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MUSIC / Gathering of the clans: Raymond Monelle on the SCO under Alexander Gibson playing modern Scottish music in Edinburgh

Raymond Monelle
Tuesday 08 September 1992 23:02 BST
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There is, in truth, no Scottish Nationalist school in music. The reasons for this are social and political to a great extent, but there is also an artistic reason. Czech and Hungarian composers could draw on a body of folk tunes, which were very little known outside their countries; but Scottish traditional music was the common property of all European cultures, from early on, and it signified, not racial identity and national independence, but merely the picturesque, the exotic, the dusky twilight of mountain, loch and glen, peopled by hairy chieftains in kilt and sporran with their pipers and clansmen.

Scottish romantic composers, therefore, were unable to use their own tradition without verging on cheap buffoonery. When Alexander Campbell Mackenzie composed a bundle of imitation folksongs for his Scottish Concerto, he succeeded only in echoing the whisky-and-haggis travesties of the music-hall entertainer.

It was an excellent plan to mount five concerts of Scottish music at the Edinburgh Festival, covering the whole known history of the genre; and quite splendid to see the Usher Hall full to capacity for the final session, in which Mackenzie was joined by other romantics and moderns. The pianist Steven Osborne took a fluent and authoritative course through the Concerto, but neither he nor the conductor, Sir Alexander Gibson, could conceal its meandering and spasmodic quality. William Wallace's tone poem The Passing of Beatrice made no reference to the kilt-and-haggis tradition, but was a kind of deluxe imitation of Wagner's Tristan, stuck fast in harmonic mannerism and moderate tempo, a quaint bit of fustian.

There were two other concertos, James MacMillan's Veni, veni Emmanuel for percussion (given its world premiere by the SCO at the Proms last month), and Thea Musgrave's work for horn. The latter, with all its rigorous harmonic consistency and ametric subtlety, seemed direct and rhetorical alongside its companion, Barry Tuckwell making the most of its shreds of melody.

MacMillan, as everybody knows, is quite a new sort of animal. He speaks of religious devotion - the concerto is based on an Advent plainsong - and of political commitment, but his music has a Joycean quality, lurching from radical modernism to queasy common chords and simple gimmicks, not quite convincing in its artistic honesty, torn with a schizophrenic tension. He shows ingenuity in giving the soloist, Evelyn Glennie, plenty of virtuosic display but very little musical matter, for in some ways the various percussion instruments, pitched and unpitched, are a pagan clatter outside the walls of the ghostly cathedral where the orchestra repeats a devout cadence.

It was a relief, finally, to hear a bit of pure humbug in which the kilt and sporran flew free, the finale of Ian Whyte's ballet Donald of the Burthens. George MacIlwham marched on in full Highland regalia and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra whooped into a skirling dance.

Thinking back over the series of concerts, it is hard to avoid feeling that Scottish music has been a sporadic affair. The polyphonic composer of the 16th century, Robert Carver, and Corelli's pupil, John Clerk, were artists of strong personality and high gifts. But James Oswald, an 18th-century publisher, was not really a composer at all: his pretty songs sound all the same. His contemporary, the Earl of Kelly, however, was a very plausible symphonist. The songs and piano music of John Thomson and Hamish MacCunn in the 19th century demonstrate, perhaps, the predicament of the talented composer obliged to sound Scottish. And finally, Musgrave and MacMillan betoken the re-emergence towards the end of this century of a true Scottish genius, post-haggis and post-sporran, a real force in the greater world of music.

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