BBCSSO (live streaming), 26/11/2020

Ruggles : Angels

Seeger : Andante for string orchestra

Julia Perry : A Short Piece for Small Orchestra

Alvin Singleton : Cara Mia Gwen

Beethoven : Piano Concerto No. 3 (Isata Kanneh-Mason, piano)

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

Andrew Gourlay

The key item in this concert was, of course, the Beethoven concerto, as part of the Beethoven 250 celebrations.  However, since it was also Thanksgiving, the concert began with a selection of 20th Century American works, well off the beaten track and all the more interesting for it.  I knew the names of Carl Ruggles and Ruth Crawford Seeger, but Julia Perry and Alvin Singleton were completely new to me.  Furthermore, none of this was what might be termed celebratory music, it was all moody, intense and often sombre.

Ruggles was largely self-taught in music, a contemporary of Charles Ives, and like Ives, a musical explorer, pushing the boundaries of compositional style in a manner very little influenced by the prevailing Austro-German currents that dominated American music at the time up until the 20s or thereabouts.  Deeply self-critical, not much of his work remains, and he stopped composing almost completely in the late 40s.  Angels is therefore one of his last completed compositions, a brief, sober chorale for muted brass, played with quiet intensity by the four trumpets and three trombones of the BBCSSO.  

Ruth Crawford Seeger, best known for her hugely significant and influential work in the field of folk music, was also in her earlier days a member of the group of 'modernist' composers around Ives and Ruggles and, like Ruggles, was another largely self-taught composer.  The Andante is the slow movement of her String Quartet, written in 1931.  It predates the much better known Barber Quartet by a couple of years, but although there's no real relation between this Andante and the Barber Adagio, there is a strangely similar affect to it; the piece winds up through a slow piling up of string sound to a searing climax, and then dies down again.  Seeger's language is far more dissonant, and much more compact - it's a very short piece - but the emotional impact is peculiarly similar.

With Julia Perry, we move a generation closer; born in 1924, she was a fairly prolific composer, particularly of vocal music.  In the 50s, she spent several years in Europe, studying, like many other American composers, with Nadia Boulanger, and after her, with Luigi Dallapiccola.  Short Piece, however, fits in just before or at the very beginning of her European sojourn.  It is less reliant on the African-American influences which Perry drew on strongly in her early works, but not as experimental as some of her later works would be, remaining mostly rooted in tonality.  It's an anguished, nervous piece, making declamatory statements punctuated by percussion at the start, leavened by wistful, dreamy passages with prominent use of the winds, before anxiety quickly sets in once more, and rarely lets up.  

Alvin Singleton is still living, born in 1940 and also an African-American.  Like Perry, he spent a significant period in Europe - fourteen years, in fact - and was a student of Goffredo Petrassi who was, if anything, an even more avant-garde figure than Dallapiccola.  Cara Mia Gwen was written in 1993, a recollection of, but not, he has stated, a memorial to his recently deceased sister.  His orchestra is very divided, slow, distinct chords from brass and winds alternating with scurrying, agitated scales from the strings.  Like the balloons of a Venn diagram, they seem to drift together at times, overlapping slightly to create a new effect, before separating again into their discrete worlds.  It's an interesting sound world, that went on perhaps just a little too long for my taste, but worth hearing.

Isata Kanneh-Mason in concert
City Halls, Glasgow 26/11/2020 (screenshot)

Much was being made in the presentation of the Beethoven concerto of its model, Mozart's 24th Piano Concerto, which is one of his grandest, and in the same key.  That Beethoven did use it as a model is indisputable, just as he based the two previous concertos on Mozart, but the point of the 3rd Concerto is that this is where Beethoven broke the mould definitively.  We are no longer hearing a continuation, but a new development altogether.  Kanneh-Mason and Gourlay's relatively low-key interpretation of his piece, therefore, seemed somewhat counter-productive, pulling it back into the Classical design rather than reaching out towards the early-Romantic one.  The discretion was well handled, generally, with crisp, neat playing from the orchestra, while Kanneh-Mason has very good articulation well suited to piano writing that almost overflows with runs.  The first movement cadenza was a bit scrappy, and she does not appear to recover rapidly from a mistake, but will make a few in succession before her playing re-centres - something similar happened in the last movement - but the slow movement was lovely, and the final rondo danced along delightfully.

[Next : 29th November]