Scottish Ensemble
Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh
The Scottish Ensemble have built a reputation over the past 56 years as a group that continue to push the boundaries of what audiences can expect from an evening of classical music. Presenting programmes that mix the standards with work by some of the most exciting new voices in the repertoire, they remain accessible to their audiences by playing in venues ranging from rural village halls to the Barbican. Shifting Patterns, a recent collaboration with the contemporary composer Anna Meredith and animator Ewan Jones Morris, typifies their work.
To set the tone of the evening the audience at Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall was first treated to Henryk Górecki’s Quasi Una Fantasia Op. 78. The first two movements have a jagged darkness and a sense of depression to them similar to Bernard Herrmann’s work with Alfred Hitchcock, the strings of the ensemble attacking each note relentlessly. Things loosened up with the other two movements as the influence of Beethoven on Górecki’s work took hold, leading to something much more melodic with even a quote of Silent Night (albeit quite a dark one) towards the end.
Then came music by Anna Meredith, which is more often played in a nightclub than a concert hall. Meredith’s influences include techno, electronic music, experimental rock and pop. Over the last few years, however, she has increasingly collaborated with classical groups, not least the Scottish Ensemble on Anno. Most of tonight’s pieces were reworked by Richard Jones from the Ligeti quartet, who has previously created skilled classical versions of works fromVarmint, as well as Meredith’s other albums.
In Honeyed Words, the strings sway and swing to the rhythms of the music. This allowed Ewan Jones Morris to create animations that highlighted the pulsing energy of the music, though it did look worryingly similar to the shapes that used to pop up on your screen on Windows Media Player in the early 2000s. Morris was not helped by the fact that the screen looked so small, rendering it something of an add-on instead of an integral part of the evening.
Taking its name from an old English word for a swarm, the next piece, Tuggemo, had a droning quality to it similar to the sound of a hive. Morris fully exploited this with an animation of bees crawling across the screen and arranging themselves into a honeycombed uniformity similar to an M.C. Escher picture. Again, though, it power was weakened by a screen too small to showcase it properly, leaving the immersive potential largely unrealised.
In the next piece, Chorale, Shill, Haze and Blackfriars, Morris started to blend his two previous types of animation now with a mix of lines and shapes, which paired well with the music. The strings were the stars of the show – the impassioned violins and full bodied cellos bringing each piece to life. Occasionally the pulsating rhythms of Meredith’s techno-inspired work alluded to the Baroque grandeur and energy of Vivaldi – and the effect was visceral: I would have happily been on my feet dancing to it. More’s the pity then, that it was not performed in a sweaty room packed with people going crazy to the sounds of the strings, surrounded by the projections. Maybe the ensemble need to play less concert halls and more festivals.
Shifting Patterns was rounded off by Nautilus, inspired by the lapping waves on the shore in Meredith’s hometown of South Queensferry, along with the stamping of her feet along the beach. Similarly full of high-voltage energy, it was the perfect way to round off the evening.