The Hermes Experiment
The Hug & Pint, Glasgow
Keith Bruce
five stars
BETTING on the tastes of judging panels for cultural awards is even more of a mug's game than the horses, but if you have money to burn, slap it down on The Hermes Experiment to win the Young Artists category in the prestigious Royal Philharmonic Society Awards this week. The singular combination of harp, clarinet, soprano and double bass has created the most interesting chamber group to appear in recent times, and the undoubted stars of Matthew Whiteside’s The Night With . . . season in this West End pub basement.
As perhaps was inevitable given the group’s line-up, it has fashioned a bespoke repertoire for itself, and this first date of a three-night Scottish tour began with a set of virtuoso pieces that are now clearly core repertoire for them. Three of them showcased the singing of Heloise Werner, beginning with Emily Hall’s verbal cleverness and culminating in harpist Anne Denholm’s arrangement of Meredith Monk’s challenging Double Fiesta. Both clarinetist Oliver Pashley and bassist Marianne Schofield also contributed arrangements to the evening, the latter of an Anna Meredith setting of Philip Ridley, originally written for counter-tenor and piano.
All this highly accomplished and hugely entertaining music was only one side of the quartet’s personality however. The stuff they knew led the enthralled, packed room towards the truly experimental. Ruari Paterson-Achenbach’s To Sleep On it was the winning selection from The Night With’s 2019 Call for Scores, and the submission was a graphic score that gave each individual player pictures as well as a few notes to interpret, carefully constructed in four movements, culminating in a love duet for harp and voice.
Its startling inventiveness was surpassed, however, by the concert’s other new commission, by Matthew Grouse. Daily Rituals was a work of electro-acoustic music theatre in three acts: Autopilot, Verisimilitude, and ‘and what do you do after that?’. Using mime as well as the mundane utterances of flat-sharing, there was four-part choral singing alongside instrumental skill, and many recognisable tropes of common humanity that had the audience in stitches. This winning combination of composer and group produced contemporary music that recognised no boundaries whatsoever.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here