NEW WORKS FOR VOICE, ORGAN AND CELLO
The Old Kirk, Forgue
Saturday 25th October 2025
Katherine Williams Soprano
David J. Smith Organ
Gareth John Cello
Margaret Hearne Text Reader
PROGRAMME:
David J. Smith First Organ Improvisation
Roger B. Williams (b. 1943) The Spell of the Rose for Soprano, cello and organ, A musical setting of a poem by Thomas Hardy (1840 -1928)
David J. Smith Second Organ Improvisation
Robert W. Milne A Song of Hope Musical setting of verses from Psalms 33, 96 and 97
REVIEW:
The Old Kirk in Forgue, quite imposing from the outside, was warmly attractive inside. The Church building, we were told, had been bought to preserve its rather beautiful organ with attractively decorated pipes. A small instrument, yes, but sounding ample and rich as played on Saturday by David J. Smith. To get to Forgue, I had to drive from Aberdeen to Inverurie, then taking the Rothienorman Road, I drove quite far along a meandering road through absolutely beautiful tree lined Scottish countryside. There, atop a slope, was the Old Kirk, with lights gleaming through its windows. I was delighted to get there and so to be be able to enjoy an evening of remarkably varied and captivating music as part of this year’s SOUND Festival.
The performance began with an organ improvisation by David J. Smith. By definition, an improvisation is the ultimate in new music. The audience are in at its very birth. David J. Smith opened with rapid decorative runs on the upper notes of the organ. There then arose a two part theme and rich chords. Overall the music had a modern angularity, but it was well shaped and attractive. I remembered David Smith’s improvisations on the Aubertin organ in King’s College Chapel. He has lost nothing of his musical creativity in this quite short piece. Repetition across the music gave the improvisation its sculptural value. David certainly made the orchestral qualities (sound blends) of the Forgue organ sing out with his new improvisation.
Roger B. Williams, composer of the first main work in the concert, explained some of the three creative inspirations he had used in building The Spell of the Rose, his musical setting of a poem by Thomas Hardy. There was part of a hymn tune by the American composer Marty Haugen. A melody from the opening of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring played on the high register of the bassoon. Finally a melody from The Silver Swan by Orlando Gibbons. Roger told us that he was particularly inspired by the final lines of this madrigal. “Farewell all joys, O death come close mine eyes, More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise”.
Before the trio of soprano, organ and cello performed Roger’s new piece, Margaret Hearne read the words of Thomas Hardy’s poem. This she did magnificently, blending the rhythm of the words with their emotional impact. Her reading in itself captured all the finest musical qualities that Hardy has put into his words. It deals with the emotional relationship between a husband and wife, from the warmth of love to the coldness of different feelings. The husband intends to build a magnificent hall with a garden. It has apple trees and pears but sadly no roses, the flowers which stand for love. The wife decides to sort this out by planting a rose bush. Sadly before it grows and blossoms, she dies, and so love cannot be fulfilled. Hardy wrote the poem in response to the death of his wife, Emma Gifford in 1912.
There are three individual and characterful musical carriers of emotional feeling in The Spell of the Rose. They are represented by the organ played by David J. Smith, the cello played by Gareth John and the soprano singing voice of Katherine Williams who delivered the words of the text with unmatched clarity. The organ had a certain angularity with here and there, a touch of bleakness which conveyed the overall sadness of the poem. The cello in contrast had a melodic warmth put across so beautifully by Gareth John suggesting the importance of love in the text. Katherine Williams in her performance brought forth the sense of living humanity throughout the music. I was impressed by the way in which Roger Williams balanced the separate expressiveness of the three musical units for which he writes while making them blend together so beautifully as a whole. There was the way that pizzicato cello was used to introduce the singing voice or near the end of the piece where the organ and cello blended together to express sadness.
More importantly in this performance, was the way in which Katherine’s singing expressed the emotional charge of the words. In the final verse, above organ and cello with both pizzicato and bowed music, Katherine, who in the poem is now a ghost, made her voice float weightlessly above the instruments.
What amazing complexity in changes of feeling, mirrored by changing musical structure, there was in this entire piece. Not long enough to be an opera, but was there not something operatic in this music, with its changes of story and emotional impact?
After a short ‘comfort break’ David J Smith gave us his second organ improvisation. Quite ornamental, it had a feeling of the dance at the beginning before working to a strong full organ conclusion. Quite magnificent really.
The second large work in the concert was A Song of Hope by Robert W. Milne. For his text, he had used parts of Psalms 33, 96 and 97. There were five sections or verses, each with its own particular musical character. Once again Margaret Hearne gave a deeply felt reading of the verses.
The first section, dealing with the praising of the Lord with instruments and singing voices, “Sing to Him a new song, sing to the Lord all the earth”, had fanfare-like playing from the organ. The second section was thoughtful with the cello taking the lead before the organ entered on the line “Honour and majesty are before him”. In the third section the cello had warm melodic playing with transparent organ music and with Katherine’s voice really taking flight. The organ was important in the fourth section in which organ, followed by cello delivered surprisingly a jaunty dance-like feeling. Finally in the closing section, number five, organ, cello and voice had a delicacy to begin with before the words and the music from the opening of the work were brought back, giving the work an ideal structural quality.
I was particularly impressed by the crystal clarity of Katherine’s delivery of the words, so important in this work. All three of the performers captured the developing changes of emphasis in the texts.
Contemporary musical composition covers such a wide range of styles. Saturday’s performances in Forgue Church were so very different from Thursday’s by Stone Drawn Circles in King’s Pavilion at the University of Aberdeen. SOUND are to be congratulated for dealing so generously with such variety in modern music.
Alan Cooper
