SCO Chorus raises the ramparts at Stirling Castle

Capperauld was in the audience again – as was his librettist, Hebridean poet Niall Campbell – for this coda to that season, and their contribution, commissioned by the SCO Chorus, was a highlight of an evening that showcased the remarkable abilities of this choir under director Gregory Batsleer.

Campbell’s The Night Watch borrows its title from Rembrandt, but is personal and intimate, 14 lines about the revelations of new parenthood in which Capperauld exploits the stratospheric pure-toned sopranos of the choir alongside a fine tenor soloist, and sets the sound of shushing with memorable skill.

Jay Capperauld (Image: free)

The new piece was followed by Paul Drayton’s startling arrangement of The Lark Ascending, with violinist Gordon Bragg’s obligato top line really playing second fiddle to the vocal arrangement of the strings part. The sustained long chord at the start, with superbly martialled overlapping breathing, gave notice of a performance that added further layers to an already intricate work, with solo voices across the choir as well and the use of a dozen lines sampled from the George Meredith poem that originally inspired Vaughan Williams.

Elsewhere the eyes of the composers were in the heavens in a more liturgical way, beginning with a setting of two verses of Matthew’s Gospel from James MacMillan’s Strathclyde Motets which might have been composed to be performed in the restored Great Hall of Stirling Castle, so apt was the rich sound of the choir in the space, vocal peals of bells preceding the closing Alleluia.

READ MORE

All you need to know about Scottish Opera's new season

The acoustic was further exploited with the placing of cellist Philip Higham in the minstrel’s gallery at the rear of the room for John Taverner’s Orthodox prayer Svyati on which the resonance of the basses at the end was especially impressive.

Roxanna Panufnik’s Kyrie after Byrd made explicit the relationship between contemporary and ancient devotional music that is inherent in the older composers that preceded her, while the setting of Psalm 150 that followed drew on younger compositional talent in the choir’s own ranks, that of tenor Andrew Carvel.

Higham and Bragg were joined by fellow stalwarts of the SCO’s instrumentalists, Amira Bedrush-McDonald and Brian Schiele, to complete the string quartet that accompanied the choir in Tarik O’Regan’s The Ecstasies Above, a 2006 setting of Edgar Allan Poe’s Israfel, about the unattainability of angelic beauty.

His tripartite structure – the quartet, a vocal octet, and the full choir – reflected MacMillan’s masterly setting of naming of the Trinity that had begun a programme that was as elevated in execution as it was in its inspirations.