Music

Nordic Music Journeys

RSNO Centre, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

four stars

On paper the result was Sweden 2 Scotland 1, but Saturday’s three hour-long concerts felt more like a score draw (pun intended).

Hosted by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and organised in partnership with the Swedish Composers’ Society (FST) with funding from Sweden’s Performing Rights Society (STIM), these adventures in new music were the first steps in a much longer journey this year. During 2024, Nordic Music Days will be part of the St Magnus Festival in Orkney and Aberdeen’s sound programme and have a weekend festival in Glasgow at the end of October.

On the eve of its latest tour to continental Europe, Scotland’s national orchestra welcomed Gothenburg’s Gageego! and our own Hebrides Ensemble to its Glasgow home to showcase works written in the last decade, and mostly within the last few years.

Cellist William Conway’s Hebrides Ensemble were a string trio for Oliver Searle’s Harbour Dreams, from his Dalriada, and Betrayal by Orkney’s Gemma MacGregor – an interlude from her opera, The Story of Magnus Erlendsson, which has a libretto by former Herald columnist Ron Ferguson. Those relatively conventional pictorial works were presented alongside electro-acoustic music by Fraser MacBeath and Finn O’Hare that made use of field recordings, solos and duos for violinist Emily Davis and Conway himself and one by Jane Stanley for Nordic Music Days organiser Andy Saunders on natural horn that accompanied viola player Asher Zaccardelli reading a letter by Lord Kelvin, who played the same instrument himself.

If there was a thoughtful programmatic flow to that sequence, the ten pieces by Swedish composers were more of a selection box. The electro-acoustic recordings featured ranged from the ominous industrial or dockyard noises of Mirjam Telly’s Apparitions to a Gothic soundscape by Sune Mattias Emanuelsson, with Scots-accented poetry by Anthony McVeigh, by way of live mixing of Lars Brondum’s Time’s Arrow that made full use of the room’s acoustic.

The virtuoso players of Gageego! demonstrated their familiarity with extended techniques on their instruments on the other seven works, particularly pianist Marten Landstrom, who was as busy inside the Steinway as on its keyboard. Many of the pieces were excerpts from larger works, starting with Benjamin Staern’s Hilma Scenes, recycled from an opera project, and including the opening and closing sections of Mika Pelo’s psycho-geographical tour of Berlin, Abandoned. It, alongside other pieces showcased, also owed much to the Covid pandemic, culminating in the mood-swings of Madeleine Isaksson’s Capsuled Time, performed by the full septet. Those recent years will surely come to be recognised as ones that, paradoxically, brought creative minds across the world together as a consequence of the shared experience of isolation.