Echoes of Scotland

Echoes of Scotland Start time: 8pm Approximate running time: 75 minutes, no interval Please note all timings are approximate and subject to change Programme Felix Mendelssohn Symphony No 3, Scottish 1. Andante con moto. Allegro un poco agitato 2. Scherzo. Assai vivace 3. Adagio 4. Allegro vivacissimo – Allegro maestoso assai Sally Beamish Viola Concerto No 3, Under the Wing of the Rock Peter Maxwell Davies An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise (1985) What drew these three composers to writing music about Scotland? Harriet Smith finds out. Scotland has long inspired artists, writers and composers, which is no surprise, given its beauty, wildness and dramatic history. All those aspects certainly appealed to the Romantic soul of Mendelssohn, who first fell in love with the country when he was just 20. On visiting the Chapel of Holyrood House in Edinburgh he wrote: ‘Dust and ruins were everywhere and a marvellous sky was shining from all around. I now believe that this chapel has given me the first inspiration for my “Scottish Symphony”.’ In the same letter Mendelssohn jotted down the first 16 bars of the symphony. But he got no further, distracted by his travels to Italy and the ‘Italian’ Symphony. Twelve years passed before he returned to it, finally completing it in January 1842. There are a number of aspects of the Scottish Symphony that make it unusual, with the four movements running without a break, lending it a sense of unity in spite of the fact that each one is quite distinct in character and speed. A slow introduction sets the scene, its elegiac hymn-like opening contrasting with heartfelt string writing. This gives way to an endlessly restless Allegro. Relief comes as we turn to the major for the Scherzo, in which a bucolic theme is first heard in perky clarinet before being passed around the orchestra. The mood shifts again for the grave slow movement, with a songful melody set against pizzicato strings whose progress is interrupted by louring passages with the wind in march-like rhythms. For the finale Mendelssohn recaptures the incessant energy of the first- movement Allegro, only turning to the major in the closing moments. Sally Beamish is English-born but spent many years living in Scotland, where she moved in 1990. It was after this relocation that she began to make her mark as a composer, having started her professional career as a violist. Her gifts as a performer mean that her music is always beautifully fashioned for whatever forces she is writing and her inspiration can come from anything from literature to a friendship. Sally Beamish writes: ‘The starting point for this piece was a poem from Carmina Gadelica – Gaelic songs and prayers collected by Alexander Carmichael in the 19th century. The poem is called “Lullaby of the Snow” and is supposed to have been sung by a young mother to her child, fleeing the massacre at Glencoe. The story is that an officer heard the sound of a child crying, and a young soldier was despatched to kill it: “The soldier came upon the mother lulling her child to sleep, the sleep of death amid the snow. And it chanced that the gentle croon of music that the child’s mother was singing in the snow was the very same music as he had last heard when he left his kin and his home many a day and a year before that. The soldier wrapped the woman and her child in his plaid, gave them what food and drink he had, and left them, to overtake his comrades. On the way he slew a wolf and showed the officer the blood upon his sword. By the mercy of God and through the soldier’s compassion mother and child survived. Descendants of the child are still living, and the tradition is current and believed throughout the districts of Appin and Lochaber.’ “Under the Wing of the Rock” is a line from the lullaby – and refers not only to the crag which hides the mother and child, but also to the wings of angels and of the “Rock”, the “Son of Tears” Himself. The piece is inspired by Celtic song and psalm, beginning and ending with an extended, quasi-extemporary slow section for the solo viola. The central section, marked Allegro, is a restless counterpoint, drawing on rhythms and chants from Celtic working songs.’ Like Sally Beamish Peter Maxwell Davies was English-born but was drawn to Scotland, making his home on the islands of Orkney in 1971. Six years later he established the St Magnus Festival, which runs to this day, bringing together amateur talent and international stars. And there’s no doubt that Orkney’s particular qualities of light, land and sea influenced Davies’s own style, as his music moved away from the deliberately provocative works of the 1960s. An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise for orchestra and bagpipes, is one such, and he described it as a ‘picture-postcard recording of a wedding on Hoy’. In it, Davies conjures a sequence of scenes, beginning with some ferocious weather, before a procession of guests head for the kirk (church). The wedding band tunes up in distinctly amateur fashion and then there’s a sequence of dances which initially sound Scottish but briefly turn to American swing (in homage to the fact that the piece was written for the Boston Pops Orchestra) before returning to Scottish soil with jig, a reel and a rather worse-for-wear rendition of a strathspey. As the revellers tipsily make their way home, dawn breaks and, the sunrise is magically evoked by solo bagpipes, making their first appearance in the piece; Davies instructed that the piper should enter the hall clothed in full national dress and process up to the stage, creating a visual as well as a musical spectacle. © Harriet Smith Performers Timothy Ridout viola Alpesh Chauhan conductor BBC Symphony Orchestra Produced by the Barbican .

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