both. She says her objective is to break through barriers between classical, folk, world music and jazz. Her compositions have been widely used, not only on the classical platform, but in film and television, including in Sex and the City, which of course also famously used Mairi Campbell and David Francis’ version of Auld Lang Syne.
Her concert today displayed all those skills, she played all her own compositions and displayed a wide range of musical influences and above all brought not only great skill in her playing but great communication and empathy with the audience. She was in short a delight to watch and to listen to. She began with an arrangement of an old Irish pipe tune by Willy Clancy, as she observed the clarsach is a Gaelic instrument, common to Ireland and Scotland. It was a delightful lilting tune and was followed by an arrangement of a fine Scots traditional tune, Logan Water, which Burns among others wrote words for. It was followed by An Bauchaille (The Herdsman), commissioned by Iona Abbey to celebrate Columba. Finally the Irish and Scots tunes were concluded with The Source, the first movement of her composition Tweed Journey inspired by the Scottish Borders ballad Thomas the Rhymer.In all these works she conveyed the importance of Scottish music and culture.
The final four works showed her versatility and wide musical influences. Mexican Monterey came from a work commissioned by the BBC to accompany a programme on Robert Louis Stevenson's travels, and is inspired by the South American harp tradition. Dawn Earth, Wind and Water is very influenced by the Kora, the African harp. Blue Orchid was a jazz and blues influenced work commissioned by Granada TV for a programme on orchids, and Book Worm which concluded the programme is a new work commissioned by the BBC for their book programme and will be on her new CD in the Spring.
Souvarna got a great reception from the big audience at the Reid Hall and delighted us with an encore of another new tune. She showed us that the clarsach is an important part of Scottish musical heritage and that she is a great performer as well as a fine composer. Her father would have been very proud, as was her mother who was in the audience today. We were all very sure that we had seen a great composer and performer. The Edinburgh Music Review will publish details of her concerts in future.
