'Homecoming' has been a marketing portmanteau in Scotland this year, timed to coincide with the 250th anniversary of Robert Burns' birth. The idea has been to attract expatriates to return and celebrate the culture and heritage in all kinds of diverse ways.
Tonight's concert was the SCO's contribution. For the Edinburgh performance, at least, it was a kind of meta-homecoming. Both Leighton and Harper taught at Edinburgh University, and there was a tangible sense of reconnection abroad in the audience with old friends and cherished memories.
One treads carefully, then, as an observer rather than participant in this social dimension. Nevertheless, my attention was immediately drawn to a sentence in the programme note about Leighton, arguing that his work should not be regarded as 'provincial or parochial'. What does that mean? Why would it matter? The easy answer to the first question frames provincialism as the country cousin of kitsch. On further thought, though, it is more of an inadequate term for a deficit in intensity, the radiance that masters possess and aspiring masters covet. Either way, to the extent that it matters at all, it is as a device of measurement in an immeasurable milieu.
The term can also call attention to a certain geographical incongruity, still intangible, which in this instance can be ascribed to Leighton's experience of studying in Italy with Petrassi. The result seems to be a firm determination not to sound English! A stately fugue opens the work, attractively voiced on the deep sonorities of the lower strings. As it builds in intensity, a sense of familiarity kicks in: the prolonged opening arc of Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste, curiously re-voiced in Leighton's harmonic language. 'Curious' because that language is neither so conservative as to afford the reliable stresses and resolutions of diatonic harmony, nor so radical as to reformulate that dynamism by other, riskier means as Bartok does. After a lively pizzicato scherzo, the concluding finale similarly draws attention to its debts: this time Shostakovich. Overtly, the opening heavily-dotted theme borrows from the fifth symphony; there are more subtle echoes, too, of the eighth quartet. The worry here is that there is a sense that the composer is attempting to borrow the hard-won emotional content invested by Shostakovich. In that respect, the 'provincial' label provides debt relief, so to speak: one can accept the sincerity of the gesture in its own terms, and simply enjoy a sonorous performance of a nicely-crafted work celebrating the virtue of doing simple things well.
James MacMillan's Tryst is a similarly early work, and similarly there are audible debts in the background—but MacMillan already possesses the radiance. One can smile knowingly at the hints of Messiaen and Copland, at the same time relishing the confident intuitions that transform an ostensibly simple romantic lyric—William Soutar's poem 'Tryst'—into an intoxicating expression of eldritch eroticism. There is a certain derangement of the senses suggested in the poem, and in translating to the musical medium it is as though MacMillan borrows Messiaen’s birds and invests them with a twist—but just a twist—of Edgar Allan Poe. At the heart of the work is a simple melody, worked initially as a folk song by MacMillan and revisited in several works. Here, it is impressively rendered as a shimmering marmoreal slab in the mould of Messiaen’s thickened line, counterpointed, rather than accompanied, by complementary lines that end up not quite meeting—a final gesture, reminiscent of Ives, that elegantly captures the elusiveness of the unnamed other in the poem.
The bearings of Edward Harper's Symphony no. 2 are uncertain in a different way. Having inspected the symphonic credentials of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies last time out, one might ask a similar question of Harper, and find a different answer–which is to find that the work is nearer in genre to the oratorio. It is scored for chorus and solo baritone in addition to the supplemented chamber orchestra, and comprises five movements—four to texts, with the opening Overture taken by the orchestra alone. At its core is a narrative drawn from life and tragic death, with an entirely modern dimension involving irreconcilable conflict being transcended by the gesture of organ donation.
With bitter irony, Harper's own struggle with cancer impinged on the composition process, and the work was premiered in 2006 while incomplete. This evening's performance, in turn, took the opportunity to redeem that occasion while regretting that the originally-scheduled third symphony, commissioned to the Homecoming theme on Robert Burns, lay incomplete at Harper’s death earlier this year.
Attended by so much grimness, it is perhaps no surprise that the sunniest, most attractive part of the score is his setting of Walt Whitman’s poem 'Miracles'. It is no coincidence, I think, that the lyricism of its prosody lends itself to vocal writing in a way that pointed up the challenges posed by the other texts selected. Ron Butlin’s poem 'Them, not us', commissioned for the work, is harsh, stark and declamatory, and difficult to break down into symphonic argument. William Barnes' Dorset dialect sits uneasily on the trained voice, while the Epilogue's text, an anglicized dona nobis pacem, sits uneasily with the Jewish/Palestinian theme.
Standing in at the last minute for the indisposed Leigh Melrose, baritone Alexander Robin Baker made a good fist of the Whitman movement in particular, while the SCO contributed a characteristically committed and taut performance under Garry Walker's baton. Walker brings an engagingly youthful persona to the stage, and an obvious command to the scores. I'd suggest he work on his pre- and post-performance presence, though—just now it seems a little apologetic, and I can't imagine why.
Photo: Edward Harper by Ian Rutherford
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