Music
Stevenson Winds, RCS, Glasgow
Michael Tumelty
Four stars
WELL, I don’t know what the composer thought, or the assessment Heather Nicoll, head of woodwind in the RCS might have made of her students’ performances of the music of James MacMillan on Friday, but I have to say I was deeply impressed by what I witnessed and heard from the Stevenson Winds.
A range of students on a combination of instruments from three alto saxes to clarinet with voice, to wind quintet, solo oboe, soprano sax and piano, and another quintet with cello, percussion and conductor, performed seven of the composer’s smaller numbers, many of them familiar to older listeners (ahem) but most of them probably new to the young players. MacMillan, now an honorary visiting professor who, I gather, is establishing another new connection with the RCS, was present.
These short pieces are beauties. Many of them, including Untold, After the Tryst (weirdly wonderful on soprano sax), From Galloway and Visions of Hoy, reflect MacMillan’s Celtic roots, of course; but the magic was not just the technical and stylistic command of the young students. Equally striking was the superbly-idiomatic quality of the playing of these musicians, who seemed to have tasted and absorbed the culture, colour, flavour, texture and feel of MacMillan’s language. They could bend, breathe and sigh notes that might make you weep. The accent was dead right. Everything they did, in other words, sounded utterly authentic to my ears. But the one that knocked me over was In Angustiis 2, MacMillan’s post-9/11 reflection, here played in the dark by oboist Irena Klimach, and an emotional arrow straight to the heart.
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