Author Archives: Emily Norris

RSNO : Magic & Monsters

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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.

Mother of Invention

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The Scotsman

Martin Parker
Sharp harpist Savourna shows herself mother of invention

Edinburgh International Harp Festival

THERE is a special kind of wit and energy behind Savourna Stevenson’s music for solo harp. The construction of her instrument, known as the clarsach or Celtic harp, works against harmonic flamboyance, contrapuntal melody and timbral colouration, but she still finds a seemingly limitless resource in the instrument’s supposed deficiencies.

Stevenson’s approach is to impose a style, genre or rhythmic pattern and experiment with extended instrumental techniques to find the most enjoyable realisation of her vision. Although her playing was of first-rate, virtuoso quality, some of her pieces were blurred around the edges, as if she was not certain if they belonged in the concert hall or supermarket. Fortunately, however, these saccharine moments were few and there was much to remember.

Her homage to Kermit the Frog, Silverado Squatters, impressively converted the harp into a one-woman, bluegrass banjo ensemble and her final piece, Fording the Tweed, shone with harmonic twists and turns that might ordinarily be impossible. Stevenson’s programme represented a forward-looking illustration of just how far the harp can go in the right hands.

Savourna Stevenson and Friends

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The Herald

John Williamson

TO all but the most dedicated traditional music fan, a concert by a solo harp player is of restricted appeal, no matter the level of technical expertise on display.
There is no doubting Stevenson’s musical gifts, but Thursday night’s show was a resounding affirmation of the work she has done in the past 16 years to bring this most maligned and marginalised instrument into a more popular arena. Indeed, Stevenson even goes as far as to admit that she aims at times to make her harp “not sound like a harp”.
By the time the show ends and all her special guests are assembled together, it is self-evident how highly regarded she is amid the British Isles’ foremost folk musicians of the past 30 years. On stage are Danny Thompson ( double bass ), Capercaillie’s Charlie McKerron on fiddle, Davy Spillane on whistle and uillean pipes, Phamie Gow on second harp, and singers June Tabor and Eddi Reader.
Each is used sparingly, but to good effect, Thompson and McKerron underpinning the often maudlin music, their natural empathy all the more surprising considering the hastily assembled nature of such a performance. Spillane complements her Iona My Heart, and has a short solo slot, while Gow, the winner of last year’s Danny Kyle award, enters for a rare airing of Cutting The Chord.
Tabor and Reader sing beautifully – the mournful The Baker, and the marginally more upbeat Touch Me Like The Sun, respectively. The Former is heart breaking, the later reassuringly soulful, Stevenson’s unaccompanied pieces, Emily’s Calling and Blue Orchid, are evocative and beautiful.
With its sheer depth of talent and breadth of styles embraced, this show came closer than any other did this year to epitomising the aims and strengths of Celtic Connections….

String Quartet

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The Herald

Rob Adams

Savourna Stevenson / Anuna, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

It’ll no’ a’ be as refined as this, the 20 days and nights of music, song, and dance frae a’ the airts that is the seventh Celtic Connections. Yet while this opening concert presented something of a restrained overture, in its own way it also gave a fair taste of where what we are about to hear and see comes from and where it’s going.

With the lightest of compositional touches, versatile harper Savourna Stevenson led her string quartet on an odyssey inspired by Scottish song, subtly integrating jazz figures and blues voicings with north-east ballad and Gaelic waulking melody.

An impressive and interestingly conceived composition which was both attractive and easily digested, Stevenson’s new three-part work set an apt scene for the bite-size works that the 17-piece Irish choir, Anuna, presented with support from a chamber orchestra comprised of members of Scottish Opera’s orchestra and a well-marshalled Irish dance troupe.

Introduced with roguish wit by founder Michael McGlynn and sung with carefulness and charm, Anuna’s repertoire is a time-travelling mini-Celtic Connections-and-beyond in itself, taking in the works of eighth-century Irish bishops, traditional songs from Ireland, Finland, and Spain, a tribute to the late Jeff Buckley, and even an Elvis Costello adaptation.

Widely found though all this is, it all fits together remarkably seamlessly, and while this latest visit didn’t have quite the dramatic impact as their candle-lit presentation of a year or two back and at times flirted precariously with tweeness, there’s a haunting quality to the sound of these voices which can make even the overexposed She Moved Thro’ The Fair sound fresh.

Calman The Dove

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The Scotsman

SAVOURNA STEVENSON
Calman the Dove
Cooking Vinyl, *****

Specially commissioned, for performance in Iona Abbey, to commemorate the St Columba anniversary, Savourna Stevenson has delivered a musical gem that features not only her fluent, jazz-tinged harp but also the moody whistle and stunning uillean pipes of Davy Spillane and the edgy, gipsy-like fiddle of Anne Wood.
The thrilling bustle of the opening track, Calman the Wolf, with Spillane pouring out notes, gives way to the slow mesmeric beauty of The White Swan – a lovely track – and then some sparkling solo harp in An Buachaille before the three musicians settle into a sustained exploration of Stevenson’s varied themes, spattered with spicy Charlie Parkerish chord changes. Delightful stuff.

London Performance of Singing the Storm

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The Stage

Graham Gurrin

 

Trio whips up stormy delight.

Superb – June Tabor and Danny Thompson joined Savourna Stevenson for their final London performance at Union Chapel by Graham Gurrin

This was the final performance by this trio of Singing the Storm, a set of new and traditional border ballads set to music by Savourna Stevenson, having been commissioned for the Borders Festival in October 1995 and taken on occasional tour since then. It is hard to see how the evening could have gone better.
You take one of the finest double bass players in the land, Danny Thompson, as quietly unassuming as he is totally in control, gently easing along the rhythm one minute, the harmonic progression the next. You add June Tabor, a very fine singer and collector of traditional songs. And you put Savourna Stevenson in charge, master of the Scottish harp and an extraordinarily intuitive composer, who has the bardic aim of storytelling well in mind in her settings of lyrics by playwright Liz Lochhead, songwriter Michael Marra and poets Val Gillies and Les Barker.
Tabor’s unaccompanied singing on Willie’s Drowned in Yarrow was superb – if you have not heard her sing in a church you have not lived. By contrast, the arrangement of Twa Corbies was complex – all bowed chords from Thompson and high-pitched tinkling from the harp – and spinetingling in a different sense.
All three musicians are noted for their desire to move on to different projects and different styles. This no doubt has some bearing on their ability to remain so fresh and exciting…

Singing the Storm

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TIMES ( Canada )

Some subtle, mature work by top performers

Singing The Storm
Savourna Stevenson / June Tabor / Danny Thompson

On this exquisite collaboration, British folk diva June Tabor joins forces with harpist-composer Savourna Stevenson and legendary bassist Danny Thompson.
Stevenson has produced a collection of dreamy landscapes for Tabor’s husky haunting vocals. Grounded by Thompson’s jazz-influenced, understated bass – besides co-founding Pentangle and performing regularly with Richard Thompson, the bassist has also worked with jazz great Sonny Rollins – the songs on Singing the Storm flow suite-like through poetic tales of funeral bakers, enchanted landscapes, witches, and gypsy queens, Stevenson’s glorious, romantic music is matched with elegant, finely wrought narratives and brought to life by Tabor’s dark, spooky readings as she inhabits the songs with a smouldering passion.
This CD will move and inspire you. Brilliant, beautiful new folk music. My highest recommendation.

Celtic Connections with June Tabor and Danny Thompson

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The Glasgow Herald

Sue Wilson

 

Celtic Connections

Savourna Stevenson, June
Tabor and Danny Thompson
Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

SHEER class was writ large over both halves of this spellbinding concert, perfectly complementing performances representing the cream of contemporary tradition.
Longtime vanguard marches on the English and Scottish scenes, Stevenson, Tabor and Thompson make up an impressive sum of parts – whether the whole is greater is hard to say, given their individual potency as performers, but it certainly proved a richly rewarding collaboration. Each has such an array of tones and effects to draw on – the calm, distant sorrow of Tabor’s singing by turns stern and tender, overlaid with bewitchingly delicate expressive detail, Stevenson’s harp equally at home evoking the atmosphere of Mexico or Mali ( in duets of her own compositions with Thompson ) or tracing gently frisky figures behind The Bonnie Bonnie Broom.
Double bass magician Thompson, meanwhile, sounded as though he had at least a trombone and keyboards up there as well, with all his bendings, stretching and blending of plucked notes. A formidable collective weight of accomplishment, combined and articulated with an engagingly light touch.

A composer who is a national treasure

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Glasgow Herald

Keith Bruce

Savourna Stevenson, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

IT’s a truism, or at least an inversion of one, but you have to be self-effacing to be valued as a national treasure in Scotland – which is why the self-made career of harper Savourna Stevenson is still under-appreciated.

Showcasing the album of music derived from her soundtrack to BBC television’s tribute to Robert Louis Stevenson ( no relation ), she proved that she is, taking her place in a band she has drawn from the Cauld Blast Orchestra, including the superb Anne Wood on Violin, Steve Kettley on Saxophones & flute and Mike Travis on drums, plus Brian Shiels on Bass and Dave Tullock ( Clan Alba, Five Hand Reel ) on Marimba.

Her melodic imagination combined with her absorbtion of styles and use of traditional musical forms from around the world is mesmerising.

This is ambience with both meaning and feeling. Across the Plains dovetails a native American corn dance with the Skye Boat Song and Silverado Squatters has her harp playing bluegrass banjo to a slap bass accompaniment.

The last number had the entire ensemble doing an impersonation of a mariachi band, while La Solitude is, in her own words, an amalgamation of French impressionist classicism and jazz – all done in a traditional music style. If you don’t get the picture, you aren’t listening

Tusitala

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The Scotsman

Savourna Stevenson
Tusitala, teller of tales

Savourna Stevenson’s new CD, Tusitala ( Eclectic Records ) features Savourna’s music for Stevenson’s Travels, the BBC production on the Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, and serves as confirmation that in compiling and arranging these beguiling themes she rose triumphantly to what must have been a fairly daunting challenge. It’s a lovely album, full of delightful, bobbing, swaying tunes that appropriately bridge the Atlantic gap by the skilful melding of jazz and Scots motifs. The Clyde to California sequence, originally commissioned by the River Tweed Festival, finds Aly Bain gusting in splendid style – the thrilling fiddle dash in Silverado Squatters and his legato calm above the rhythmic storm of Clyde to Sandy Hook surely capture the essence of the composer’s compulsive juggling with the elements of tension and release.

Anne wood, also on fiddle, has a marvellous time in Jekll and Hyde, her jaggy, slithery contrasts giving a clear sighting of Dr J’s little secret. Steve Kettley’s grumpy, Archie Shepp-ish tenor sax in Treasure Island and his sumptuous soprano sax work in La Solitude are other highlights in a sparkling album.

Oh, and Savourna’s harp is as captivating as ever!