Scottish Chamber Orchestra: Death in a Nutshell
The Queen’s Hall - 11/11/21
Tonight’s concert is called ‘Death in a Nutshell’, the name of the last work on the programme, an SCO commission and a World Premiere by Ayrshire composer, Jay Capperauld. As has become the commendable practice, the programme is introduced by one of the players. Tonight it’s the turn of Louise Goodwin, the SCO’s Principal Percussionist. She tells us that the Capperauld is her favourite. “Well, it’s bound to be” she jokes, “because it’s the only one I’m in.” We laugh politely. In a concert featuring popular works by Mahler and Wagner, how can this rather strange-sounding new piece compete?
Without Louise, we embark on the three percussion-less works. The first is that oddity by Charles Ives, ‘The Unanswered Question’, where the very quiet legato strings, a small group of higher woodwinds and a solo trumpeter, standing on the far right of the balcony above the stage, play in different time signatures, apparently independently of each other. The piece, written in 1908 remains, certainly for me, a question that continues to be unanswered, though the programme provides a key to the meaning of the different orchestral sections.
We’re on securer ground with the Mahler, his ‘Adagietto’, the fourth movement from Symphony no 5, written in 1901. Mahler himself often conducted it as a stand-alone concert work, and its lush strings and harp melody may well be a love song for his wife Alma. It has become better known as the theme for a more obsessive love on the soundtrack to Visconti’s 1971 film ‘Death in Venice’.
The third work is another celebration of love, Wagner’s 1870 ‘Siegfried Idyll’, famously a birthday gift to his wife, Cosima, when it was performed to waken her by 15 musicians on the stairs of their Lake Lucerne villa. Again it’s beautifully played by the SCO strings, with woodwinds and horns coming to the fore as the piece progresses. James MacMillan, conducting tonight, keeps the tone hushed, building through a long controlled crescendo. It occurs to me that the Idyll, like the Mahler, is another unanswered question. These legato lines appear to strive for an ending but remain unresolved. It’s never been a favourite of mine although I would travel – and have travelled - a long way to hear Wagner operas. Only for a few moments when the horns play towards the end is there the kind of Wagnerian excitement which I enjoy. By that stage I’m hoping that the cook is ready with a well-deserved breakfast for Cosima and the musicians!
Perhaps three slow quiet string-dominated works one after the other is too much of a good thing. Apart from the fiercely squeaking winds in the Ives, it’s after eight o’clock before we even hear a mezzo-forte from the orchestra. However, all of that is soon to change.
Louise Goodwin is joined on the platform by another percussionist, Ally Kelly, with a huge array of conventional and not-so-conventional sound-effects. She told us that she enjoyed having a legitimate excuse to clank beer-bottles in the back row of the orchestra and to bring her Ikea hammer into work. This is no exaggeration.
There are six movements in Capperauld’s work, each of them representing a crime scene. He has been influenced by Frances Glessner Lee’s art-work Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, miniature recreations in the form of a doll’s house of twenty real-life scenes of unexplained death. These date from the 1940s and 50s and are still used in Baltimore as a teaching aid for students of forensic science. Illustrations of the nine scenes given a musical representation here are provided in the online programme on the SCO’s website.
Like most of the audience I studied these strange retro photographs with some puzzlement, but once the work started, there was far too much of interest on the platform to ponder them further. ‘Malleus Dei’, the first movement starts with a cacophony of sounds: Goodwin, yes with Ikea hammer, bashes away at the piece of wood, the full force of the winds play loudly in jagged rhythms. The second movement, representing the murder in the kitchen, starts with a quiet humming as if of drones. There are spooky noises and subdued wails from the winds, and Ally Kelly makes eerie noises with brushes on his drums. Despite its oddity, there is a clear differentiation between the sound pictures of the movements.
The jazzy third movement is my favourite with “Wah wahs” on the muted trumpet, followed by a solo on alto saxophone by Lewis Banks (I’d been looking forward to this since I heard him practising before the concert). The beer bottles, complete with labels are clanked together, and there’s a frenzied solo on rock-style drum-kit, played of course by the male percussionist (though unlike most rock and jazz drummers he’s not allowed to indulge himself!). Xylophone and horn, with winds playing their highest notes, dominate the fourth movement, while the most horrific crime scene, the murder/suicide of a family provided a very loud and dissonant fifth movement. During the last movement Alison Greene puts down her bassoon to pick up a newspaper, as do the other winds at the right of the back row. Fear not, this isn’t a commentary but another sound-effect as they rustle the papers. Falling leaves perhaps.
James MacMillan calmly keeps all this variety under control. It’s great fun and a terrific performance. Jay Capperauld, a tall thirty-two-year-old, is obviously delighted by the well-deserved tumultuous applause.
In a concert which explored existence, love and death, death certainly provided the most entertainment. So there may be hope for all of us!
