A month-long residency with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra by dynamic Finnish violinist and conductor Pekka Kuusisto is ending in a programme featuring two UK premieres – a violin concerto written for him by Anna Clyne and a song cycle composed by Helen Grime for the other featured soloist, soprano Ruby Hughes. Add in fiddler Aidan O’Rourke duetting with Kuusisto on some of the folk tunes used by Clyne in her five-movement work, Time and Tides, and an interval set on the decks by Andy Levy, AKA DJ Dolphin Boy, and it looked like a long and rather eclectic evening. Instead it flowed with an easy sense of purpose.
Grime sets three poems about happiness, Larkin’s joy in springtime, Coming, finding perhaps surprising company in verses by American writers Sandra Cisneros and Jane Hirshfield. Grime’s music matches the words – becoming more abstract through the sequence, but Hughes was in complete command of the work’s tonal and dynamic range, the drama of the delicious vocabulary and the kinship to improvisatory jazz. With just 14 string players, Kuusisto’s violin was a spare foil to her voice.
The Clyne concerto is a delightfully diverse work drawing specifically on transcriptions of four folk melodies from England, Finland, Scotland and North America. Whistling was required of Kuusisto alongside his solo line at the start and humming and singing from the whole orchestra at the end. The second movement is not so much a scherzo as the soundtrack for the chase scene in a western, developing from a series of Bach-like variations, with frenetic flutes and horns as well as the soloist’s virtuoso role. The slow movement featured chords from the reeds that mirrored the sound of the harmonium Kuusisto chose to play in his preceding trad session with O’Rourke.
Framing all this was the concert-opening Lighthouse by Estonian Erkki-Sven Tüür, its differing perspectives also referencing Bach and evocative of the searchlight on the waves, and Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus, which brought the evening to an almost-mainstream conclusion. The birdsong recordings that are the “soloists” of this concerto seemed more prominent than they can be with a symphony orchestra, and the dialogue with nature all the more effectively realised for that.
The barrier between the classical world and traditional and popular music is increasingly porous. That this concert, including two brand new works, attracted an enthusiastic near-capacity audience of the widest age range speaks glowingly of where the orchestra has arrived in its 50th anniversary year.
• Concert repeated at City Halls, Glasgow, 15 March.
