RCS/Hebrides Ensemble: Walton’s ‘Façade’

RCS Stevenson Hall 22/2/26

Hebrides Ensemble

RCS instrumentalists, conductors, narrators and dancers

https://www.rcs.ac.uk/whats-on/walton-facade-hebrides-ensemble-with-rcs-conductors/

The afternoon of 22nd February in the Stevenson Hall at Glasgow’s Royal Conservatoire was the venue for latest showcase of RCS talent in collaboration with an established professional ensemble.  The headline work, performed after the interval, was Walton’s (1951 rewrite) “entertainment”, ‘Façade’, 21 satirical poems of Edith Sitwell recited metrically as sprechgesang accompanied by small ensemble..  As the culmination of an inspiring week of workshops with Visiting Professor of Conducting, Martyn Brabbins, five students from the Conducting Department led the Hebrides Ensemble in the ‘entertainment’, each conducting a handful of the 22 pieces (including the opening ‘Fanfare’).  The narration was provided by three students, one each from the Vocal Performance, Musical Theatre and Stage & Screen departments.  The first half of the programme augmented the 6 members of the Hebrides Ensemble as scored in ‘Façade’ (flute doubling piccolo, clarinet doubling bass clarinet, alto saxophone, trumpet, cello and percussion) with 6 RCS student instrumentalists playing “side-by-side” (1 extra each of flute, sax, trumpet and cello, plus a trombone and a celesta), providing a broader (if quirky) tonal and timbral palette for four of the student conductors, working as arrangers.  They had been assigned Spanish keyboard pieces to score, which they then conducted in performance.  Challenging enough, one might imagine?  But no, the transcriptions also had to be danceable – students of Second Year BA Modern Ballet choreographed and performed the dances themselves.  In his introductory remarks to the well-attended concert, Martyn Brabbins pointed out that conducting for dancers requires accurate and unvarying tempo.  No pressure, then?

First up was Scarlatti’s 1746 Sonata in D Major, K.96 arranged and conducted by Cambridge graduate and founder of the Cavatina Orchestra, Max Todes, who is pursuing his Masters in Conducting at the Conservatoire under Martyn Brabbins and Michael Bawtree.  The briskness and liveliness of the original were preserved in the arrangement, with imaginative use of the celesta and marimba.   British Chinese conductor Chloe Lu Ye (Miller) is on the second year of her Masters.  Her primary degree from Birmingham is in Film Composition.  Her arrangement of the ‘Zambra’ from Albéniz’s 1888 ‘12 Piezas características’ was unmistakably Hispanic with idiomatic trumpet and castanets, but also sported some quirky wahs from muted trombone and some atmospheric vibraphone.

Colombian-Italian Leverhulme Conducting Fellow, Stefano Boccacci, already has an impressive CV of conducting engagements and assistantships and is currently assistant to Ryan Wigglesworth at the BBCSSO. He is also completing his PhD (researching programming and production of 20th century chamber operas by Xenakis, Weill and Piazzolla) at the Université de Strasbourg.  His was the most substantial arrangement, 3 of Turina’s 1930 ‘Danzas Gitanas’.  Another ‘Zambra’ started dreamily and impressionistically and featured lovely cello and clarinet solos, atmospheric celesta and saxophone.  An authentic flamenco vibe set in and was supported by idiomatic clapping and stamping from the percussionist.  ‘Danza de la seducción’ seemed to channel Debussy’s timbral palette despite the unusual instrumentation, with flute and piccolo, clarinet and trumpet managing to shimmer, whilst I don’t think I have ever before seen a single percussionist conjure seduction from marimba, vibraphone, timpani and a cymbal.  Quite magical.  Something of the snappy trumpet vibe of Stravinsky’s ‘Histoire du soldat’ inhabited the arrangement of ‘Sacro-monte’, the clarinet adding colour while the castanets kept things decidedly Iberian.

St Albans-born violinist and conductor Ammal Bhatia is a Leverhulme Scholar studying for his Masters in Conducting under Martyn Brabbins.  He is a Co-Founding Director of the Enys Chamber Music Festival in Cornwall and has forthcoming debuts with both the BBCSSO and the RSNO.  His arrangement of ‘La soirée dans Grenade’ from Debussy’s 1903 ‘Estampes’ gave the delicious sinuous arabesques ro the clarinet, which worked perfectly to my ear (but I was unable to discern whether it had been transposed from the punishing F#-minor/major original – to be fair G-flat major transposed for a B-flat instrument has only 4 flats; the minor has only 1).  Thoughtful use of cello and trumpet solos added colour, and the trombone and bass clarinet managed to emulate the lower notes of a guitar.  I have no expertise on which to base judgement of dance, but I felt subjectively that this last arrangement was the most eminently danceable.

Insofar as it can be crystallised to any kind of specificity, the target of Edith Sitwell’s satire appears to be pretension, insincerity, vanity and all forms of idle aspiration to social sophistication.  But if poseurs and poseuses are firmly in the sights, so are the voyeurs and the performers.  Whether feigned or genuine, Hispanic colour hangs about either the absurd characters in the poems or their surroundings, justifying the Spanish-themed arrangements of the first half as a prologue.  The seaside is also a recurrent backdrop.  The ‘entertainment’ dates from 1922,  a time when the young Walton, having failed his exams at Oxford, was the protégé of the Sitwell siblings living with (and supported financially by) them in their Chelsea home.  The first public performance (1923) involved the sextet, conductor (Walton himself) and narrator (Edith Sitwell) concealed by a curtain, through which a large megaphone horn protruded and delivered the verses at the unsuspecting audience.  It was panned by the critics, though some appreciated Walton’s musical jokes.  Not so I.  I have known and loved the music since 1968, when my family moved from Waterford to Dublin, where we could receive BBC2 and enjoy Joseph Cooper’s superb classical music quiz show, ‘Face the Music’, whose signature tune was the orchestral suite version of the ‘Popular Song’ from ‘Façade’.  The verse, to be honest, I can take or leave as poetry, but as rhythmic fodder for the music, it is excellent.  And, as pen portraits of preposterous people, priceless.

The fifth conductor, who had not participated in the first half, was British-Swedish cellist/conductor Claudia Jablonski from London, currently in her first year of post-graduate studies at RCS Conducting with Martyn Brabbins and Michael Bawtree on a Leverhulme Scholarship.  While at the Royal Academy of Music, she founded the Orlando Orchestra.  She has also been mentored by Paavo Järvi at the Järvi Academy, and conducted concerts of the associated Pärnu Music Festival   She has forthcoming projects with the RSNO, Scottish Opera and NYoS.  The 3 narrators were Sebastian Armstrong (studying BA Acting), Evie McColgan (studying Musical Theatre), and Caspian Plummer (studying Vocal Performance).  Of these, London-born baritone Caspian was already in my ken, having mentioned him as one of Sarastro’s 3 priests in RCS’s ‘Die Zauberflöte’  last March and praised his German diction as baritone soloist in Edinburgh Royal Choral Union’s Brahms’ Requiem the previous November.  All three narrators delivered the rhythmically precise patter element of the words to perfection, assisted by conducting that met the challenge of supporting sprechgesang as ably as it had supported dance.  Experiencing the actual words as vehicles of sardonic humour proved rather more problematic, and I found myself in disagreement with Martyn Brabbins, whose introduction to the second half was undeniably dismissive of their value and significance, and of the megaphone in the premiere as a mere theatrical stunt.  I would suggest that ‘Façade’ can be experienced more fully in sound-engineered recordings and live too, but with vocal amplification, and indeed I have enjoyed both.  Even absurd words deserve to be heard.  All three narrators worked hard with vocal production but often struggled to make the words themselves heard over the music, and all mitigated the limitations in different ways.  Sebastian made use of facial expressions to convey mood if not actual semantics.  Caspian could draw on his excellent diction to deliver the consonants despite the vowels being stunted by the silencing of his baritone tessitura.  But it was Evie who delivered the fullest vocal performance, her voice modulating expressively across its whole tonal range, despite not singing, often managing to surmount the sextet with contrast where raw dynamics would have failed, while whole-body movement in time to the music made the whole seem organic.  A performer to watch.

The instrumental playing was an absolute delight, every cheeky quotation hitting the mark: ‘Rule Britannia’ in the ‘Fanfare’, ‘I do like to be beside the seaside’ in the ‘Tango-Pasodoblé’ and Rossini’s ‘William Tell Overture’ in the ‘Jodelling Song’, to name but three.  The loss of words notwithstanding, ‘Façade’ was very entertaining: what more can we ask of an ‘entertainment’?  An immensely enjoyable way to spend a Sunday afternoon and another display of the wealth of talent emerging from Scotland’s Conservatoire.