City Halls, Glasgow, 19 January 2008

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (photo - BBC SSO)

IN HIS INTRODUCTORY comments on the world premiere of Ronald Stevenson’s Praise of Ben Dorain, a new symphonic work inspired by the great Gaelic poem of that name, musicologist John Purser highlighted the contrast between Duncan Ban MacIntyre’s lyrical 18th century descriptions of the eponymous mountain, teeming with fauna and flora, and its reduction to a relative “desert” today.

There might not be much that music can do about environmental despoilation, but symbolically at least the mountain bloomed again at Celtic Connections’ opening weekend, as the 250-year-old Gaelic words and music of an illiterate Argyll gamekeeper took their place on the City Halls stage, in a performance featuring the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the Scottish Opera Chorus, plus the Glasgow University Chapel Choir and the Edinburgh Singers.

For Stevenson, who turns 80 this year, the concert marked the fruition of a journey that first began at the 1962 Edinburgh Festival, when the then 35-year-old composer presented a score of his celebrated piano work Passacaglia on DSCH to its dedicatee, Dmitri Shostakovich. Their meeting took place at a reception hosted by the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, who suggested to Stevenson that he compose some kind of setting for Ban MacIntyre’s poem, which MacDiarmid had recently translated.

During the music’s gradual evolution, Stevenson’s ideas grew to incorporate sections of both MacDiarmid’s text and the original Gaelic, sung by two different choirs, along with other Gaelic material relating to Ben Dorain and Ban MacIntyre, plus a closing contemporary verse by Glasgow poet David Betteridge.

The music itself was broadly based on the poem’s original piobaireachd structure and accompanying melody, which Stevenson deployed somewhat like a fugue, elaborating successively on its urlar or theme in a succession of stunningly beautiful instrumental passages, including some especially sublime writing for strings and brass.

The vocal interleaving of Gaelic and English also proved effective, although the latter choirs’ approved classical-style diction sounded gratingly plummy and perjink in this context. (Mind you, Scottish Opera’s Gaelic pronunciation probably wouldn’t withstand expert scrutiny.)

Opening with two child soloists and ending with paired adult voices, the 45-minute piece gracefully evoked the life cycles celebrated in Ban MacIntyre’s poem, with the mountain invoked as mother to all the creation it supports, a hymnal aspect stirringly reflected at times in the singing, in between the orchestra’s lush pastoral sequences. And Stevenson’s music offered in turn a deeply-felt celebration of Ban MacIntyre’s writing, and the culture that engendered it, framed by the composer’s own unique artistic dialogue between past and present.

With the concert going out live on Radio Scotland, the first half expanded on the theme of poetry and music’s close kinship in Gaelic culture, with some excellent solo and ensemble singing from Kenna Campbell, James Graham, Gillebrìde MacMillan and Norrie MacIver, including several other Ban MacIntyre compositions. In particular, Graham’s rendition of the exquisite love-song Oran da chèile nuadh pòsda (A song to his bride) was utterly mesmerising: little wonder that he’s the reigning Mod gold medallist.

Special mention must also be made of the BBCSSO’s terrific opening romp through Malcolm Arnold’s Tam O’Shanter Overture, which they attacked with thrilling gusto, under the evening’s conductor James Grossmith, kicking off a landmark night in aptly exultant style.

© Sue Wilson, 2008

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