The Lord of the Strings

Sunday Herald

Children’s Classic Concerts
Usher Hall, Edinburgh by Christopher Lambton

Is it really 10 years since Children’s Classic Concerts had the audacity to offer real live orchestral music to children? The idea is simplicity itself: a big orchestra and real music, the only concession to tender youth being brevity. It has been a success from the start – a Scottish innovation that has spawned imitators in England and overseas. CCC has had its ups and downs, though.

I am one of those grumpy critics who has ignored screams of pleasure from his own children in order to fulminate against silly lighting or ill-prepared theatrical gestures. But no-one ever said it would be easy. It has been a challenge: one problem being to devise a format that allows children to enjoy the concerts when they are three and still to enjoy them when they are thirteen.

In this concert CCC comes of age triumphantly. Conductor and artistic director Christopher Bell has found an excellent balance between chat and music. The highlight is a new commission from Savourna Stevenson, Misterstourworm and the Kelpie’s Gift, a brilliantly coloured showpiece based on a fusion of folk tales narrated with gusto by Lord of the Rings star Billy Boyd. I was prepared to harrumph when Boyd later mounted the podium and pretended to conduct the William Tell Overture but, in truth, I laughed loud.


RSNO : Magic & Monsters

Scotsman

Classical review • Carol Main

****

Usher Hall, Edinburgh

AT A time when the search is on to identify new audiences for classical music, does it matter whether the children at the RSNO’s Magic and Monsters concert eventually metamorphose into grown-up enthusiasts? For now, they are simply having fun.

Skilfully presented by Christopher Bell and Children’s Classic Concerts, Sunday afternoon’s performance produced cheering, whistling and stamping of feet. Magic was conjured up from Dukas’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice (in its jaunty Disney makeover), and the hall’s very own monster took a starring role in the big-tune bits from Saint-Saëns’s Organ Symphony.

There was also an opportunity for the young audience to sample some of the best music being written now, alongside the familiar favourites. Howard Shore’s The Lord of the Rings was a popular choice, but more satisfying by far was Savourna Stevenson’s Misterstourworm and the Kelpie’s Gift, vividly narrated in its premiere performance by Billy Boyd, the Hobbit star of the aforementioned film.

Stevenson’s first score for a full orchestra is a mixture of Greek legend, Scottish myth and Orcadian folklore, conveyed with instrumental storytelling that has a special, intuitive magic all of its own.


Children’s Classics

The Herald

Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow • Michael Tumelty ****

christopherBillyRSNOSavourna Stevenson should be feeling extremely pleased with herself as she emerges from a weekend that doubtless was tinged with nervousness. By any criteria, her first full exercise for symphony orchestra, Misterstourworm, a tale of myth and legend, of magic and monsters, woven around the creation of Scottish islands from the west coast to Orkney, can only be judged a resounding success.

Though in the early stages of composition there was the explicit precedent and inspiration of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, by the time of completion of the project, a two-year venture funded by a Creative Scotland award, very little of that original impetus remained, barring a close reference in the theme associated with Coran, the hero of the tale, woven with characteristic elan by playwright Stuart Paterson. Indeed, in so far as there is a didactic element to Peter and the Wolf, Stevenson’s often-beautiful and exciting composition is in a different sphere to Prokofiev’s yarn, concentrating more, as it does, on colour and atmosphere than on characterisation through individual instruments.

The orchestral imagery that permeated her music was impressionistic and, in at least one instance, where tumbling woodwind scales magically represented the water streaming off the back of a kelpie, ravishing and exquisite.

True, Misterstourworm, conducted by Christopher Bell as the centrepiece of a rather overlong children’s concert, and played with gusto by the RSNO, sounded as though it could have used another rehearsal for familiarisation, and it cried out for visual imagery to clarify the progress of the story, narrated with increasing relish by Billy Boyd; but it is a splendid addition to the repertoire which, one hopes, will circulate and return.


Going back to her roots

The Herald

Savourna Stevenson is about to premiere her first orchestral work, a Scots tale of monsters and legend. By Michael Tumelty

BY her own admission, Savourna Stevenson is feeling “a bit desolate” at the moment. With the completion of Misterstourworm – The Kelpie’s Gift, her first piece for full symphony orchestra, the renowned harpist and composer has reached the end, or rather is approaching the climax, of a project that has dominated and permeated her creative life for two years.

She is in that peculiar hiatus between having put the last dots to her new work, which will be premiered this weekend by the RSNO, and hearing what the music actually sounds like. Nothing there, you might think, that hasn’t been experienced by every composer who pours his or her thoughts into a score, then wonders if the music will come off the page and spring into life. Yet, for Stevenson, whose new, 14-minute orchestral work will be played in Magic and Monsters, the first concerts of the new season by the Children’s Classics Concerts organisation, it represents a major move in her career, one of those “hold your breath” moments.

On the one hand, it’s a new step, and she has done “nothing like it before”. On the other, it is a conscious attempt to “pull together” many of the multiple strands of the music that has featured throughout her diverse career.

A narrative tale with music, built around the legend of the creation of Orkney and the Hebridean islands, Misterstourworm is the fruit of a Creative Scotland Award, whose handsome financing of (pounds) 25,000 has enabled Stevenson to undertake the “once in a lifetime” opportunity of moving into the territory of the symphony orchestra, and taking with her her long-time associates and close collaborators, writer Stuart Paterson, who has scripted the children’s tale, and actor Billy Boyd, who has gone on to big- screen fame through his Hobbit character in Lord of the Rings, and who is stepping off the publicity machine for the third film to return to his native Scotland and narrate the story in the two performances this weekend.

The tale of monsters, myths, and legends, which is written to through-composed music with narration, draws extensively on Scottish music influences and is consciously trying to avoid the Peter and the Wolf syndrome by resisting characterisation through individual instruments.

There is another element that, for Stevenson, adds an edge to the new experience of writing for symphony orchestra. She seems consciously not to make a big deal of it, but her conversation is peppered with references to her father, the veteran classical composer, Ronald Stevenson. “I suppose I’ve been running away all my life from what my father’s been doing; and now here I am doing it.”

She has, of course, shown the score of Misterstourworm to the great man, who, she says, has expressed nothing but support. That he is a major influence on her musical life is beyond question. As the musician in a family of three children – with actress Gerda her sister, and violin-maker Gordon her brother – Savourna Stevenson has always been conscious of the presence of her composer father.

Even as she became established in working with front-line names in traditional music, including Aly Bain, June Tabor, Martin Carthy, Fairport Convention, and Eddi Reader, she was aware that she wanted resolutely to plough her own furrow, through her compositions and what she calls her “quest for the harp”.

It goes way back. “I was desperate to find my own musical niche as a teenager. I lived with a fear: can I do things? I also lived with a demand for perfectionism from my father. Though I was always encouraged, and always received helpful advice, I guess I kicked away from it.

“I’ve spent a lot of time trying to make the harp a contemporary instrument. I never wanted it to be a museum piece, which is why you’ll find me doing things like pitch bends or strumming the strings.”

That questing approach to the instrument and the music has led Stevenson to the remarkable tapestry of musical diversity with which she is indelibly associated.

With the encouragement of musical colleagues, she has “dared to go bigger and further, to learn about other instruments and work in different areas”.

She has worked with wind and brass instruments in a jazz context. She’s worked extensively with Womad, the World of Music, Art, and Dance. For almost 20 years she has worked in music theatre, allied to scriptwriter Stuart Paterson, in shows at the Royal Lyceum and Dundee Rep. She is closely associated with music education.

And she has composed. Her Tweed Journey, the tracing of a musical river from source to sea, was commissioned by Judy Steel. In a number of her commissions, she has worked with words by Robert Louis Stevenson and John Buchan. In her String Quintet, which has developed an off-the-wall life of its own in a very peculiar context, she used the classical format of the string quartet, plus harp.

What she wanted to do in her Creative Scotland project, which has resulted in Misterstourworm, was “to dare myself to pull these strands together, write for orchestra, and to produce something not concentrating on the harp as an instrument”.

She wrote the piece on keyboard, with advice from a composer colleague, then orchestrated it with further advice and help from a friend who is a professional orchestrator working in the film business.

She found it a massive task, which entailed setting aside other work, and isolating herself from many of her other musical interests. The exercise was complicated by the fact she has a young family, including an 18-month-old baby. How did she cope? “Stress and panic,” she says, unhesitatingly.

As demanding as she has found the project, it has clearly whetted her appetite. She hopes the new piece will be a “useful” addition to the repertoire, would be intrigued to write for orchestra again, and has a strong inclination also to write for voices, particularly choral voices.

She also has an eye on her string quintet, which she has a notion to re-orchestrate for a fuller string orchestra.

That quintet, meanwhile, has developed its own context (not least as a nice little earner) by being requested by and licensed to Sex and the City for use in the steamy tv series. “There’s nothing quite like the street cred you get when your young son runs into the room shouting, ‘Mum, you’re on Sex and the City again’.”

Magic and Monsters, sponsored by Caledonian MacBrayne. Saturday, Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow; Sunday, Usher Hall, Edinburgh. Both performances at 3pm


Hansel & Gretel

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh

Forget the Christmas-show tag. Forget the children. Just go and see this wonderful play like you would any other. I defy any adult to leave this latest Stuart Paterson masterpiece without a tear in their eye. The kids, of course, are made of sterner stuff, but even they sit absolutely spell-bound throughout the two hours of chilling drama. Situated somewhere between a particularly sinister Midsummer Night’s Dream, and an extra-redemptive King Lear, Peterson’s play takes us deep into the forest to face the blackest and bleakest of evils.
Every aspect of Hugh Hodgart’s production is first rate, be it Billy Boyd and Caroline Devlin in lead roles they were born to play, Irene Macdougall excelling herself as the witch and stepmother, Savourna Stevenson’s stunning live score, or Greg Smith’s haunting design..

 


The Sleeping Beauty

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh

Two Tales for the price of one as the brilliant Christmas show specialist Stuart Paterson weaves the story of the princess and the frog into the dream world of the Sleeping Beauty. In doing so, he creates a great rites-of-passage allegory, taking us through the adolescent minefield of temptation, deception and false appearances, finally reaching a rich and rewarding resolution.
As one character says: “The love that wakes between boy and girl, that is the true sleeping beauty.” The awakening is as affecting as it is hard won. With a creepily oppressive design by Greg Smith, and a beautifully delicate score by Savourna Stevenson, Hugh Hodgart’s production demands to be seen by every adult – with or without a child in tow….