Music review: RSNO's Nordic Music Journeys – Scotland and Sweden, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Three short concerts, or one concert in three parts? It was possible to view Saturday’s Nordic Music Journeys either way. The focus was new music from Sweden and Scotland, two hour-long programmes by Swedish ensemble Gageego! spotlighting Swedish composers, responded to with a central one by the Scots-based Hebrides Ensemble showcasing the Scottish equivalent.

To put it in further context, this event – a collaboration backed by the Swedish Composers’ Society (FST), the Swedish performing rights society (STIM) and the RSNO – was the first of several related performances happening throughout Scotland this year as a build-up to an late October / early November Nordic Days Festival in Glasgow. Curator Andy Saunders confirmed a further presence at Aberdeen’s Sound Festival, with representation also expected at other key events.

Saturday was therefore something of a taster, and one that raised an intriguing question: is there a capacity for genuinely original thinking in the field of contemporary composition these days?

That was no more salient than in the electro-acoustic music dotted throughout these programmes. There’s something intrinsic in the vocabulary of the electronic music studio that still seems embedded in a mid-to-late 20th century sound world, lingering echoes from the pioneering achievements in the 1950s/60s of the BBC’s early radiophonic workshop.

Maybe that’s unfair, because inspirational ideas frequently emerged in some of Saturday’s electronic offerings. Glasgow-based Finn O’Hare’s ääni was particularly invigorating, transforming close-up sounds of ice melting into a compelling symphonic soundscape, cohesive and challenging. In the same Hebrides programme Fraser MacBeath’s Mar gum biodh an teine air do chraiceann (part of a larger Gaelic-inspired piece) played charmingly with sampled folk song.

Lars Bröndum’s Time’s Arrow, deliberately retro in its use of analogue technology, was intense but ultimately overstayed its welcome. Mirjam Telly’s Apparitions, mostly an excitable acoustically-spatial adventure, spent its duller moments resembling a full-on Scalextric race.

Yet it was in the live acoustic performances that the greatest consistency and originality emerged. Gageego!’s opening programme, under conductor Fredrik Burstedt, included Henrik Denerin’s Collide, a touching amalgam of grainy subtleties. Mika Pelo’s Abandoned, a tribute to “abandoned music philosophies” by the likes of Stockhausen and Crumb, paradoxically proved fresh and exhilarating.

If Gageego!'s presentational style was a tad improvised, the Hebrides Ensemble responded with slicker continuity, from the gestural, glacial cello luminosity of Aileen Sweeney’s Siku to the kinetic fascination of Oliver Searle’s Harbour Dreams. Based on a letter by Lord Kelvin, Jane Stanley’s Lalla Rookh for speaker and natural horn recaptured the spirit of Britten, with its whooping horn acrobatics. Gemma MacGregor’s string trio Betrayal served up refreshingly conservative modernism, before the sensitive nuclear string writing of Fergus Hall’s Laig Beach and Rylan Gleave’s Heartstrings.

Gageego! launched its final session with the intoxicating originality of Alfred Jimenez’s With Voice, Cage-like in its dynamic containment. Ylva Fred’s Motor Music owed more ultimately to Bartok and minimalism. Marie Samuelsson’s The Lion was unexpectedly playful and sensuous, structurally a loose stream of consciousness. Madeleine Isaksson’s Capsuled Time closed the event – written in 2020 at the height of Covid anxiety, both chilling and pacifying, a drama of the soul. Collaborative new music events like this used to be commonplace in Glasgow. Good to see them back.