Town House, Inverness, 14 November 2008

Hannah Phillips (photo credit - David Charles)

MY FIRST lunchtime concert at the Town House was a banquet of chamber music composed or arranged for one of my favourite instruments, the clarsach or lever harp, and its larger cousin the concert or pedal harp. A shame, then, that outside the imposing Victorian Gothic windows the massed band of Pat Munro’s pneumatic drills were doing their darnedest to distract the audience. You could almost hear the collective effort of a hundred ears swivelling in order to focus on the music.

Treating the unscheduled and decidedly unwelcome percussion group with the contempt it deserved, Inverness-born Hannah Philips appeared unflurried as she sailed through the starter, Edward McGuire’s 1994 Prelude 14 for Clarsach. Originally commissioned for the 6th Year syllabus, it demonstrates the full range and subtlety of this, the more amenable of Scotland’s arguably indigenous musical instruments, the other being the Highland great pipe.

Happily, Phillips switched to the pedal harp with its stronger dynamic for Hindemith’s Sonata for Harp, as it was slightly more able to cope with the external cacaphony. Alas, the pneumatic drills were as a gentle accompaniment compared to the angle grinder which invaded Faure’s Impromptu and threatened to turn it into an endurance test for anyone with unpleasant memories of the dentist’s surgery.

Making a supreme effort to boost concentration to maximum it was still just possible to lose oneself in the sensuous, atmospheric tapestry of arpeggios and glissandi.

Mercifully, the angle grinders had completed their fell task by the time Phillips returned to the clarsach for a Scottish interlude, beginning with a tune with local connections, the late Donald Riddell’s Morag Haig Thomas and ending with a Patsy Seddon composition written for her niece.

Next up was Ivan Drever’s beautiful slow air Leaving Stoer, arranged by Phillips, with pibroch-inspired ornamentation, a late interpolation of Gordon Duncan’s Clueless, arranged by Catriona McKay, and a footapping pair of traditional dance tunes from St Kilda and Skye. Clueless may sound better on McKay’s extended Starfish clarsach, but on Phillips small instrument it had lost a lot of the compulsive quality and shine which it possesses when played on the pipes.

The last course of this lunchtime feast was Sally Beamish’s fascinating Awuya, commissioned by the University of Glasgow to mark the retirement of the Regius Professor of Zoology, Keith Vickerman. Here Phillips’ relative inexperience showed in her rather tentative, stiff approach to the African beats which surely demand to be pummelled vigorously and wholeheartedly into the soundboard of the pedal harp.

Inspired by the progress of the disease commonly known as Sleeping Sickness, the piece develops into a lullaby which is, poignantly, all that remains of an African tribe which was wiped out some sixty years ago by the disease.

In a brief speech of thanks before returning us to the workaday world, Inverness Arts Forum’s James Munro announced their recent award of Highland 2007 Legacy funds to commission a new work for Phillips from Eddie Maguire, to be performed at the Town House next September as part of the Homecoming 2009 celebrations. One to look forward to.

© Jennie Macfie, 2008

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